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Microsoft just launched a new version of its Bing iPhone app. The iPhone app gives you comprehensive access to Bing's core services, including Bing maps and directions, as well as news and image search. Besides offering better stability and a few interface tweaks, the new version of the Bing app also integrates more tightly with the iPhone by giving you access to your contacts in the mapping feature and making it easier to copy and paste URLs and share interesting results through email.

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Releasing Bing for iPhone Worldwide was an Accident...

Just as it launched this new version of the app, however, Microsoft also pulled the Bing applications from all the non-U.S. versions of the App Store. According to a statement Microsoft sent to Neowin, the company "inadvertently made it available to all countries in which the Apple Marketplace has a presence." Why it took Microsoft three months to pull the app, which was released in December 2009, remains a bit of a mystery.

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If you are in the U.S., however, the Bing iPhone app remains to be the best way to access Microsoft's "decision engine" on your phone. The new version now includes a number of interesting new features. One of the most useful features is the app's ability to let you bookmark maps, websites and direction. Sadly, however, this feature isn't integrated with Apple's Safari, so your bookmarks don't carry over to the iPhone's default browser.

Other new features include better parental control settings, private search and the ability to edit your search history and support for first generation iPod touch devices.

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This week we've got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back with their second book in four months. Released earlier this month, Rework, a no-nonsense rethinking of how to successfully start and run a business, comes hot on the heels of their first book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, which published in November of 2009.

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This time Fried and Hansson take a more general approach to business by examining the ways that new companies are disrupting traditional business practices and making a big splash. They cover their entrepreneurial bases by reminding us that "no time is no excuse" and that "a business without a path to profit isn't a business, it's a hobby," but then also elaborate on less traditional practices that have helped them succeed.

The main theme of the book is to trim the fat and do fewer things better; simplifying every aspect of your business and doing a smaller number of things at a higher quality is far better than trying to do too much and a mediocre level. There were times when customers of their products wanted more features and they refused to comply because it would slow them down and decrease efficiency. They decry time-stealing meetings, lengthy contracts, childish office politics and bloated inventories because they weigh down companies from reaching their full potential.

Rework is a great read for entrepreneurs because it is very focused and doesn't waste any time with lengthy use cases. The book itself is an example of the principals it teaches; the quality of a written work is not based on it's length, so why should company be judged by how many features it offers? Fried and Hansson admit that the book, which comes in at a dense but brief 288 pages, was originally drafted to be nearly twice as long, but why say in 600 pages what you can say under 300? Another reason the book is a great read is because of the authors' open and honest tone.

"Ever seen those weapons prisoners make out of soap, or a spoon? They make do with what they've got," one passage humorously points out. "Now we're not saying you should go out and shank somebody, but get creative, and you'll amazed with what you can make with just a little."

Other useful and easily digestible analogies for their unique business ideas include comparing your company to a hot dog stand. They advise that the best way to trim down an inflated company is to find the "epicenter" by asking yourself, "If I took this away, would what I'm selling still exist?" The best hot dog stand doesn't worry about the decorations on the stand, or the condiments - it worries about the hot dogs.

There are dozens of other valuable pieces of advice in Rework that are sure to inspire any entrepreneur or small business owner. But as LeVar Burton famously said at the end of each episode of Reading Rainbow, you don't have to take my word for it. Seth Godin, who has authored several books on business and entrepreneurship including The Dip which we profiled earlier this year, had nothing but high praise for Rework.

"Jason and David have broken all the rules and won. Again and again they've demonstrated that the regular way isn't necessarily the right way," says Godin. "They just don't say it, they do it. And they do it better than just about anyone has any right to expect."

This book is an obvious buy not only because the of the expert advice dispensed by the successful founders of 37signals, but also because the book is an easy, quick and inexpensive read. Personally, in a few short hours I was able to breeze through the audio version, which can be found online for less than $10. But if you prefer reading words on a page, the Kindle version is also $10, or a hardback copy is just $3 more at some online retailers.

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During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.

Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,” but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from here.

Here are a few highlights from our meeting:

His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company, traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings, including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.

I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.

Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Bangalore.”

Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.

“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)

Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building know-how.

Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs. Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and they’ll create products.”

India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.

There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of the United States or China,” he adds.

Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35% live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”

Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing. I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.

But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local jobs or job training.

This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.

Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their time.

Back in June, Google launched Sputnik, a suite of tools that runs over 5,000 tests to check a web browser’s JavaScript conformance. Last week, they made the tool a lot easier for anyone to use, with a version that works in the web browser. The results are interesting.

