Although the sound and video quality are not yet stellar, we're very impressed with the concept. This is the kind of thing that would make remote, instant video journalism possible. Click a link, speak your peace with another webcam user, end the recording, and you are presented with an embed code the second the recording is over. Read, watch, and get registration code info at the end of the post!

And here's a chat with New York IBMer Mauricio Godoy:

No review of a new Internet video service would be complete without commentary from the godfather of video blogging, Steve Garfield:

As mentioned, we'd like to see better sound and audio quality, and there are a few site bugs. But we'd also love to get a simple, in-browser video editor to clip the ends of recordings or even merge two separate recordings together. Better yet, we'd also like to see a downloadable format so the chats can be pulled into a desktop video editor and remixed with other media, as well.

As for the embedding part, we'd like to see more customization options, especially for colors and sizes. We'd pay for that, and also to see a version without the Wetoku watermark in the top right corner. Other features we'd pay for include preroll and postroll, for branding and recommendation of other videos, respectively.

The folks we tested the site with pointed out the similarity to TinyChat. In terms of ease of use - this, too, is the ultimate one-click webcam experience - the two services are quite similar. However, TinyChat videos disappear second by second, never to be seen again unless the user in question has a pro account. Will Wetoku recordable, embeddable video chat be a free service? What do you think of the concept so far?

We have a limited number of registration codes for the private beta. If you're interested in testing the site, please email jolie@readwriteweb.com and include a link to your blog.

The three steps to building an online brand are:

1. Look good,

2. Get noticed,

3. Build trust.

In the long run, only the last one matters. Enron's logo was just fine, and it got noticed, but on that last count, well...

You need to do many things on the cheap. but there is one thing on which you should spend as much money as you can afford. Spend for it in cash if you have it. Spend for it in equity if you don't. Do it yourself if you are brilliant at it. If you are lucky enough to have a friend who is brilliant at it and will do it for free, well, good for you (but the fair thing would be to give her or him some equity).

The thing we're talking about here is logo design. Your logo will set the theme of your site's design. It will visually key off the story that you tell in words.

Yes, you can re-design it later when you have the money. But when you need to get noticed and you need those first impressions to be good ones, a great logo really does matter.

Get Noticed, Part 1: Don't Rely on PR Mechanics

When you are established, you can be a "PR mechanic" and do the basics, such as:

• Send emails to bloggers,
• Announce news via wire services,
• Send press releases with embargoes.

Those mechanical tasks are fine when you are big and established and well known. But they are totally pointless when you are working out of your garage and no one has heard of you. You can do these things yourself -- they don't cost much time or money -- but just don't rely on them for results.

When starting out, you need to be a PR artist. You need a bit of magic to get noticed. You cannot delegate this. You or your partner have to do this because, first, you cannot afford to hire a PR person yet (at least not a good one) and, secondly, anyone who picks up on your story will want to speak to the person who was passionate enough to build the service.

You have to begin with an insanely great Web service. PR artistry won't help a poor site. Some people might take a look, but then they will ignore it just as fast.

If you have a great service, then getting noticed is very easy. You tell someone, who tells someone else, who tells someone else... That happens fast in a networked world.

Get Noticed, Part 2: Study the Networking Science of PR Artists

Magic is merely a science you don't understand yet. The magic of PR artists is understanding how networks of influence work and getting into those networks wherever they can.

If you are a serial entrepreneur and your last venture was a roaring success, simply contact a few mega-hubs of influence. They will surely listen to you and get the word out, even if your new service is rubbish (in which case, it will die after a short burst of hype).

But for you, the first-time entrepreneur, who doesn't know anyone famous, just getting anyone to listen to you is a small victory. Luckily, today you have a couple of amazing social media tools to traverse those networks of influence. The one you choose depends on your service:

• Twitter for a consumer service,
• LinkedIn for a business service.

Some fans may be annoyed that I left out Facebook, but there is a reason. Facebook is designed to communicate with your friends. Those friends may or may not be able to help you. If they can, that is probably a coincidence. And relying on coincidence to build a business is not good.

Twitter is the easiest way for your consumer service to get noticed because it is so open. Find experts in your area; it's not hard. Google around until you find some people who write intelligently about your market. Then find those people on Twitter; they are probably there, but if not, don't worry: plenty of other experts will be.

