According to Mark Gurman over at 9to5Mac, Apple has acquired a third mapping company, this time 3D specialists 3C Technologies.

Sources say that C3 Technologies CEO Mattias Astrom , C3 Technologies CFO Kjell Cederstrand, and lead C3 Technologies Product Manager Ludvig Emgard are now working within Apple's iOS division. The leading trio, along with most of the former C3 Technologies team, is still working as a team in Sweden (interestingly, the division is now called "Sputnik"), where the C3 Technologies company was located prior to the Apple acquisition.

They specialize in making 3D maps from photo data using declassified missile-targeting technology. Apple previously bought map data companies PlaceBase and Poly9, and while they still rely on Google for the actual maps in OS X and iOS, it’s not hard to imagine some fantastic new Map app just may be in our future.

Here’s a video showing how C3 works.

Source; 9to5Mac

If there’s one thing TiPb loves even more than iPhones and iPads, it’s giving cool iPhone and iPad accessories and apps to our fabulous readers. This week is no exception, as we’ve got the Jawbone ERA, the Lifeproof case, The Early Edition 2, and ReaddleDocs winners, and a ton of new giveaways — just for you!

Jawbone ERA

• clealsgirl

Lifeproof case

• Jezlyn

The Early Edition 2

• Kobyron
• Jvy Dyao
• Lremy22
• Maddin
• Marcus Harwell

ReaddleDocs for iPad

• Dinesh Arya
• Nickmykola
• Slickvic621
• Drew
• garylapointe

More chances to win

• Halloween Costume Contest: Email us a photo of you in costume with phone or tablet in hand and you could win!
• Giveaway: Pad & Quill Little Black Book for iPhone
• App Giveaway: SpookyTones for iPhone
• App Giveaway: Noteshelf for iPad
• App Giveaway: pwSafe – Password Safe for iOS

Every week a few of us from team TiPb will bring you our current favorite, most fun and useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they're iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch related, they're fair game.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Reminders – @iMuggle and @llofte

Ally: I’ve been using the default reminders app in iOS 5 for a few months now. I was hesitant to think it could replace my current task management apps but it pretty much has. I love that it can sync across all my Macs and other devices. I don’t have to log in to some 3rd party website to view my reminders or have a Mac app launched. It just seamlessly integrates with my current workflow and iCal setup.

Adding a reminder is quick and easy and now with the addition of Siri, I’m actually not forgetting things (well most of the time anyways). Now the only thing I’m missing is a jailbreak and all those fancy themes for my iPhone 4S!

Leanna: I recently sent out a tweet saying that the combination of Siri and Reminders is greatly improving my life – it’s so true! I swear I’m one of the most forgetful people on the planet, so having reminders is very helpful for me. Before the iPhone 4S, I would use various to-do apps, but they were hit or miss for me because I would think about the things I had to do at moments I couldn’t add them to my list, like while driving. By the time I could add them, I’d forget. Not anymore!

Believe it or not, I’ve become a more productive person since getting my iPhone 4S. I tell Siri to remind me of all sorts of things at specific times or when I get home or arrive at school. If I’m driving when I remember of specific task I need to get done, it’s not a problem because I can ask Siri without taking my eyes off the road.

Siri and Reminders is exactly what I needed.

AppDelete (OS X app) – @Alli_Flowers

I would never have thought of going with a Mac app for my pick of the week, but this one saved my bacon. I actually purchased AppDelete shortly after buying my first Mac. Coming from Windows, I was not only uncomfortable just dragging apps to the trash can to delete them, but it wasn’t always working. And I kept finding remnants left behind. A quick search led me to AppDelete, which comes with a 5 use trial. Five uses was enough to convince me that it was well worth the $7.99 purchase price.

Skip to yesterday when I discovered that by some quirk of fate, my Lion installation of iTunes had menus in some unreadable, unrecognizable Slavic language. Nothing I tried would get my menus back to English, not even half a dozen new installations of different versions of iTunes. But I couldn’t remove it, because iTunes cannot be removed from Lion…or so they think! As if by technomagic, AppDelete removed all traces of the evil iTunes and allowed me to install a nice fresh version direct from Apple.

AppDelete has a ton of features for getting rid of things. You can drag an app right to to AppDelete (instead of OS X’s trash can), or you can search for things to delete including apps, files, and orphans. AppDelete is like the terminator – it will find what you want and get rid of it. Permanently.

