The global appetite for mobile applications will explode over the next two years, new research suggests.

A study done for Getjar, the world’s second biggest app store, said the market will grow to $17.5bn (£12bn) in the next two years.

The study claimed downloads would climb from 7bn last year to 50bn by 2012 - a 92% year-on-year increase.

It found there had been a gold rush with the number of app stores rising from four before 2008 to 48 today.

The study also suggests Apple’s domination of the market could be challenged.

“We wanted to find out the real value of the industry because we felt certain segments like the iPhone were being over-hyped and so-called feature phones were being under-hyped,” said Getjar founder and chief executive officer Ilja Laurs.

Feature phones are less powerful than smart phones but can still run some third-party software.

Smart rush

While Apple’s App Store is regarded as the dominant player, there are many more to choose from including those from BlackBerry, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and Samsung.

Nokia is just one of the many players with its own app store

Google’s Android Marketplace, for instance, has more than 30,000 apps made for smartphones running on its mobile operating system.

Mr Laurs said the figures attributed to the iPhone’s value have been unbelievable in some cases.

“The value of the iPhone App store ranges from as low as $700m (£466m) to $2.5bn (£1.66bn). You can see the range is huge,” he said.

Mr Laurs said the research found that feature phones should not be ignored in the rush to create apps for smartphones.

“It is almost as if these phones don’t exist. We know smartphones are an extremely important phenomenon, but in terms of consumer mindshare and revenue share, feature phones represent 90% of the global market compared to 10% for smartphones and data cards.”

Industry shake-out

Researcher Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting said that the charging model which dominates the app ecosystem is changing.

“Advertising and the sale of virtual goods has helped expand choices for developers and we will see all of that ramp up in the next couple of years,” he told the BBC.

But most commentators think Apple’s paid model will survive for the foreseeable future.

Developers are looking at what opportunities the iPad offers them

“I wouldn’t say it is going to die, but the industry is going to evolve in alternative directions ,” said Getjar’s Mr Laurs.

Apple’s iPad, for example, is expected to boost the app market according to statistics from analytics firm Flurry.

It reported that developer activity for the iPhone has risen 185% in advance of the iPad’s April arrival. Applications for the iPhone can be ported over to the new device.

“We have definitely seen a shift back to the iPhone with the anticipation of the iPad and a little bit of the disappointment with the Nexus 1 (Google phone),” Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry Analystics told business site MarketWatch.com.

“Definitely there has been a rush of applications. It will invite a new wave of developers and it is a very cool device so people are going to develop for it.”

Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.

Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.

The “important milestone,” as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 per cent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.

By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine per cent in the same time - although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube and Google Maps.

Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 per cent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.

Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.

In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail’s format.

Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.

Engineers designing the world’s fastest car believe they now have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground.

Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h).

Initial iterations of the car’s aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle’s rear.

But the latest modelling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration, allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas.

“At Mach 1.3, we’ve close to zero lift which is where we wanted to be,” said John Piper, Bloodhound’s technical director.

“Up until this point, we’ve had some big issues. We’ve had lift as high as 12 tonnes, and when you consider the car is six-and-a-half tonnes at its heaviest - that amount of lift is enough to make the car fly,” he told BBC News.

“We’re very close now to fixing the exterior aero surface, which really opens the floodgates to the rest of the design work to really get going.”

Computing power

By playing with the position and shape of key elements of the car’s rear end, the design team has now found the best way to manage the shockwave passing around and under the vehicle as it goes supersonic.

The solution is a major milestone in Bloodhound’s design.

The effort has been assisted greatly by project sponsor Intel. It brought immense computing power to bear on the lift problem.

Before Intel’s intervention, the design team had worked through 11 different “architectures” in 18 months. The latest modelling work run on Intel’s network investigated 55 configurations in just eight weeks.

To claim the world land speed record, Bloodhound will have to better the mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997.

It will be powered by a combination of a hybrid rocket and a jet engine from a Eurofighter-Typhoon.

Three who worked on Thrust are also engaged in the Bloodhound project, including driver Wing Cmdr Andy Green, project director Richard Noble and chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres.

They plan to mount their assault on the record in late 2011, driving across a dried up lakebed known as Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

‘Bullet’ test

Bloodhound’s aero shape is not completely fixed. Further work is still required on the jet intake ducts, the winglets that control lift, the air brakes (deployable structures that slow the car), and the large rear fin. The team also needs to model the air flow into the car.

But settling on the principle exterior surface means the team can now push forward on the main chassis structure and interior packaging of all the components that go into the vehicle.

John Piper intends to produce a master model of the car in late August, early September.

This will be followed by about five to six months of detailed drawing to direct the manufacture of components.

The aim is to have the car built and ready to begin testing in the second half of 2011.

Work is progressing on the wheels which will have to endure tremendous forces as Bloodhound races across the pan.

The 900mm-diameter, 120mm-thick aluminium discs will rotate at 10,300 rpm. The radial acceleration will be equivalent to about 50,000 g at the rims. Under those conditions, the alloy actually begins to stretch.