Following those experts does not mean that they will follow you back. But you can look at who they follow. Choose the ones who are experts in your subject, and follow them too. See what hash tags they use, and put out some tweets using the same tags. Re-tweet some of what they say; they will notice it on their wall of vanity.

If one of the people they follow mentions you, your target expert may notice. If two or three mention you, they certainly will.

This is certainly much, much easier and more effective than cold calling, cold direct-mailing, or cold emailing.

Similar techniques are possible on LinkedIn. But by the time you read this, they may be overused, ineffective, and regarded as spammy, and LinkedIn or Twitter may have put in place controls to block certain techniques.

So, as you look at the current social media world, just remember:

• Everything is a network. Traverse the network until you find some entry points, and then start from there.
• Everything social revolves around conversations, and conversations often start with a story and move on to a question.

Get Noticed, Part 3: Tell a Good Story and Ask a Question

Now you have a great site and a great logo. All you need now is a great story. All three have to be in harmony. You need to be able to get that story across in:

• One sentence in an email. 140 characters is as good a limitation as any.
• 30 seconds verbally, at any F2F event when someone is in front you. (If you are lucky enough to trap them in an elevator in a tall building, you may have plenty of time. But you will more likely be at a cocktail party after a conference and have far less time.)
• One page, or five minutes, once you have the person's attention.

People have been telling stories ever since they have been hanging out in caves, and all stories tend to have these characteristics:

• A beginning, middle, and end. Being a startup, you can tell only the beginning. But you are claiming to know how the middle and end will play out. You are spinning a science-fiction tale.
• Protagonists, tension, good vs. evil, with good winning out in the end.

Corny? Sure. Effective? Definitely.

Whatever you do, though, don't waste a good story-telling opportunity with bland corporate-speak, PR-washed, yawn-inducing, click-away drivel. Ask any journalist or blogger friend to send you the most cringe-inducing examples of this to scare you straight. Keep the story human and real and simple.

Once you've told your story, have a question ready. That is how you engage in a conversation. The questions come at strategic points in your flow. When you have finished your 140-character, 30-second story, ask a question. Ask another question once you have finished your one-page, five-minute version.

Here is the golden rule of questions:

Questions must be open-ended.

A closed question invites a "No." You make it too easy for the person to walk away. Basically, the question should be something along the lines of:

"Well, what do you think?"

No, this won't work every time. It won't even work most of the time. You will have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.

Build Trust

Once you get noticed, you will have to build trust. In the end, a brand is simply a representation of trust. You trust Red Bull to keep you awake without damaging your system too much. (Okay, maybe not. Not everyone trusts every brand.)

With a website, you are promising four things:

• This is not a scam.
• We will not abuse your privacy in any way at all. Period.
• We will not waste your time with buggy code, clumsy user interfaces or long-winded articles that promise more than they deliver.
• We will give you something either useful or entertaining (or better yet, both, which would be magic but is not imperative).

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June - who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what's included in the guide and how to purchase it.

The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299 from this page. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) We believe that's an unusually low price for an incredible amount of business value. Compared to other reports, or internal time spent tracking the market, you get a whole lot for your money here.

What The Report Includes

The research team at ChubbyBrain extracted the raw deal-by-deal data (240 deals in this quarter) from a wide variety of sources (e.g. regulatory filings, press releases, etc.) and through direct conversations with investors and startups. ReadWriteWeb then analyzed the data based on our understanding of early-stage Web technology innovation, so you can see the trends.

We start out with the basics. You get to see this detail on all 240 deals - the company, the investors, the date, the amount. Our Deal Tombstones have it all. Then we dive deep into four key areas: What Market Spaces Are Hot Or Not, Which States Are Getting The Most $$ and Deals, Which Investors Are Most Active, How Is Money Flowing Through The ABC Rounds.

Whether you're a Partner at a VC Fund, an active angel investor, an investment banker or an adviser to entrepreneurs - there's a lot here for you.

You can download a free sample section of the report here. Again, all of the above is available for the low price of $299. Just visit this page to purchase the written report.

Thanks for your interest and good luck with your venture investing!

2. Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation launched Edutopia in the hopes of creating educational best practices for multimedia in the classroom. The site includes online polls, curated blogs, assessment tools and a dedicated magazine for educators at the K-12 levels. The 2009 Webby Award winning site's best content is in its library of high-production videos for teachers and educators.

