Should babies use apps? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Fisher-Price and Open Solutions.

The complaint challenges these companies on the claim that “apps for tablets and cell phones are educational for babies.” Laura Moy of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law is working on the complaint with the advocacy organization. She offered this statement in the release:

These companies are violating federal laws that protect consumers by making totally unsupported and unsubstantiated claims about the educational value of their products … And not only are they breaking the law, they are unfairly taking advantage of well-meaning parents who want nothing more than to help their babies get ahead of the curve. The Commission should stop these practices and make crystal clear that if companies want to market apps as educational for babies, they must have evidence to back up their claims.

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When the news broke that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will acquire the Washington Post, people from around the publishing industry speculated about what it could mean for publishing and journalism.

Over at Thin Reads, Howard Polskin wondered if the new acquisition could boost Kindle Singles production at the storied newspaper. Check it out:

The Washington Post is already in the e-book single business with projects on Osama Bin Laden, President Obama and a compilation of Watergate-related story by Woodward and Bernstein. It seems like the ingredients are all there for The Washington Post to emerge as a bigger player in the fledgling e-book single market under the direction of Bezos.  If that happens – and it’s a big if at this point – here’s how both players could benefit.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the best free apps for transcribing recorded interviews, speeches, videos or other audio content.

If you don’t want to do the work yourself, there is another option. For $1 a minute, you can transcribe pre-recorded text using the Rev Voice Recorder app. At a conference last week, I tested out the platform with a ten-minute speech.

I recorded 10 minutes of a speech on the app’s “normal” setting from my seat in a hotel ballroom. I recorded the speech and uploaded it to the Rev translators straight from my phone at 2:30 in the afternoon. They emailed me back a clear and accurate transcript at 9:00 pm the same night.

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In a great essay at The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal compared browsing Facebook to gambling addiction, showing how the site sucks you into “The Machine Zone”– mindlessly shuffling through pictures.

Below, we’ve highlighted five apps that you can check instead of Facebook, actually reading or learning something the next time you need a digital fix. Here’s more from the article:

What Facebook and slot machines share is the ability to provide fast feedback to simple actions; they deliver tiny rewards on an imperfectly predictable “payout” schedule. These are coercive loops, distorting whatever the original intention of the user was. What began as “See a picture of person X” becomes “keep seeing more pictures.” The mechanism itself becomes the point.

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The Tabby Awards/Business has opened for its second year. The deadline is August 30, 2013.

Follow this link to enter your business app–the new award will celebrate the best business-related apps created for iPad, Android or Windows 8 tablets. Check it out:

The Tabby Awards /Business competition returns for a second edition. If you have developed or commissioned a tablet app for work and productivity, whether for your own organization or to be distributed on an app store, you can have it reviewed by an international panel of expert judges who are on the look for the best business apps.

Do you struggle to meet your daily writing goals? Buster Benson has created 750 Words, a way to make sure you keep writing every day.

You can sign up for the free service, track your daily writing and earn stickers for your accomplishments. Benson created the site as a digital twist on “morning pages” from The Artist’s Way. That handbook suggests you write three longhand pages every day. Check it out:

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day … This site of course tracks your word count at all times and lets you know when you’ve passed the blessed 750 mark. And it gives you a nice big screen to write on, automatically scrolls as you write (like a typewriter), and automatically saves your writing as you go.

Many writers and other media professionals focus on Apple’s iOS devices when creating apps and other mobile content.

In a recent Copyright Clearance Center interview, Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau explained why writers need to pay attention to Android readers. Currently, 15 million users spend 3.5 billion minutes on the community writing site and  80 percent of that traffic comes from mobile devices. Lau concluded:

Android launched in 2008 and became a really popular platform in ’09 and 2010, at that time, Wattpad was really taking off, because, using Android as an example, it’s a free operating system. The Android device that you can buy in developing countries today, the lowest high price point is approaching $50 right now. It’s very affordable. And in many cases, the Android phone is the gateway for people living in those countries to the Internet. That’s their only connection to the Internet. They skipped the desktop era.

Moleskine has released a new iPad 3 or iPad 4 cover and notebook combination, helping you scribble on paper or the iPad while creating.

The rubber shell case protects your iPad and adds a fancy Volant Reporter Notebook–customizable for left and right-handed writers. Would you pay $89.95 for this handsome accessory? Check it out:

This Moleskine tool integrates devices and paper, digital and analog, protection and design. The rounded spine allows the tablet cover to lay flat when opened fully, and the inside is lined in soft, ivory faux-suede. The new Moleskine Tablet Slim Cover is available in a variety of stunning colors to match your personality, AND the cover of the included Volant Reporter Notebook matches the cover color of the Tablet Cover!

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Have you ever struggled to read a sign written in a foreign script? Now you can draw the characters and let Google Translate help you read the sign.

Google Translate recently rolled out handwriting support, allowing readers to input handwriting in 45 languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. You can even download a Google Chrome app to help with the process. Check it out:

suppose you see the Chinese expression “饺子” and want to know its meaning in English, but have no idea how to type these characters. Using the new handwriting input tool, you can simply draw these characters on your screen and instantly see the translation … Other text input tools in Translate include virtual keyboards, input method editors, and transliteration. They are also available in other Google products, including Gmail, Drive, Chrome, and Android.

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Judges have picked the finalists for The Tabby Awards, prizes to celebrate the top consumer apps in the world of tablets.

We’ve included the names of all the nominees below. Here’s more from the release:

In the last few weeks, an international jury of tablet professionals reviewed the submitted apps. The panel of judges was assembled in collaboration with the Application Developers Alliance and was co-chaired by Ravi Bhatt, CEO of BranchFire, and George Jones, chief consultant at Hit Detection and previous Editor at Maximum PC and TabTimes.

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