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Startups and the Lure of the (Hyper)Local

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

For a long time, technology has been touted as a force that can help us connect globally. But the urge to stay connected locally remains. And the same technological innovations that have facilitated global commerce and communication now seem to be turned towards helping us (re)connect to our neighborhoods, communities and local businesses. As buzz around location-based networks and services grows, "the local" is poised to be a place that's increasingly the emphasis for innovation and entrepreneurship. Sponsor People want to know what's going on locally. People want to shop locally. People want to network locally. And hyperlocal services make it easier to engage in and market to a local community. Technology need no longer be feared by local businesses as something that would drive their customers elsewhere - namely online. Although location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla have received significant attention as part of this trend, they are far from the only services. Hyperlocal search and news sites are two other services that have seen recent growth. Last week, Milo.com , a website that enables shoppers to research products online but then make their purchases locally, added products and real-time inventories for over 100 independent, mom-and-pop stores across the country. While Milo.com has served the "big box" stores for some time, this move to incorporate smaller retail outlets marks another way in which the local is starting to take advantage of online opportunities. "Smaller stores that once viewed technology as a threat, now see the benefit it has for reaching potential shoppers and attracting new customers into their actual brick and mortar locations," says Jack Abraham, Milo.com founder and CEO. Abraham says that Milo.com helps local businesses address the classic problem of how to get new customers in the door, but offers the best of both worlds - that is both an online component for reading reviews and the assurance that if they drive to their local store, they'll find the item in-stock, ready to "touch, feel, and buy." The hyperlocal can offer both geographic and content granularity - the ability to focus on a very specific location and subject matter that might otherwise be too small to be served. By merging the local and the online, businesses can respond quickly to meet the needs of their customers. Startups have long used local communities as a testing ground for both marketing and business models before opting to expand. The increasing interest in the hyperlocal might make it more than just a launching point. What do you think of the potential for expansion of more hyperlocal startups? Discuss

Hulu to Begin Charging for Programming

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:30:00 +0000

The Los Angeles Times reports that Hulu , the online television site, is going to start requiring payment for some of its programming beginning May 24. The five most recent episodes of current shows would still be available for free. But to see anything more would require membership in its Hulu Plus program, which costs $9.99 per month. Sponsor Hulu has reported profit in its last two quarters, bringing in $100 million. If it were an independent company, that might be thought quite impressive. But Hulu is owned by Disney, NewsCorp and NBC Universal. Those companies have rather larger expectations. ReadWriteWeb reported last week that Hulu's numbers indicate a slowing and plateauing of the company's growth. Hulu Plus would add an additional revenue stream that would augment its advertising. What remains to be seen is whether the charges stimulate revenue or inspire users to seek free content elsewhere. Discuss

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Social Media Marketing Overload? Some Tips for Startups

cgseo — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:05:10 +0000

It is widely accepted that social media has transformed the landscape of marketing radically, and no longer can businesses - no matter their size or stage of development - afford to avoid social media. While the importance of developing one's brand online remains paramount - most obviously through the registration of a domain name - the proliferation of social media platforms can be overwhelming, and startups might feel compelled to register and interact with every service in order to quicken the spread of their name. Sponsor The multitude of social media platforms allow new businesses to establish their online presence, develop a brand and a message, and grow fans and followers - and of course customers - all without extensive investment in elaborate or costly marketing campaigns. The danger, however, lays in the proverbial "spreading oneself too thin" by attempting to make sure one's startup has a presence in every social media network. While new businesses should certainly take advantage of social networking, here are a few tips to help avoid social media overload: Avoid social-media-for-social-media's sake : Social media endeavors should always be in service of clear business goals, not merely an abstract notion of "user engagement." Develop a social media plan that supports your business plan. Use the services which which you're most comfortable : Take advantage of social media networks to which you already belong and in which you are already active. It is preferable to develop a robust presence on one or two platforms than to create profiles on every possible site, particularly if these are in danger of becoming unused and out-of-date. Engage : Despite the far-reaching power of social media networks, these services are not bullhorns. Use them to engage in dialogue with potential investors and customers, not merely to push information out to them. While social media can be a great place to share information, promote a service, and so on, it is important to be responsive - listen, engage. Track, evaluate, and adapt : Many services offer analytics tools in order to ascertain traffic levels and engagement. Be sure to check these regularly to evaluate the ROI of a platform. And as the field of social media is ever changing, be prepared to adapt. For example, just because a service like Foursquare is popular now does not mean that you should be forever wedded to location-based marketing. Although it is tempting to register for every social media site and to try to adopt every new tool, the drawback may be that in an attempt to network everywhere, your startup fails to network anywhere. Discuss