3. LearnHub: LearnHub is a network where members can create their own communities, share lessons, chat, create tests and tutor each other online at no cost. Schools create their own virtual classrooms where students complete assignments, play games and share photos and text. One of the great features of this site is that the site's report generator allows teachers to track users' progress. While the content is not as in-depth as Scitable's, this is a good site for standardized test preparation and basic K-12 education exercises. For more examples of test preparation sites, see our RWW list of resources.

4. Moodle: Moodle is a free open-source course management platform designed to help teachers create better online resources. Microsoft Education Labs recently announced a new Live@edu plug-in for Moodle. Now in addition to providing lesson plan, assignment and quiz-making tools for teachers, schools also gain access to Outlook Live for e-mail, Office Live Workspace for document sharing, Windows Messenger for chat and Windows Live SkyDrive for 25 GB of storage. This tool is slightly more advanced than some of the others in the industry, but it does offer a number of scalable solutions.

5. Edmodo: Edmodo is a private micro-blogging service for schools that allows teachers to edit privacy options within their virtual classrooms. Educators generate a join code and students log-in to chat, link to files, share notes and check their collective calendars for upcoming exams, quizzes and Pro-D days. While some of the other tools we've presented offer an open-access learning environment, this invite-only service offers students the chance to utilize web-based multimedia tools while allowing teachers to control an online discussion's security.

6. YouTube Edu: YouTube Edu allows students and educators to access lectures from leading educators across the country. For example, Yale and Brandeis University professors upload their lessons for public enjoyment. One of the most popular Channels is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning - a collaboration launched by the Indian Institutes of Technology and Science in Bangalore.

7. ESL Video: ESL Video allows language educators to create quizzes from virtually any video on the internet. From here they can embed their quizzes into their classroom sites or redirect students to the ESL Video domain. Teachers tailor their video quizzes to specific learning units or create simple vocabulary quizzes like the one I made below using YouTube videos. While this tool may not be as sophisticated as some of the above services, its merit comes from the fact that teachers can incorporate pop culture products into their lesson plans with very little effort. Judging by the fact that the below Miley Cyrus video has more than 92 million YouTube views, teachers may be able to harness this tool to ignite a love of learning.

Let's be honest here, you're the educators! If you've got your own favorite resources, add them in the comments below.

Built by cloud development agency FirmCloud in collaboration with FreshBooks, the FreshBooks Connector for Salesforce allows an enterprise to smoothly create an invoice for a contact or opportunity within their CRM.

In terms of functionality, it looks like converting contacts and opportunities in Salesforce.com to invoices is fairly easy. In addition to simply moving data from one platform to the other, the Connector creates a tab within your CRM to monitor activities on your 20 most recent invoices. There's a 15-day free trial for the app, but after that it'll cost you $50/month per organization.

Overall, this new app is a match made in heaven, for sales at least. If you're seeking to try it out however, you'll have to get it direct from FirmCloud, since it's strangely hidden as a private feature in the AppExchange.

In both free and paid deployments, these collaborative networks are proving to be a favorite testing ground for a new way to manage the knowledge of soldiers. In some ways, these rigidly hierarchical organizations are displaying an real willingness to experiment, compared to the civilian businesses declaring themselves enterprise 2.0.

The real source of knowledge for any field manual, military or civilian, is the people on the ground. The process of gathering and filtering that information to put it in to official Army Field Manuals typically takes three to five years, and the wiki experiment is tasked with seeing if they can reduce that time frame. It's no surprise they're emphasizing the real-time capabilities of sharing information: after all, wiki means quick.

This initial pilot is built on MediaWiki, the free and open source software behind Wikipedia, and will let Army personnel get their hands on seven Field Manuals already in use.

This isn't the first time the U.S. military has tried the wiki way. For some time now, RDECOM in the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the US Marine Corps, and the Defense Language Institute have been MindTouch customers.

There's no doubt that wiki software of all kinds has been used on a departmental basis within the military for years. But this summer's test is the first time the Army itself has gone public with one. No doubt they'll find the software and the collaborative culture it inspires transformative.

Ted Patrick, Adobe's Senior Manager of Developer Communities, put it like this: "I think we will see Flash on different devices support the soul of the device in capabilities and APIs" - including GPS. That's an exciting trajectory and more than we've heard before. Full Flash on phones by the end of this year is more or less on schedule, but the integration of these physical features certainly revs up the imagination.

