Samsung Epic 4G joins EVO as Sprint's second 4G phone

Fifty-seven percent of Android apps are free, compared with 28 percent of iPhone apps and 22 percent of Windows Mobile apps, according to the analytics firm Distimo. Of apps that aren’t free, most are $2 or less. This is not true for Blackberry and Windows Mobile apps.

This is a landmark. It was just a couple of years ago that Internet Explorer dominated the world of browsing the Internet; it was used by more than 90 percent of people who went online. Of course that was mainly because it came packaged with Windows, so anyone who bought a computer automatically had it. But you can have as many Internet browsers as you want on your computer and gradually people began to move toward something better. Even Joy’s sister, who is totally baffled by computers, now uses Firefox for email and web browsing. So it’s still true, that if you make a better product, you will usually win out.

Like Google Analytics, which is also free, Woopra tells you how many visitors you have, where they’re coming from, and what pages they’re visiting. But it goes way beyond that. Unlike most website analyses, you see a live count of your visitors on a map of the world, marked with glowing dots as people come in and out. You can click on any dot and choose “start a conversation” if you wish.

This seems awfully intrusive to us, but Woopra executives claim people love to be stopped in their tracks

and asked how they’re enjoying the site. Of course this can help you understand what works and what doesn’t on your site.

The map also indicates what keywords users are searching on in that area of the world. Looking at a test site, “OneMansBlog.com,” we saw that no one was searching on U.S. Vice Presidential candidate “Sara Palin” in South America, but there was one search going on in Africa, and over a hundred in the U.S. On our own site, we were surprised to see it being read by people from many countries.

No information about visitors is collected beyond what is known to any similar service, but each Woopra visitor is tagged with an ID number. So if you want, you can set up an alert that tells you the next time a particular visitor is on the site. You can also set up other kinds of alerts. Find out every time you get visitors from Beverly Hills, or Timbuctu. You can get alerts identifying the use’s native language. This may seem weird, but most browsers have this information.

Woopra is still in the beta phase and currently has 45,000 users. The company is only going to issue 5,000 more invitations before closing out the testing process so they can get ready for their official launch a few months from now.