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Social Media Marketing Overload? Some Tips for Startups

White House to Federal Agencies: Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:17:00 +0000

In a memo released yesterday , the White House made it significantly easier for federal agencies to use everything from social networks to online forums. But with the newfound freedom comes a surprising caveat: User ratings and rankings on those services, the new guidelines warn, "should not be used as the basis for policy or planning." In other words, a million Americans can Digg or retweet an important blog post, but government officials shouldn't use that popularity as an indicator of the post's value. Sponsor That's not always a bad thing considering that a dedicated group of like-minded people can game a casual voting system. But the voice of a social network corresponds to real people in the real world. A recent study , for instance, found that Twitter chatter accurately forecasts box-office revenues. As a whole, the new guidelines [ PDF ] were sorely needed. Social media and other online activities fell under a law that arduously dictates how agencies handle written materials. Under the new guidelines, online activities are now considered a "public meeting," which gives agencies much more freedom to blog, hold virtual meetings or even run contests. That freedom comes with a stipulation. The memo was written by the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator, Cass Sunstein. In it he explains that agencies should "exercise good judgment and caution when using rankings, ratings, or tagging" because they aren't "statistically generalizable." That's true, but it doesn't mean they're worthless. John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, told us last year that if you keep in mind that social networks don't necessarily represent the entire scope of the American people, then the data from them has "tremendous, tremendous value." At least 66% of all federal, state and local governments now use social media. It's still early in the current midterm election cycle, but candidates are already investing heavily in social media; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the rule, not the exception. Those candidates will take their online communities with them to Washington when elected. Where else would they expect to get input on public policy than from that same community of voices? Discuss

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White House to Federal Agencies: Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls

Paperboy: Bridging the Gap Between Print and Online News

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:37:43 +0000

Swiss startup Kooaba is trying to bring the worlds of printed news and virtual content closer together with its Paperboy iPhone app . This app, which is currently only available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, allows users to take pictures of articles from a range of popular magazines and papers and then see additional content about these articles on their iPhones. Paperboy will also make a digital version of the article available in your Kooaba archive and users can then share this article with their friends by email and on Facebook and Twitter. Sponsor Note : Paperboy isn't available in the U.S. version of Apple's App Store. In the U.S., only Kooaba's app for recognizing books, DVD covers and other physical objects is currently available. Kooaba also worked with Wired last year to make some of the magazine's advertisements more interactive. Kooaba, which specializes in image recognition and already offers similar recognition tools for book and CDs, is working directly with a number of magazine publishers in the German-speaking world. The company plans to bring its services to other countries as well. Sadly, the service doesn't work for papers and magazines that don't work directly with Kooaba to get their content featured on the app. Kooaba needs a PDF version of the magazine to train the service's image recognition software. Besides making the article available for online reading and sharing, Paperboy's partners can also include links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as links to related articles and videos. Magazines and papers can also choose to charge their users for accessing extra content through Paperboy. In addition, advertisers can embed related links to their web sites whenever somebody scans a relevant article or print ad. Overall, this looks like an interesting concept. Even though the newspaper and magazine business is in the middle of a deep crisis, print won't go away for a while and applications like Paperboy can help print publishers to bridge the gap between their traditional publications and their online presence. The question, however, is if other technologies like QR codes aren't easier to use for publishers who just want to embed a link into an article for example. Via: Netzwertig Discuss

