At a special education event on Thursday, Apple introduced a revamped version of their iTunes U services. iTunes U is a collection of podcasts in both audio and video formats, from a number of universities in the United States. Topics covered range from chemistry to basketball and offers a range of choices for different lessons and tutorials.

Apple has now removed the iTunes U service from a tab deep within iTunes and has created a brand new application, simply called ‘iTunes U’. This goes in part with Apple’s new push for education, following the release of textbooks for iPad, bringing a number of textbook publishers under the Apple umbrella.

If you’re an educator at a university, college, or K-12 school, now you have an easy way to design and distribute complete courses featuring audio, video, books, and other content. And students and lifelong learners can experience your courses for free through a powerful new app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The iTunes U app is available for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch on the App Store for free [App Store]. This new app brings together all pieces of the iTunes U service, and tightens Apple’s control over their multiple updates to the service over the past few years.

Apple’s education services went into the shadows recently, but is now poised to become a focal point of Apple’s revenue stream and targets a larger audience for their products.

Flurry is a San Francisco-based analytics company that concentrates on the mobile space. They’ve recently released numbers indicating a sudden jump in iPhone OS development. Flurry tracks deployed and in-development applications through developers who incorporate their analytics package, a Neilsen system for apps if you will. According to a recent blog post entitled, Flurry Smartphone Industry Pulse, January 2010:

Flurry tracks over 20,000 live applications and over 2 billion user sessions each month. Applications that include Flurry Analytics have been downloaded to more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices.
So if anyone has the pulse on the course of mobile application development its Flurry.

In the same blog post Flurry reveals they tracked 1600 new iPhone application starts in January. That doesn’t seem remarkable taken by itself. However, they tracked only 600 new application starts in December. That’s almost a threefold increase in application starts in the course of one month. The explanation, of course, is iPad anticipation.

Any successful person knows that to be successful you don’t merely follow the crowd, you lead it. The huge increase in new application starts just goes to show that not only were foresighted developers anticipating the iPad, they were actively pursuing the opportunities it brings. The coming months should see a new, virtual gold rush as developers move on the opportunities the iPad brings. The primary participants? At this point I think the developers really delving into the iPad will be those creating games, eBooks, and content delivery platforms. Those are the three areas really targeted by the iPad. Others will follow but these three areas will be the real veins initially mined in this new gold rush.

Will the iPad bring a new boom of development for the iPhone/iPad platform? Will this boom bring a noticeable stratification between iPhone and iPad applications? Will you be participating in the gold rush? Leave us a comment and give your thoughts.

By: Erin Peterson