ReadWriteWeb

A new mobile app platform called WiO is set to revolutionize the TV watching experience by allowing customers to immediately get information about the products and services they see advertised on screen, both in TV commercials and within the shows themselves.

Through a mobile app running on customers' phones, marketers can offer a variety of follow-up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more. In total, there are 10 follow-up actions offered. And the consumer is in complete control of which ones, if any, they respond to.

EggDrop is a new mobile application for buying and selling goods in real-time with those in your local community. The idea is to improve upon the mobile commerce experience by using the technology that ships on modern smartphones. The app lets you use the camera for posting photos of items for sale, filter searches by location and receive push notifications to stay informed about the items you're watching, buying or selling.

In addition, EggDrop introduces an interesting pricing model - the "falling price auction." This enables so-called "frictionless" transactions that work without any haggling, bargaining, deals or discounts. It's as if eBay has been re-imagined for the mobile, social, location-based age.

Amid rumors of a possible buyout, the popular TV and movie streaming service Hulu is at last making its Android debut as promised. Like its iPhone counterpart, the mobile app connects paying customers to the Hulu Plus service, Hulu's premium subscription-based offering.

Unfortunately, not all Android devices are supported at launch.

This morning, another new startup launched a mobile social networking application where location is the primary feature and friends comes second. Banjo, which shows you all the people nearby upon first launch, is one of many similar services now arriving to fill a void in the social networking space. These services are identifying the disposable, the elastic and the ephemeral social networking that occurs  - or could occur, given the right technology - when tied to a particular location at a particular point in time.

But does Banjo have the winning formula? What about the others? And will anyone really use these services?

The most important thing you need to know about Banjo, the Palo Alto-based startup launching its new mobile app today, is that it's not another social network. "Banjo is a social discovery service," explains CEO Damien Patton. "It's a layer on top." What he means is that you don't have to build a community on Banjo, you don't have to add or remove friends - in fact, you don't even have to create a profile to use it.

Instead, Banjo, when launched, shows you the people around you. It's a social network based on who's present at any given location.

I very rarely review a single mobile app these days - we prefer to do mobile app round-ups here on ReadWriteWeb - but I'm going to make an exception this time for Photogram. This new iPhone application, launched just yesterday, is deserving of a mention, if only for catching my attention among a sea of mobile photo app startups.

From the description, the app seems somewhat basic, maybe even a little boring: share photos via Facebook, Twitter or email. But it does so with a simplicity, elegance and ease that I've often found lacking elsewhere.

Today, Yahoo introduced two new search tools, one a new online search engine for finding new mobile applications, and the other a mobile app called AppSpot (iPhone, Android), which does the same. According to a Yahoo blog post, the goal of these new services is to help you better sort through the some 425,000 mobile applications on the iTunes App Store and the 200,000 apps on Google's Android Market so you can find the app you need.

But will Yahoo's efforts prove better than any of the existing services that already do the same?

In Apple's new App Store Review Guidelines out this week, it appears the company has backtracked on its earlier plans to strictly enforce how mobile application publishers can sell subscriptions. In the earlier set of guidelines released February, Apple required any applications selling content through subscriptions to also make that same content available within the app at the same price or less.

Now, the guidelines state that app publishers can offer access to content purchased outside the app, with no requirement to offer the subscription through Apple's store.

Score one for RIM: its new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is getting an official Facebook application before Apple's iPad. Announced at this week's BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Florida, the new app is the first tablet-optimized interface for the PlayBook. With Facebook for PlayBook, users will be able to view and add friends, read through their News Feed, view photos and videos and chat with their Facebook friends.

Mari Sheibley, the lead designer at Foursquare, has created a resource of inspirational mobile user interfaces for the benefit of the mobile design and development community. The website, available at Mobile-Patterns.com, offers dozens of screenshots of popular mobile applications showing how they implement various UI elements like comment boxes, splash screens, lists, sign-up flows and more.