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Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:18:26 +0000

"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands , his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee. Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person. Sponsor Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha . He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company's own service providers to select new hires in the future as well. Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites , due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo . Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully. Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done." Social search Aardvark started out as a lot of manual human effort behind public facing technology, then became a search-sorting algorithmic people-connector that Google bought for millions. Fancy Hands is half human and half-machine, too. It connects your emailed task requests with the right staff members to fill them. In that way it's a little reminiscent of Aardvark , the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars . At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work. The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work. This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity. He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business. These Hands Are Fancy People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of. These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience. There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that. For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds. Photo by Justin Ouellette . Discuss

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iPad: The First Real Family Computer

cgseo — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:38:13 +0000

With the iPad's arrival this weekend, a holiday weekend for many Americans, this new iPad owner had the chance to see the device in action. In fact, "see" is the operative word here. Not, "play with myself," as is the case with most new tech gadgets I purchase. Instead, I simply watched from a distance as, over the course of the day, the iPad found its way into the hands of nearly every family member from ages 4 months to 87 years old. The incredible thing? No one walked away confused, frustrated or disappointed. It did precisely what they wanted it to do and with such ease that my tech support was not required - not even once - allowing me to sit back and relax...with an old-fashioned, paper-based magazine. Sponsor After hearing the hoopla from the iPad launch, the crowd of "not-so-early" adopters has likely been left wondering if this is a case of media over-hype or if something revolutionary has truly occurred. If you count yourself among this group, then perhaps the spec-filled, analytical reviews won't sell you on the device's potential. You already know what the iPad can do: apps, games, eBooks (or rather, iBooks), media and so on. But what can it do for you? How does it fit in with your life? This anecdotal review may help you to answer that question: A Day in the Life of an iPad The morning after the iPad's arrival - incidentally Easter Sunday here in the U.S. - I spent the first half hour of my day with the iPad in one hand and a baby bottle in the other. While the little one ate, I read the New York Times. For free. Well, at least some of it. Although a full-featured paid application is on its way, the " Editor's Choice " app available now is a great way to hit the highlights from the paper's top sections. The iPad's weight here was a bit of an issue - 1.5 pounds may not seem like a lot, but holding it aloft away from baby's grabby fingers was a bit tricky, especially because, unlike an actual, dull grey-colored newspaper, the iPad's glowing screen and colorful images is an invite to touch that can't be denied. Morning Newspaper Later, in the car to the family gathering, I finished reading the articles I missed in the NYT's offline mode. I have the Wi-Fi version of the iPad, so Internet access is limited. But the articles were still available, cached to the device for just this situation. I then passed the time with a game of iMahjong . Like most iPad games, Internet isn't needed to play. Upon arrival at our destination - the sister-in-law's house where extended family would meet, dine and relax, I mistakenly imagined that the only two people who would be interested in my latest purchase were the teenage nephews, already iPod Touch owners and avid gamers. Although they were immediately engrossed, to be sure, they weren't the only ones who would spend time with this new device, as I would later find out. Game-Playing Device The first question from the oldest nephew: "I heard iPad apps are a lot more expensive than those for the iPod Touch - is that true?" Unfortunately, it is. For whatever reason, iPad developers have mistakenly assumed that a bigger screen means a bigger price tag. This is not how the