GoComics is an iOS, Android and Windows Phone app from Uclick, a division of Andrews McMeel Universal. It’s available now as a free download for all three platforms, and carries optional in-app purchases to temporarily remove advertising through a subscription to the service’s “Pro” account.

GoComics is a companion to the Web service of the same name, which has been offering electronic versions of classic and contemporary comic strips to Internet-based readers since 2005. Content on offer includes political and editorial cartoons as well as established classics such as Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts, other syndicated content and original Web-based comics. The available comics are updated daily, with featured content displayed on the app’s front page in a “slider” interface as well as quick access to both popular and new strips. The archives are also searchable, allowing users to quickly find their favorite strip and, once located, jump back to a specific point in time to view the comic for that day.

The GoComics app is much like using the Web service. It is not necessary to sign up for an account to browse the available content, but doing so provides a number of benefits — most notably the facility to add individual installments of a comic to a “Favorites” list and the whole series itself to a “My Comics” list for easy access at a later time. The user may also connect their account to Facebook, though the exact benefits of doing this are not made particularly apparent in the app itself. Other social features include the facility to share an individual comic on Facebook, Twitter or via email — doing so provides a link to the comic’s Web-based version for anyone to read, regardless of the device they are on.

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Piddas21′s today launched RemotePlay on iOS, an app that allows users to instantly stream and share videos, photos, music or documents in real-time with other users.

“We’re very excited about launching RemotePlay on iOS as it allows us to truly demonstrate how disruptive peer-to-peer broadcasting of content across multiple platforms can be,” said Piddas21 founder and CEO Joe Lin, in a statement. “RemotePlay gives people a new way to share their favorite content and dramatically enhances the way they interact socially through technology.”

Piddas21, a subsidiary of the worldwide leader in notebook original design manufacturing Quanta Computer, released the Android version of RemotePlay in early March. Now with the launch of the iOS version of RemotePlay, iOS users can automatically import their music and videos from iTunes as well as share content from third-party apps like Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive and others (including email attachments), with other users who also have the RemotePlay app installed on either an iOS or Android device.

The Taipei-headquartered mobile app company Piddas21 claims RemotePlay is the first mobile app that allows users to instantly stream content to another user who also has RemotePlay installed on their device. Users can instantly stream content to one person at a time or multiple people at once. The app doesn’t allow for users to select a certain group of people — it’s either one person or everyone. Each user who’s a recipient of the shared content can independently pause, replay and view the content as they please.

For additional information about the app’s user interface, how users share content or the technology behind the app, refer to our previous coverage for the Android launch of RemotePlay.

RemotePlay is available now on the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and on Google Play for Android smartphones and tablets. The app will release for Windows Phone 8 in the coming months.

Glympse is an iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry app from the company of the same name. The app originally launched back in 2009, but has undergone numerous major revisions since then — revisions which have allowed it to survive in the crowded marketplace even as other location-based mobile-social apps either withered and died or found themselves acquired and merged into other services. The current version of Glympse, which is a free download on all platforms, is currently enjoying a feature spot in the New & Noteworthy section of Apple’s iOS App Store. This review is based on the iOS version, tested on an iPhone 4S.

One of the reasons Glympse has survived so long is its fundamental rethinking of how location-based apps can and should work. Rather than creating a proprietary social network for users to share their location with friends using the service and other networks connected to it, Glympse is not reliant on any sort of traditional social functionality and does not have its own attached social network in the traditional sense. Rather, it is an app intended to allow users to quickly and easily share their current location and/or estimated time of arrival at a specific destination — and to be able to do this in a cross-platform manner that is not reliant on other people having the app installed, or on people having a compatible device.

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New mobile app startup Piddas21 today launched Piddas21 RemotePlay, an app that allows users to instantly share videos, photos, music and documents in real-time across multiple mobile platforms with any other user.

“We like that people can interact on their mobile phone or tablet,” says Joe Lin, founder and CEO of Piddas21, a subsidiary of the world’s largest notebook original design manufacturer (ODM) Quanta Computer. “You can instantly broadcast any media [type], and then you could push it to other devices instantly.”

Piddas21′s RemotePlay app is said to be the first mobile app to allow users to instantly stream content to another user that has the app installed, Lin says. He adds that a few scenarios where RemotePlay is useful includes sharing a video with friends at a cafe, a document between students in a college lecture hall or a family expense document between a husband and wife. The content a user can share can come from photos and videos on their device’s camera roll as well as from other apps like documents stored on Dropbox or a pictures stored on Facebook.

