AOL has been making huge moves this year, swallowing up startups left and right. Trying to stay competitive with younger companies who seem to be weeding out those who fight off innovation and forward progress. I commend AOL’s purchases, as an old weathered pioneer of the industry AOL needs to keep pumping life into it’s brand in order to stay afloat in the competitive space. About.me joins a great lineup of acquisitions this year that include TechCrunch, StudioNow, 5min Media, Thing Lab and Pictela.

The question now becomes, how much did AOL pay for the company that they hope well lead them through the aggressive Social Media front? While no announcements have been made publicly, lets just say that AOL made founders Tony Conrad, Timothy Young and Ryan Freitas an offer that they couldn’t refuse.

Conrad discussed the sale with Business Insider, and while he would not comment on the sale price he did outline the parameters of the decision. Basically Conrad states that since they only had to raise around $425,000 in funding, selling now offered a profitable and guaranteed payoff: “Given how little capital we raised and the acquisition price, our entire team does very, very well in this outcome.”

On November 15 2010, LIVESTRONG.COM released the MyQuit Coach app for the iPhone.  Released only a few days before American Cancer Society’s 35th Annual Great American Smokeout, the MyQuit Coach app offers personalized quitting plans for smokers.  This cleverly designed app will help iPhone owners and smokers of all ages stop smoking and discover a new path to a healthy lifestyle!

LIVESTRONG.COM has established itself as the place for you to achieve your health and wellness goals, and when you do, LIVESTRONG.COM will recognize and reward those achievements! Over the past couple of month LIVESTRONG.COM has been working hard right beside all of its followers in making the app more exciting and entertaining.  They’ve been working on new badges for eating right, getting fit and living your best life!

Not only does the MyQuit Coach app allow you to design a personalized plan to help you quit smoking, but they also arrange it so you’re not alone. With a built in social support circle you have the ability to update your Facebook and Twitter so that your friends can cheer you on along the way!

Here are some other health conscience apps making their way across the globe one smart phone at a time:

Livestrong Calories Counter creates an easy way for you to keep track of what you eat.

MyFitnessPal allows you to enter in the name of the food and it will record the calories, protein, sodium, and so on.   You can also enter exercises for “calorie credits!”

And finally, we all know how important sleep is and what better way to do it with the sound of rain and waves to coax you into the deepest sleep.

Pure Sleep Premium includes ambient electronica, three noise tracks, and rain and waves soundtracks. It features sleep and deep sleep programs, as well as napping options. And just so you don’t sleep through your meeting, it also functions as an alarm clock!

The new app craze has swept the mobile industry and is expanding rapidly. Developers have been able to find a new outlet in a competitive industry, nonprofit companies such as LIVESTRONG have found a clever way to monetize and other more established organizations find it an effective marketing tool. The app markets worldwide are exploding onto the scene and soon enough the phrase, “there’s an app for that” will be obsolete because there will be an app for literally everything.

Following up on yesterdays post about IBM’s aggressive acquisition strategy, Zynga has come crashing in to try and steal my thunder. The social gaming company that has attracted 215 million monthly users by way of thrilling, edge of your seat simulation games such as Farmville and Frontierville (hint of sarcasm), has announced the acquisition of Texas based mobile gaming giant Newtoy (now “Zynga With Friends”). Newtoy’s most successful creation Word’s With Friends has been downloaded 12 million times since its release. This acquisition, along with seven other acquisitions in as many months, a recent expansion to Japan and a new alliance with American Express all signal Zynga’s strong offensive in the gaming industry.

Zynga acquisition and expansion craze has carpeted across the nation, hopped the pond to Europe, swept over to Beijing and most recently bombarded the shores of Japan with a recent announcement of Farmville’s Japanese release. Entering the competitive Japanese gaming market will be a difficult move, but Zynga executives have expressed the need to broaden international influence, as well as climb onto different platforms, the most important right now being mobile.

Overall the aggressive strategy has panned out well for Zynga. The social gaming titan has been able to attract nearly 10 million user everyday to it’s most popular game Farmville, and projections place Zynga at an estimated value of roughly $5.6 billion. So kudos to you Zynga! Not only do you have a pretty awesome name that I have repeated in my head more times than I would like to admit during the course of writing this article, but you have also been able to surge in a less than friendly economic environment. Like IBM, your business strategy is “building a better planet”, well at least for the childhood farmer in all of us.