"As Apple has shown," Governor told us by phone, "the User Experience elements are really important - it's not just how you draw screens. Adobe has understood this and will be offering APIs accordingly. What's most important is that they support a new interaction model because that's what developers want. Augmented reality apps, being more gestural about how you interact with applications - that's a big deal."

Governor, whose analyst firm counts Adobe among its clients, says that things will get really interesting when the Flash developer tool Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder) integrates mobile and mobile features like accelerometer and multi-touch into its development environment. That's not currently on the public road map, but seems like the next logical step. "There's all these really cool phones beyond the iPhone, like Nokia phones, that have APIs for things like accelerometers, but the functionality hasn't been taken advantage of," Governor said. "If Adobe can simplify access to this functionality for new interaction models then it can, through tools, democratize sophisticated development on these platforms."

We've had only initial contact about this with Adobe at press time but will update coverage if we get more information.

While we tend to focus here on non-gaming mobile apps, it's not hard to see that multi-touch, accelerometer and GPS use by Flash apps will probably have the biggest impact on games.

The mobile Flash demonstrations shown today by Adobe were all on Android devices, still no world on Flash for the iPhone. ("It's up to Apple," was the line again today.) A bevy of beautiful, touchable, turnable, location-aware Flash apps on Android could create a pretty compelling competitor to the contents of the iPhone app store.

In addition to Wales, other CK-12 advisory board members include CEO of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla, CTO of JotSpot Graham Spencer and founding principal of the High Tech High charter school program, Larry Rosenstock.

CK-12 intends to make use of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Meanwhile, Wales' other open textbook project, Wikibooks, is licensed as GNU Free Documentation. Both licenses ensure that the book content is free to be copied, redistributed and modified for either commercial or non-commercial use with the only major stipulation being that author's receive attribution. Wikibooks currently has over 38,602 volunteer edited pages with subject matter in natural sciences, computing, humanities and social sciences. The project already includes books from at least 15 different languages.

According to CK-12, the difference between Wikipedia and CK-12 is that the organization "specifically focuses on K-12 standards-based content centered around the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects vs. serving as an encyclopedia of knowledge...CK-12 offers materials such as lesson objectives, vocabulary, and Q & A - similar to those found in textbooks." However, the group does not address comparisons with Wikibooks. At this early stage with CK-12, the key difference between Wikibooks and CK-12 appears to be that the latter organization envisions one day supplying printed textbooks via an on-demand press similar to Lulu or Blurb.

Earlier this year, a company called Face.com brought facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of an application called Photo Finder which scanned through untagged photos and identified the people within them. Now, using the same facial recognition algorithms that made Photo Finder possible, the company is introducing Photo Tagger, an app which scans through select online albums to automate the tagging process.

About Photo Tagger

But where Photo Finder focuses on discovery, Photo Tagger focuses on productivity. With the new app, you can choose the albums to scan - whether your own or those belonging to your friends - and the app will process the photos they contain. Photo Tagger will batch the people it finds into groups and will then suggest tags for them. Once you confirm the tags, they're automatically pushed to Facebook where the people tagged are notified, just as if the process had been done manually.

Facebook users who upload a lot of photos will find an application like this extremely useful as it dramatically cuts down on the time it takes to tag images. Instead of having to go through each photo one-by-one, you can simply confirm the tags the application suggests. And surprisingly, it doesn't make a lot of mistakes. The facial recognition technology employed by both of these applications is incredibly accurate. In our tests, the most common mistake it made was to identify a picture of a friend's child as the friend themselves - a problem that has a lot to do with how facial features between related family members are so alike. But for the most part, the app identified photos correctly.

The Photo Finder app has already produced amazing results. It has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos so far and has identified more than 2.3 million faces. What's even more shocking about these numbers is that the app is still in closed alpha. Imagine how many faces it will scan when it opens up!

Get in on the Alpha

Photo Tagger will also launch in closed alpha but will probably be closed for a shorter period of time than the Photo Finder application. The reason for this is because Photo Tagger scans albums on the fly as opposed to scanning an entire network of inter-connected users and their photos like Finder does - a number which can be on average over a hundred thousand photos. Since that causes a bigger impact on the service's back-end than Photo Tagger, it will remain closed for longer while the company works out the kinks.

