Did you notice that today Apple became more valuable to the stock market than Google? The iPhone maker now has a market capitalization of $183 billion vs. $174.5 billion for Google. What does that mean to me?

For starters, people believe that Apple can continue to defy gravity. Secondly, when it comes to growth, people believe focus is the right approach. What do you guys think?

Apple said this afternoon that it sold 7.4 million iPhones in its most recent fiscal quarter, 7 percent more than the same three-month period a year earlier and a whopping 43 percent more on a sequential basis. The numbers illustrate two key points: Mobile is indeed the future and reducing the base iPhone model to $99 is helping unit sales, in a big way. Continue »

The number of people accessing social networks on their mobile phones at least once a month in the U.S. has doubled since the beginning of the year, to 10 percent in the third quarter from 5 percent in the first quarter, according to Forrester Research, in line with stats Facebook released last month. The number of people who accessed that social networking site from their mobile phones tripled to 65 million, up from 20 million people back in December. The data also heralds what many people sense, that mobile phones are becoming an extension of the lives we lead on our personal computers. 

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Twitter yesterday launched a mobile version of its popular micromessaging service in Japan, making it the first country to get its own local language version. To boost its presence abroad, the fledgling San Francisco-based company has been tapping into the mobile industry, unveiling a partnership this week with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile operator, in addition to one with UK-based O2. Continue »

Skimble, a web site that helps you plan and track your outdoor activities and workouts, hopped on the Twitter train today with the release of a feature that lets you tweet your activity to its site. It joins a growing group of exercise-focused applications and web sites that are integrating the micro-messaging service into their offerings. For example, Kevin over at jkOnTheRun has reviewed RunKeeper, an iPhone application that lets you post your workouts and run times to Twitter, and he currently logs his pushups workout to the onehundredpushups web site, which tweets his results.

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Shazam, a popular mobile application that allows you to ask your phone what song is playing by holding it up to the source of the song, has raised an undisclosed amount of capital from the iFund, a $100 million fund started by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to published reports, Shazam had previously raised $12.3 million from Acacia Capital and DN Capital, even though company officials told us last year that they had raised nearly $20 million in funding.

First of all, I am shocked to learn that the iFund is not only investing but is still around, as it’s been awfully quiet. That being said, my original thesis on the iFund and other app-focused specialty funds hasn’t changed — I think they will be as successful as the RSS Fund or the Java Fund. Secondly, despite the popularity of the app, Shazam has some business challenges. Continue »

From Loopt to FourSquare, it seems like every mobile-focused startup these days wants to hop on board the location-based application train. Aloqa launched an iPhone version of its free Android and BlackBerry application last week (the startup’s CEO, Sanjeev Agrawal, spoke during a panel at our recent Mobilize conference).

Like Geodelic, Aloqa helps you find nearby points of interest — what it calls “channels” — that you can customize according to your preferences. For example, if you’d rather get a cup of coffee from Peet’s than from Starbucks or another cafe, you can subscribe to the Peet’s channel. You’re then a tap away from pulling up a map that will guide to the store location you want to visit. Continue »