As Oklahoma City residents reel from a major tornado, the Red Cross has a free app that tracks disaster shelter availability. The Safe and Well site will help you connect with loved ones.

While the shelter app is Apple only, you can download the Red Cross tornado app in Google Play for an Android tool to find shelter. Follow this link to download the iOS app:

Shelter data reflects all Red Cross managed disaster shelters across the United States. Information is updated at least daily, and more often during disasters, including location, capacity, current number of shelter residents, and the date and time of the last update for each activated shelter … The application uses data about open shelters from the American Red Cross National Shelter System (NSS). The NSS contains information about 60,000 potential disaster facilities and is used to track and report on shelter information during disasters. The NSS enables emergency managers and disaster relief workers to identify relevant information for all shelters in use and to develop effective response strategies before disasters strike.

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With more than 700,000 apps available in Google Play’s Android app store, it can be difficult to find new apps that you like to use.

Appreciate aims to address this problem by giving you personalized recommendations on what Android apps you might like based on the apps that you are already using, as well as on what your Facebook friends use and what kinds of apps other app users like you are using.

The free Android app works like a search tool for app discovery. You can create a profile and identify which apps you like and it will match you up with other apps that you might like. The app has a live stream of apps recommended specifically for you, and you can do social searches to see which friends are using apps that you might be considering. You can also look for apps that are similar to apps that you use including alternatives that mega-users like the most.

Online and app food ordering companies Seamless and GrubHub have agreed to merge their services. Combined, the organization will offer users access to more than 20,000 local restaurants in more than 500 cities across the U.S. In 2012, the two companies delivered about $875 million in gross food sales to local takeout restaurants, earning a combined revenue of more than $100 million.

“We have always shared the same goal – to bring more business to restaurants – and by working together, we will be able to bring even more innovation to customers across the U.S and U.K.,” wrote Jonathan Zabusky, CEO of Seamless on the Seamless blog. Read more

Doctors and nurses are continually turning to smart phones to help patients. This, time it’s the data that is alerting nurses to changes to patients’ daily habits through Gingeri.o’s behavioral health analytics.

Ginger.io taps into the continuous sensor data from your mobile phone and other devices to predict individual behavior changes and identify aggregate trends. Our research from MIT Media Lab demonstrated that location and communication sensors can be used to model individual symptoms and long term health outcomes.

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Controversial Facebook based app, Bang with Friends, got the boot from Apple’s app store. Since January, the app has garnered plenty of negative attention and one knock-off called Bang with Nobody (actually a Google Plus stab). Apple did not comment on why the app was removed, but it’s safely assumed that the app violated  Apple’s sense of decency with the pornographic nature of the app. Perhaps Apple is not “down to bang.”

Bang with Friends’ graphic logo was recently switched to its benign acronyms on Facebook as a means to appease Facebook’s policy so similar tactics might work for Apple, though it seems that the company’s “puritanical porn policy” may keep it out indefinitely.

What do you think? Should customers be concerned with Apple’s authority in removing apps that millions of users may want?

Do you wish your Facebook posts had a wider reach?

PostRocket shared a long list of practical Facebook tips in an infographic, looking at how you can optimize your stories, images and posts for Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. EdgeRank decides how many people see your posts, so you should follow all these useful tips.

Click here to see the whole infographic. Above, we’ve embedded PostRocket’s ideal dimensions for a Facebook photo post.

(Via Alma Katsu)

Yahoo has agreed to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Yahoo said in a press release that they “promise not to screw it up,” explaining that Tumblr will be operated as an independent business and that David Karp, the  company’s founder will remain CEO.

Still, the two companies will work together in some ways. Here are some details about how from the press release:

Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.

As part of the news release, Yahoo revealed that Tumblr has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and signup about 120,000 people every day. In addition, Tumblr gets about 900 posts per second, users spend 24 billion minutes on the site per month and more than half of Tumblr’s users use the site’s mobile app.

Doug Stambaugh has been named Vice President of global eBook market development and strategy at Simon & Schuster, a newly created position that has been established to support the publisher’s growing global eBook business.

Fast & Furious 6: El Juego has joined the top free iPad apps list this week at No. 1, according to research from AppData. The video game from Kabam lets players race around London earning cash and the respect.

Below, we’ve listed the top free iPad apps of the week. The list links to Inside Network’s research about the individual apps, including historical charts, developer information and download information.

To support Mediabistro’s Media App Summit, we spotlight the top free apps every week–helping our readers discover, enjoy and analyze successful content. Read more

Gilt Groupe, an online destination for flash sales on luxury items, has updated its Android app with a new design to make it easier to shop the site from an Android phone. Making shopping easier is important for Gilt, who generates more than 30% of its overall revenue and half of its daily traffic from apps and the mobile web.

To help promote version 3.0 of the app, Gilt is running a series Android-exclusive mobile sales on the new app. From May 28^th to June 1^st, Gilt members that shop the Android app will get access to exclusive offers before they go live on the site. In addition, Gilt is offering free shipping on all orders placed through the Android app from May 28^th at 12pm EST to June 1^st at 11:59pm EST.