A few of AppDelete’s advertised features: - Hidden mode for full backgound operation - Finds associated items that are invisible or hidden - Archive/install from Archive feature for safekeeping and transferring items to another Mac - Preference to protect Default (Apple) apps - Keeps a log of all activities and has the ability to Undo a deletion - Force Empty Trash for stubborn to remove items - Don’t wait until you find yourself in a position where you can’t get rid of something.

Get AppDelete now.

[$7.99 - Purchase link]

CamScanner – @chrisoldroyd

I have been looking to apply for a new mortgage for my home this week and one of things I had to produce were scans of my payslips and passport. As I have an HP Scanner and Printer this shouldn’t be a problem right? Wrong, even though the printer is installed and working wirelessly on my PC it will not work as a scanner, the software does not even see it. Total fail!

Luckily I have my trusty iPhone 4S at hand, a quick search in the App Store and CamScanner is on my home screen and its free. A couple of pictures later and it re-sizes them, squares them up and emails them as a PDF. Awesome!! It can even search text within scanned documents as it supports OCR too. With CamScanner, your iPhone is actually a portable scanner, with which all your paper documents, receipts, notes, whiteboard discussions can be archived anywhere at any time.

If you want a simple to use scanning application for your iOS device, this is very good.

[Free - App Store link]

WriteUp – @sethclifford

I’m a sucker for apps that sync with Dropbox, and I’m just as smitten with plain text editors. Naturally, as you might expect, I’ve tried a great number of the apps fitting this description in the App Store, and one of my favorites that I’m currently enjoying is WriteUp.

WriteUp hits all the basic notes for me out of the gate, but it has a few nice interface features that some of the other apps are missing. You have the ability to apply different themes to the app, which is nice if you want to change things up visually from time to time. There’s also a very handy swipe menu (which plenty of apps have come to utilize, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less useful) that lets you copy text or HTML, mail text or HTML, or delete the note all from the main notes list. There’s also a full-screen edit mode which is really nice, allowing just a little bit more screen space and less clutter when your keyboard is up or a simplified interface when you’re just reading over notes in general.

The app has great Markdown support and allows for previews with one tap, which is great to quickly check on your formatting as you’re writing. A new feature to the app is also the ability to tweet the contents of a note, so that if you want to, you can set up files to store drafts that you can access on your iOS devices and your desktop or laptop, and save ideas wherever they strike you. The settings contain plenty of font options, sort options, and the ability to change the Dropbox folder to which the app syncs, which is nice, because since I switch apps so frequently, I can have one single folder for notes, and point whichever app I’m using at that folder.

There are a lot of great choices for text editors on iOS, almost an embarrassment of riches. If you’re still looking or just like to sample what’s out there, WriteUp is a solid candidate for a test drive.

[$3.99 - App Store link]

Flick Home Run ! – @jdipane

Personally I get pretty bored of games on my iPhone rather quickly, I don’t care for games with an intense plot or story line, I would rather something I can launch to play for a few minutes and close without worrying about having hit a save point. Flick Home Run is a great game that I came across, very similar in concept to Flick Golf, except baseball styled. They pitch the ball to you and you swipe your finger across the screen and try to hit a home run, simple right? Wrong. Some pitches come straight, others swirvy, slow, fast, all sort of craziness comes across the screen, and each has to be hit a bit differently in order to try to get a home run. In the sky are various balloons which offer different prizes and multipliers, and there are a few different home run types depending how far the ball is it.

If you are looking for something to kill some time, and to offer a small challenge, be sure to hop in the AppStore and pick up Flick Home Run today for free before it goes back up to 99 cents!

[Free - App Store link]

Noteshelf – @reneritchie

This isn’t really my pick of the week. I’m donating my pick this week to Andrew, one of the big brains behind the scenes at Mobile Nations because he was so in love with this app, I just had to help give his recommendation voice.

When Andrew first got his iPad it was out of curiosity but it rapidly fell into inconsistent, infrequent use. He surfed some web, he consumed some content, but between his laptop and his iPhone there just wasn’t any compelling reason for a third category of device, regardless of what Apple said.

Then he started investigating note-taking apps. Then he found Noteshelf. Now his iPad is a first-class device in his lineup, and his go-to device in meetings and brain-storming sessions. Now he’s using his iPad so much he can barely keep it charged.