minds of penny-pinching, allowance-earning tweens and teens think, though. And although they may not be the target market per se, their moms and dads are. A game priced too high will simply be ignored - or worse, torrented, the nephews tell me. There are plenty of iPhone apps on torrent sites, I'm being told - referring to the online stores of cracked, hacked and otherwise ill-acquired software programs, movies, TV shows, music and media made available for download for those running free torrenting client applications on their computers. iPad apps will soon appear here, too. Should developers be worried about this black market for their super-sized creations? Yes, possibly. Unlike the more moderately priced iPhone apps, iPad apps can be much more expensive. And if their prices extend beyond the comfort levels of today's consumers, you can be sure the apps will leak out on backchannels such as these. With pricing in mind, I tell the nephews they could download anything they wanted so long as it was free. And so they set forth upon their iPad adventure. After playing a number of games, including the Guitar Hero-like " Tap Tap Radiation ," a tilted maze in " Labyrinth Lite ," the role-playing game " Aurora Feint 3 ," some sort of shoot-em-up called " EliminatePro ," and several others, my iPad was soon filled with a screen of apps I knew I'd never touch but would be regularly accessed time and again at subsequent family functions. Child's Plaything Once the older nephews had their fill, it was the 5-year-old's turn. With adult supervision, he enjoyed Disney's interactive book app, Toy Story and created works of art fingerpaint-style via Doodle Buddy . (He got a real kick out of the sound effects that accompanied the paste-in clip art in the program, too. Animal sounds, apparently, are incredibly funny). We mistakenly thought that the Marvel comics book application would also be a fun diversion for this second-youngest of the family. (Don't laugh - comic book aficionados we are not.) But after a second-page reference to "Girls Gone Wild" in the free Spiderman comic and a third-page image of our favorite superhero shouting "Shut the @#*% up!," we realized that, at some point, comics must have grown up. These one-time children's past-times are now adult graphic novels. Oops. App closed. Back to doodling. Grandma's Photo Album Later, with bellies stuffed by Easter ham and dessert, the iPad found its way to the baby's grandmother. One guess what she looked at? Yes, baby pictures. "Can you email me some of those later?" Of course I could, but not later, now . Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, photos (a max of 5 at a time) can be sent directly from the iPad's built-in Photos application . ...And Everything Else Now hours had gone by, and the iPad was still in circulation. With nothing else to do, I opened a wrinkled, balled-up magazine I had thrown into my bag precisely for this reason. I didn't expect to get much iPad-time myself, I just didn't realize that it would literally never return to me. As one person played on the iPad - reading, watching a video, playing a game, etc. - others relaxed with TV, a book of Sodoku puzzles, toys, and (gasp!) even printed newspapers. On the iPad, someone was playing cards . Then someone was watching Netflix . Grandma is showing great-grandma more photos. Look! The baby is doodling! Now someone is trying an iPhone app on the iPad. (Verdict? Not a good experience. Forget the fact that the iPad runs all the iPhone apps - they look awful. Don't bother.) Interestingly enough, one "app" that was never launched was Safari , the iPad's built-in web browser. By nightfall, the iPad had been in rotation for hours upon hours and still had nearly 40% battery remaining. The battery longevity claims (10 hours+) are true, it seems. A Family Computer Debates about the iPad's worth as an eReader, aside, fears that it will somehow transform us from a population of content creators to passive consumers (most of us already are just that), hopeful claims from big media that it's the "future of publishing" - I'd argue that none of these are reasons to buy or not to buy an iPad. Simply put: the iPad is the first real family computer. No longer is computing an isolated experience with one person staring at one screen, fingers clacking away on the keyboard while the rest of the family does something else. The iPad was shared between brothers, giggled over by children, and downright snuggled up with by parent and child. It was no more isolating an experience than someone reading the paper in the next chair over. It was easily just another everyday object. And that may be its biggest selling point yet: the iPad hides away the technology, and makes content king. And at the end of the day, that's not really such a bad thing. Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner with ReadWriteWeb. Discuss

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iPad: The First Real Family Computer

What’s a "Universal" iPad App and How Do You Use It?