No matter, because out of the two applications, Facebook users will likely find Photo Tagger the more useful of the two since it offers a more direct purpose: tag these photos fast!

Photo Tagger launches today in private alpha. If you want in, you can click this link to add the app to Facebook right away. Only the first 100 ReadWriteWeb visitors who do so will be given access. Good luck!

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The "Zwitch to Zoho" name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of today, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.

Even the Salesforce.com edition limited to 5 users (for $9/month per person) includes support for Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The new additions and pricing plan for Zoho CRM include close integration with Zoho Mail, but using either Outlook or Gmail will cost you an extra $3/user/month. In other words, to get the full functionality of Salesforce.com, it'll be more than four thousand a year, not the barely more three that Zoho is touting.

Even if you won't get quite the 80% savings that Zoho is proclaiming, its new CRM is still significantly less expensive than Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM Professional, or many others out there. And especially in today's IT world, money talks.

We tested the iPhone app yesterday, and it is indeed a very capable eReader app. It especially stands out because it gives users the ability to customize everything from background and text colors, to what gesture users prefer to switch pages (swipe or tap), as well as line spacing, font size, and margins. The desktop app, which we tested on a Windows PC, is also very usable and customizable, but doesn't feel quite as elegant as the iPhone app.

While the apps are good, though, the B&N eBook store will only be able to really live up to its potential once the company starts to sell the Plastic Logic eReader. While the Kindle is a great device, there can be no doubt that the design is a bit clunky. The Plastic Logic reader, however, looks quite slick, and thanks to its touchscreen, it also offers a sought-after capability that the Kindle currently doesn't offer. In order to compete with Amazon, though, B&N will have to sell the Plastic Logic reader at a price that compares well with Amazon's Kindles.

Wireless Store?

One feature that makes the Kindle stand out from its current competition is the ability to buy and download books wirelessly directly from the device. According to Plastic Logic, the company's eReader will also be able to transfer information wirelessly, though it is not quite clear if this will mean that B&N will partner with a wireless provider, yet. If B&N and Plastic Logic decide against this, though, this could give users an important reason to shun B&N's eReader/eBook store combo.

Can Barnes & Noble Compete with Amazon?

In the perfect world, it wouldn't make a difference whether you prefer a Plastic Logic reader, a Sony Reader, a Kindle, or an iRex iLiad. The Kindle has shown (and so did the iPod before it) that having full control over the hardware and content typically results in a more convenient and attractive package for consumers. In the long run, this will probably (hopefully?) change, but for now, we think B&N is doing the right thing by copying this model for its eBook store, though we will have to wait until the roll-out of the Plastic Logic eReader and how consumers react to it before we can really render a final verdict.

As B&N decided not to compete on price (it sells most eBooks for the same $9.99 as Amazon and also offers free samples for every book, as well as a selection of books for under $5), the quality of the hardware, the number of available books, the openness of the store, and the quality of B&N's service in general will be the areas where the company will have to stand out. Given what we have seen so far, we think that Barnes & Noble might indeed be able to challenge Amazon's position in this market, especially given that we are still in the early days of the eBook and only a few consumers have picked sides at this point, and even fewer have actually bought an eReader yet.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

According to the new study, available as of yesterday from the Nielsen Norman web site, the average success rate for performing various tasks on the mobile web was only 59%. Compare that to 80% for the same tasks when performed on a PC.

"Observing users suffer during our ... sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994," Nielsen told USA Today. "It was that bad."

Some of the tests involved in the study had participants heading to specific web sites, including Fandango.com for movie reviews and Anthropologie.com for a shopping task. Other tests were more general and open-ended, allowing users to do web searches to find the answers to various questions. As they surfed, participants came across sites that were both mobile-ready and those that were not.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that success rates dramatically improved when surfing the mobile versions of the web sites - by 20%, to be exact. Also not surprising was the fact that smartphone owners had less trouble performing the same tasks as users of traditional cell phones. For example, iPhone owners had an average success rate of 75% while other smartphones averaged 55%. Traditional cell phones, however, only averaged 38%.

Is the Mobile Web Unusable or is it the Devices People Use to Surf It?

The study calls into question the usability of today's mobile web, pointing out contributing factors to the problem which include things like small screens, awkward input on mini-keyboards, poorly designed sites, and bandwidth issues.

But the overall takeaway from this research feels like a case of putting hard numbers to information we already knew: surfing the web with your hot pink Razr's built-in browser is an experience that leaves a lot to be desired.

