Apple Inc. announced Tuesday that its iPhone users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications since the company opened its popular App Store one year ago.
While the company was unclear on whether it counted app upgrades and reinstalls, the number is certainly light years ahead of its rivals, such as BlackBerry App Store and Google Android Market.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, said in a press release. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
Despite holding only a tiny fraction of the worldwide smart phone market, the company also boasted that its App Store features more than 65,000 apps with more than 100,000 users contributing to the iPhone Developer Program.
And according to Apple’s numbers, the App Store appears to be growing at a very rapid pace. Last April, Apple announced it surpassed 1 billion mobile apps downloaded, with that number increasing 50 per cent over the last three months.
Shut-down tool for virtual environments
Raleigh, NC-based power management firm Eaton Corp. announced Tuesday that it is now offers VMware ESXi 4.0 compatible software.
For companies using virtual machines and servers through Eaton’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS), the company has developed its NetWatch 5.0 UPS connectivity software and Network Shutdown Module 3.20 to work with virtual environments. The tools will now be able safely shut down any VMs or virtual servers during a power outage to ensure IT shops can protect their data.
“The shutdown features of our software products raise the bar in user friendliness and intelligent management of VMware’s ESXi virtual machines,” Hervé Tardy, vice-president and general manager at Eaton Distributed Power Quality Business Unit, said in a release. “Our software together with our energy-efficient extended runtime UPSs help to advance our customers’ green IT initiatives and give IT and data centre managers confidence that their virtual infrastructure is well protected.”
The company, which is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, added that its customers only need a single shutdown agent on each physical server, regardless of the number of VMs hosted on the server.
