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In a recent interview, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told technology reporter Om Malik that his company was "very bullish" on mobile, even going so far as to say "we will embrace every device." That's a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment for years but has yet to launch anything for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site.

Now, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there's a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. "We don't think about one device only," Kilar said.

However, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it's not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard.

One of the most common complaints about the new iPad is that it doesn't support Flash. In a recent criticism of the device, Adobe's Adrian Ludwig writes, "Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web." While Adobe is offering a number of workarounds, dark horse Tobey Schneider's open source HTML 5 Flash Interpreter Gordon is an ambitious project with heroic intentions.

Switzerland-base development and design firm Jilion recently launched a site demonstrating their latest project, SublimeVideo, an HTML5-based video player. Although not publicly available as of yet, this sleek, fast, and plug-in free video player shows off the potential of the upcoming web standard HTML5.

If you've been wondering what the future of web video looks like, look no further than here.

Applications that looked amazing on larger multi-touch experiences like Microsoft Surface may have a more affordable consumer-facing counterpart. While the iPad has been widely criticized, many startups are thrilled by its possibilities. In mid-November we featured Paris-based Pearltrees as a new design interface for remapping Web information. We spoke to CEO Patrice Lamothe to hear his thoughts on the release of the iPad.

Google launched a new web-based version of its telephony service Google Voice on the iPhone today at m.google.com/voice, built on HTML5 like Google's other iPhone apps are. This after a long and heated battle with Apple over allowing Google Voice on the iPhone. Once it's a website, though, there's nothing Apple can do about it.

HTML5 makes for a relatively nice experience, with its local caching for speed and its responsive interface, but there are some things about the Google Voice web app that just don't feel quite right. It's hard to know which of its problems are just oversights to be fixed and which of them are rooted in the fact that it's a web app. What do you think, is an HTML5 telephony app good enough? Or does your phone need to, you know, be on your phone?

YouTube just announced that it will begin supporting HTML5 video players this evening across many of the videos on the site. The feature isn't live yet but is expected to be within the next hour or two. If this test goes live site-wide, it will be a good thing for the web.

An HTML5 video player will allow videos to be viewed without Adobe's Flashplayer plug-in, videos will load faster and developers will be able to build all kinds of other intriguing features into a media delivery scheme based on the next version of HTML.
For now users will need to sign-up the HTML5 preview on Test Tube and they'll need to be using either Chrome, Safari or the Chrome frame in IE.

This morning Google announced that "offline Gmail" is leaving the Gmail Labs testing area and will be implemented as a standard feature for all users. Once enabled, this feature allows you to access your Gmail even when no internet connection is available. You can read and respond to messages, star them or label them just as you would if you were online. When a connection is restored, all the changes you made are synced with Google's servers and any messages in your Outbox are sent out.

As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality.

It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.

Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery.

Earlier this morning, Mozilla released the fourth beta version of Firefox 3.6. Besides over 140 bug fixes, the new beta also introduces support for HTML5's local file handling API. This feature gives web apps the ability to access and handle local files selected by the user. A photo site that implements this feature can now work with images locally, for example. You don't have to upload your images to the site - instead, the web app can just manipulate the photo through the browser locally and an upload is only necessary if you want to store the image remotely.

It only took 3 years to go from HTML2 to HTML4, but the HTML4.01 specifications were published 10 years ago and even though today's web looks very different, we are still waiting for HTML5. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group started preliminary work on what is now known as HTML5 in 2004 and the W3C HTML Working Group was adopted this draft as the basis for the HTML5 specs in 2007. Some modern browsers already offer partial support for HTML5, but there are still quite a few issues that need to be resolved before we will see the finalized version of the HTML5 specifications. One area where there is still a lot of discussion is support for video in HTML5.

From the R&D Labs at Ricoh, there comes a new QR code creation tool called iCandy. With this application, you can easily create QR codes that automatically launch and begin playing your music in iTunes. If you don't already own the song, scanning the QR code will prompt you to purchase it from either iTunes, Amazon, or Rhapsody. In addition to iCandy's music-related features, the app can also create codes that take you to any web site with a URL, perfect for bands wishing to promote their MySpace page, Facebook fan page, YouTube video, or anything else on the web.

Has this happened to you? You receive a message on Facebook that you've been tagged in a photo, but when you go to look at the photo you discover that it wasn't you at all, but some sort of product, service, or cause that a marketer is trying to promote. According to news from AdAge, this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It's so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.