How-to video aggregator HowCast announced today that it has hit 500,000 downloads of its iPhone app and a quick spin of the service shows why - it's fabulous. Just six months after launching, HowCast is already the second most popular free app in the Lifestyle category - behind the YellowPages and ahead of AAA Discounts. That's pretty impressive.
HowCast was founded by a team of former Google and YouTube employees and raised $8 million in venture funding before it launched. The iPhone app is a great way to learn new things on the go and it's a lot of fun.
Earlier today, President Obama announced that he plans to create the position of a 'cyber czar' in the White House. No announcement about who will fill this position has been made yet, however. During his speech about this topic earlier today, Obama stressed that the focus of this new position will be to deal with cyber threats, but that the White House also plans a new education campaign to raise awareness about cyber security and digital literacy.
It should be noted that while 'czar' might sound like an impressive title, in terms of the White House hierarchy, this new position will only be that of a "special assistant to the President," and whoever will fill this position will not have direct access to the President and have very little authority and even less authority over budgets.
Pixelpipe, the service that lets you upload your media to multiple sites across the web, has just released a new version of their application for the Android smartphone OS. With the app having long since been a staple on our iPhones, we're glad to see that the app is expanding to other platforms and adding another item to their already huge list of free software, which includes browser addons, program integrations, mobile applications, desktop apps, and more in addition to their online web-based service.
On May 19, TypeRoom launched their triple-tiered premium product, TypeRoom Professional. A bit like in-browser website creation and editing app Zimplit, which we reviewed yesterday, TypeRoom allows for simple and nearly instant web content editing without software and with little or no expertise in the subject.
While the free version of the service allows for the kind of lightweight, static HTML editing we reviewed in Zimplit, the Pro version is "a powerful and complete CMS that allows for extremely easy setup and integration and that gives a level of usability that we feel has not been attained before in a CMS," according to the TypeRoom blog.
In addition to preparing for the launch of Bing, Microsoft's much-hyped semantic search product slated to replace Live Search, the company has also announced a standalone product optimized for real-time web search. This offering includes Internet Explorer 8 bundled with search and webslices from OneRiot, a real-time social search engine we've written about in the past. Microsoft is also offering a real-time add-ons package that includes the same OneRiot products.
According to the IE Addons Gallery page, "This special version of Internet Explorer 8 comes loaded with fresh OneRiot goodies, putting the real-time web directly into your browser."
We Are Hunted, the Billboard of the social web, has launched a new page to show users the 99 most popular tracks as determined by Twitter users.
As music and music video sharing become ever more popular (and supported by third-party services and apps) on Twitter, musicians and music fans have yet another set of metrics to determine virality, popularity, and trending of specific tracks. So, how do the folks at We Are Hunted nail down what's hot now using only Twitter?
TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client, launched a Blink-182 themed version of its application today. The Blink-182 version of TweetDeck is based on the current version of the app (0.25).
We have often wondered how an application like TweetDeck or Seesmic could make money from their efforts. Tweetdeck, after all, is the most popular desktop Twitter client, yet it doesn't feature any advertising or pro versions, so providing customized versions of the app to bands and brands seems like a very smart way to actually make money for TweetDeck.
Hulu, the popular online destination for streaming TV shows and movies, just opened up its new Labs project and one of the first projects to come out of the Hulu lab is a desktop application for viewing Hulu's content on Mac and Windows desktops instead of in a browser. In addition, Hulu also released a new video panel designer that allows users to customize Hulu's embed code, a new recommendations engine, and a new way to browse videos by when they aired on live TV.
The Google developer conference has been chock-full of announcements, but one that we are particularly excited about is a "20% time" project from software engineer, Moishe Lettvin. The gadgets.realtime is a Javascript library on top of a collection of APIs based on Google Talk. Right now implementation is limited to Orkut and Google Gadgets, but we'd love to see the framework opened up to the web at large.
The idea is that developers can build mini-applications that can allow real-time user interaction through the instant messaging foundation of Google Talk IM. Lettvin showed off an example of a chess game that was not only discussed over IM but played through an interface with IM-like communication infrastructure running underneath it. That's pretty hot.
Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.