Breaking down the app’s UI, at the top, a user will see a list of devices that are connected on the same Wi-Fi connection. On the bottom, users will see a breakdown of the different media types such as pictures, videos, music, Flickr pictures and documents that can be shared instantly. To share content, users simply drag-and-drop the content either to one person at a time or multiple people simultaneously. Once content is shared, a control panel pops up, which allows each user to play, pause, replay or sync the content in real-time on all devices.

The app also enables users to see what apps and devices other users are using. Piddas21 calls this “presencing information.” Once a user is done sharing a piece of content through RemotePlay, it disappears from the recipient’s device, which keeps the original content in the possession of the sender while not taking up any storage space on the recipient’s mobile device. There are privacy settings implemented into the app so a user can specify whether or not they want to be promoted if someone requests to share content with them.

The technology behind the app allowing the Taipei-headquartered Piddas21 to identify devices who are using RemotePlay on the same Wi-Fi network is a lightweight protocol with HTTP. RemotePlay doesn’t use existing media sharing standards like DLNA or UPnP because those standards can’t discover devices well, Lin says.

RemotePlay is offered in two flavors — free with ads and a pro version for $1.99 with no ads. The app is available now for Android, in a few days for iOS and in a few weeks for Windows Phone 8.

Once again Apple’s iOS is the most lucrative platform on Opera’s mobile ad platform, with an average eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of $1.64, according to the web browser maker’s Q3 2012 State of Mobile Advertising report.

The Oslo, Norway-headquartered company’s mobile ad platform, which touts itself as world’s leading mobile ad platform, serves more than 10,000 mobile sties and apps and delivers more than 40 billion ad impressions per month.

Platforms below iOS’s eCPM of $1.64, which was 25 percent more than the worldwide average of $1.31 eCPM, was RIM at $1.06, Android at $0.88 and Nokia’s Symbian OS at $0.37.

In terms of traffic and revenue, iOS devices accounted for 46.37 percent of total ad traffic and 58.40 percent of revenue. Android made up 25.66 percent of traffic for Opera and 16.79 percent of revenue, which are traffic and revenue percentages that are far fewer than that of Apple’s suite of iOS devices. Microsoft’s Windows Phone devices, which were shoehorned into “Other,” represented 20.04 percent of traffic and 19.67 percent of revenue, with an eCPM of $1.28.

At the Masters of Monetization session at this week’s Appnation event in San Francisco, Mahi De Silva, executive vice president, consumer mobile for Opera, said despite there being more Android devices than iOS in the ecosystem, people use more apps on iOS than Android. He added that advertisers want an audience they can reach and it’s easier to integrate ads on iOS versus Android, so advertisers tend to favor iOS.

The iPad remained the most lucrative Apple device ($3.96 eCPM in Q2 2012), averaging $4.42 eCPM, which is more than double the eCPM of the iPhone at $1.48 and more than triple the eCPM of the iPod Touch at $0.82.

“If you look at some of the big media companies, on iPad they are getting CPMs they never saw on the desktop because of the rich-media experience on the device,” said De Silva at Appnation.

Between mobile apps and web, apps grabbed the two-thirds majority of advertising dollars, generating 73 percent of revenue for Opera. The remainder of ad revenue came from mobile web.

Publisher category-wise, the business, finance and investing category generated the most revenue per impression compared to other publisher categories while the sports category displayed the most growth.

Opera took a closer look at the U.K., one of its best performing regions, in this report. Surprisingly, BlackBerry traffic in the U.K. is almost four times higher than BlackBerry traffic in the U.S., with 14 percent of total traffic in the U.K. coming from RIM devices compared to 4.40 percent in the U.S. Also, publisher categories the U.K. favored include the arts and entertainment and the health, fitness and self help categories.

Publishers using Opera’s mobile ad platform include Pandora, Shazam, and CBS, and some advertisers include Samsung, Walmart and American Express.

Data for this report was collected from Opera’s subsidiaries including AdMarvel, Mobile Theory, and 4th Screen Advertising, three mobile advertising companies it purchased for upward of $100 million in total.

Opera says it remains on track to generate more than $400 million for mobile publishers in 2012, which is a large increase over 2011 when it generated $240 million.

