When I’m desk bound early in the mornings, my habit is tea with RSS. Today is no exception, and a quiet perusal through my 100 or so subscriptions in FeedDemon produced quite a few gems, all of which I share in my link blog.

Here’s a dozen of the best for starting the weekend:

Google’s App Store for Business to Launch Next Week. Google is set to launch an app store for business next week, Mashable has learned from sources close to the company. It will be focused around creating software for Google Apps and could launch as soon as Tuesday.

Do People Tweet About Brands More Out of Hate Than Love? The presence of two media brands – the BBC and BET – on this week’s Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart raises some interesting questions about why people tend to tweet about brands

New York City police to issue press passes to bloggers. This week New York City Law Department issued press passes to bloggers for the first time. In its new rules, to be adopted by the New York police department, will “expressly incorporate online-only media such as blogs”. The changes follow a lawsuit filed in November of 2008 that challen…

Apple Confirms iPad Arrival In April. Despite fears over possible delays, Apple has today confirmed that the Wi-Fi-only model of its iPad tablet will go on sale in the United States from 3 April, while British users will have to wait until late April for the Wi-Fi and 3G version of the device. Apple also took the opportunity to conf…

#BeMyGuest – a call to guest bloggers. Journalism.co.uk is taking part in #BeMyGuest – a month-long initiative to encourage bloggers to swap posts. Set up by PRs Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle, the criteria for participating are simple. You must: Write at least one post for someone else’s blog; Feature at least one guest… [I’m interested, too, in taking part.]

Toyota’s reputation slowly recovers, YouGov perception tracker reveals. Toyota’s long-term brand damage may not as bad as initially feared, according to polling data from YouGov.

Steep Rise Predicted For Touchscreen Mobile Devices. More and more users are likely to opt for touchscreen mobile devices, after Gartner predicted that sales of touchscreen mobile devices in 2010 will grow 96.8 percent over 2009 sales. The IT resarch firm expects the worldwide touchscreen mobile device market to top 362.7 million units in 2010, a…

iPhone apps compared – how do news publishers shape up? The news industry buzzword of the year so far is just three letters long: “app”. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are falling over themselves to grab a slice of the burgeoning mobile app economy, led to a huge degree by Apple’s iPhone. But how developed is the news and publishing ..

Location-based services on mobile phones: Follow me. Adverts that know where you are could be lucrative—not to mention controversial. The initiative was designed to draw attention to a serious issue and it achieved its goal. Pleaserobme.com is a simple website that publishes a live feed of posts that appear on Twitter, a microblogging service, showi…

India’s Twitter SMS GupShup Gets An App Store. Fresh off a $12 million investment, SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, is launching an App Store. The store aims to expand SMS GupShup’s ecosystem by allowing developers to create SMS-based mobile applications based off of the microblogging service…

FT plans PayPal option for online news. The Financial Times is to begin trialling PayPal, the electronic payments service owned by Ebay, for daily or weekly access to FT.com, which at present charges an annual subscription…

Rise of social networking killing off loyalty to news brands. The increasingly large role that social networks are playing in how people get their news is killing off loyalty to individual news organisations, according to a major US study.