Fiksu tracks the daily U.S. traffic of the top 200 free apps in the App Store, and found that starting with the iPhone 4S smartphone’s launch last fall, download activity ramped up from 3.8 million daily downloads in September to peak at 6.79 million downloads in January, driven by the holiday boom in iPhone sales. Downloads fell slightly in February to 6.35 million and then plummeted by nearly 2 million to 4.45 million total downloads in March.

“With the novelty factor of the iPhone 4S launch and the holidays well behind us, and no other events in March to spark discovery, March’s download dip was expected,” Fiksu CEO Micah Adler said in a statement. “An unexpected contributing factor could be the decline in the use of robotic install tactics by app marketers responding to Apple’s new policy.”

It’s also worth noting that Fisku only tracks U.S. numbers, so international downloads could still be high. While Verizon Wireless and AT&T saw their iPhone sales dip in the first quarter, Apple more than made up for it with strong international smartphone sales.

Though U.S. iPhone owners may be downloading fewer apps, that doesn’t mean they’re using their phones less. Fiksu also tracks a metric it calls the Cost per Loyal User Index, which measures the marketing costs developers spend to secure a loyal customer – one who opens their apps at least three times a month. In December, that cost reached $1.81 per user, but it dipped down to $1.14 in January and held steady at about $1.30 in the previous two months. So while iPhone customers may not be downloading as many new apps today, they look to be spending more time with the apps they already have.

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Ace Metrix scores ads based on perceived effectiveness by a selection of randomly selected viewers, which it says are “representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience.” Apple’s Siri ad, which you can see below, scored a 652 overall out of a total possible 950 points, which tallied from respondent scores on criteria such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, etc. Apple’s 652 was 8 percent higher than the average score for ads in the same tech-oriented category.

Other ads that did well include spots from Pillsbury, Coca-Cola, Nintendo and Duracell. Santa was featured in 35 new ads during the holiday 2011 season, including Apple’s, and each of those campaigns performed above their category average.

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If you have colleagues spread from New Delhi, India to New Haven, Conn., how can you hope to bring everyone together to celebrate the season and build a bit of camaraderie? Beers in the break room are probably out due to logistical constraints, but that doesn’t mean you have to forgo holiday fun entirely, according to a recent post by Wayne Turmel for Management Issues.

For the piece, Turmel talks to Jeff Diana, the chief people officer for HR software firm SuccessFactors, who offers some tips for encouraging celebratory feelings among remote workers.

“If you can’t afford to fly in or buy hotel rooms for remote workers, whether that’s for a holiday party or planning session for the year ahead,” Diana says, “consider including remote workers in team celebrations via social media, video, or other group (or individual) acknowledgement of their contributions.”

He also notes that with many workforces becoming more and more international, holidays throughout the year provide a great opportunity for cultural sharing:

Take advantage of the international holidays throughout the year to educate local and remote employees about holiday customs in other regions. For example: Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, Kwanzaa, Day of the Dead, and many other holidays throughout the year provide excellent opportunities for employees worldwide to share personal anecdotes and professional insights about life in their “neighborhoods.”

It’s a far cheerier suggestion than Stacey Higginbotham’s recent worry that telecommuting across international boundaries will increasingly make work-free holidays a thing of the past, and the ambition to share across cultures to increase inter-team understanding is admirable. But at the same time, there’s something sad about the idea if donning your party hat to sit in front of Skype.

With remote “parties” unlikely to be actually enjoyable, is asking employees to attend simply burdening them with an unwanted and unpleasant additional responsibility during this busy time of year? Would it be better to just offer them extra time or money to show your appreciation and make their season genuinely cheerier?

Alternative suggestions to the tech-enabled virtual shindig are light on the ground, though everyone seems to agree it’s poor form not to make sure remote workers are always invited to activities (even if there is basically no chance they can attend) and everyone should receive the same holiday goodies should any be distributed.

So what about your remote team: Will you be using the holidays as an occasion for team-building festivities, and if so, how?

Image courtesy of Flickr use DeaPeaJay.

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Allrecipes.com said it had its biggest traffic day ever on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The website saw more than 6.8 million visits from people who viewed more than 32.5 million pages of content. According to Allrecipes, that represents a 32 percent increase from the day before Thanksgiving 2010. For larger reference, typically the site sees some 24 million unique visitors over the course of one month.

And more people are looking for food-based content while they’re away from the desktop. Visits to Allrecipes.com from a mobile device during the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were up 218 percent year-over-year, the company says.

Of course, this news could come in handy given Allrecipes’ current strategic situation. Last month, Allrecipes’ parent company Readers Digest announced plans to put the cooking site up for sale.

