TNW has put out an interesting article today on Kindle e-book sales compared to iBook sales, going as far as to say that the Kindle still outsells Apple's equivalent by 60-to-1.

In June, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said iBooks had already captured 22 percent of the e-book market, a gigantic number given that the store had just launched. Many were skeptical of Job's number, however.

TNW spoke with J.A. Konrath, a popular author who is a huge fan of the future of e-books, about how well sales are going for him, on both platforms.

Konrath publishes his books on Kindle himself, cutting out publishers that used to take most of his profits. By doing so, and selling his e-books at a very reasonable $3 a piece, Konrath is making over $2 per book sold. When his books were in paperback, he was lucky to make $0.80 for every $10 book sold.

The author compared sales from iBooks, the Kindle, and from paperback: "Publishers might be looking at enriched or enhanced ebooks as their new big-ticket items to replace hardcovers. But the major ebook retailer, Amazon, isn't set up for video. Kindle isn't even able to do color yet. That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month."

Given an average 30-day month, that is 6000 books sold on the Kindle and just 100 through iBooks, a 60-to-1 ratio.

While this is just one author's figures, Job's 22 percent number seems to be misleading, at best.

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Samsung has announced today that Melissa Thompson of Greater Manchester has broken the record for fastest text message, shattering the old record by almost 10 seconds.

Thompson was using a Galaxy S with Swype and texted the phrase: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

The former Guinness World Record was 35.54 seconds for the phrase, which was shattered when Thompson did it in 25.94 seconds.

Thompson was shopping with her boyfriend when Samsung asked her to take a shot at the record.

Says the texting champ: "I used to send a lot of text messages - 40 or 50-a-day to Chris alone so we both knew I could type fast. But since we moved in together and I started my job I haven't been texting as much and, you could say, my fingers were out of shape. It's a real shock to find out that I'm the fastest texter in the world."

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Motorola has released their official Android upgrade schedule, giving some long-time owners a set timetable for updates to their smartphone operating system.

A few of the devices are still running Android 1.6, or even 1.5, and are in desperate need of an update.

Unfortunately, most of the devices listed will not be getting an upgrade to 2.2 Froyo.

The schedule:

North America
Droid X by Motorola (USA): Upgrade to Android 2.2 planned for late summer
Devour (USA): Will not have a software upgrade to Android 2.1
Backflip, Cliq and Cliq XT (USA): Upgrade to Android 2.1 (testing in process) planned for late Q3/early Q4
All Android 2.1 and 2.2 upgrades for Canada are under evaluation only. This includes the Backflip, Dext, Milestone, Quench

Europe
Milestone: Initial rollout of upgrade to Android 2.2 planned for Q4
Backflip and Dext: Will not have software upgrades to Android 2.1

Asia-Pacific
Milestone, Motoroi and Titanium (all Korea): Initial rollout of upgrades to Android 2.2 planned for Q4
Milestone (Asia-Pacific): Upgrade to Android 2.2 under evaluation
Backflip, Dext and Quench (all Asia-Pacific): Upgrades to Android 2.1 under evaluation

Latin America and Mexico
Milestone: Upgrade to Android 2.2 under evaluation
Backflip and Dext: Will not have software upgrades to Android 2.1

If you don't want to wait, you can always just root your device and throw a ROM on their.

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Facebook recently posted to their blog that they now have 150 million people actively using the social network from their mobile devices, including smartphones, MP3 players and tablets.

The Facebook for iPhone app is also now showing as having 103 million active monthly users, which amounts to almost every "i" device ever sold.

In June, Apple said they had sold about 110 million iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.

Says David Kirkpatrick, of The Facebook Effect: "The Facebook application is by far the most important application on both the iPhone and the iPad. Without the Facebook application, my own opinion is the iPhone would never have become as important as it is. It's the single most widely used application. It's so heavily used compared to other apps that I have been told by someone who thought he knew the data — this is highly secret data and I don't know the actual numbers — that more than half of all usage of the iPhone of apps, other than those provided by the phone itself like telephony and email, is coming from Facebook. And on the iPad, too, it's just a huge, huge part of usage. So in a way, Apple and Facebook are joined at the hip, and I think that's one reason why Zuckerberg and Jobs have been spending time together."

Additionally, the App Store is nearing another milestone, 250,000 apps even after 50,000 were pulled by Apple or by the developers.

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EMI Music has just purchased Digital Stores Limited, a company which provides online stores for artists including The Beatles, Queen & Oasis.

The acquisition is a logical one for EMI, which is in need of revenue streams outside of physical and online music sales. Although the business has been improving since the 2007 purchase by private equity firm Terra Firma, they still lost more than 600 million euros last year.

It also dovetails nicely with the recent trend of labels signing artists to 360 deals. These deals give the label a cut of everything from merchandise to tour revenue, and are becoming an increasingly important part of the modern music business.

Owning a company like Digital Stores also has a lot of potential for selling services to artists not otherwise affilliated with EMI. Both artists on other major labels and those who wouldn't be signing with any major become potential revenue sources.

If they manage it well, this could be a key part of EMI's transformation from a traditional label to an all around music marketing and artist services company. Of course any of the major labels could have done that already.

The stumbling block has never been capability. What they've lacked has been the will to change. As long as executives are fixated on preserving a dead business model that will remain a problem.

This purchase seems like a good move, but the follow through will determine just how successful it is.

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