When serial inventor, pro candle maker and very early YouTube star Paul "Renetto" Robinett called me on the phone six months ago and told me he and a team were creating a new video service, I was interested. When I got to see the service on Robinett's phone in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel at SXSW, I was downright excited. This was my favorite new app that I saw in Austin. It's not publicly available yet, but it's finally getting close.
It's called Glmps and it's a social photo service - with a very important twist. It stores the five seconds before you snapped a photo in video - and saves the whole package together for context. It's cool; it lets you see a little bit of the story behind a picture and it turns video into a fun freeze-frame experience. Check out the Glmps I made of my lunch, below.
In the battle of cloud music services, you have a variety of options including radio service like Pandora and Last.fm, online lockers like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, Internet radio stations and premium, "program-your-own" services like MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and Zune. But what if you want it all? Then you may want to consider mSpot and its recently updated mobile app for Android.
Over a year after its launch on the iPhone, Norway-based browser maker Opera Software has at last ported its Opera Mini mobile browser to the larger form factor of the Apple iPad. The new universal iOS application, Opera Mini 6, brings a full-featured Web browser to both tablet and phone, offering a customized start page, tabbed browsing, password saving, social sharing and more.
Today, the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) has launched Miro 4, an updated version of its desktop media player which now introduces a notable new feature: the ability to sync with Android phones and tablets.
Previously, the software was used for finding, viewing, downloading and sharing digital media discovered through a variety of channels including YouTube and BitTorrent. It was simply a browser-less way to access online media. But with this new release, Miro has positioned itself as the open source alternative to DoubleTwist, currently Android users' go-to desktop program of choice for duplicating the iTunes experience. And while, at present, Miro lacks some of DoubleTwist's polish, it makes up for it in a rich, and ever-expanding feature set, including, at long last, podcast subscriptions for Mac users.
Zaarly has a different way of conducting commerce online. The startup offers a real-time Web and mobile location-based platform that can help people get what they want or need from the community around them. Zaarly launches to the public today to bring the mobile local commerce platform to neighborhoods everywhere.
Zaarly launched for a test run during SXSW in Austin in early March and did $10,000 in less than 48 hours during the conference. The startup is backed by some high profile investors including Ashton Kutcher, Felicis Ventures, Bill Lee (Tweetdeck, etc.), Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit and others.
Application and content discovery on the iPad can be a daunting task, especially for new users. Users often get a feeling of "I know this is a cool piece of technology, but I don't know what to do with it." Sometimes it takes a tech geek friend to show you some of the cool apps to really feel like you have taken a step into the future.
App maker Cooliris has released three new discovery apps called Decks that can help consumers find new apps, movies and photos (on Flickr). Decks for Apps is the most useful of the bunch. It is integrated with the App Store to show off the top applications and make them easy to research and download. It is like perusing a shelf at a retail store from consumer days of yore, instead you are sitting on your couch.
The hardest part of finding good music online these days is discovering what you should look for in the first place. Almost all our old favorites are available on demand but finding good new bands and songs remains a challenge. Various services are competing to fill this need as effectively as possible, but it's a tough nut to crack.
My new favorite entrant into the field is an iPhone app from long-time MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Hype Machine Radio is being sold for $2.99 (iTunes) and is worth every penny. The company says the app is "the Hype Machine evolved into a lean back, non-stop rich radio experience." It's essentially a mobile music blog browser, complete with continuos play, album covers, blog posts reviewing the songs, subscriptions, automatically personalized playlists and offline caching of the music posted by particular blogs. It's a great compliment to other music services and it's very nice looking, too.
I've had the BlackBerry PlayBook for nearly two weeks now. Although we don't typically review gadgets and hardware here at ReadWriteWeb, RIM was able to send us a review unit. Below are some initial impressions and thoughts, but for a more detailed review, you should head to the gadget blog of your choice, if you haven't done so already.
The PlayBook is, in a word, serviceable. It is not a nightmare, but it's not incredible, either. However, it shows potential. It's surprisingly heavy for its small, 7-inch size. It needs apps, badly. It needs core apps, including email, calendaring and contacts at the very least, because webmail doesn't seem work properly. It needs to be less buggy, in general. But the PlayBook is rapidly improving. Although in the short term, it's an unfinished product, perhaps undeserving of a full review, and possibly even undeserving of your money as of yet - that situation is changing quickly. How quickly? RIM is currently promising PlayBook updates as often as every two weeks.
A new webpage annotation service launched this week name Scrible that aims to make the online research, note taking and organization easier and more intuitive.
Scrible is a toolbar that Web users can install on their bookmark bar that gives a variety of options to annotation of the Internet. It can highlight text, take notes, bold, underline and italicize text on a Web page and then save the page with the notations to a personal library. As far as the ability to manipulate words on a page and save those notes, the Web has not seen anything quite like Scrible.
As a part of an experiment to really understand the value and the shortcomings of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform, I recently made the HTC HD7 my primary device. The only exception to this is when I travel, when a mobile hotspot (such as is provided by my Nexus S) is a necessity. I don't know that this experiment can last much longer, however, because today's Windows Phone is simply not powerful enough for my day-to-day needs. When the "Mango" update (due this fall) is released, that may change.
In the meantime, I spent a little time playing around with the desktop software side of the Windows Phone experience, which is notably different depending on whether you're a Mac or PC person. Different, however, doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, I've found.