Not only are we checking in at our favorite places and finding out where our friends are, but now we are able to engage in games or tasks to win prizes and virtual rewards.  You don’t have to be a real time Boss or Mayor to call yourself one anymore.  Checking in is fun, but getting prizes, rewards, and a chance to be the Mayor makes day-to-day life that much more exciting.

Some of the Mobile apps that have been on the forefront of this evolution are Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Scvngr, BrightKite, and Loopt. While each app has its own distinctive features, they share noticeable similarities.

Scvngr is a Boston-based start-up that helps organizations engage people through location-based smart phone games. Seth Preibatsch, The CEO and “Chief Ninja”, wanted to make the planet more entertaining and engaging by building a game layer on top of the world.   Scvngr, unlike other location-based applications, puts gaming first.

Applications like this seem to be popping up all over the place.  Here’s one I found that connects sailors in places all over the world, www.bluemapia.com, web and mobile social mapping for boaters. Bluemapia allows sailors to socialize with other sailors and share on the map their sailing trips, videos, photos and comments about the places they’ve visited by boat.

So whether your mimicking the mannequin at American Apparel and cat walking your way to a Fashionista Badge or earning a Foodie Badge for visiting the most restaurants, Scvngr assures you’re in for an exciting day!

A complete turnover in the way we use the Internet has been announced and will be employed in the coming year. The face of the Internet will change from the standardized .com to a new arena of customizable domains. The switch will benefit both user experience and branding efforts, but unlike the evolution of the Internet the expansion will disenfranchise the innovators and only allow a select few to reap the benefits.

The movement is called New gTLD (New Generic Top Level Domains) and allows the “.com” to be replaced with a company, organization or generic name. For instance instead of visiting canon.com you would visit .canon, about.canon, or products.canon. Besides addressing security concerns, this transformation would enhance, personalization, branding, customer experience and overall web functionality. The new wave of Internet domain terminology would likely be introduced to encompass corporations, locations, and common terms, but would not be available for everyone.

The $185,000 application fee is just the beginning of a process that will likely set numerous roadblocks to prevent entrepreneurs from taking advantage of the new space. There is only a 45 day window to apply for the new domain, announcements have been limited and a new window won’t be cracked for another 10 years. The acquisition of a personalized domain also comes with a strict selection process, so even if you have the money there is no assurance that you will be among the privileged.

The personalization that exists with the New gTLD gives already successful companies and government organizations a digital edge over the entrepreneur who strives to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. The revolution is being referred to as Beyond .com and may act as a step forward for internet operations, but represents a giant step backwards for what the internet once was. Instead of an open playing field that rewards the most creative and innovative minds of our youngest generation, the move to beyond .com will stem progress while rewarding the status quo. The secrecy and caste involved with this transformation will bring about a new dark era of the internet in which the will to achieve is regulated by those with monetary control.

One way the rise in enterprise apps can be demonstrated is through the move of popular business software services towards mobile alternatives and additions. Some of the early phase mobile enterprise applications have come in the form of productivity suites that have emerged from existing desktop software such as Box.net and SalesForce.com.

Box.net, one of the leading content cloud computing software offers businesses the ability to access and share content, such as documents and presentations, over a secure shared network. Now this software is available over your mobile device, allowing businessmen and women to access all of the information on their computer at any time and place. This increase in connectivity and productivity seems to be driving the mobile movement and can be translated into profits within the corporate world.

SalesForce.com is another productivity suite that has been recently introduced to the app market. With the Salesforce mobile application users can access the most comprehensive CRM software from their smart phones and tablets. The Salesforce mobile app offers the business community a more immediate way to manage sales and customer information.

These productivity  applications are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mobile enterprise software. New technologies make it easier for businesses to continue essential office functions on the go, in turn empowering relationships, increasing ROI, and driving corporate value.  Other than productivity software companies large and small are riding the wave of mobile apps by creating mobile  marketing campaigns, deploying customer service applications and implementing hand held devices internally to promote efficiency. From the health care industry to mobile banking, the rise of enterprise apps in the mobile market seems to be taking the corporate world by storm.