The latest mobile web apps that have knocked our socks off are from a startup of ex-Googlers called NextStop and the Yahoo-owned events calendar Upcoming. Both offer new mobile iPhone apps that can be updated seamlessly, are available immediately and are a lot of fun to use. Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

NextStop

NextStop is a local review site that has positioned itself as "Yelp for Travelers" but needn't be limited to travelers alone. Though it doesn't have the traction that Yelp has yet, its feature set is far superior. The two biggest differentiators of its mobile site are the ability to view collections of activities near your location and the ability to easily post attractive reviews of places from your phone. Yelp doesn't allow users to publish reviews from their phones but NextStop makes it a joy. User Experience throughout the site is really well done.

NextStop is more attractive than Yelp's iPhone app, it encourages you to put a bookmark on your phone's desktop and there's an integrated photo uploading app coming soon as a work around to that limitation. Once you put that bookmark on your dekstop, NextStop caches a long list of images and javascript so it will load very fast the next time you visit the page. IPhone app? Why bother?

It's a wonder to behold and could become my new first stop for planning an evening on the town, even if I have to go to Yelp for now to check out more reviews of the places NextStop suggests I go.

If you'd like a more in-depth look at the use of HTML5 by NextStop, make sure to check out Robert Scoble's interview with the company.

Upcoming

Yahoo's Upcoming is a great social events calendar. As of today, navigate to m.upcoming.yahoo.com and you'll find the service's beautiful new mobile web app. It looks good on the iPhone, on Android and on quite a number of other browsers that it's on the lookout for as well. It's the kind of interface that makes me want to use Upcoming more regularly!

Bookmark this puppy onto the desktop of your iPhone and you'll have a great way to catch up on upcoming local events when you're on the go. It's all about finding a good interface for users to plug into at the right time in the flow of their day. This is a great example of that - and why make a native iPhone app when you can get all the functionality packed into this mobile web app?

Web vs. Native Mobile Apps

Raven Zachary and Jason Grigsby are two mobile developers based in Portland, Oregon. They worked together building the Obama Presidential Campaign's celebrated iPhone app. After that project was done, the two parted ways to their respective companies. Zachary, who was project director for the Obama app, started SmallSociety - an iPhone development shop that's built native apps for high-profile companies like Whole Foods and Cliff Bar. His company's ZipCar app was showcased on stage at the MacWorld event announcing the iPhone SDK. Zachary is a big believer in native mobile apps.

Grigsby co-founded CloudFour, a mobile app shop that took a very different direction.

"After launching the Obama app," Grigsby says, "we had people coming to us for native apps every day, but we decided we only wanted to do mobile web apps. Philosophically, I don't see any way that web app technology isn't going to be bigger than distributing apps through an app store. As the demographics of users change, you'll find people aren't going to spend their time browsing the app store. They will go to browse the web and they aren't going to install something unless it's heavily promoted. Who's going to do that? Small businesses are going to need mobile apps if they are going to be found at all."

Zachary disagrees, though, and the two say this is something they have friendly arguments about frequently.

"[Users] already browse the web more than anything else, with the possible exception of listening to music," Zachary contends. "Apps appeal to consumers in a way that the web simple doesn't today. The first step is getting a great mobile browser into the hands of consumers. That cuts out pretty much all Nokia, Windows Mobile and Blackberry consumers right away. That's a huge portion of the market. That's going to take years to rollout, and for those consumers to adapt. Meanwhile, iPhone app market keeps growing."

Zachary also contends that gaming will be key. "The mainstream gaming market will always be native. HTML 6 or 7 isn't going to solve that problem. [Because those games require] direct access to hardware. Gaming drives a large percentage of native app revenue."

What do you think? Is the future all about mobile web apps or will most app development continue to be for native mobile apps, now that there are some compelling and widely used mobile app platforms?

1. What He's Having: There are moments in life when the stars align and you find yourself in Thailand during a full moon festival, Italy during an olive harvest, or Fiji for the biggest surf waves of the year. You could take your chances, or you could consult Joobili. Joobili is an event-based travel recommendation system where users enter their desired travel dates, country of travel and interests. From here the Joobili community suggests a variety of events with a map view of the results. Rather than planning your trip blindly, you can hit (or miss) every major festival, sporting event or concert tour on your travel route. TripSay and I Want to Go There also offer crowd sourced tips on favorite travel spots. Meanwhile, NextStop members entice your inner-adventurer using pictures and short 140-character descriptions.

2. The Whole Fam Damily: Are you traveling with a large group? Triporama lets users plan by committee. Similar to Evite, hosts create a group home page and invite friends and family members to contribute. Members can store and share travel research, assign tasks, conduct polls, build itineraries and integrate maps. While this is an extremely useful tool, be warned that if you ask for someone's opinion, you'll probably get it. TravelMob is another great tool offering similar group planning functionality.

3. A Clean Bed: With hostels, it's a crap shoot as to whether or not you're going to end up in a room with a drunk couple or a mentally unstable ex-pat. And if you're traveling on a budget, hotels can be expensive. Air BnB offers fantastic deals on nightly rooms, sublets or vacation rentals. Site members rent out their fully-furnished rooms, apartments and homes. For the price of a horrible hotel in New York, you can often get a luxury apartment with kitchen facilities. iStopOver is a similar service, but users can also rent out office space. This way you can extend your stay, finish some work and still have time to enjoy the sights.