Notably, both the Opera and Safari web browsers beat Google’s own Chrome browser in the test. As you can see in the picture above, Opera is the clear leader, with only 78 failures (the closer to the center, the less errors). Safari came in second with 159 errors, with Chrome in third with 218 errors. Firefox is close behind with 259 errors, while Internet Explorer is the outlier with 463 errors.

These tests were run on Windows machines, with the latest released version of each browser. Using the web tool on my Mac, though, shows similar results (at least for Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — there is no IE for Mac anymore).

While much of the focus on JavaScript is about speed (that’s what the SunSpider test measures, for example), Sputnik is interesting because it focuses on conformity, making it more like the Acid3 test, which tests web standards compliance. Chrome, Safari, and Opera have all passed Acid3, with Firefox getting very close (94/100 for Firefox 3.6). IE, meanwhile, again lags behind with just 20/100 for IE8. And even the new IE9 preview only scores 55/100.

Speaking of IE9, I tried to run the Sputnik tool in the preview build of the new browser on Windows 7. Unfortunately, it completely shut down several times after getting up to about 50 failures after only a few hundred of the 5,000+ tests — not a good sign. But again, it’s just a very early preview release of the browser, and early SunSpider results for the browser have been good.

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The Telx Group, a New York City-based data center operator, has filed for an initial public offering that could see it raise as much as $100 million from the public markets. The last major data center operator to go public was RackSpace, and that was back in 2009. With the demand for data centers and Internet services on an upswing, Telx’s attempt to go public is very timely.

The company is well known for owning 60 Hudson Street, an iconic wired carrier hotel in Manhattan where more than 250 networks converge. Owned by private equity firm GI Partners, its other assets include The Planet and EV1 Servers.

Telx has 15 data centers with about half a million square feet of data center space. The company had revenues of $98.3 million in 2009 and net losses of $9.9 million. Telx, which also provides global interconnection and co-location services, has about $130 million in debt. The IPO is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs & Co. and Deutsche Bank Securities. Telx has applied to trade on the Nasdaq market under the ticker TELX.

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot. Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

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Last month we wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.

CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online.

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When I think about the lowest common denominator of mobile communications, text messaging follows close behind voice. Obviously, every phone offers voice capability by definition, but texts are nearly as ubiquitous. Email is catching up as consumers leave basic feature phones for smartphones — and many feature phones offer either a native or add-on email solution. But text messaging capability is still farther along in terms of reach across handsets. Brightkite, a location-based social network service knows that, which explains the company’s new GroupText feature.

GroupText reminds me of an old-school party line amongst friends that uses text messaging instead of voice communications. Looking to get a group of friends all together in one location? You could send emails, make phone calls, or use an online invitation service. But I keep coming back to that lowest common denominator of the text message since it’s instant and most everyone has access to the service. GroupText bundles the text message conversation in a chat-like view, making that lowly text function social and powerful — think threaded text messaging with multiple people.

The whole concept is perfect fit for Brightkite, given its location-based bent. If I want to chat with a bunch of folks about a topic, I’ll have the conversation in medium like email. But if I’m simply trying to get a group in one location, I’m going to shoot venue info and other event details in brief text — something I can’t easily do in Foursquare, which is my current LBS service of choice. GroupText doesn’t require my friends to have a Brightkite account, so there’s no mandatory network registration hassle. Each GroupChat can handle 25 friends and responses are sent to all in the group — folks can also attach pics or indicate their location so there’s no need to ask “when are U getting here?” And the entire group interaction is available on the web for those who aren’t currently mobile or for “Monday Morning Quarterbacks” that want to replay the conversation — after a wild night on the town, I see some after-the-fact entertainment value here.

Brightkite recently submitted a software update to Apple that includes the GroupChat feature and anticipates arrival in the iTunes App Store soon. Until then — the lowly text message lives on!

Images courtesy of Brightkite

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet: The Web Is Changing
• Company Profile: Brightkite (free)

Last week we told you about how Chevrolet, a division of General Motors, was bringing an augmented reality (AR) marketing promotion to SXSW in Austin. Now General Motors is kicking it up a notch with some experimental technology that will bring the world of AR to car windshields and provide a heads-up-display (HUD) experience.

The new technology, still very much in the testing phase, uses an array of sensors which track both objects on or near the road, as well as the position and angle of a driver's head and eyes. By combining the data from these sensors, GM can then project images onto the windshield with lasers to help drivers stay safe when driving.

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"Let's say you're driving in fog," says Thomas Seder, group lab manager for GM's research and development. "We could use the vehicle's infrared cameras to identify where the edge of the road is and the lasers could 'paint' the edge of the road onto the windshield so the driver knows where the edge of the road is," Seder said.