But regardless of the fact that Allrecipes is in play, there is definitely a larger trend at work here. For example, a new tablet-based cookbook produced by iPad textbook startup Inkling is selling like hotcakes: Earlier this month it became the third highest grossing iPad app worldwide. Meanwhile, new startups such as Foodily are solely aimed at making it super easy to find and share recipes with online contacts. With so many people looking to the web for recipes and cooking tips, there are certainly more food-focused technologies on the horizon.

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Questions of Holidays Past

What virus scan software do you use? I was asked this question so many times I had to come up with an answer for the PCs in my life. So I looked around, and thankfully, Patrick Norton on The Screen Savers (yes, that long ago) once reviewed AVG Free, so I tried it on an XP machine and started answering “AVG” when asked this question. On a Mac, well that’s a different story entirely.

How often do you defrag your hard drive? While a common practice on Windows, I haven’t performed this task very often on Mac, at least not in the same way as on a PC.  I do recommend executing the Disk Utility’s “Repair Disk Permissions” as well as purchasing a tool like Micromat’s TechTool Pro.  Keep in mind that if you did purchase AppleCare, then you did get the deluxe version of Micromat’s TechTool product.

My hard drive crashed and I don’t have a backup; what can I do? In most cases, nothing, you’re out of luck.  It’s always good to have a solid backup strategy.  Here’s an area where there are a lot of options on a Mac like Mozy, Carbonate, Backblaze or CrashPlan. Some options like Time Machine are very easy to set up and use, not to mention it ships free with every Mac.

Questions of Holidays Present

When do you think the iPhone will be on Verizon? The new Mac vs PC battle has been replaced with the Android vs iOS battle.  Many have speculated that this battle is really an extension of the AT&T vs Verizon battle, which Verizon already really won a long time ago.  While AT&T’s exclusivity isn’t going to last forever, it’s still not certain when exactly other carriers will be selling the iPhone.

What apps should I get for my iPad? The market between smartphone and laptop is, at least for the time being, totally owned by the iPad.  For me personally, the best apps for the iPad are for the kids. Perhaps productivity is more your thing, or games, but there are just too many out there to say what’s best for all.  The best accessory for the iPad is an Apple TV, and then the best app would be Apple’s own Remote.

Do you really get eleven hours of battery life? Yes, yes we do.  Well, some of us at least.  Those of us running iPads and those of us not running Flash on the new MacBook Air. While the iPad is advertised at being able to watch videos for ten hours straight, others have been able to keep their Macbook Air running for just about as long.

Question of Holidays Future

What ever happened to Google’s Android? This isn’t to say Android won’t exist in the future, because it will. Rather, I think it’ll less and less be Google’s Android alone. It’s very likely we’ll start seeing greater divides between device manufactures, carriers, marketplaces and even the third-party apps themselves.  Not even Google has it straight about where and when to use Android and where and when to use Chrome OS.

So this holiday season, when you’re asked for your assistance or opinion, give it freely. The time is coming when the average consumer will know enough about Apple to carry on an informed discussion anyway.  What sort of questions do you think you’ll be asked this holiday season, and what are some of your favorites from times past?

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Want to get a little work done or check in with your friends on Twitter? Here are a few handy excuses that you can use when you want to escape your family for a little work or online play:

• Just give me a few more minutes to watch this software compile.
• It only looks like I’m checking Twitter. You can’t see the other work I’m doing because it happens inside the computer.
• I’m finishing a job for a very important top-secret client, but shhhh, it’s a secret.
• Wait, don’t look! I’m buying presents online, and you don’t want to ruin the surprise.
• I need to check Twitter / Facebook / other social networking website because I have important business clients that I need to keep track of.
• I’m not playing this game for fun. This is research for some work I’m doing for another top-secret project.
• I need some quiet time alone in a room to write this blog post. If I get interrupted, I might lose my work and have to start over.
• I need some airplane reading for the trip home, so I need to stay online until these books finish downloading. They’re kind of big; this might take a while.
• I was just looking up some new cookie recipes to surprise you with something new for dessert.
• I’m working on something terribly boring. Trust me, you don’t want any more details.
• It may look like web surfing, but I’m really looking for new clients. You wouldn’t want me to run out of money and move home, would you?

What are your favorite excuses for getting in a little extra online time during the holidays?

Disclaimers:

• Yes, these are meant to be humorous suggestions, not serious ones.
• Dear mom and other family members: No, I would never use any of these excuses with you.

Photo by Jacob Enos used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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If there’s one thing that seems to define work in the digital age, it’s the blurring of boundaries between our work lives and our personal lives. As we all know, work expands to fill the time available, and thanks to the ubiquity of email and instant messaging and smartphones and iPads, virtually any time is work time — and that includes family-oriented holidays like Thanksgiving, according to a recent survey from Xobni and Harris Interactive. The email service found almost 60 percent of people check their work email during the holidays, and almost 30 percent of that group check their mail multiple times a day during their time off at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Of those who checked email of any kind during the holidays — work or personal — 79 percent said they’ve gotten a work-related email from either a colleague or a client. And more than 40 percent of that group said that they were either annoyed, frustrated or resentful at getting work-related mail while on holiday. Interestingly enough, those in the 18 to 34 age range felt the strongest about this, with 56 percent saying they felt annoyed or resentful at this intrusion into their personal lives. Only 30 percent of those aged 45 to 54 said they felt this way.