4. Map Happy Directions: Whenever you see a travel brochure with the phrase, "The city's best kept secret" on it, you know this is an outright lie. Real secrets travel by word-of-mouth and are far from the noise of the tour buses and gift shops. AMap.to allows users to add links, videos, images, directions and comments to a map. This is a great way to share your favorite restaurants and parks and help others find them. The service offers the option to upload a shortened URL to Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Be choosy with what you upload, after all, it's only a matter of time before the cult of Lonely Planet travelers flock to online communities for new suggestions. If you're looking for spots in the US, TripCart offers travel mapping for drivers. Users can share and plan their routes and rest stops on the way to major and not-so-major attractions. Now you can get lost in that maize maze you've always wanted to visit.

5. Posse Up: Sometimes you've been on the road so long that you just want to see a familiar face. Dopplr lets frequent travelers share their location and travel plans with friends. Similar to TripIt, the service lets us upload itineraries and share them to schedule a rendezvous. While not specific to travel, Whrrl, Loopt and RWW's most promising company of 2008, Brightkite, are also great geo-based friend tracking tools.

6. Home is Where the Heart Is: Steven Tyler sings, "life's a journey, not a destination." But honestly, after 20 hours of connecting flights and airport food, sometimes the destination looks like a lifesaver. For five dollars FlightTrack ensures that we find our airport gates, catch our connections and make our way home. The premium version costs $10 and allows users to sync with their TripIt itineraries. NextFlight also tracks departures for more than 1,100 airlines. Meanwhile Flight Status tracks arrivals, departures and your baggage. And for those of us lacking a good sense of direction, Gate Maps helps us navigate confusing airport layouts and make it from gate to food court to gate.

Using Muxfind is as simple as using any search engine - and you don't need a Muxtape login to access it. Above the search box, you have three options to search by: "Find Artists and Songs," "Discover by Muxtape," and "Discover by Artist."

The first option will simply return results either listing songs by the artist you searched for or the songs matching the song title you entered. Each link actually takes you to the muxtape where the song can be played, so you may need to scroll down in order to find it.

The second option, "Discover by Muxtape," will help you find new Muxtapes to enjoy. To use this option, you enter in the name of a muxtape that you liked, and Muxfind will return muxtapes that are similar to it, in terms of mood or genre, as best we can tell, that is. There is no info on how this matching algorithm works, but it does seem to return results from the same overall "genre" of music. For example, a muxtape by Stefan, which featured Bloc Party, Shins, and The Chemical Brothers, matched up with muxtapes featuring Moby, Depeche Mode, and Morphine.

Search by Artist on Muxfind

The final option also returns similarity-based results, but this time specifically by artist. For example, if you do a search for Radiohead, you'll get a list of results that link to muxtapes where a Radiohead song is included in the playlist. This option doesn't always work as well since some people's muxtapes are quite eclectic and include Radiohead tunes right along with NIN and Public Enemy, whereas others keep theirs more mellow as a whole, combining Radiohead with other mellow artists like The Postal Service or Modest Mouse.

However, that isn't so much of an issue with the Muxfind service itself - it just reflects the varying tastes of the users on Muxtape. If anything, this "problem" could be looked at as a feature instead because a user who strangely pairs Radiohead with NIN may just have a musical taste similar to yours, even if the two songs don't seem to automatically go with each other as being "similar artists." Much like a radio station simply plays artists in the same genre of music, Muxfind, in the same vein, could help you find online streams of artists in the same genre, too.

Conclusion

On A VC, Fred Wilson notes another reason that services like Muxfind and other user-gen search tools have value: they are "a bit of a quality filter." Because it takes time and effort to post something on the web, whether a playlist, a link, a photo, or video, the items that people actually take the time to upload are usually something worthwhile.

Muxfind isn't by any means the first or best music search/discovery service, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Hype Machine, Mixwit, and even iTunes offer ways to search and find new music to love. However, for those that love the muxtape format, Muxfind is worth a look.

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

The New York Times has taken a lead in bringing newspapers into the digital landscape over the past year. In 2006, the company launched its specialized RSS reader built on the Microsoft WPF platform, but it was this past fall that things really started to heat up on the digital side of the Times.

The paper put out a Facebook application, which has been a modest success with about 1,500 daily active users. They followed that in October with the controversial decision to put reader comments on the main page of the paper's web site.

In November, the Times took Techmeme full on by launching its own news aggregator powered by the Blogrunner technology it had acquired. Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year," NYT Tech Editor Saul Hansell told us at the time.

Then in January, the company made an investment in Wordpress, the popular blogging engine that powers their own blogs.

Conclusion

An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.

"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."

The New York Times seems to understand that. Says Aron Pilhofer, the paper's interactive news editor, the goal of an API is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

ReadWriteWeb is ranked the 10th most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati. Our site is read by tech and media professionals, early adopters, developers, designers, analysts, CIO's, VC's, media execs, leading thinkers.

Compete Search Analytics is a way to build and optimize search marketing campaigns.

SynthaSite enables you to make your own website in minutes, using Drag & Drop. It's free and no download is required.

Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. As well as instant messaging, Webmessenger 2 has a Presence system that allows sites to display and leverage online user presence anywhere.

Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.

Thumbplay is the fastest-growing and largest mobile content provider in the U.S., offering ringtones, videos, games and graphics to mobile phone users across all major U.S. carriers.

O'Reilly Media's Graphing Social Patterns is a conference for developers and marketers building and distributing apps for MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial and other social networking platforms. It is on June 9-11, 2008 in the Washington, DC area.

Wild Apricot offers Membership Database Management Software for non-profits and associations.

Central Desktop offers a set of Wiki Tools for business teams (not the IT department). There's no download, it's delivered on-demand. There is a 30 day free trial.

Quintura is a visual-based search engine. Currently it is offering to display your brand (via graphical ad) in the search cloud on Quintura.com for free - click here for details.

MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW and SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.