ReadWriteWeb

A team of developers from a garage in France launched a location-based question and answer site today called Gootip. The service uses Google Places API tied with its own algorithm to specify where a question is being asked and tries to increase the relevance of the answer with users IP location from Foursquare and the Facebook Graph.

Gootip emerged in beta today without having any buzz ahead of time and no funding from any venture capitalists. It has been bootstrapped by three founders who worked at e-merchant Price Minister - Mathieu Bidart, Eric Gagnaire and Thierry Sebba - who claim to have shut themselves in a garage with bottles of wine for the last six months to push out the product.

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.

Fresh on the heels of the still unresolved Lodsys matter, a second patent-holding company is now targeting mobile application developers, claiming infringement on its patent for a system that involves collecting data from questionnaires and sending that data to a central server. The company has sued 10 application development firms so far, but claims that this patent covers "thousands of existing apps."

And unlike with Lodsys, the patent firm is not just targeting iOS developers.

If you have to keep an eye on your iPhone data usage - whether it's due to data caps or roaming fees - then you might like Onavo, a new app that will monitor and compress your data so you can use (and pay for) less data.

Once you download the Onavo app and register your device, your data is routed through Ovaco's services, which compress your data and help you track your usage, identifying for example which apps are data-download-intensive.

I was trying to make it through this week without covering JavaScript or Node.js, to make-up for all the coverage of JSConf and NodeConf last week. But this is too good not to mention: Nathan Rajlich has figured out how to install Node.js on a jail broken iOS device, and he's compiled a .deb package compatible with Cydia that's available to download.

A little over a year ago, some new iPad owners found they were having issues with the device's Wi-Fi connection. Signals were weak, or worse, dropped altogether. The only solution at the time, before Apple released a fix, was to disable and re-enable the Wi-Fi connection.

Now, that same problem has returned, and this time, other iOS devices are affected, too, including the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Rocketship Education, a network of K-5 charter schools, announces today that it has received over $3 million so far this year in philanthropic investments from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The funds will be used to help further develop the technology that supports the Rocketship Hybrid School Model.

That model relies on a blend of traditional classroom learning and individualized online instruction. The latter involves the schools' Learning Lab, in which students spend time each day working on computers to their master reading and math skills. The Learning Lab helps the schools assess students' weaknesses and, through adaptive learning technology, helps provide remediation for those areas.

A lot of foreign language instruction is geared toward the travelling experience. But what that typically means is a few vocabulary lessons on shopping and a few key phrases on how to order from a menu. If you aren't really interested in local dining or boutiques, then you'll probably find that even mastering all the vocabulary or phrases in a language guide will do little to help you on your particular journey.

A set of new apps hits the iTunes App Store today that offers a much better way to help you customize what you want and need to know about a particular language - whether you're travelling for business or for pleasure. TripLingo launches its first 4 apps with Mexican Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portugese versions.

In this continuing series, we round up some of our favorite new applications for smartphones each month, specifically for iPhone and Android devices. This spring edition is one of the longest lists yet - there have been a number of incredible new launches to highlight this past month. (And yes, we know it's May already, these things take time). As a bonus just for this month, we've added a section for new iPad and Honeycomb apps, too.

As always, feel free to share your favorite apps in the comments!

There will soon be two new app stores available to iPhone jailbreakers, it's being reported. In addition to the Cydia app store, the default home to jailbreak applications for Apple mobile devices, it looks like the once-popular Icy store will also be making a comeback. The other new store is called Lima, and this one will be a browser-based alternative to Cydia, as opposed to a downloadable application.