cgseo — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:52:14 +0000

Do you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch and are planning on buying an iPad , too? Then you need to know about the new "universal" applications now available in the iTunes App Store. These combo apps for Apple's line of mobile devices are basically "buy one, get one free" deals except for one small difference - both apps are bundled into one download. When you run the universal application on a small-screened device, you'll see the iPhone version and when you run the app on your iPad, you'll see the larger, iPad-only version. And these won't just be blown up, oversized iPhone apps either - they'll be custom designed apps made specifically for the iPad. Sponsor How To Find Universal Apps When searching through the application store, you can identify the universal apps by the small plus sign that appears to the left of the application's price in the search results. Or, if viewing the description page for an application, the left-side column will read "This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad" underneath the app's icon and price. There are a few applications already available which support this new pricing format, for example, Pandora , Instapaper Pro , Evernote , WordPress , LogMeIn Ignition , IMDb and Now Playing . Some other applications even include the word "universal" in their application title. Unfortunately, Apple's own e-Reader application, iBooks , is not one of them. There is no addition configuration needed in order to choose the right version for the device you have plugged into your Mac or PC prior to syncing. If you're syncing your iPhone, the iPhone application is copied over to your device. If you're syncing your iPad, the iPad application will copy over. App Sharing: This is Why the iPad Doesn't (Yet) Replace Your PC or Mac The only problem with this configuration is that it does require that you actually sync your iPad to your computer. Yes, you need to hook up your new tablet computer - you know, the one designed to replace your notebook or netbook - to your computer. That's the only way to make the universal app available to your other mobile devices via your iTunes library.

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

cgseo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0000

We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. Sponsor Want a quick visual introduction to Augmented Reality? Check out the following video from our friends at Common Craft, just released today and available for licensing from their website . Ready to jump into the nitty gritty of AR for marketing your company's product? That's what our report is for. Here's what you'll find in ReadWriteWeb's latest report . The report is divided into three parts. PART 1: The AR Market Defined - provides a succinct introduction to Augmented Reality (AR), its history, current size, how fast it is scaling and key players in the market. PART 2: AR Supplier Profiles - profiles 10 leading companies specializing in the development of Augmented Reality applications for their clients. PART 3: Summarizes results of a survey of AR developers providing insight on key controversies in the field, project requirements, cost categories and duration of development. Survey of Experienced Developers The survey of experienced developers included in the report has unearthed some information about AR implementations that you won't be able to get anywhere else. How important is it for companies to use existing AR browsers as opposed to building their own stand-alone mobile AR apps? Hidden costs associated with AR app development. Developer experience requirements for AR app development. Timeline for development of AR apps. Total cost and cost break down for developing a Webcam AR project. When live video processing will be enabled on popular mobile phones? This is critical for the next stage of AR, because it will allow for apps that are responsive to what's actually being looked at instead of just what's expected to be in a given location. Also check out our other ReadWriteWeb Premium Reports , which will give you a competitive advantage by enabling you to understand key Web trends such as The Real-Time Web and its Future , and The Guide to Online Community Management . Keep an eye out for our next Premium report coming soon, which will cover best practices for location data acquisition and user privacy! Discuss

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Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