It is, in fact, the rise of the smartphone that has made the mobile web such a popular destination on both consumer devices and those designed for business use, like the Blackberry. Prior to what we can only call the "smartphone explosion," not much thought was given to the mobile web by users, web site owners, or by the handset manufacturers whose built-in browsers seemed to make the problem even worse in some cases. Data plans were an expensive luxury, too, so many people didn't even bother to add on the extra package that made mobile web surfing possible.

But when the smartphones took off, a movement in which Apple's iPhone has had a major impact, the mobile web felt the ripple effects of all the new users coming online. Not only were companies designing mobile sites, they were taking the time to design iPhone-specific sites, too. Although the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone in existence by any means, it has been a driving force of change for the smartphone industry as a whole. With its highly usable Safari web browser and touchscreen, other manufacturers had to step up their game in order to compete.

These days, every cell phone carrier offers multiple types of smartphones in their lineup from touchscreen Blackberrys to Android-powered phones to the iPhone and more. On these phones, the usability of the mobile web is not really an issue.

So what is this study really saying, then? If you want to surf the mobile web with ease, get a smartphone? Or perhaps it's pointing out how terrible the browsers are on traditional cell phones, seeing as how those who struggled the most were using what many would call "old school" handsets (aka "feature phones"). It's also interesting that no comparisons were made between the basic built-in browsers and a user-installed upgrade like Opera. With Opera Mini's site compression and zooming abilities, for example, accessing sites - both mobile and non - on any phone becomes much easier.

Ultimately, though, the market for feature phones may be on the decline, making usability issues such as the ones found in this study of less importance going forward. In March of this year for instance, IDC reported a decline in mobile phone shipments due to the poor economic conditions worldwide. What was really interesting, though, was that the smartphone segment of this market, while not unaffected, still remained in positive growth while the rest of the market was poised to expect an 8.3% downturn. As noted by the IDC report, that "speaks volumes about the potential upside for these devices when the market turns." What it means is that the market for feature phones is fading out. In the future, when every phone becomes a smartphone, the usability of the mobile web probably won't seem so bad.

1. Photofiltre is a desktop app with a UI reminiscent of Photoshop and a pared-down set of functions. This app eliminates layers and some user controls for certain tools but leaves plenty of room to play with color, saturation, and effects.

The toolbar allows for certain types of painting and selection, but basically, users are limited to making whole-image adjustments.

Has: Levels, lots of color correction and highlight/shadow options, clone stamp

Lacks: Layers, settings and controls for certain tools

If Photoshop Is a Ten: Photofiltre is a 5.

2. Paint.NET is a fascinating desktop app we just found out about through reader recommendations. And our readers were completely right. We found that this app, even though it required a multi-step download process, just might be able to replace Photoshop entirely for many users. We were able to adjust layer blend modes and opacities, create new gradient layers, apply and adjust a bevy of effects and filters, and just about everything an average, non-professional Photoshop user would do.

The toolbar and palettes were familiar, and although some of the breadth and scope of the features felt a little shallow, there's a lot that can be done with this tool.

Has: Layers, full toolbar, levels, curves

Lacks: Sophisticated color correction/alteration, paintbrush, and selection tools; adjustment layers

If Photoshop Is a Ten: Paint.NET is an 8.

3. The GIMP is touted by many as the be-all, end-all of image editing apps. This open-source, desktop-based piece of work has been part of amateur designers' stable of resources for a long time and retains a solid place among Photoshop's free competitors.

All things being equal, there's not a lot we can say to criticize GIMP. As an open source app, it is subject to continuous rounds of improvement; there is no free app that will duplicate the Photoshop experience as well as GIMP will.

Has: Lighting effects, a full paintbrush tool set, pen tool path selection, layer masks

Lacks: Adjustment layers, some effects previews, layer effects

If Photoshop Is a Ten: GIMP is an 11, because it gives users 90 percent of Photoshop's functionality at zero percent of its cost.

4. Aviary is the hot new kid on the block when it comes to image editors. The four-app suite is a web-based beauty that allows for separate functions for images, vector graphics, design work, and more. Photos can be imported from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and a number of other sites.

