According to an eye-opening projection today from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, Apple’s Chinese investment will begin paying enormous dividends next year.

Just two weeks ago, massive crowds outside of Beijing’s Apple Store caused Chinese police to deploy crowd-control measures to ease the iPhone 4S frenzy caused by the device’s long-anticipated arrival.

So unruly were Apple fans that the company was forced to strip the Aple Stores of their iPhone 4S unventory and revert back to selling the smartphones online only in China for the time being.

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A new report published Friday from Distimo provides an overview of the effects when an application is featured in the Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple App Store for iPad and Google Android Market.

One of the key findings of the report shows that the average revenue rose by 41% in the Apple App Store for iPhone when looking at those applications that were already among the 100 highest grossing applications in any category, on the first day of the sale.

Moreover, Distimo’s report finds, the revenue during the whole sale increased by 22%. In the Apple App Store for iPad those figures were +52% and +19%, respectively. In the Google Android Market on the first day the revenue increased by 7%, and during the whole sale increased by 29%.

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On Wednesday, the tech space was buzzing with news that appears to suggest that Apple has officially surpassed Samsung as the world’s biggest smartphone maker.

Fewer than twenty-hours removed from the company’s record quarterly earnings report, analysts viewing the cold, hard data say Apple has likely bumped Samsung out of the top spot by a sizable margin.

Last night, Apple revealed sales of 37 million iPhones in the last three months of 2011 alone.

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According to the latest data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), Apple’s iPhone 4S is picking up scores of new users from rival platforms.

Polling data published this week shows that 36 percent of iPhone 4S buyers previously owned Android, BlackBerry, or Palm devices.

Shaken out, the numbers show that 50 percent of upgraders came from BlackBerry, 39 percent from an Android phone, and 10 percent from a Palm handset.

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Blue Bite, a mobile marketing company that specializes in location-based campaigns, has published results of a recent NFC-enabled mobile campaign for hotel reservation app HotelTonight that saw more than 15,000 unique mobile engagements in the first six weeks alone.

Blue Bite teamed up with RMG networks — a provider of Out-Of-Home (OOH) TV & video networks — as well as mobile advertising provider Amobee to launch the campaign for HotelTonight across a handful of major U.S. markets.  HotelTonight’s mobile app allows users to book same-day hotel reservations.  To jumpstart the campaign, Amobee utilized RMG Network’s locations outfitted with Blue Bite’s mTAG Platform to reach HotelTonight’s core demographic.  These RMG network locations included eight major U.S. airports and hundreds of “busy downtown cafe locations across the country.”

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Verizon is doing its part to push the smartphone industry out of its comfort zone in a hurry.

On Wednesday, the largest carrier in the United States announced that it has a new “hard requirement” of all future smartphones on its network: they must support 4G LTE.

In response to the so-called demand, iPhone loyalists are openly questioning whether the next generation Apple touchscreen smartphone will finally embrace 4G LTE.

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In conjunction with what the rumor mill suggested, Target is planning to open a series of Apple stores within Target stores later this year at select Target locations.

Initially, 25 “specialty stores” will open and be dedicated exclusively to Apple products. The stores will be opened inside of existing Target retail locations.

Target is yet to announced which stores will be the first recipients of these so-called “Apple Mini Stores.”

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