Cloud gaming service Agawi announced today its new Windows 8 GameZen app that offers developers and publishers the ability to bring their social games, web-based games and more to Windows 8 computers and x86 tablets. GameZen will allow developers to bring their games to Microsoft’s new Surface devices “soon.”

“What GameZen allows publishers and developers to do is literally take their existing games such as Facebook social games, web-based MMOs, pretty much all categories of games, and instantly make them available in a market that comprises potentially of hundreds of millions of users,” Agawi CEO and co-founder Rajat Gupta told Inside Mobile Apps.

He added that “Practically any Facebook game for example, should be available on GameZen. Think about even larger titles like Empires and Allies to small titles that are more niche.”

There’s no cost for developers and publishers to get their games on Agawi. Also, developers and publishers don’t need to do anything at all in regards to adding touch controls to their games for GameZen on mobile, it’s all handled by Agawi’s automated real-time gesture virtualization, which ads multi-touch gestures to games where it wasn’t present.

Started in February 2010 as a YouWeb incubated company called iSwifter that streamed flash-based social games to the iPad, the company renamed itself to Agawi in August 2012 and pivoted its business to focus on mid-core and hardcore games.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Tuesday at its Build conference that Windows 8 sold four million copies since launch and that there are currently 670 million PCs running Windows 7. Using Ballmer’s figures to make his point, Gupta says the potential for Windows 8 is huge and believes consumers will eventually convert over from Windows 7 to Windows 8. He adds that GameZen is an effective way for game developers and publishers to reach the large Windows audience.

“For a publisher to take their existing web-based game, and instantly without having to invest any incremental dollars into it, make it available on a new platform is huge value add.”

The Menlo Park, Calif,-based game streaming startup announced back in September its partnership with Microsoft to bring its game streaming service to Windows 8 devices, which will utilize Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform to stream games to Windows 8 devices including computers, tablets and eventually smartphones. Some of Agawi’s cloud gaming service competitors include OnLive and Sony’s Gaikai.

In an effort to attract more mid-core and massively multiplayer online (MMO) developers to bring their games to Windows 8, the company set up the Agawi Game Partner (AGP Gold) Program. Agawi rewarded developers who signed up early by featuring their games in GameZen. Gupta couldn’t mention any games, developers or publishers for GameZen at this time.

GameZen is available for free in the Windows 8 Store starting today. As of right now, the app doesn’t monetize, but Gupta says Agawi will work with their development and publishing partners to figure out the appropriate way to monetize.

Agawi has only received a “very small” seed round of funding from unnamed Silicon Valley angel investors and funding from YouWeb Incubator, according to Gupta. The rest of Agawi’s funding has come from its own revenue to finance itself up to this point.

Microsoft announced today the operating system details and hardware options for the upcoming Windows Phone 8.

Microsoft manager of the Windows Phone program Joe Belfiore today revealed the new operating features coming to Windows Phone 8 including a new lock screen powered by Live Apps, Data Sense, Kid’s Corner and Rooms.

During the Microsoft event in San Francisco Belifore revealed that the Windows Store now has more than 120,000 apps. He added that 46 of the top 50 most popular apps on other platforms will now be on the Windows Phone. Some of those top 50 apps include Temple Run, Urban Spoon, Angry Birds Star Wars and Where’s My Water? Pandora, in particular will hit the Windows Store in 2013 with a whole year of free music and no advertisements. Other new apps coming to Windows Phone 8 include Words with Friends, Chase, PayPal, Draw Something and more. Belifore also revealed that Microsoft has doubled the language support for the Windows Phone to 50 languages and Windows Phone apps are now available in 191 countries.

In an effort to put people at the center of the mobile experience Microsoft revamped its Live Tiles and Live Apps so users can see the things they care about from other people including their latest photos, tweets and more. Users can now rearrange and resize Live Tiles however they see fit. A new lock screen powered by Live Apps allows users to see content, pictures and notifications from apps at a glance. Microsoft has also partnered with Facebook to bolster this feature by allowing Facebook photos to show up in the lock screen.

Windows Phone 8′s new Data Sense feature aims to help users get the most out of their data plan. Users can surf the web more and use less data through Data Sense’s software that compresses every web page. Microsoft says users can increase mobile browsing by 45 percent on the same data plan versus another handset without Data Sense. This new feature also helps users find nearby Wi-Fi hotspots on a map and helps users manage their data usage. Additionally, Data Sense can adjust appropriately as users approach the limit of their data plans.