The levels to this app amaze him and he keeps finding new features and new combinations of features that light him up and get him praising it anew. Noteshelf is literally a note-taker’s Nirvana in finely crafted App form.

He sold it so well Leanna and I have both bought it, and now, like Andrew, we’ve moved from looking for the best note-taking app to looking for the best stylus to help us take more detailed, less fat-fingered notes.

Look for what Andrew — and we — find in a future pick.

[$4.99 - App Store link]

Thomas & Friends: Day of the Diesels – @Barryloy (Reader’s Choice)

This week, my 2 1/2 year old son found the Thomas & Friends train app in the App Store. After checking it out, I noticed it was on sale for 99 cents, instead of the original price of $4.99. This was great news, because as anybody with kids knows, things get expensive fast. The Thomas & Friends: Day of the Diesel app is great! It has a story book, movie, coloring, puzzles, and matching. The games are great because there is a easy and hard setting. My son has played with it for a few hours and loves it so far.

[$0.99 - App Store link]

Your pick?

You're part of the team as well, so we will be choosing one reader to make a submission each week! Just look for the announcement on twitter or our Facebook page each weekend for a chance to be picked! In the meantime, jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Georgia and Rene go all Airwolf vs. Blue Thunder with iHelicopter, the iPhone-controlled remote helicopters. We’re talking terrifying takeoffs, ludicrous landings, and crazy crashes. This is TiPb TV.

Courtesy: iHelicopters

iHelicopters sent us two helicopters to test out so we immediately thought — dogfight! The helicopters themselves are really cool looking, sleek but with enough exposed electronics to add that ferocious techno feel. They charge over microUSB and once you charge them up and install the free iPhone app, i-helicopter, you’re ready for some fun.

iHelicopters also have LED, so you can light them up and take them out at night. Super sweet. Now the battery doesn’t last super long, but we were pleasantly surprised we managed to film for a couple of hours of admittedly intermittent use without recharging. If you’re constantly flying, don’t count on anywhere near that long, but if you bring your charger with you, you can top up and go again.

You can choose between a touchscreen joystick or accelerometer and gyroscope-based controls. I’m not even going to lie. It will take you a while to get good. It’s not like video game physics. Once these babies get going, they have momentum… even when they’re crashing into the ground.

Now crashing can break things, but the iHelicopters themselves were really resilient. The blades did break once but iHelicopters provides a bag with several replacements for each, which is really appreciated.

Just after we filmed this episode iHelicopter announced a new version — with missiles. Needless to say, they’re on their way to TiPb HQ and Rene’s in a for a surprise…

Scooby-Doo has eventually infiltrated the iPad and what better timing than just before Halloween. The new app titled "The Haunted Halloween: A Scooby-Doo You Play Too Book is a mixture of interactive book and puzzle games all based around this spooky time of the year.

It's Halloween in Coolsville and Scooby and the gang are invited to a Halloween party! Only Scooby and Shaggy find themselves in a real haunted house! They need your help to find all the hidden Zoinks Points and solve the Haunted Halloween Party puzzles!

• Word highlighting for younger readers.
• Read along with professional narration.
• Record your voice reading the story, or have your child record theirs.
• Customize your experience: Text display, audio, and autoplay mode can be turned on and off.
• Easily jump to your favorite page or activity with the visual index.

• Personalize Your App! iPad 2 users can use the camera to take a photo with Scooby-Doo. iPad 1 users can import a picture from Photos.
• Collect Zoinks Points! Throughout the story, look for opportunities to earn Zoinks Points. Write down your code and enter it on zoinkspoints.com to get free exclusive Scooby games, videos, downloads and more!
• Interactive Animations: Tap mysterious hot spots for spooky surprises.
• Sticker Fun: Choose a background and use digital Scooby-Doo stickers to create your own Scooby-Doo scene. Use multitouch to spin, shrink, and grow the characters! Save to Photos to share with friends.
• Puzzles: Tap the puzzle icons and turn pages into jigsaws to solve.
• Coloring: Choose from multiple pages and get creative with the Scooby-Doo palette. Save to Photos to share with friends.

It doesn’t mention it in the game features but I really hope there is a mini game that lets you help Velma find her glasses; I have always wanted to do that!

The Haunted Halloween: A Scooby-Doo You Play Too Book is iPad only and costs $0.99 for a limited time only. If you want to pick this up, don’t leave it too late or it may go up in price!

