BlockChalk is an anonymous message board for your neighborhood. The company's founders want to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody's privacy. At it's core, BlockChalk feels a bit like an anonymous, location-based Twitter clone. BlockChalk just released its native iPhone ( iTunes link ) today and also offers an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi. Android users can access the service through a mobile website. Sponsor Anonymity Makes for an Easy Setup Given that BlockChalk is completely anonymous, you don't have to sign up for the service or jump through any hoops before you can get started. Simply start up the app, allow the service to access your location data and you can see what others around you are saying. BlockChalk works worldwide and has active users in over 90 countries. Features BlockChalk keeps its feature set light and to the point. Besides posting your own messages, you can browse replies to your own posts and respond to messages publicly and in private. On the iPhone, BlockChalk also supports push notifications. By default, BlockChalk doesn't reveal a user's exact location. You can, however, force the service to do so by typing [here] in a post. One of the company's co-founders, Stephen Hood, used to run the product team at del.icio.us and some of the same design aesthetics shows in BlockChalk. The design is simple, to the point and doesn't get in the way of the product's features. Anonymity: Good, Bad or Just the Best Way to Get People to Share? While using BlockChalk is a lot of fun, there is also something strange about the anonymity of the service. On the one hand, it will surely encourage those users who would otherwise be afraid to reveal their location to use the service. On the other hand, however, this could easily encourage vandalism. BlockChalk offers a profanity filter and the ability to 'bury' posts, but only time - or an attack by 4chan - will tell if this will be enough to discourage disruption. Discuss

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BlockChalk: An Anonymous Message Board for Your Neighborhood

TweetDeck 's iPhone app just got a much-needed update . Version 1.3 brings a slew of new features that finally bring TweetDeck back on par with its competitors on the iPhone. The app now supports Twitter lists and Twitter's new geotagging API. The app now also offers optional support for Twitter's new retweet style and the TweetDeck team has made a number of smaller tweaks and fixes that make the app faster and more stable. Sponsor Lists TweetDeck for iPhone keeps the app's well-known column-style layout and still syncs any changes directly with the desktop app. It's great to see that TweetDeck now supports lists. Unlike other apps like Tweetie 2, however, TweetDeck for iPhone doesn't allow you to create new lists or even add new users to an existing lists. Location In today's announcement, the TweetDeck team puts a lot of emphasis on the new geolocation features in the app. You can now choose to geotag all of your tweets automatically or just add your location info to select tweets only. The app can now also display a map with an overview of all geotagged tweets in any given column (including columns that display persistent searches). Just click 'more' in the bottom right corner and the option to see all the tweets on a map will appear. Given that very few people currently tag their tweets with location data, however, chances are that your map will look rather empty. Over time, though, as more apps start to support this feature, these maps will hopefully fill up with more tweets as well. For now, this is an interesting feature, though it is probably only useful for a small group of users. Discuss

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TweetDeck for iPhone Now Supports Lists and Geotagging

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha 's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May , as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia. Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For? Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience. I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the "Google Killer" theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn't more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha's similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn't give into the hype - they stuck to what their goals were. I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things. But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to "pass a test" with "serious users" - by which he means academics and computational users. If it's useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream. Use Case: Education One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets. A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it "also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions." Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education - because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that "it's better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further." Either way, it's clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it's on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There's no point in the education system pretending it doesn't exist. If you're interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to 'Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.' Use Case: Computational Journalism This one was described to me as "anomaly spotting." For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could "automatically enhance news." Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it's expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations - including good old blogs. Use Case: Sports Watching Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You're watching the Friday night game on TV, it's a close game and you're curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams - but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc. As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do "chained queries" - queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s. Other Use Cases We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator , Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses - because a lot of health data "can't be wrong." He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA? Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches. Conclusion It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data. Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you're aware of similar computational web apps. See also: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here's What You Need to Know Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update Discuss

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Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! The eight technologies identified include the following: Bluetooth 3.0 This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years. Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes. Location Awareness Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo , they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky ( so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.) ? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future. Near Field Communication (NFC) NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets. 802.11n & Cellular Broadband 802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment.

With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare , Gowalla and Brightkite , location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they're only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too. Each time that I've tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don't have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world. Sponsor Stalqer , available as a free iPhone app since earlier this month, has solved this problem by connecting to your Facebook , Twitter and Foursquare accounts and providing a map of your friends based on information it gathers from those services, even if they don't use Stalqer. If your friend uses a geo-tagged Tweet, or if they check in on Foursquare, Stalqer knows where they are. Stalqer can even pull your friends' location from their Facebook profiles if they publicly display that information, but in most cases this is limited to the city level. You can also view your friends' locations in a list, or even in an augmented reality view by turning the phone on its side while in the map view, but Stalqer's killer feature is its workaround of a pesky iPhone limitation.

