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Analysis shows more than $100 million has already been invested in companies which focus on creating iPhone apps - only half of it coming from the iFund.

Evernote's launch time is drastically increased on the iPhone 3GS, finally making it good enough to kill off Apple's native notes app. Now you can sync your contacts, calendars, texts and notes more using apps and services. That and more in this week's hidden gems.

You now have the option to save your videos as a copy instead of saving over the original when you're trimming it, thus enabling non-destructive video editing. The SDK now also includes APIs giving apps access to edit videos.

The new version of the iPhone OS, including the beta released today by Apple, upgrades the iPhone's baseband. As such, iPhone 3.1 may make it much harder to unlock your iPhone later.

Apple this afternoon released an updated SDK along with the beta for iPhone OS 3.1.

There's a way for you to get rid of those monthly text messaging fees whether you send just a few each day or you need unlimited messages.

AIM and BeejiveIM beat Shape Services to the release of Push Notification instant messaging by a couple days, but Shape Services has a trick up their sleeves. Actually, the company has a couple. First, it pushes your Twitter account to your iPhone. Second, it pushes Skype voicemail.

AT&T Navigator becomes the second turn-by-turn app in the U.S. App Store, unfairly bypasses In App Purchases.

BeejiveIM has always been an expensive instant messaging client. It is also extremely powerful, supporting AIM/MobileMe, MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, Facebook MySpace, ICQ and Jabber. Thus far it has circumvented the lack of background processes in the iPhone OS by pushing incoming messages to your e-mail inbox. It wasn't the most elegant solution but it worked well. Now BeejiveIM holds the distinction of being the first instant messaging app with push notifications to be available in the App Store.

We all should be enjoying the impressive power of Push Notifications right now on a plethora of super cool apps which have been enabled with these new alerts. Unfortunately, there is no killer app for these yet. Instead, we have a hodgepodge of little more than a dozen apps like Star Defense, AP Mobile, Tap Tap Revenge and Textfree Unlimited, among others. While all are quality apps, none of them has wowed us.

As luck usually has it this post will go live and sometime shortly thereafter it'll be invalidated. I still have to ask the question though because I think it's on a lot of people's minds. I certainly don't want to be that guy who cries wolf.

We've had a great response to our Applists so we've decided to make it a little easier to find out what's going on. We're going to begin tweeting every new app we add to our definitive lists on Push Notifications, Mapping and Peer To Peer apps. All the apps on these lists make use of iPhone OS 3.0's newest features and, so far, there aren't as many of them as you might think. However, they're trickling in all the time and we're adding them to the lists as they debut.

We were wondering who would get the honor of first rip-off using Apple's new In App Purchases. Wonder no longer, that honor goes Gokivo + Yahoo! Local Search.

Yes, it's true. Go ahead, give the headline another look - no one would blame you for not believing it.

This week features a pair of apps for the art aficionado, a great new mapping app from one of the oldest companies in the Web-based map business, an app loaded with a ton of how-to videos and an old Twitter app gets an awesome update.

This week we'll look at a couple apps to keep in mind as you upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0 or consider buying an iPhone 3G S. We'll also check out DoGood, an app which will make you feel good about the world. We'll also look at Global Impact, which won't.

Around the world, 22 carriers will be offering tethering plans so iPhone users can connect their computers to the Internet using the phone's connection and 29 carriers will be ready to send MMS messages when iPhone OS 3.0 launches next week. AT&T is absent from both these lists.

We detail the primary hardware changes from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3G S and what they mean to you.

AppConnect adds social networking features to app bargain hunting, bringing us that much closer to app discovery nirvana. Also, in this week's column, we'll take a look at recently updated must-have utility that's free until June 5 and a great game for kids.

If you're a dog lover or don't have a really twisted sense of humor, you probably shouldn't read this.

The App Store still lacks quality apps in two important categories - chat and feed readers.

Though the reality of the App Store is more failure than success, the app gold rush continues to tantalize. Many great ideas go completely unnoticed and the only thing to blame is the American Dream. This is the story of ContactGo, an App Store financial failure.

In this week's column we'll take a look at a recently-updated remote control app and take another look at the App Store's screamer app offerings.