Kid’s Corner allows parents to create a separate environment for kids using a Windows Phone 8. Parents can grant access to apps, music, games and more by simply checking boxes next to a list of apps.

Rooms, a new addition to Windows Phone’s People hub, lets users create particular sets of people from the main contact list with which they can share messages, photos and notes. The feature is similar concept to Google’s Circles feature. For example, a grocery list can be shared between a standard Family Room. Users of other phone devices like iPhones and Anroids can get part of the Rooms experience such as shared calendars.

Users can access documents and photos from a Windows 8 PC, tablet, phone and even Xbox with Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service. SkyDrive is the first cloud service that fully intergrates Office documents from any Windows 8 device. SkyDrive offers 7GB of free storage, with the option to add more storage. Music can now be synced from a Mac, Windows Phone 7 or Windows Windows Phone 8 via a companion app. So users can now have their entire iTunes music library on their Windows Phone 8.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ended the conference by showing off multiple upcoming Windows Phone 8 handsets including the Nokia Lumia 920, Samsung ATIV S and HTC 8X. Nokia, who’s exclusively focused on Windows Phone development and is selling the most Windows Phones on the market, will be releasing its new Lumia 920 which features optical image stabilization and wireless charging capablilty. Samsung’s ATIV S features a 4.8 inch screen and long batter life. Lastly, the HTC 8X sports a built-in amp, Beats Audio and a wide-angle lens on the back-facing camera. All three devices from Nokia, HTC and Samsung feature Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that are made to optimize the Windows Phone 8 experience.

Developers can get their hands on the Windows Phone 8 SDK for free starting tomorrow.

Microsoft first took the wraps off its Windows Phone 8 operating system back in June, revealing a mobile operating system that will share the same file system and drivers as the Windows 8 desktop operating system.

Windows Phone 8 devices will begin going on sale in Europe this weekend and the rest of the world in November, with such devices including the Nokia Lumia 920, HTC 8X and Samsung ATIV S. AT&T will be getting the HTC 8X, Nokia Lumia 820 and exclusive Lumia 920 on November 14. Verizon will be carrying the HTC 8X and exclusive Nokia Lumia 822 by Thanksgiving. T-Mobile will be receiving the Nokia Lumia 810 and HTC 8X on November 14. Lastly, Canadian mobile network Rogers will have the Nokia Lumia 920 on sale beginning tomorrow.

Game streaming startup Agawi is hoping to entice more mid-core and massively multiplayer online (MMO) developers to bring their games to Windows 8 with its new AGP Gold program.

Short for Agawi Game Partner Program, the initiative will be an ongoing effort, but Agawi is sweetening the deal for early sign-ups. Companies that join the program now will have the chance to have their games featured in Agawi’s Windows 8 app, which will launch alongside Window 8 on Oct. 26. According to today’s press release, AGP Gold is open to all developers, although Agawi has said it will favor social mid-core and MMO-type titles when choosing which games to feature.

“It’s a great opportunity for web-based mid-core and MMO game developers to make the leap over to mobile and tablet-based gaming,” said Agawi co-founder Peter Relan in a statement accompanying today’s news.

A Microsoft partner themselves, Agawi uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to stream games to desktops, laptops, mobile devices and tablets running Windows 8, which according to the company eliminates the need to port a game to make it run on the new OS.

Originally a flash-based game streaming service called iSwifter, Agawi renamed itself and pivoted to focus on mid-core and hard-core targeted games in Aug. 2012.

DeNA, Gloops partner for international expansion — DeNA has entered into a comprehensive business alliance with Japanese mobile-social game developer Gloops that will see 10 Gloops games land on the Mobage network, five in 2012 and five in 2013. Unlike previous games Gloops has made for Mobage, all 10 titles will be targeted for North American and European markets. One of the titles will be based on what DeNA refers to as a “popular American franchise.”

15 percent of iOS devices upgraded to iOS 6 after 24 hours — Map woes aside, iOS device owners appear to be enthusiastic about iOS 6. Mobile cross-promotion network Chartboost reports 15 percent of all iOS devices were running the operating system within 24 hours of its launch.