So why do people check their work email? One reason seems to be that they know if they don’t, they’ll end up with a ton of email when they return, and will have to spend hours wading through it or dealing with the fallout from not having responded. The Xobni-Harris survey found 42 percent of those who said they check work email while on holiday believe doing so eases the workload when they return. This is something I can personally identify with, but it creates a kind of Catch-22 at the same time: Checking mail might reduce the volume after the holidays, but it can also suck you into a vortex of work that leads to even more emails.

Another interesting statistic from the survey( the full version of which is here): Almost 20 percent of those who received work-related email during their holidays said they were thankful for having gotten the messages, because it was a distraction from the family holiday. There’s a boatload of material in that kind of response for psychologists to plow through, but it seems to suggest that just as family time can provide a welcome relief from work stress, work can also sometimes provide a relief from family.

If you’re interested in issues like work-life balance, and how both workers and companies are handling the future of work in a digital age — including a look at what we like to call the “human cloud” — please join us for Net:Work in San Francisco on Dec. 9 at the Mission Bay Conference Center. We’ve got a great lineup, including John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox’s PARC research center, and Brad Horowitz of Google. There’s a description of the event and a full schedule of speakers here, and you can register here.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Siasoco

The good news is that with a simple strategy in place, it won’t take much effort to return to your normal productivity level. Here are a few tips:

Pre-plan your schedule. Plan your post-holiday work schedule even before the holiday reunions, celebrations and other activities take over. This is the primary reason why I easily got back to my regular workload. As soon as Jan. 3 hit, all I had to do was look at the schedule I prepared two weeks earlier to see what I needed to do. Without it, I would’ve probably spent a day or two regrouping.

Work a little during your downtime. In a previous post, Darrell talked about how he uses the holidays to work. I have to admit that I agree with him. In fact, I found myself working harder than usual for a few days. If you feel that’s being too much of a killjoy, choose to work on light tasks — perhaps checking your mail or brainstorming. The point is to avoid work being overwhelming after the holidays.

Now, this doesn’t mean you’ll get up in the middle of a family gathering and start typing away in your laptop.  I waited for my family to be asleep or for the activity to die down before I started working. This allowed me to be part of the festivities, while getting some work done during times when less was happening.

Stick with your normal body clock. I know that this is easier said than done, but one of the reasons that many people feel sluggish post-holidays is that their body clocks have adjusted to a later waking-up time. If this has happened to you, make sure to try and reset your body clock back to suit your ideal sleeping hours before the regular workweek starts.

Don’t forget to relax. As Dawn recommended before, it’s important to relax. I know some people who actually spend the holidays being completely stressed out preparing gifts and celebrations. The irony is, they don’t end up enjoying their supposed “vacation time” from work. Avoid falling into that trap and catch up on your sleep.

How easy is it for you to work after a long holiday? What techniques do you use to get your productivity back to normal?

Image by abcdz2000 from sxc.hu

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Inbox Zero

I usually manage to get my inbox under control right before I take a week off during the holidays, but by the time I return to work, it has usually filled right back up with new email. This time, I’m making a real effort to keep it at inbox zero for more than a few hours. I went to inbox zero about a week ago, and I’ve managed to keep it at zero all week by spending a little time each day responding to what I can and moving everything else into areas for response or further reading while creating tasks for to-do items. By keeping up with this process during the holidays while the volume is more manageable, I hope that I’m building up habits that will help me continue to manage my email in 2010. Even if you don’t aspire to implement inbox zero over the long-term, there is something very refreshing about starting the new year with a clean inbox.

Paperwork, Planning and Finances

This is also a great time to get all your paperwork, planning and finances in order. I plan to tackle that pile of paperwork accumulating on my desk that really should be filed, and it’s a great time to get everything ready for your taxes. You should also take some time to set your goals for 2010 and come up with a plan that will help you achieve them.

Relax

Nothing helps me get a fresh start like taking a few days off to relax and recharge. It’s hard to get a great start on the year if you are overworked and exhausted. I took most of last week off to visit family, but the holidays come with their own stresses. I plan to work like mad on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to get the rest of my work done along with some paperwork and other business; however, I’m going to take a nice, long four-day weekend off at home to relax, read and hit the gym to start the new year feeling great.

What are your favorite tips for getting the new year off to a great start?

Photo by Flickr User Daniel Voyager used under Creative Commons.

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