It’s Thursday and we’re bringing you the digital week in review. Catch up on the biggest headlines in our recap below, and follow us on Twitter for insights all week long.

Jobs: Apple Has Inked More than $60MM in iAd Commitments for 2010

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference earlier this week, Steve Jobs announced that the company has signed mobile ad campaigns for several large brands, including AT&T, Best Buy and Chanel, among others. TechCrunch also reports that in just eight weeks, Apple has garnered more than $60 million in iAd commitments for 2010 – or half of all mobile advertising spend forecasted for the second half of the year (according to Apple).

Image via The First Post

The iAd platform will allow users to interact with ads from within an app – without disrupting their primary mode of engagement, whether that be playing a game or watching a video. The platform debuts in less than a month, on July 1.

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This week brought big news from Google that might just change how consumers think about television — as well as new stats on Foursquare’s growing user base, the launch of a different kind of location-based network that turns check-ins into a game and a new iTunes feature that incorporates reviews via Rotten Tomatoes. Get the scoop on all of these stories in our recap below.

Google Introduces Web-TV Mash-up ‘Google TV’

Google unveiled Google TV yesterday at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. The new innovation, which Google describes as “TV meets web, web meets TV,” aims to create a seamless experience between media consumption across television and the Internet.

As Google notes, the average American spends five hours per day watching television – however, we are spending more and more time consuming media via phones and computers. If there’s one thing that traditional TV (generally) lacks, it’s the Internet. And if there’s one thing that the web lacks, it’s the viewing experience that TV has to offer.

Here’s how Google hopes to combine the best of both worlds within a “seamless experience:”

• Google TV will have Chrome built in, so viewers can access favorite sites and easily move between TV and the web.
• The product will expand the traditional functionality of television – opening up the experience to include a web browser through which users can play games, listen to music, view photos and more.
• And, of course, Google TV will integrate search – allowing viewers to navigate through various channels, sites, apps and more.

As we noted in an earlier post, television and the web seem to be on a collision course of sorts. People are discussing television in online arenas – and looking to online arenas to find TV content. We look forward to seeing how Google TV leverages technology to further this trend in the future.

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From the day of the iPhone’s release, consumers and pundits have been commenting about its prominent lack of Flash. Recently, in a very rare move, Steve Jobs openly and directly announced Apple’s thoughts on the matter in a letter published on Apple’s site.

The letter, and the public’s reaction to it, has spread explosively through the tech blogosphere, and Apple is making no effort to hold it back. The letter was linked directly from its homepage, in a spot normally reserved for major announcements or new products.

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This week brought big news from Apple – first the public release of its new iPad tablet, and later an unveiling of the new iAd mobile advertising platform. Also making the headlines was a new report from the IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers that found that online advertising has surged back after losing steam last year. Read our complete roundup below.

Apple Unveils iAd Mobile Platform

On Thursday Steve Jobs announced iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform. According to TechCrunch, Apple will sell and host the ads and share 60 percent of the revenue with developers. iAd placements will live within the mobile apps, and Jobs said developers can integrate them into their apps “in an afternoon.”

“If you click on an ad now, you’re yanked out of your app. As a result, people don’t click on ads,” Jobs said at the iPhone developer preview event. “We have figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of the app.”

Jobs demo-ed ads for Toy Story 3 and Nike, which incorporated interactive elements like games, location services and even iPhone accelerometer tool. He added that since the average user spends a half-hour each day interacting with apps, there is a tremendous opportunity for app advertisers to “deliver interaction” and also “emotion.”

Thanks to iAd, we can expect to see far more ad-supported applications across Apple’s devices now that Apple’s providing its own ad platform for creating ads. Yet advertisers have been able to create application ads for about as long as there have been iPhone apps through networks such as AdMob, Medialets and VideoEgg. With 85 million iPhone apps and iPod Touches already sold, and 4 billion apps downloaded – all before the iPad debuted – there’s room for several competitors, and many popular apps have little to no advertising to date.

iAd will likely compel all networks, agencies, marketers, and developers to provide richer experiences and better data. Meanwhile, with Apple doubling down on support of HTML 5 for creating the ads, it will create more fragmentation in the short-term but could lead to broader adoption on Apple’s standards – potentially not just for Apple’s devices but for mobile applications running on other mobile operating systems.

Read more insights from 360i over at Ad Age.

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Behold the iPad: Apple’s new tablet debuted this week (image via Mashable).

What a week. Steve Jobs revealed Apple’s much-anticipated tablet, the iPad, to the world, location-based services continued to be main topics of conversation and we at 360i began a new chapter in our journey. We’ve got your complete recap below.

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While at the Consumer Electronics Show, I moderated a panel at Digital Hollywood on “Mobile Commerce and Content: The Mobile Web, Texting, Search, and Advertising Options.” As you can see, the panel covered a lot of ground, and I can’t begin to capture it all. But I did take some notes and I’ll share those here.

I need to thank my panelists here for all their insight, and I wish I could have done the session more justice, but look out for any of them at other events as you’re guaranteed to learn a few things.

• Ali Rana, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Dynamic Logic
• Jamie Wells, Director, Global Trade Marketing, Microsoft Mobile Advertising
• Brian Johnson, Senior Vice President, Americas and Asia Pacific, mBlox
• Thomas Roberts, Chief Product Officer, Digital and Mobile Services, kgb
• Pooj Preena, CEO, Groupe Hi-Media USA;
• Greg Fawcett, co-founder, MobiAd Sales

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Yesterday the New York Times visited 360i’s New York office. The folks at nytimes.com met with agency creative directors to discuss fresh approaches to display advertising. They shared with us some new integration opportunities for advertising and editorial, including the newest Apple homepage roadblock ad.

By now everyone who has visited the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired or NYT online (or read the trades) in the last few months has seen one or more of these placements. The most recent Apple ads featured the Mac and PC characters discussing how PC is as easy to use as 1 through 23 steps, mostly involving restarts. Another ad showed hundreds of iPhone app icons flying over the publisher masthead, across the page and into a waiting iPhone. The payoff: “Thanks a billion. One billion downloads. Only on the App Store.”

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