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You’ll have to make do with this until April Get thee to the clickery! The iPad is hitting the streets on April 3 and you can start pre-ordering on March 12. As far as we can tell there was no real “delay” here, per se

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iPad to be released on April 3, pre-orders on March 12

Apple just announced that its tablet device, the iPad, will be available in the U.S. on April 3. See announcement below.

When Apple unveiled the device a few months ago, we were told it would be available by March. Rumors began to swirl recently that shipment of the devices was delayed until April. According to the release, the Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available starting April 3, with the Wi-Fi and 3G models rolled out by late April. Starting on March 12, U.S. customers can pre-order the device either online or at their local Apple retail store. The device will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Pricing has remained the same, with the basic Wi-Fi enabled model starting at $499. Pricing is as follows: $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB.

Apple is launching with 12 apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the 150,000 apps on the App Store. The supposed Kindle-killer will debut with an iBooks app, which will be available for free download from the App Store in the US on April 3. Apple’s partnered witha number of publishers including the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.

Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds–thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook–and delivers battery life of up to 10 hours.*

iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch(TM) interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. You can read and send email on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard or import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. iPad makes it easy to watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or flip through the pages of an ebook you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection.

The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 150,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers are already creating exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.

The new iBooks app for iPad includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.

The iTunes® Store gives iPad users access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 films including over 2,500 in stunning high definition. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer.

Pricing & Availability

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year.

The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year.

*Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

In the great metal room There was a comlink and a Tauntaun and a picture of- The Executor flying over the forest moon That’s right: for those parents who don’t want to read their children the potentially death-tinged Goodnight, Moon we present Goodnight Forest Moon , a beautiful parody by Noah Dziobecki. You can download it here , print it out, and totally freak out the other fathers when they come over on playdates and realize you totally have the coolest book collection ever.

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Goodnight, Forest Moon

Fresh off the acquisition of AppVee, social mobile app directory Appolicious is releasing a few new features including a Facebook App, an Appo.me URL Shortener for links to apps, and a Twicker ad model, which allows users to view tweets and offers from sponsors on the site. Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more.

The Appolicious Facebook app allows users to access Appolicious’ recently launched Curated App Lists, which are recommended lists of apps from users based around hobbies and interests. The startup also launched Twicker, an ad format where advertisers send customized messages to the Appolicious audience via Twitter. The Tweets are seen on a ticker at the top of the site’s page. Sponsors pay a monthly fee to advertise via the Twicker.

Additionally, Appolicious is rolling out the Appo.me URL shortner, which gives the ability to easily create, grab and share a shortened URL that links directly to an app. You simple type in the name of an iPhone app and Appo.me automatically completes the app name and will give you a shortened URL for the link to the app in the iTunes store and its landing page on Appolicious’ directory.

Appolicious’ Facebook app will compete with the mPlayit, a Facebook-based mobile app directory. But the feature I find most compelling is the URL shortener, which makes it dead simple to find and link to any app on Apple’s App Store. Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007.

Research reports forecasting future market sizes should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it occasionally helps to see the estimates of research organizations in order to gain some perspective on the current and upcoming trends for those markets.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what research2guidance has to say about the worldwide smartphone application market, which it estimates will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013.

The big surge in applications will be driven by a fast-growing number of smartphone users, which the research company estimates will increase from about 100 million last year to nearly 1 billion by 2013.

There’s a ton of opportunity for corporations to tap into this vast audience with mobile apps, research2guidance adds, because according to its research only 10% of Fortune 2000 companies are targeting their customers with a smartphone application to date.

Still according to the agency’s findings, the vast majority of them have published applications to give access to their core products or for promotional purposes (91%). Only a minor share (9%) use applications as a stand-alone product.

If you’re interested in the full report, you can purchase it here.

Does your company offer mobile applications for smartphones? On what platform?

Hamburg, Germany based Qype, a Yelp-like site that’s focused on European markets, has recently had long acquisition looks from both Google and Nokia, we’ve heard from multiple sources. A deal with Nokia in particular was looking extremely likely until recently.

The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe.

Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range.

But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms.

Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland.

So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years.

Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.

Yesterday, Luke Wroblewski – Chief design architect at Yahoo! – wrote a blog post singing the praises of audiosharing site Huffduffer. But it wasn’t Huffduffer’s service that got Luke W animated, so much as their sign-up page.

While most sites use a standard form with text-boxes and radio buttons for new sign-ups, Huffduffer presents its questions as a ‘Mad Lib’ style statement…

“I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be _____________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________. By the way, my name is ______________ and my website is ___________.”

…which is kinda neat.

But Luke, being a ‘chief design architect’ (one of the world’s more tautological job titles), wanted to find out more. Specifically, he wanted to know if this style of form actually encourages more people to sign up than the usual Name: ___________ / Email address: __________ format. So he persuaded Ron Kurti at Vast.com to do some A/B testing and, whaddya know?, it turns out the conversational fill-in-the-blanks form increased conversion by 25-40%.