[App Store link]

Have an app you'd love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we'll take a look.

 

Maybe you’ve already mastered the basic Siri commands, read our tips on setting up relationships and improving pronunciation, and even joked around a bit and are itching to try out something a little more ninja? Well look no further! You’ve shared with us your favorite secret Siri commands and we’re sharing them back to all our readers.

• [Punctuation/symbols/emoticons]. Siri can understand many basic symbols, emoticons and punctuation marks, as long as you say them by the right name. Examples include “open parenthesis”, “close square bracket”, ” “frowney face” (love it!), “new paragraph”, “pound sign”, etc.
• Play playlist [playlist name]. Siri will play not just a song, but a whole playlist for you.
• Find all email by [contact]. Siri will give you a short list of emails from the contact you ask for.
• What’s on my calendar for [date]. Siri will show you all your appointments for today, tomorrow, next Monday, or February 28 (2012) if you ask nicely.
• Search [Bing/Yahoo]. If Google’s not your cup of tea, Siri will search the competition for you.
• Search [Google/Bing/Yahoo] for [specialized information] [time] [place]. Whether you want the latest scores, show times, etc., if you phrase it just right, Siri can often find it for you.
• Who was in the cast of [movie]: Siri can tell you the name of that actor you know you’ve seen before but just can’t remember.
• Delete all alarms: Siri will delete all alarms, not just individual ones, in case you never want to be woken up again! (I found this by accident on Rene’s phone. Shhhh!)
• Message [Social network] [Status]. If you’ve set it up on Twitter, Facebook, or another social network that lets you update via SMS, Siri will message your status right to it.
• Restart. Siri will re-spring the Springboard. It’s not a full reboot, but it’s faster.

There are some other super-ninja style tips in the links below, like CalDAV accounts so Siri can post to Remember the Milk, or adding URL schemes to get Siri to open apps. Do you have any other secret, advanced Siri commands? Let us know in the comments!

More: CrushApps, TUAW, MacRumors Forums, TechLand

The inimitable Steven Sande and extraordinary Erica Sadun of TUAW fame have put together an Amazon Kindle book designed to help us help Siri help us.

This short, focused book teaches you how to use Siri from the ground up. You’ll learn how to achieve the the highest recognition rate as you talk. You’ll discover which categories Siri responds to and find out how to make the most of each category in your conversations. You’ll discover practical how-to mixed with many examples to inspire as well as instruct.

Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple’s Intelligent Assistant is a available now for less than the price of a fancy mixed coffee beverage. Go grab it. Then ask Siri where to find a good fancy mixed coffee beverage that you can enjoy while reading it.

Source: Amazon.com

Marshall Bock has posted a set of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 Photoshop templates on his blog. They include:

• Both 4 and 4S models
• Both black and white body colors
• Portrait, landscape, and angled orientations
• Every combination of the preceding bullet points
• Rendering that matches Apple's product images as closely as possible
• Created at high res scale for Retina Display
• Made entirely of vectors and layer styles for scaling up
• Full alignment to a 2px grid for pixel precision at 50% scale
• Screen images as Smart Objects for inserting your own screenshots
• Clean, organized, color-coded, well-named groups and layers

Handy asset for both developers and designers.

Source: Marshall Bock via @flyosity

Now that you’re running on iOS 5 with iCloud and creating OTA backups, you might find you’re quickly blowing through the 5GB that Apple gives away from free. While you can turn off some individual things, like Camera Roll backups, to save space, if you’re backing up multiple devices or lots of data, you might still need more iCloud storage. Surprise, surprise, Apple gives you the ability to buy it.

1. First tap into your Settings app.

2. Scroll down and tap into the Settings for iCloud.

3. You’ll see all the services you have synced with iCloud on this screen. If you scroll down a bit further you’ll come across a Storage & Backup tab. Tap it.

4. You’ll now be presented with storage upgrade options. All paid MobileMe users were given an additional 20GB storage plan for free for their first year. But if you feel the need to upgrade from the free 5GB everyone will get, you can do so here. You can add an additional 20GB for $40/year or an additional 50GB for $100/year.
5. Simply tap on the option you’d like to upgrade to in order to select it. You may be required to sign in with your Apple ID to confirm.

You should now be good to go with even more storage to back up all of your content to iCloud. And if you think you’ve purchased too much storage you can always go back in and downgrade your storage whenever you like.

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward…)