And although having separate apps for different levels of control and execution is the perfect way to scale the overall functionality for different user groups, we found having to switch back and forth between, for example, the Peacock effects editor and the Phoenix image editor, was disconcerting. And Peacock itself is a radical departure from current image editing paradigms, confusing in a way that is only rivaled by Yahoo! Pipes and tax documents. Instead of launching themselves and their work right into the UI, users will have to spend some time in tutorials and make an initial investment before they see a payoff in their results.

Has: Mask layers, layer blend modes, toolbar, selection modification, layer filters, keyboard shortcuts

Lacks: Previews of many filters/effects, controls for customizing effects, continuity and integration between apps

If Photoshop Is a Ten: Aviary Phoenix is a 7; with Aviary Peacock, it's a 2-9, just depending on how much time you want to spend on tutorials.

5. Splashup is just about as good as it gets. Although it lacks a few crucial tools, it makes up for it all by delivering a beautiful knockoff of the Photoshop interface. It actually looks - dare we say it? - a lot sexier than Photoshop. The app also allows for easy importing of photos stored on social sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and more.

Without so much as registering an account, users are taken immediately to a pared-down, in-browser PS with an abbreviated but adequate set of capabilities. This is the Photoshop Lite we've all been asking for all these years. The tools presented allow for just enough control and just enough subtlety to create professional-looking results:

Has: Layers with effects and blend mode/opacity options and a full, floating toolbar

Lacks: Curves, levels, vibrance, and a slew of the less-used Photoshop features

If Photoshop Is a Ten: Splashup is an 8.

6. Users must register accounts to use flauntR app suite. This Flash-based, in-browser app is definitely one of the best-looking of the bunch, but it lacks the all-important layers that take the amateurish edge off an edited image. Without layers, the final results will always look just a little bit ham-fisted. Nevertheless, flauntR gives users a quick, effective way to adjust images and apply effects.

Images from Flickr, Facebook, and other sites can be pulled into the editor, as well. In addition to offering print services through the printR app, the mobilR app also allows for creating background images for several mobile devices, a cool and unique offering. The profilR moreover allows for the automatic creation of appropriately dimensioned avatars for various social network profiles.

Our finished product isn't something we're terribly proud of, and we certainly wouldn't call the result "professional," but the app was quick and simple to use:

Has: Curves, a range of photo filters and effects, one-click palette adjustments, and a decent set of color adjustment tools

Lacks: The ability to change settings and strengths of many effects, and, as aforementioned, layers

If Photoshop Is a Ten: flauntR is a 4.

7. FotoFlexer is a convenient, quick, in-browser editor with lots of great features. It's also got an API, which we find fascinating.

While we weren't able to experience the levels of magic we would have liked (we couldn't create new layers not based on existing images, for example), we did get to jerry rig a few cool effects and create an image that looks 'Shopped enough.

Users can register accounts to store their edited images on the site, and they can also pull photos in from Flickr, Facebook, and similar social sites.

Has: Equivalents of Curves, Pen selection, Magic Wand, Layers, Liquify, and a ton of easy-to-use filters

Lacks: Full-featured opacity settings and blend modes, a Paintbrush equivalent

If Photoshop Is a Ten: FotoFlexer is a 5.

There are quite a few apps we left out of this list; which ones are your favorites to use? If we missed anything crucial, please be sure to let us know in the comments.

Stanford-Clark has set up various systems for real-time monitoring of the Internet of Things, many of them using Twitter (he calls the resulting tweets "tweetjects"). One example got a bit of mainstream media coverage lately: a house that uses Twitter to monitor its energy consumption.

He's also now hooked up his house sensors to a Twitter account: andy_house (it's a private account, so requires Andy's approval before you can follow it). Here's a BBC tv report about the house and other similar projects involving sensors and Twitter:

As well as his own house, Stanford-Clark has also set up Twitter accounts for his local ferry and bus - for example so they can tweet their real-time locations.

What Use is a Tweeting House?

Stanford-Clark told me that as well as providing useful data about what his house is doing - for example how warm is the lounge, or has he left a door open - the system can also apply intelligence to his house. For example it can cross-reference house data against AMEE (an open platform for measuring energy consumption), in order to infer the real-time carbon footprint for his house.

These experiments are just the start of what's possible by hooking sensors up to real-time messaging systems like Twitter. However there's a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done first. Stanford-Clark told me that to get at this type of data for many everyday things, governments, city councils and companies will need to instrument public things with sensors - e.g. gas pipelines, buses, trains, ferries.

