Apps and Software

Los Angeles is the latest city to call for a ban on apps that allow users to sell their parking spots — on their driveway and on the street — to others.

After facing legal heat over selling street parking in San Francisco, where it is still based, MonkeyParking offered its controversial service in Los Angeles. Now members of the city council have called for legislation to ban it.

The app provides a platform where users can sell their private parking spaces to others for cash. Driveways cost $10, and the parking spot owners pocket $8 of that amount, according to the App Store ...

Android developers had a busy year in 2014.

The number of apps in the Google Play Store grew by more than 50% last year, outpacing Apple's App Store for the first time, according to a new report.

The latest numbers come from appFigures, an analytics service that monitors data from the thousands of apps that use its platform. The report noted that all three app stores it looked at — Android, iOS and Amazon's Appstore — saw a large amount of growth, but Google saw significantly more than the other two.

"What's interesting is that although Apple continues to grow strongly, it's really Google Play that's growing," the company wrote. "In 2014, the number of apps distributed through Google Play has doubled." ...

Real time translation, the kind we imagined in science fiction is finally within reach. In the space of just a few months, Microsoft has introduced live translation services to Skype (still in preview) and now the latest Google Translate features live, language-detecting, two-way audio translation on its free iOS and Android apps

Like Skype Translator Preview...