Search for "Google Mobile App" in the iTunes app store and if you've got a 3GS or iOS4, you'll be able to use this incredible visual search technology. Take a picture of a landmark, a book, a bottle of wine or much more and you'll instantly receive Google search results about the subject of your photo. The availability of Goggles on iPhone was just announced minutes ago. See the demo video below. If you'll excuse me, I need to go run around and take pictures of things now, while jumping up and down and clapping.

Needlebase is a point and click tool for scraping data from web pages, turning that data into a database, normalizing it, de-duplicating it, and reconciling data similarities. It requires absolutely no technical knowledge - but with a little imagination it can do incredible things. ReadWriteWeb is excited to offer 100 invites to the closed beta of Needlebase today. Read on for screenshots and info about how to get an account.

It took me minutes to do and the possibilities are incredible. For one thing, I was disappointed to find that though 72 people have put @rwwgeo on a Twitter list, only 3 of them live in Colorado, the geotechnology capital of the US. I'll run the same analysis on all the account's Twitter followers before getting down on myself too much, but I suspect that means the account is getting more traction among Silicon Valley tech geeks than it is among Colorado geogeeks. That's something I, as the manager of that account, would like to know. You can view my dataset here.

Twitter is just one type of website to scrape and turn into a database. All kinds of sites offer lots of possibilities. Location data can be grouped by metro area and entries can be merged and unmerged by drag and drop.

The service's key differentiator is its ability to look at a big set of data and recommend which entries should be merged. If you tell it to look at a list of restaurants by name and location, it will recommend that "Bob's Burgers, Tampa, Florida" be merged with "Bobs Burgers, Tampa, Florida" but not with "Bob's Burgers, Portland, Oregon." The interface displays a list of recommended merges, which can be managed in bulk.

It's a really incredible tool, I want to take a week off of work just to think up, scrape, sort and analyze databases from all kinds of different pages around the web. I really, really hope that Google doesn't drown the tool if the ITA acquisition goes through.

The first 100 readers who email marshall@readwriteweb.com, subject line Needlebase, with your name, email and perhaps a little information about yourself, will receive invites from the company.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

According to news posted on Accentuate in mid-September, and more recently on blog sites Pulse2 and The Next Web, the potential Mahalo lawsuit involves disputes surrounding a change to the site's terms, which now give the company ownership of the content published on Mahalo.com. Prior to the change, the writers also owned the content. This change angered some of the site's users, who are now attempting to sue the company.

The law firm of Green Welling, LLP is currently gathering information from affected writers and attempting to get a class-certified suit underway.

Mahalo employees and contractors interested in participating in the suit are being asked for any "information, documentation, screen captures, emails, other communications or experiences with Mahalo.com," notes Accentuate Services, a blog dedicated to freelancing and fiction writing. The site is maintained by Michelle L. Devon, one of the injured parties, and now the plaintiff in the suit. Those joining her can remain anonymous through attorney-client privilege, she says.

The details of the case itself are not currently being discussed, but it involves revenue sharing disputes and intellectual property law from our understanding of the matter. Devon was previously seen commenting on this thread on Mahalo Answers, the Q&A sub-section of the search site. Additional discussion is also available online in dedicated forum sites both here and here.

Note: Mahalo has not yet responded to our request for comment regarding the suit. We will update this post if we hear back.Update: Mahalo's official comment: "We're not going to speculate on rumors of lawsuits. However, our terms of service have been and continue to be clear. We've always operated under Creative Commons. Under the prior terms of service, the writers owned the content and provided Mahalo with a license to use it. Now that we compensate writers with bi-weekly cash payments, we amended the terms so that we own the content and provide the writers a creative commons license to use elsewhere if they choose. Bottom line is that Mahalo is pro-writer, as evidenced by our substantial and ever-growing investment in quality content. Our Mahalo Guides and Gurus are talented, passionate, creative contributors who are the lifeblood of the site. Writers interested in sharing their passions with a huge audience of readers should not hesitate to apply."

Calacanis Working on TechCrunch Competitor Called "Launch"

As the different parties investigate a potential suit against Mahalo, it seems Calacanis has a new project. According to an article in today's Guardian, the entrepreneur is now investing in an editorial startup called Launch.

Launch will take on TechCrunch, says Calacanis, but with more of a focus on "quality and insight," he says. "When I started with [Engadget founder, and Joystiq, Gizmodo and Hackaday co-founder] Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it's even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

Launch won't offer news via blog posts, as TechCrunch does, though. It will be provided as an email newsletter - the same format where Calacanis's own deeper insights disappeared to back in 2008.

"If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog," he told the Guardian.

Do Bloggers Lack Credibility?

As bloggers ourselves, it's hard to not be stung by words like his. Bloggers lack credibility? Ouch.

But blogging, let's remember, is just a format for publishing content. Anyone can blog, from mainstream journalists to uninformed amateurs. That's the power and the beauty of the platform, in fact. Who exactly is Calacanis speaking about when he makes comments like these?

Besides, today's blog readers are now savvier than ever, often interacting with writers through comment forms and on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, which he summarily dismissed. Commenters add their thoughts to posted stories, expressing their support or agreement, pointing out mistakes or offering different opinions or opposing points of views.

