The Maryland Jockey Club announced Monday it has an app of its own.

The app, which will provide instant, real-time access to the latest Preakness Stakes updates, is available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones.

So while you’re out in the infield or the stands during Preakness later this month, you can get all sorts of historical data, blog posts and wagering info. And the app will still be handy during daily races too, giving pre-race program notes, as well as scratches, results and video replays.

“We thought it was logical to launch this new platform around our biggest event, but plan on utilizing it year-round,” said Maryland Jockey Club President Tom Chuckas.

The app is already available to be downloaded from Apple’s App Store, while the app tailored for Androids and BlackBerry phones will be ready for consumption later this week.

The 136th running of the $1 million Preakness — the middle jewel of the Triple Crown — is Saturday, May 21.

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A recently released study on the practice of “traffic pumping” — directing cell phone calls to rural landline carriers to generate higher long distance fees — estimates the practice will cost wireless companies upwards of $170 million this year.

The March study by Connective Solutions in Bethesda is a follow up to the first study the firm did in July 2010 that looked at  the impact of traffic pumping. The study found that 10 percent of calls meeting the traffic pumping profile originated from Maryland, second only to New York City, which accounted for 17 percent.

Traffic pumping takes advantage of a provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that lets rural carriers charge more to handle incoming calls since they have less traffic on the lines and higher infrastructure costs.

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They’re all featured in this blog post, thanks to a variety of interesting business news developments Tuesday.

Nonprofit employment grew 2 percent in 2009, compared to a statewide drop in total employment of 3.2 percent, according to “Nonprofits by the Numbers,” an annual report published by Maryland Nonprofits, a trade group that advocates for nonprofit organizations.

Over the period from 2004-2009, nonprofit employment grew by 9.5 percent while total employment shrank 2.1 percent, according to the report. Nonprofits in Maryland employ 255,408 people or 10.6 percent of the state’s work force, and account for 10 percent of all wages paid statewide, up from 9.5 percent of the work force and 8.6 percent of wages in 2004.

Click here if you’d like to see the report.

Meanwhile, just in time for Easter, Just Born Inc., a Bethlehem, Pa.-based confectionary company that makes the yellow, pink, lavender, blue and white chick- and bunny-shaped marshmallow candy called Peeps, has launched an online store, www.peepsandcompany.com.

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My husband loses things. Keys, glasses, CD players. (He’s the last person in America to use a portable CD player, but that’s another story.) Last week he lost his cell phone.

He thought it had fallen out of his pocket in Baltimore. Or in Philly. It was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region. The phone was history.

Or so we thought until I got a call this past weekend. “Do you know someone missing a phone?” asked a woman I didn’t know. Indeed I did. But she wasn’t about to hand over the Samsung to just anyone.

“Is this Hope?” she demanded, not just slightly suspicious. She had checked the phone’s outgoing-call log to see whom the owner had dialed most often. He usually called me.

Finally persuaded I was legit, she took my office number and said she’d call Monday afternoon when she got off work. Just after noon the phone rang. The woman, who gave her name as Lisa, said she’d meet me outside the Enoch Pratt main library.

As I crossed Cathedral Street, a woman on a bench out front waved to me. Lisa and I had never met but we recognized each other. She handed me the phone, which she said she’d found lying in the gutter on North Charles Street on Friday.

“It was about to get run over,” she said. I thanked her for her kindness, which she waved off.

As I turned to head back to work, she called after me: “I charged it for him.”

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AT&T may have had a national ad campaign claiming its network has the fewest dropped calls (video below), but a new survey reveals that Verizon Wireless comes out ahead – with an average of only 2.2% of customers experiencing a dropped call over a 90-day period.

With more cell phone towers underway nationwide, numbers are improving across the board. But what happens when three to four million spectators converge on Washington, D.C., and want to call their Mom to tell her all about the Inauguration?

“It’s the mother of all demand,” said a senior member of Washington’s wireless trade group.

Spectators are being advised to text message rather than make calls to clear up traffic, and to send rich media – like videos – later in the day rather than earlier.

Sprint is preparing for the increased demand by reinforcing existing cell phone towers and adding additional telephone line connections.

My concern is more vital in nature: What if there is a medical emergency among the sea of people and calling 911 is not viable due to the high concentration of cell phone traffic?

RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter

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