The problem for most organizations, including government, is that they aren't necessarily sure what uses there are right now for sensors. For example power companies may not see the economic value of replacing meter readers with automatic sensors. Stanford-Clark's response is that "a lot of other apps will spring out of the woodwork," when sensors are added and hooked into messaging software.

Stanford-Clark and IBM have identified 3 main things that are required for this trend to play out fully, conveniently summed up as "the three 'I's": Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent. In my next post, I'll explore this more - plus some of IBM's other projects in this area.

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity in the iPhone platform if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's PRX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can't even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn't want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there's tax complications, the platform's standard 30% fee for payments isn't tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

For now the app is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding is up for renewal this summer. Shapiro says that a second round of funding would be used to create "showcase apps that would break new ground and create new technology." He says the company is particularly interested in technologies that represent a hybrid of digital and broadcast. "With radio," he says, "there is still a tremendous amount of reach that you don't want to give up on when you move into the digital space."

Fixing the App

That hybrid paradigm is very well represented by the new version of the Public Radio Player. The previous version, called Public Radio Tuner, was one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone store but it didn't really work that well. Radio streams got dropped a lot. That's no longer a big problem with version 2.0.

The new version of the app tackles the problem of dropped streams by making the buffering settings much more sophisticated. Remember, the App doesn't host any of the audio, it just points to the live streams or podcasts stored on public radio stations' own servers. Project manager Matt MacDonald says the app now determines what kind of bandwidth the receiving phone has, then buffers the inbound stream accordingly before serving it up to listeners. The end result is a radically more usable radio app on wifi, 3G or Edge connections.

It's still not perfect; this like every app is at the mercy of AT&T's wireless network, but dropped streams appear to be much, much less frequent than they used to be. The interface sometimes hangs when loading menus, but Shapiro says that with the new release today bug fixes are a top priority and though crash reports are appearing infrequently, they are being closely watched. "Just shake the phone," he jokes. "Then it will work better."

More Than One Kind of Content

The new app brings a whole lot more radio to your iPhone. In addition to pointing to hundreds of radio streams, PRX has co-ordinated a number of different sources to pull show schedules down to be stored locally on your phone. "Scheduling data has been a big effort," Shapiro says. "It never existed in one place and is still a moving target."

A company called Public Interactive (recently acquired by NPR from Public Radio International) has a metadata tool that originally captured music playlists but now publishes radio show schedules as well. NPR and many radio stations also display schedules on their own websites. PRX aggregates all that data, stores it on your phone, syncs it with the radio stream links and then checks for changes each time you launch the Public Radio Player app.

Having the particular show that's playing displayed along with a station name makes a very big difference in the user experience.

The 2.0 version of the app also includes support for "on demand" or podcast listening. Hundreds of podcasts are navigable by featured shows, category or alphabetically. Podcasts are integrated into some of the show schedules as well. When listening to a streaming station, you can view the rest of the day's schedule and see what other shows will be broadcast later. Then you can choose to listen to previous recorded editions of those shows. It's a pretty seamless experience.

Search is No Small Matter

The new search functionality integrates all of the above, letting you search for keywords or topics and finding both recorded and currently live shows that match your search. MacDonald says the company used an open source program called ThinkingSphynx on the back end, worked closely with the NPR API team and is still working on teaching local radio stations about the importance of standards-based content titling. Listening to streams and podcasts on iTunes or an iPod may not have been so difficult with incomplete file names, but show a radio station how broken its content looks in a dynamic iPhone directory and the message comes through loud and clear.

There have been other efforts to index all the public radio streams online; Public Radio Fan is the most notable and is more international, but is less sophisticated and is based on the desktop and browser. (After listening to some international broadcasts via Public Radio Fan it's hard not to be a little disappointed with even Public Radio Player's extensive but exclusively US menu.)

As a media technology, Public Radio Player offers a unique blend of content aggregation, focus on both real time and recorded content and extensive data integration on the back end. All on the iPhone. Its design and performance continue to improve. It's a very impressive offering in terms of content delivery; if it can find a way to use the new platform it's on to transcend the public radio paradigm of on-air pledge drives, that would really be remarkable, wouldn't it?

Jake Shapiro says that offering Public Radio Player on other platforms, including a web interface, is a logical next step. You can follow the project's progress on the Public Radio Player blog and download the application here.