While an email newsletter will arguably have a highly engaged audience, as Calacanis says, it's hardly positioned as a direct competitor to TechCrunch, or any other top-tier news site, blog or otherwise.

But that's just my opinion, as a lowly blogger.

In the comments (or elsewhere), you can share yours. That's how this works, folks. And we like it.

Photo by Joi Ito.

In the company's latest report (sample) "Mobile Broadband Traffic Across Regions 2009-2017," they've determined that this increase will account for nearly three quarters of all global traffic via mobile broadband portables. The top region for video consumption will be Asia Pacific which will account for over half (53%) of the traffic. That will be followed by Europe (26%) and then North America (14%).

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

According to Steve Smith, founder of Coda Research Consultancy, "the sheer amount of traffic people will consume worldwide will put pressure on operator revenues and network capacity, necessitating radical efficiency drives." He also notes that, in the short term, end user frustration with bandwidth and speed will increase. To illustrate this point, he mentions that today as many as three-quarters of Europeans are dissatisfied with the speeds they currently receive. That's an interesting comment, especially considering all the grumbling we hear about AT&T in the U.S. and their general failure to deliver on the promise of high-speed internet for iPhone users. (In many urban areas, they can't even consistently deliver a signal!) Although this report didn't focus specifically on smartphones, it's somewhat comforting to know that overseas users are experiencing the same struggles as we do here in the U.S.

However, once mobile broadband operators complete their build-outs and upgrades to this high-speed data network of the future, the resulting impact it will have on the internet as a whole will be mind-blowing. One could even argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen over time - since the invention of the hypertext protocol and the web browser, that is.

The Next Revolution for the Net: Extremely Fast, Lots of Bandwidth

In the early days, slow dial-up speeds left us with simplistic, HTML-coded web pages where the most action to be had was an animated GIF. As bandwidth and speeds increased, pages became more robust, too. This change led to sites like Amazon and eBay, both of which launched in 1995, allowing people to shop from home using their PCs. By 2001, the usefulness of the net encouraged enough people to come online to make sites like the crowd-sourced Wikipedia possible. By 2003, the still-increasing speeds meant users could now download music from the newly launched iTunes store, customize (and overload!) their online profiles on MySpace, and play in online virtual worlds like Second Life. The following year, online photo-sharing prepared to go mainstream thanks to the launch of Flickr. Facebook, too, launched this year and eventually became the largest photo-sharing site in the world only three years later when they announced how they hosted over 10 billion photos on their site.

Also in 2005, the abundance of high-speed data connections made video-sharing site YouTube a hit among a new generation of user-generated content producers. By 2007, broadcasters banded together to launch Hulu, a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. In Europe, the BBC iPlayer was doing much of the same. In 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the handheld and revolutionized the mobile phone industry. This year, the handset's hardware was upgraded to record video, too.

As you can see, many of these changes were either directly or indirectly impacted by the increasing speeds and bandwidth provided by both mobile operators and ISPs. But currently, it's the mobile broadband networks which are having more of an impact on the latest trends. Even with all their struggles (cough AT&T cough), without the bandwidth provided, phones like the iPhone wouldn't even be possible and the smartphone revolution wouldn't be underway as it is now.

So what will the world look like by 2017? It's almost hard to imagine. But the promise of 4G could deliver things like live streaming HDTV, real-time updates from a variety of services, video chat, abundant use of MiFi, mobile cloud computing, streaming via iTunes instead of downloading (we like that!), and much more. In other words, the high-speed net that you use at home could go with you everywhere via your netbook, tablet, smartphone, or some other device in between. What will that mean for the world of online applications and cloud computing? Only that the next big shift for the internet as a whole is underway and we're privileged to be watching it happen now.

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

• 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them.

The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie.

We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications.

Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future.

Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

The company is expected to roll out a test of the pricing scheme sometime next quarter for new customers in Beaumont, Texas.

Even if just 5% of users are currently considered high bandwidth consumers, as Time Warner is quick to point out, activities like streaming video are growing in popularity. Charging per usage -- and effectively penalizing high bandwidth users -- may only serve to stifle the growth of rich media on the web, even as things like the new Apple TV and the unlimited Netflix streaming plan seek to push these activities into the main stream.

We expect that most users won't be happy with the idea of being charged based on usage. Even those who might actually save money may initially respond negatively -- psychologically, unlimited use sounds like a better deal than being charged by usage.

Outside of the US, in Europe and in Australia, I have many friends whose broadband plans have usage caps of a few GB of data transfer each month. They often complain to me about the inconvenience of having to plan and monitor their Internet usage to make sure they have enough data transfer left to do the activities they want to do. It is unlikely that consumers in the US, who have so long enjoyed unlimited data usage, will be open to a change to per usage billing.

But which is a better option, per usage billing where the more you use, the more you pay, or data throttling, where certain activities are just made automatically slower at the ISP level? Are there any other solutions that ISPs should be considering to keep network congestion in check and costs down? Let us know your thoughts on the subject in the comments below.