Given those impressive numbers it’s a cast iron certainty that in the next few months dozens of sites, starting probably with Yahoo!, will consider upgrading their sign-up pages to this new, friendlier format. The trick, of course, will be to get the wording just right – to customize each sign-up page for the site’s particular audience.

…which has given me an idea for a ‘fun’ weekend contest! Hurrah!

Your challenge is this: suggest some Mad Lib-style wording for the sign up page of your favourite web 2.0 site. The funnier the better. Post your entry in the comments and his time next week I’ll pick the funniest (say) three and award some excellent prizes.

Prizes that will include (but are not limited to): fame, recognition of your brilliance and whatever crap I can find in my hotel room – a signed copy of my eBay-auction-winning book, a TechCrunch tshirt and maybe one of those little bottles of shampoo you get.

Here are some examples off the top of my head to inspire you. Yours should be better…

Twitter:

“I do everything Oprah tells me to do so I’d like to use Twitter for three days. I’d like my username to be __________ and my password to be ‘password123′, or the name of my dog which is ______________. Please autofollow me to Oprah, Ellen Degeneres and Taylor Swift.”

Google:

“My name is ___________ and I would like to sign up to use Gmail/Google Buzz. The name of the person I am secretly having an affair with is ___________ and my social security number is _______________. Please display this information on my public profile.”

YouTube:

“LOL!!!! My n@me is ____________ & I wanna join yutube becos this video sukkkssss!! I think _____________ is GAAY!!! LOLLZ”

Livejournal:

“My name is ______________ and joining Livejournal is my only hope of getting anyone to read my poetry. My birthstone is ____________ and my current mood is _____________ and lonely. No one understands me. I hate my life.”

MySpace:

“My name is ____________ and due to some kind of administrative error I would like to join MySpace.”

Go, submit!

Sometimes I despair of Europe, even though I’m proud of what can be achieved here. But really, guys, can we get it together?

At the same time the European Union is investigating a pretty flimsy anti-trust complaint against Google, it’s conspiciously ignoring a case in Italy where three Google executives have been found guilty on a ridiculous charge. Here is the bizarre story.

An Italian court yesterday convicted three (ex) Google executives in a trial over a video showing a teenager being bullied. The Google Italy employees were accused of breaking Italian law by allowing the video of bullying of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome to be posted on YouTube in late 2006.

Despite the fact that Google removed the video within hours of being notified of its existence, Judge Oscar Magi (pictured) absolved the three of defamation but convicted them of privacy violations. The three executives have received a suspended six-month sentence, while a fourth defendant was acquitted.

Google has responded in a justifiably vociferous blog post calling this a “serious threat to the web in Italy”. Frankly they are right.

There’s no shortage of real-time search engines that are tracking the web and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for results. Collecta, OneRiot, Microsoft’s Bing and Google all offer compelling search engines to tap into the real-time stream. Today, social media client Sobees is jumping into the stream with its real-time search discovery platform.

The platform, which is powered by Microsoft Silverlight and runs on top of Windows Azure, has the look and feel of Sobees’ Twitter client. Within the page, the search offering aggregates searches by categories in five columns or modules including real-time search (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facterylabs and OneRiot), image search (Bing, Flickr, Google and Yahoo), video search (Bing, Google and Youtube), web search (Bing, Google and Yahoo) and news search (Bing, Google, New York Times and Yahoo).

For each column, the user can filter results by choosing to click off services, or click off columns all together. You can also choose to search from trending topics pulled from Twitter and Yahoo that are updated in real-time. While the engine is a standalone sight, it will soon be included in Sobees’ Twitter client as well. The real-time search platform is fairly innovative and could be a good companion to the the client

Although the third-party social media application space is crowded, Sobees seems to be doing well for itself. Its client, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn. The startup recently struck a deal with Yahoo in December to integrate the client in Yahoo Mail in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (the application is called “My Social Networks”).

Sobees will also be launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search, geolocation, lists and most of the basic Twitter functionality. A native iPhone app is in the pipeline. I’m a fan of Sobees and find myself wishing the startup offered a mac-client.

PayPal is finally extending its money transfer system to the BlackBerry, with a new, free Send Money app for the Blackberry. The app will let you access your PayPal account and easily send money to a recipient. You can find on the BlackBerry App World here.

The app will also tap into your contact list on the phone making it simple to choose a recipient to send money too. Users can also access their recent PayPal transactions and monitor their account balances directly from the app.

You can even send money in 23 different currencies, with the app available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal and Australia. The BlackBerry PayPal app joins its iPhone and Android app cousins.

While the new BlackBerry app is minor compared to some of the recent innovations PayPal has launched, it still represents the company’s greater strategy of becoming the next wave of payments technology. PayPal’s parent company eBay, has made a big push in the mobile space so its safe to assume that PayPal will continue to focus on mobile opportunities in the coming year.

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