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Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More On its Q3 earnings call, Apple announced that there are over 650,000 apps on the Apple App Store, up from 600K in April of this year. Apple exec Peter Oppenheimer also mentioned that 250,000 of those apps were developed specifically for iPad. Perhaps more importantly to you hungry entrepreneurs, Apple paid out approximately $5.5 billion to developers. This is a huge jump from the $4 billion figure Apple reported in April. iOS 6 — with its deep Facebook integration — and the new iPhone, which is expected in September, should only bolster these numbers. To get a little perspective, Google’s most recent numbers in the Google Play dep...

Ron Johnson is best known for creating Apple's retail empire. He's now CEO of retailer JCPenney. This week, he detailed his amazing vision for turning JCPenney into a techno wonderland in Apple's image. And he's turning to Oracle for help. Apple's store design gets almost all the attention. Not as flashy but just as important is the software that does everything from tracking inventory to letting salespeople ring up purchases with iPhones. Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney has old, proprietary code. Johnson is yanking out about 500 applications, nearly all of them custom applications created over the years, and having Oracle be its one-stop shop. This is a big win for Oracle, since its archrival IBM has been entrenched with retailers for decades. (Look at this 1976 article about JCPenney installing IBM cash registers, for example.) Neither company disclosed the size of this deal for Oracle, but it's easy to see that it's big. JCPenney already used quite a b...