Gene Simmons has a lot more going on upstairs than you might think. In a recent interview with Industry Gamers, the legendary long-tongued bassist for KISS showed his business accumen while discussing the various projects he’s working on, including a digital translation service called Orstbo (did you know Simmons speaks five languages? Crazy!). Dear to his heart is an effort to take the KISS brand to places it has never been before, such as a Hello Kitty line and appearing in Archie Comics. However, Simmons dropped a real bunker buster by saying that he’s working on an Angry Birds deal. Yes, that Angry Birds.

In this world of 140 character Tweets and 160 character text messages (for those of use who are still trapped in the past) we all find it necessary to condense our thoughts from time to time. For the long-winded, like me, this is an important daily exercise that constantly reminds me I could be texting/speaking/communicating more efficiently, and encourages me to cut out unnecessary words and, I’ll admit it, sometimes punctuation. If you can’t be bothered to look over your text messages or, God forbid, edit your tweets for brevity, have no fear, the Trimit iPhone App is here and it will automatically maim your text to fit character limits by rmvng vwls & adding abbr.s 4 u.

Trimit has a wealth of functionality to help you not only butcher your own text, but also that of others. The Trimit interface consists of a text box where you can type in your own text or import text from a url. After that, you can open up the settings and make a few choice decisions like whether or not you want Trimit to use abbreviations and eliminate vowels, and also how far you want the text condensed; there are specific buttons that correspond to the character limits of things like tweets or Facebook statuses. After you’ve taken care of that, just shake the phone and the words will be ground down into the equivalent of juice concentrate.

Do you have a hectic, busy lifestyle? Commit sins that you really need to confess, but said hectic lifestyle prevents you from visiting a confessional? Ever wish you could just confess your sins on the go and get on with your day?  Well, there’s an app for that! Officially approved by the Catholic Church, Confession: A Roman Catholic App sells for $1.99, a small price to pay for a clean, mobile soul. Described on iTunes as “the perfect aid for every penitent,” the app provides a “personalized examination of conscience” per each password protected user profile, as well as a step-by-step guide to the sacrament. Just think, now you can immediately confess after you stumble across some unseemly thing on the Internet, rather than travel across town to the nearest church like you’ve always done.

(BBC News via Geekologie and Engadget)

Sitting around while moving nothing but your fingers all day can leave you with the shivers. Well, now you can continue your marathon of inactivity by controlling your thermostat from your phone! Oh, America.

I shouldn’t be quite so flippant about what actually sounds like a pretty useful application. Available for computers as well as iPhones (no word on an Android app), the Filtrete program is designed to set “temperature changes, four times a day, every day of the week. That’s 56 individual data points to configure on a small display with a minimum of input options.” Which might be a bit much to deal with on a phone’s touch screen. But think of it as a remote start for your car – if you’re coming back from the airport in the dead of winter (say from a warm, sunny environment) the least you deserve is coming home to a warm house. So this would allow you to turn up the heat in the cab on the way home or even before that.

Plane Finder AR is an app for the iPhone that uses a bit of augmented reality to overlay flight information, flight origin and destination, near any plane that the iPhone points toward.

Because iPhones weren’t geeky enough already: “Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel” is coming to the iPhone next month, courtesy of THQ Wireless. According to Mashable, “Lightsaber Duel” builds on an older iPhone app, “Lightsaber Unleashed,” which used the accelerometer in the iPhone to create whooshing, officially sanctioned lightsaber sounds.

The key difference here is actual dueling: if an iPhone-owning friend of yours also has the app, you’ll be able to use Bluetooth to duel with one another.

After loads of speculation about Apple‘s sudden, sweeping ban of more than 5,000 sexually suggestive iPhone apps — ranging from pornography to pictures of women in bikinis — the company’s head of worldwide product marketing, Philip W. Schiller, has explained where Apple is coming from.

In an interview with the New York Times, Schiller says that complaints from “women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see” led Apple to institute its ban on sexually provocative iPhone apps.

Why, then, did Apple give racy Playboy and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue apps free passes, even as they shut down an app from a swimwear vendor that featured women wearing the bikinis they were trying to sell?