Lockheed Martin is working on the design. It will shortly run an experiment in which earth from Hakskeen Pan is fired out of an air gun at a sample of aluminium that has been pre-stretched to simulate the loads that will be experienced by the real wheels.

“A piece of dirt at Mach 1.4 is faster than a bullet so we’ve got to make sure we’re not overstretching the material,” said John Piper.

US regulators have unveiled the nation’s first plan to give every American super-fast broadband by 2020.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which will now submit the plan to Congress, said broadband was the “greatest infrastructure challenge”.

It estimates that one-third of Americans, about 100 million people, are without broadband at home.

The FCC’s goal is to provide speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to an average 4Mbps now.

“Broadband for every American is not too ambitious a plan and it is absolutely necessary,” former FCC chairman Reed Hundt told BBC News.

“The consequences of not succeeding are heartbreaking. Every nation needs a common medium to gather around and to have the internet as a common medium where a third are left out is unacceptable.”

‘Silver bullet’

In an executive summary released ahead of the presentation to Congress on 16 March, the FCC said: “Broadband is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life.

“It is changing how we educate children, deliver healthcare, manage energy, ensure public safety, engage government, and access, organise and disseminate knowledge”.

For industry analyst Erik Sherman of business and news site BNet.com, all the talk “sounds like an overstatement”.

“The plan cannot be a silver bullet for all these issues and problems which exist for a number of different reasons and not just because of a lack of broadband.

“The plan is very big in scope and if you look at the rationale, the FCC is basically saying we need more money for more internet. I am not saying we don’t need a broadband plan but we have to be realistic about what it can and cannot do,” Mr Sherman told BBC News.

‘Fairy wings and wishes’

Months of hype and speculation has preceded the presentation of the country’s first comprehensive broadband roadmap. The FCC has also held a series of briefings previewing its goals.

“It’s an action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues,” said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.

Wide differences in broadband access are revealed by statistics

The executive summary revealed that access to high-speed internet services had grown dramatically from eight million Americans 20 years ago to nearly 200 million today.

Estimates to implement the plan have been put at $350bn (£233bn). How that bill will be split between private investment and tax dollars is not known.

“Who pays and how much is the big fight ahead,” said technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.

“The devil is in the detail and right now it’s all fairy wings and wishes. The Republicans are going to fight anything that is excessively expensive while the Democrats have to be wary of looking like they are cutting cheques at a time when the government is for the most part broke.”

The FCC will auction off some 500 megahertz of spectrum to pay for some of the expense. More than $7bn will come from President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, which targeted broadband-related initiatives.

‘Digital exclusion’

For years the technology industry has pushed for the US government to create a national broadband plan.

Ahead of today’s meeting with Congress, a number of hi-tech companies wrote to Mr Genachowski to praise the plan.

“Broadband is critical to America’s long-term economic and social well-being. As society increasingly moves online, the costs of digital exclusion grow as well,” said the signatories of the letter, which included Cisco, Sony, Salesforce, Microsoft, Facebook and Intel.

One possible battleground is expected to be over the sale of spectrum that is mostly in the hands of television broadcasters.

Mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon have said they will need more spectrum in future to provide superfast reliable internet connections to every customer.

“The problem is most of the spectrum is occupied by somebody else. They are going to want a lot of money for this,” said Adam Thierer, president of the free-market leaning Progress & Freedom Foundation

Reindeer have no internal body clock, according to scientists.

Researchers found that the animals are missing a “circadian clock” that influences processes including the sleep-wake cycle and metabolism.

This enables them to better cope with the extreme Arctic seasons of polar day, when the sun stays up all day, and polar night, when it does not rise.

The team from the universities of Manchester and Tromso report their study in Current Biology journal.

The body clock, or circadian clock, is the internal mechanism that drives hormone release on a rhythmic 24-hour cycle.

Light also influences these hormonal rhythms, but in most mammals, this “circuit” also involves the circadian clock, which can influence the release of hormones without the influence of light.

Anyone who has experienced jet lag is familiar with the effect of the body clock.

But the research team from research institutes in the UK and Norway found that, in Arctic reindeer, this circadian clock was absent.

Professor Andrew Loudon from The University of Manchester took part in the study.

He said that the reindeer may have “abandoned use of the daily clock that drives biological rhythms” in order to survive the extreme conditions in the Arctic.

He and his colleagues studied reindeer living in Northern Norway, 500 km north of the Arctic circle. Here there are 15 weeks of continuous daylight in summer and eight weeks during the winter where the Sun does not appear over the horizon.

They investigated levels of the hormone called melatonin - which is important in the sleep-wake cycle - in the reindeer’s blood

They found that there was no natural internal rhythm of melatonin release into the blood - the hormone simply responded to the cycle of light and dark.

Professor Loudon said he believed that evolution had “come up with a means of switching off the cellular clockwork” and that the result was “a lack of internal daily timekeeping in these animals”.

He commented: “Such daily clocks may be positively a hindrance in environments where there is no reliable light dark cycle for much of the year.

Organisms use their circadian clocks to correspond with their living environment; but if their environment has a very different cycle, it may be better to follow that rather than use the internal clock.

“This could be the case for a range of animals living at the poles of the Earth or in the depths of the ocean.”