HTC unveils two Windows 8 handsets — HTC has revealed what its two Widows 8-based handsets, the 8X and the 8S will look like. The midrange targeted 8S comes in four colours and features a 4” touch screen, 5 megapixel camera, 720p video recording, 4GB of storage, 512 MB of RAM and a Qualcomm S4 1GHz dual core processor. HTC’s flagship 8X phone is also comes in four colors, but has a 4.3” touch screen, a Qualcomm S4 1.5GHz dual core processor, 1 GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p video, a 2.1 megapixel front-facing camera and 16GB of storage.

Pocket adds text-to-speech Listen feature – Content curation app Pocket now supports text-to-speech through its new Listen feature. Currently only available to Android users, the new feature allows users to have the app reach saved articles to them out loud.

Horn drops to $2.99 — Phosphor Games’ critically acclaimed title Horn is on sale for $2.99 until Sept. 27. The game is also now localized into 11 languages.

Thumb hits 1.2 million users – Social opinion sharing app Thumb now boasts 1.2 million members. According to the company, the average user now spends more than five hours a month using hte service.

Amazon releases its own Maps API — Amazon’s Maps API is now available for interested developers. Currently in beta, the Maps API is designed for developers who are currently using Google’s native Android Maps API, and allows for interactive maps with custom overlays.

Apple shares rise on iPhone 5 — The fast selling iPhone 5 has pushed Apple’s share price above $700 for the first time. At the time of writing, Apple shares were selling for $698.70 in after hours trading.

[Acquisition] Shutterfly grabs up mobile print app developer Penguin Digital — New York-based Shutterfly has acquired Penguin Digital, the developer behind iPhone photo printing app MoPho. MoPho’s technology will be rolled into Shutterfly’s own printing apps, according to TechCrunch.

[Launch] Hotel Transylvania app hits iOS – Playfirst’s latest game, Hotel Transylvania Dash, a licensed game based on the Sony Picture’s animated movie Hotel Transylvania, is now available in the iTunes App Store.

[Launch] The Bard’s Tale hits Android – inXile has brought its classic humorous RPG The Bard’s Tale to Android. The game is available in Google Play, the Amazon Appstore and third-party app store TegraZone for $5.95.

[Launch] Ricky Gervais gets into app market with JustSayin’ – Popular comedian and Office-creator Ricky Gervais is lending his star power to social conversation app JustSayin’. The app allows users to record conversations and post them to their social media profile to enable voice-based communication. The app is available on iOS.

[Funding] Square closes $200 million fourth round — Mobile payments processor square is now valued at an estimated $3.5 billion after closing an enormous $200 million Series D round of funding. Citi Ventures, Rizvi Traverse Management and payments partner Starbucks all participated in the round.

[Funding] Scopely raises $8.5 million in venture funding – LA-based mobile social gaming company has raised an impressive $8.5 million in venture round funding from Anthem Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Greycroft partners and others reports VentureBeat.

[Funding] GENWI gets $2 million for mobile publishing push – GENWI, the startup aimed at working directly with publishers to create mobile apps, has raised $2 million in additional funding from Floodgate and Elevation Partners.

YoYo Games today announced its cross-platform game development software GameMaker: Studio is expanding its reach and will support both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 for developers.

This is only the latest in a series of high-profile updates for GameMaker: Studio, which launched in May. YoYo Games is the latest among software providers to announce their inclusion of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 compatibility for cross-platform game development, as both Unity and Adobe have revealed similar plans. GameMaker: Studio, however, is specifically designed to make creating games on multiple platforms as cost-efficient as possible.

CEO Sandy Duncan tells us that with GameMaker: Studio, a developer can create a game in the software and launch it for a wide variety of platforms with minimal effort and cost. During a demonstration with a demo game in the software, he shows how all users need to do is select the format they want to put the game onto and then click a compile button, showing us the game in both HTML5 and on a new Android Nexus 7 tablet. This allows developers to develop a game at minimal expense (he says most titles are created for “well under $50,000 a game”) while distributing it as broadly as possible.

“Game publishing has become a non-intuitive business,” Duncan tells us. “Even if you have success like Rovio, it’s very hard to use that success to help your next game.” Duncan is talking about Rovio’s latest iOS release, Amazing Alex. Even though the game’s been critically well-received, it hasn’t replicated the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Angry Birds; our AppData traffic-tracking service shows Amazing Alex is the No. 90 top paid app, No. 52 top paid game and the No. 330 top grossing game in the iTunes App Store.

Duncan tells us GameMaker: Studio for Windows 8 will be available for developers before October 26, while Windows Phone 8 compatibility will launch sometime later this year.