The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

Welcome to part four of Tapsauce’s Holiday Guide! We’ve already told what you get for your spouse, your kids and yourself, so today we’re moving into your social circle! Depending on your personal disposition, your friends may be more important than your family or your kids, so keep them happy this holiday season by drowning them in cool stuff! Earn their friendship for another year!

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(Talksauce is the Friday editorial where Tapsauce editor-in-chief Jacob Hall talks about something that’s on his mind. His brutally honest opinions don’t represent the views of Rocksauce Studios, but hopefully they’ll give you some food for thought!)

“Nowhere” is an exaggeration, but it feels dramatically apt. Does technology have to be good looking? No. Does it need to be good looking it you want to actually sell it? Of course!

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The iPod turned ten on Sunday. Yep, it’s only taken a decade for Apple and its army of iDevices to emerge from out of nowhere and conquer our lives. There really is no looking back.

To commemorate the birthday of what may be the most important gadget of the 21st century — smartphones, apps and tablets certainly wouldn’t exist as they do today without the iPod redefining what a mobile device could do — let’s take a look at the evolution of the iPod family.

Exciting photographs and tech history after the jump… More after the JUMP…

Apple is no stranger to massive amounts of money raining down on them from the people of the world. It’s a simple, mutually beneficial transaction: people love Apple enough to fork over their hard-earned dough and Apple loves taking that hard-earned dough. Anyone who has ventured to an Apple Store on the release day for a new iPhone or iPad has seen it with their own eyes: hundreds, if not thousands, of tech enthusiasts lined up around the block for hours on end just to be among the first to claim the latest iOS device. With over 300 Apple stores worldwide (as well as the other various retailers that stock Apple products) and Apple products flying off the shelves at an absurd rate, exactly how much money is being made?

Oh, about $28 billion, up from the meager $15 billion that was made this time last year.

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Three years ago this month, the Apple App Store officially launched. This past week, the Apple App store crossed 15 billion downloads. To put that in perspective, it took iTunes nine years to reach 10 billion downloads. The word you’re looking for is Whoa.

The jawdropping numbers do not stop there. One month ago, Apple announced that the App Store had passed the 14 billion download mark. That means that one billion apps were downloaded in the past month. One fifteenth of the store’s total downloads occurred in the past thirty days. That’s about thirty three million apps downloaded each day. That’s before you even mention the 130 million books that have been sold through the App Store.

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From the “OMG THAT IS AWESOME!” file come the amazing iPod Nano Watch concepts from Scott Wilson and the Team at Minimal.

Take your iPod Nano – and put it into a watch band. Now what do you have? One of the coolest watches ever to grace someone’s wrist. While companies aren’t making apps for the Nano yet, I think it’s only a matter of time before it happens. Especially in light of this sort of thing – different watch faces, different timers, and can you imagine having Netflix or Facetime right there?

When the world gets closer to making comic strips like Dick Tracy a reality, the happier we get!

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Today, branding website Brandchannel announced it’s award recipient for 2010 Overall Award Placement. Brandchannel looks at the movies that are #1 each week at the Box Office, and from that compiles data about the products being displayed on the big screen. They also rely on input from some of their readers, and we’re guessing just a few of them are users of Apple products.

So how exactly did Apple come away with this award? Well according to Brandchannel “Apple products appeared in ten (or 30%) of the 33 films that were number one films at the US box office in 2010, outstripping appearances by any other single brand for the year. Nike, Chevrolet and Ford tied for second place, each appearing in 24% of the top films. Sony, Dell, Land Rover, and Glock appeared in at least 15% of the #1 films.”

That’s right, more people used Apple products in movies than they used Glocks! Brandchannel unfortunately didn’t provide a list of the #1 movies, but they did provide a list of the movies that were not #1 from 2009 and 2010 that had Apple product placement:

Morning Glory, Somewhere, Repo Men, Hereafter, Machete, Greenberg, Catfish, Dinner for Schmucks, Lottery Ticket, Solitary Man, Going the Distance, Chatroom, Hot Tub Time Machine, Please Give, She’s Out of My League, Chloe, Killers, Book of Eli, The Spy Next Door, When in Rome, High School, Cats and Dogs 2, Step Up 3D, Gulliver’s Travels, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Knight and Day, You Again, Vampires Suck, Drag Me to Hell, Orphan, I Love You, Man, Duplicity, Crank 2: High Voltage, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Imagine That, Sorority Row, Answer Man, Post Grad, I Love You Beth Cooper, All About Steve, Hurt Locker, New York, I Love You, It’s Complicated, Road Trip: Beer Pong, Law Abiding Citizen, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Funny People and Couples Retreat.

Apple certainly has the advantage of the iconic logo that helps make their brand recognizable, but HP has made big strides in the product placement department with their partnership with Beats, and their new webOS product line due to hit the market this summer and that could provide some decent competition for some screen time coming soon to theaters near you.