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Stalqer: Aggregated, (Almost) Live Location Data on the iPhone

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it - the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it's raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures , real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing. Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great. Sponsor Outside.in says that its headlines will soon be run on CNN's website, much like MSNBC has said it will run hyper-local news from the related site it acquired this year, EveryBlock . EveryBlock tends to discover a lot more information than Outside.in does. Its public records discovery is especially good. It's a lot of fun to read health department inspection reports from neighborhood restaurants (in a perverse sort of way) and that's not something Outside.in unearths. EveryBlock has to date been limited to a handful of big cities around the US, though. Outside.in has no such limitation. Things not to love about Outside.in include a garish new advertising-filled page layout (just subscribe by RSS feed) and a heart-breaking iPhone app. That app discovers your location and brings up area news - lots of fun to use when house-hunting in different neighborhoods. Not so much fun when it fails to work, which is more often than not in my experience. If you want a good local news iPhone app, check out Fwix . I'm eagerly awaiting the launch of Nozzl Media , a related service we profiled in our report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . These kinds of data parsing services, tied to real-life experiences like geographic location, are becoming an important value add now that more and more data is coming online. Everyone wants to discover the future of news - these kinds of services could well be an important part of it. Note: Outside In is also the name of a 40 year old youth social services agency that also deserves respect, speaking of local. Discuss

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I Love Outside.in & It Just Got CNN Backing

The rapid growth of the mobile web is a force that could be disruptive to Google, a company that built its search engine for a desktop-based world. On the handheld, all bets are off. Anyone with an innovative concept for improving mobile search could gain ground, possibly even overtaking Google as the top search provider for mobile devices. But don't worry - Google hasn't been ignoring this trend. The company has been busy prepping various initiatives designed to get people googling from their mobile phones. From scannable barcodes to an innovative visual search app that lets you perform searches by taking photos, Google is slowly revealing how they plan to dominate search in the real world too. Sponsor Google Does Barcodes (Again) Google hasn't given up on barcode scanning just yet. Although a failed Print Ad program featuring barcodes for newspapers was shut down at the beginning of the year, that hasn't stopped the company from giving barcodes another go. This time, the venue isn't the old-fashioned newspaper, but local businesses. Through Google's Favorite Places program, over 100,000 of the U.S.'s most popular local businesses will receive stickers sporting Google's logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading "we're a favorite place on Google." Business owners can post these decals to their store windows to show off their respectability and popularity - and you can bet many will. Customers scanning the barcode will be taken to that store's "place page" which reveals various details about the business including hours of operation, reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers, brands carried, menus (if a restaurant), and even mobile coupons if available. In addition, users can "star" (rate) the establishment and submit their own review, if desired, turning Google Local Businesses into a Yelp -like user-generated reviews service. While this initiative has a better chance for success in introducing barcode-scanning to the U.S. market than the Print Ad program did, there's still going to be some confusion on the part of consumers as to how to get started. Google notes in their Favorite Places FAQ that many modern smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, and other Android devices offer barcode scanning applications, but no links or suggestions are provided. This leaves consumers with having to figure it out on their own. In addition, feature phone owners whose more basic devices include cameras may also wonder if there is software for their phones, too. In some cases there is , but the less tech-savvy mainstream user base has no way of discovering that without taking the time to do some research on the topic. Perhaps Google should have introduced a cross-platform barcode-scanning application of their own? If they had, it could have definitely helped push the technology adoption forward. It's almost surprising that they haven't yet done so especially considering that their latest search rival, Microsoft, has. With Microsoft Tag , for example, you can create your own barcode-like "Tag images" as well as download mobile Tag-reading software. Mobile Coupons As mentioned above, the Favorite Places' barcodes will link to pages that support mobile coupons, assuming the business chooses to offer them. However, these coupons aren't limited to "favorite" businesses - any business listed on Google Local Search can use this feature. Announced late last month , Google introduced the mobile coupon feature to their Google Local Business Center program which lets any company offer coupons that consumers can access right from their mobile phone. At checkout, the shopper just needs to show the coupon on their mobile's screen to receive the discount. Visual Search via Mobile Photos Google Visual Search is an upcoming technology still in development which was revealed on CNBC's " Inside the Mind of Google " segment on December 3rd. This innovative mobile application aims to provide an even more intuitive way for interacting with the real world via your mobile phone. With Visual Search, users with phones running Google's own mobile operating system "Android" will be able to take a photo of their location and use that to trigger a Google search. In order for this to work, advanced algorithms have to match the photo with those stored in a massive database on the backend. Initially, this service could be used to provide information about various landmarks, businesses, or other notable locales, but really the possibilities are endless. Eventually, the same technology that recognizes landmarks could recognize other objects, too, like products on store shelves, billboard ads, or street intersections. It could even