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

Let's say you want a list of every Fortune 1,000 CEO in the United States, along with a picture and contact information. You can look through Google. Top page results may help a bit. But to get the granularity you need, top page results can only go so far. What's the best way to go about discovering and collecting information that is so often scattered and fragmented? Crowdsourcing works but you need a process and a way to organize the information. Sponsor Smartsheet provides a way to use wikis and spreadsheets for crowdsourcing information from services like Mechanical Turk and Live Works . Smartsheet recently integrated with Google Apps. Clients can work from Google Apps to crowdsource information through Smartsheet. Let's say you have a list of the startup companies from the top 10 metro areas in the United States. You have the names of the companies in Google Apps. But you are lacking the name of the CEO and any contact information. So, you add some columns and open the Smartsheet application directly from Google Apps. You may now make your request to have the work done for you. Smartsheet opens a service such as Mechanical Turk. You describe the job, what you need and set your price. As the tasks are performed, the new information pops into the spreadsheet. You can then import the spreadsheet back into Google Apps. Smartsheet integrates with a wiki environment. For example, Smartsheet works with Brain Keeper . Structured information from Smartsheet may be imported into the wiki, providing the crowd-sourced data to anyone with access. Crowdsourcing is a classic example of how the enterprise can get information almost immediately that could take hours to collect if done manually by one person. The cost savings alone makes Smartsheet an application worth giving a try. SmartSheet is a subscription service. Pricing starts at $9.95 per month on a per-user-basis. Discuss

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Smartsheet and Google Apps: Crowdsourcing Made Easy

Using a cloud computing service may sound enticing, but you better consider how that data can be moved around if you want to switch to a different provider. It's a big problem that now has the attention of Vint Cerf, who is calling for standards to define how customer data gets passed between different cloud service providers. Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, is one of those legends of the tech world, up there with people like Steve Wozniak . He is one of the co-designers of the TC/IP protocol. He is one of those few who had this idea way back when of hooking computers together to create a network. Today we call that network the Internet. Sponsor So you listen when Cerf gets up to speak and says that it's like 1973 out there when it comes to cloud computing data portability. According to InfoWorld , Cerf said major cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and IBM have no real form of interoperability. Cerf spoke Thursday night at the Churchill Club in Menlo Park, Ca. "We don't have any inter-cloud standards," Cerf said. "The current cloud situation is similar to the lack of communication and familiarity among computer networks in 1973." People will want to move data around. They may have multiple cloud service providers. They may want to use different cloud service providers as an interconnected network. Moreso, customers will simply want to move data from Cloud A to Cloud B. Cerf went on to say that the industry needs to develop protocols and standards to make this all happen. It's important to note that Google, Cerf's employer, obviously has a stake in how this all pans out. We went to Aardvark to ask about this issue. What can you do right now to avoid getting locked into one cloud service provider? Marc Limotte , director of engineering at Feeva Technology, writes: "The obvious problem is that the difficulty in switching limits consumer choice and therefore competition. You can't "vote with your feet", if you can't walk away. This is common in IT, though. It's never been easy to switch from one enterprise package to another, or from one hosting facility to another. The data isn't even the worst of the problem. In most cases, you can at least get an extract (even if it is terabytes of data), and perform a load in to some other system. The more complex issue is when you architect your solution to take advantage of a vendor's proprietary services (e.g. the data store in Google App Engine, or the Amazon's SQS). Not that you shouldn't use these features... they're useful, just be aware that they start to limit your options is you want to someday move away from that platform. My suggestion... make sure you know how to export your data. And try and use your own interfaces in front of custom services. that way if you want to move, you just have to write an adapter, and not a complete re-architecture." Discuss

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Vint Cerf: It's like 1973 for Moving Data Around in the Cloud

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

One month ago Google unveiled five big new technologies in one day - and then launched real-time search that afternoon. One of those five was something called Near Me Now, and it just went live moments ago . The feature lets Google grab your geographic location and display restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATM machines and more in your immediate vicinity. It's available today for both iPhone and Android users. It's enough to make a person bookmark Google.com, instead of just Googling through the browser search bar. Sponsor This feature is much more useful than Google Latitude and it's more lightweight than launching Google Maps. It probably doesn't bode well for established local mobile search apps like Yelp or for innovative new ones like NextStop . Those are a lot of fun, but Google's Near Me Now is good enough, it's fast enough and gosh darn it, I think people are going to like it. Next: See four more awesome new technologies Google unveiled along with Near Me Now. Discuss

