From blogs.adobe.com
Adobe AIR Marketplace is a central resource that allows developers to make their applications available to millions of potential users and makes it easy for consumers to find them.
The new AIR marketplace was launched a few days ago and features a brand new look and several new features. Do check it out!
As we mentioned a few days ago Compete was releasing a new user interface on the 15th of April. The time has come and here is what the new interface looks like.
The interface has had a huge makeover, in which now combines all of Compete’s business elements in a much simplier way. All of Compete’s solutions can be now found in a simple hearder bar, which offers everything from Analytics to Keyword tools. The analytics tools has a much cleaner and easy to user interface, but Compete is still trying to push Pro accounts as much as possible.
Overall the feel of the site is much better than before, and with the cleaner finish the usability of the site increases. I just wish my traffic would increase!
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk and discussion surrounding Ashton Kutcher and CNN. First he manages to get almost as many followers on Twitter as CNN (almost 900K). Then he challenges CNN to a race to get to 1 million followers first. If he wins, he’ll “”ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s house.
This made me think a bit about Ashton and his original tech startup the Blah Girls. Blah Girls launched with a lot of press and publicity (mainly due to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington), but now it seems to be a very basic gossip blog with a cartoon attached.
Blah Girls produce a weekly vidoe who is pretty much a catoon spoof. The videos are very well develop and quite cool. However, these videos and Blah Girls in general doesnt seem to be getting much traction at all. The Blah Girls Youtube channel has over 3,500 subscribers but each video seems to be lucky to get more than 1000 plays. Plus for some reason YouTube has given Blah Girls a partner page, but they dont seem to meet the requirements of being a YouTube partner (apart from the fact that Ashton is quite well known).
Back to the site itself it seem that is had an initial push at launch but then has been slowly growing at the same pace as a normal gossip blog. The site has a great design, but there seems to be a huge gap of white space between the video section and where the actual blog starts. Ashton I really think you need to take a look at the design and try to piece it all together a bit better. Additionally, Ashton why arent you twittering about Blah Girls on your Twitter stream? Im sure 1m followers will really help you in pushing your site to the next level faster, plus you have a benefit that no other gossip blog has, your already bloody famous!
Have you ever wondered if you should take an umbrella with you to work? Well here is a very simple website that makes that decision for you, UmbrellaToday.com. With UmbrellaToday you just simply input your zip code (USA only service) then their service will let you know if you need an umbrella for the day. Its that simple!
Additionally, UmbrellaToday now has a opt in text and email service in which send you an update only when you need an umbrella for the day. If you are using the text option I’m not entirely too sure if the website is paying for the text message or you are, I’m guessing the later.
However, UmbrellaToday is a very simple idea and service that can actually help!
Today we have added a new feature on Crenk that we hope will help many other blogs promote their great content. This new feautre is called Community News. The Community News section can be found in our sidebar and it is basically a submission process that lets any user advise us of a great blog post.
The articles that will be shown in our Community News section will be related to startups and will either be great start lists or reviews. We hope that by adding links into our Community News section other sites will get some great promotion and traffic, while at the same time receive a linkback from our site.
Submissions to the Community News section is completely free and only takes a minute to submit. So please feel free to help us promote some of the best content on the web.
Google has just release Chrome (its internet browser) to the world in beta stage. If you are interested in testing out this new browser then head here to download.
So, what does a Google Chrome beta bring? Speed, and lots of it. According to Google, it’s 25 percent faster than the stable build of Chrome, which is nothing short of amazing given that Chrome is already blazing fast.
Other new features are form autofill, full page zooming and autoscroll, as well as a way to get a side-by-side view by dragging out tabs to the side of the browser window, which you can see in the amazingly short video below.
There are so many sites out there that are based on Wordpress and have numerous writers, including Crenk. Here at Crenk we sometimes find it hard to keep track about what sites to write about and who is writing about these sites. Previously we used Our To Do List Wordpress Plugin to keep track of these tasks, but since Wordpress 2.7 launched we have had numerous issues with this software and we are interested to find out if there is an alternative.
With the Our To Do List Plugin we are currently finding that we can add new tasks but when it comes to removing or editing these tasks it just does work.
Are there alternatives to the Our To Do List Plugin?
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Author: Scott Fitzhugh
Price: Free
Ratings: 147 Reviews – 
(at the time of writing)
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Author: CondeNet
Price: $1.99
Ratings: 41 Reviews 
(at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Author: Joseph Pintozzi
Price: Free
Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Author: 3Cube Technologies
Price: $0.99
Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Finding quality articles can be time consuming in today’s era where we are hooked to reading interesting and worthwhile info on topics we like. Regator is such an aggregator portal which searches and provides interesting articles and latest news and happenings in technology, health, entertainment, sports, and latest happenings in business and finance sector, all organized and categorized at one place.
Regator is a portal where you can find links to various interesting article published on web from time to time. So you don’t have to search and keep looking for an hour for something useful and interesting to read. The Site has various categories where you can find articles of that niche and click on the link to read it. Actually regator has a team of few people who work to search these articles from sites and blogs that provide quality content and put them at one place for people to read.
You can even search posts and articles on your favorite reality shows or episodes. There is a ’search’ and even ‘advanced search’ feature for you to search for specific reviews of products like your favorite ‘iPhone’ or cool new ‘Nokia N97’ and you will find tons of posts on it. Also you can register on site and rate the posts you read on regator and the highest rated articles are shown on the front page of regator, just like the other social bookmarkers like Digg. You can personalize a lot on regator including organizing, saving and rating your favorite articles and posts.
Not only does it have article search but also audio and video posts for those who like watching more than reading. If you specifically like reading content from blog, they also have that search category – ‘Blog results’ on front page. Regator has nearly 2 millions posts archived by them till now. Its actually archiving the best of weblogs content and presenting it in a organized and searchable way.
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Sagar Trapasia from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog.
Accomedion is a new musical instrument application that combines a keyboard harmonica and an accordion.
Sound sources from keyboard harmonica are used, and chord buttons similar to the ones on accordion are attached. The wide range of tunes will be played as accompaniment.
Main functions
- Capable to shift between major chord and minor chord
- Capable to record and replay up to three tunes
- Five demonstration tunes are stored. Capable to play in accordance with the tutorial guide.
- You can play it like a real keyboard harmonica by blowing the microphone. (iPhone only)
You can download this application from the iTunes store here. 
The new Skype is here. Skype 4.0 for Windows have launched which offers full-screen video calling, crystal clear call quality and better usability. There’s also the usual free voice and video calls to other Skype users, instant messaging, SMS, and call to landlines and mobile devises at cheaper rates.
Additionally, a new built-in bandwidth manager ensures that consumers have the very best Skype video calling experience possible even on a low-bandwidth connection. If you have a fast enough connection (recommended 400 Kb/s or higher), a dual-core processor PC and a Skype Certified High Quality Video webcam, Skype delivers up to 30-frames-per-second High Quality Video.
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