Weekend Fun: New Apps for Your iPhone

cgseo — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:17:25 +0000

As one of ReadWriteWeb's iPhone users, I'm always looking for new applications to try out. Some get downloaded for a day and then deleted right away, others slowly inch their way closer to my homescreen. Even rarer are the ones that become actively used on a regular basis. Occasionally, we like to share our findings regarding our favorite new apps. (See, for example, last month's list here ). Although I can't guarantee that all of the ones on the list below will become favorites forever , they piqued my interest enough to get a coveted spot on my iPhone this month. Let us know what you think about their potential for long-lasting success. Sponsor 1. Miso I've been playing with Miso off and on for a week or so. Dubbed a "Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies" by yours truly, this app lets you "check-in" to the TV shows and movies you're watching and earn badges. While I like the idea, I've found that the app suffers from the lack of an easy way to find and follow other users. That leaves us TV-watching "stay-at-home" folks feeling a little too isolated when already taking part in a rather non-social, non-interactive activity. However, if the app can improve the ability to find and follow other like-minded entertainment consumers, there's potential for a fun "niche use" type of app here. (Review: Miso: A Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies ) 2. MediaServer MediaServer seems so promising, but I've had trouble getting all aspects of it to work properly. The app is designed to be an easy way to view your iPhone media on your TV set by way of a Media Center-type hardware device (XMBC, Boxee, etc.) or game console (PS3, XBox 360). And it is easy to use. You install the app, launch it, and boom!, your media console sees your iPhone - no configuration required. As far as viewing user-created videos or photos, the app excels. But streaming music or video? Not so much. Due to varying degrees of DRM applied to the files themselves and codec support on the hardware device, playing media on your TV is harder than it should be. (I tried with the Xbox in my tests.) Whether it's the app that's to blame or the hardware, I can't tell. However, MediaServer did become a great way to do iPhone photo slideshows on the TV and that alone is keeping it on my phone for now. Hopefully the rest will be improved in time. 3. Sticky Bits The RWW bloggers who attended the recent SXSW festival have come back raving about the barcode-scanning Stickybits app (iTunes link). The app, which debuted at the conference, goes hand-in-hand with the online service that lets you either print your own barcodes or buy pre-made stickers which you can then associate with real-world objects. Using the Stickybits iPhone application, anyone encountering these stickers in the wild can scan them to discover whatever data theyv'e been associated with. Will Stickybits actually stick around though? It's too soon to tell, but it sure is fun to play with in the meantime. (Review: Stickbits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds? ) 4. Siri Although not brand-new, the Siri app which debuted in February on the iPhone is rapidly becoming one of our all-time favorites and therefore has to make this list again. If you have not installed Siri yet, do so now! Built with artificial intelligence technology, Siri functions as a personal assistant which can provide information on a variety of topics from weather to movie listings to restaurants, events and more. You can either type into the app's search box or speak your query to get started. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The voice recognition works well, too, although it never understood "Alice in Wonderland movie" no matter how many times I said it. (Maybe it already knew I wouldn't like that movie?) We'll give it a pass there, though - voice recognition is a tough nut to crack. Still, the intelligence of this app will soon have you relocating the apps it replaces (movie listing apps, restaurant finders, etc.) to back screens of the iPhone. (Review: Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web ) 5. Tweeb Obsessed with ego-tracking your Twitter stats or tasked with managing a corporate account of some kind? Then Tweeb's new Twitter analytics tracker (iTunes link) is a handy app to have. For $1.99, you get access to real-time, on-demand statistics including tweet counts, follower counts, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs on your tweeted links. You can also use the app to tweet, manage your friends, block or unblock users, view Twitter profiles, view your following lists and manage multiple Twitter accounts. The data is presented in clean, easy-to-read layouts and there is even a history section so you can measure your growing influence over time. Well worth a couple of bucks if you access this data on a regular basis! 6. Buzzie The first app to access Google Buzz natively is pretty great, but I'll admit that I'm more likely to switch over to Buzz from Google Reader's mobile website than launch a standalone app. If the iPhone had app multitasking though, that would be a different story. Still, Buzzie has a few standout features - photo-sharing and photo browsing, most notably. It also feels "a lot snappier" than Google Buzz's web app, noted Frederic earlier this month during his demo. (Review: Buzzie: The First Native Mobile App for Google Buzz ) 7. SpringPad Part of Springpad's service , this Evernote competitor functions as a mobile note-taking and reminder app. Similar to Evernote's offering, you can write a note or snap a photo to remember something (which is then added to your online account), but it also introduces barcode-scanning as another way to "remember" an item. You can use the app to access all your saved data, too - handy for accessing shopping lists, recipes and restaurants you want to try while you're out and about. (Review: Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner ) Honorable Mentions Other apps getting demoed on our iPhones include the following: Brizzly for Twitter : Will we leave Tweetie 2 for this new Twitter iPhone app? It could happen! Feathers : Want to have a little fun with your tweets? Feathers lets you decorate them with symbols, icons or even post them upside-down. Notifio : Just launched, this app tries to bring Android-style notifications to one central place on the iPhone, but it's dependent on others to use its API to do so. If successful, it could be amazing...but that remains to be seen. You can see all the apps on my iPhone courtesy of AppsFire here . Discuss

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Weekend Fun: New Apps for Your iPhone