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Google's Near Me Now is Live & Good Enough to Replace Yelp

The smart phone is not a phone. It's a computer. It's like your desktop or laptop. It stores data. It connects to the Internet. It runs applications. It's a computer, not a phone. The real challenge for the enterprise is to shift its thinking about how it will move beyond the carriers and one day become an entirely data-centric organization - an organization that gives information workers the ability to work entirely on an IP infrastructure, be it for Web-based productivity applications or on a VoiP network. Forrester Research issued a report today that calls 2010 the year of the smart phone. That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? To its credit, Forrester does use the report as an opportunity to explore how the enterprise can make the smart phone a part of the daily work life for as many employees as possible. Sponsor There are many reasons for the enterprise to adopt a smart phone culture: There is no excuse anymore. Workers have to be connected. The big weave on the social Web is getting richer. Billions of threads are being added by the day. How can we even tolerate not being connected? Collaboration depends on being connected. You can't be fully connected without a decent smart phone strategy. People are not working at the office as much anymore. They need a smart phone to keep up with their work. As illustrated by Forrester, the trend is already in play: It does not have to be that expensive to adopt a smart phone culture. People want to use their smart phones for both their personal lives and work, too. They will pay for their data plans. Forrester agrees. From the executive summary by Ted Schadler: "Employees, aka consumers, are mad about smartphones, attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere. Fourteen percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones to do work today, and another 64% would like to. That demand, coupled with the willingness of some employees to share the cost of a monthly mobile plan, sets the stage for a surge in the use of personal smartphones for information work. Information and knowledge management professionals should immediately call for a formal bring-your-own (BYO) smartphone strategy, establish a sliding scale for when to reimburse employees, and pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across corporate-liable and personally liable plans." Forrester's BYO recommendation makes sense. But he does not explore how smart phones can be treated as computers. This discussion can create a new level of discourse in the enterprise between IT and business users. Forrester points out that IT recognizes the importance of smart phones. Many companies are already developing policies for how the devices should be treated. Collaboration tool are not being heavily used but this could change if smart phones were treated as tools as much as communication devices. MobileIron follows this approach, offering services that give IT managers the ability to be more like change agents than police forces. In MobileIron's view , information can be tracked with a data-centric approach. Applications can be monitored. Users and administrators can view a social graph that shows usage. That's a smart approach. It stimulates thinking and moves people to start exploring how a fully data-centric approach can be adopted over time as VoiP matures in the enterprise. Discuss

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"Smart Phone" is a Misnomer: It's a Computer, not a Phone

Until now, all the news on the hyperlocal news site EveryBlock was compiled by the site's editors and algorithms. Today, EveryBlock launched a nifty new feature that allows its users to post stories to the site and notify their neighbors about interesting events in their neighborhoods. The new feature allows users to post anything from news alerts to questions and classified ads on the site. These alerts will also now appear in EveryBlock's newly enhanced iPhone app ( iTunes link ). Sponsor These announcements will be clearly labeled as thus and messages will also be published to nearby neighborhoods, ZIP and block pages so that other users in the immediate vicinity can also see them. Currently, EveryBlock is only available in a select number of cities in the U.S., though the service plans to expand its reach in the near future. MSNBC acquired EveryBlock in August 2009. Creating a 21st Century Community Message Board As EveryBlock's founder Adrian Holovaty noted in today's announcement, the new feature is "intentionally open-ended." EveryBlock wants to give its users the ability to send out announcements for "every imaginable purpose" and describes this new feature as a "21st century community message board." To enhance this interaction between users, every place page on EveryBlock now also features a discussion board. Overall, this is an important move for EveryBlock. The site is now more interactive than ever before. Thanks to these new user contributions, the information on the site will also now become even more timely and relevant, too. Discuss

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Notify Your Neighbors: EveryBlock Launches User-Contributed Announcements