In other words, it would be like having a fighter pilot's HUD in your car, except instead of tracking the sky for bogies, your car tracks the road for possible dangers. The display works by coating the windshield with transparent phosphors which emit light when excited by a laser. GM says this is better for the driver because the entire windshield can be used to display information, not just a portion of it like current in-car HUD systems. The technology also includes the ability to recognize and read road signs and alert the driver to when they are driving too fast or if construction is ahead.

The company says that while this exact technology will not be in any cars in the near future, some of the features will start to be rolled into upcoming models. What this likely means is the transparent phosphor windshield will be placed in cars and used to display other HUD information, like speed, gas and other indicators.

The hard part of this technology doesn't seem to be displaying it; rather, the barrier is in the sensor work between tracking objects on the road and tracking the position and angle of the driver's eyes. Since it's much easier to simply display objects that don't rely on exact positioning for the driver's point-of-view, it's likely we'll see these additions before the true AR experience becomes a reality.

Eventually, however, GM hopes technology like this will make for better turn-by-turn directions and make it easier to find locations upon arrival. We've all heard our GPS systems say, "You have arrived at your location!" only to look around and not necessarily know where it is. With this new system, GM hopes they can solve the problem of "the last 100 yards" by displaying indicators of specific locations based on the sensor readings.

This certainly seems like the future of driving, but I wonder if it will be displaced by cars that simply drive themselves. If we can create sensors good enough to find the lanes in the road and nearby vehicles, why not just let the car drive it self and skip the HUD? Either way, its great to see AR taking steps forward beyond marketing and into practical application in a consumer space, even if it is years in the future.

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Back in January, Google announced that it would follow Mozilla’s lead and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337) for “particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the first of those.

As noted on the Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes (both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337 prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that Google is calling, “High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects.”

This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser are likely to launch at some point over the next few months.

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Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5 million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic Ventures. CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.

The round is an extension of a $3 million series C the company raised last year, and brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million.

Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on the paper, printing, and postage costs.

Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself.

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Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation.

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.

My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. I think that location, similarly, gives us an interesting new view of our data.

This momentum has been slowly gaining steam since, essentially, the iPhone was released. We, the developers and general nerd populous, finally had an open platform that had location (in the form of latitude and longitude of our users) baked into it. The first wave of location services made location the core feature. Much like social, this isn’t sustainable long-term. You can’t be “Some Company plus location” and expect to sustain users. Especially after Some Company enables location themselves.

Which bring us to the second wave of location, which I think was started by our friends at Foursquare. They were, in my opinion, the first product to gain traction by moving past simple location and building an experience on top of it. It’s as if co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai said, “Okay, we have location, but that’s boring. Let’s make a game out of going out with our friends!” In other words, they worked under the assumption of having location and built a compelling experience from there.

I think people who are building location-based applications need to keep two things in mind:

1. If there’s any war brewing, it’s over presence. That is the very basic question of where you and your friends are and who may know those details. Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, et al, if they wish to own presence, will be duking it out with Twitter and Facebook. For anyone who’s not already in this game it’s going to be very hard to break into it at this point.

2. You need to move past the mindset that location is the feature. Build products under the assumption that you have a user’s location and that you can use the social plumbing we’ve been building for the last nine years. What kind of interesting experiences can you build on top of the potent mixture of friends, location, and the real world?

So who’s going to win? More than just one company. The users are going to get more interesting and compelling experiences, some familiar names will revolutionize their products with location, and some kid in a garage we haven’t heard of is about to make us all look like fools.

I can’t wait.

[photo: flickr/bogenfreund]

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Crashed web sites, stolen credit card info — imagine seeing the damage caused by Internet viruses and worms unleashed on a fleet of vehicles. The results could include vehicle location data used with malicious intent, the prevention of a plug-in vehicle battery from recharging, remote starting of a car, or even — as a disgruntled young former car salesman in Texas has demonstrated this week — stranding drivers with a car that won’t start and a horn that won’t quit.

Here’s what happened in Texas, as Wired and the Austin News report: A terminated employee from a car dealership called the Texas Auto Center logged into the company’s web-based system and was able to remotely wreak havoc on more than 100 vehicles. The dealership’s system is able to disable the starter system and trigger incessant horn honking for customers that have fallen behind on car payments. It’s meant to serve as an alternative to repossessing the vehicle, and the ex-Texas Auto Center employee, arrested Thursday on charges of computer intrusion, was able to set off the horn command at will and make it so drivers couldn’t start their cars.

Cars are growing ever more connected to communication networks, and upcoming generations of electric vehicles will take it a step further with connections to the power grid. Already, electric car makers have unveiled smartphone apps designed to let users to remotely control certain vehicle functions and battery charging. Down the road, we’ll likely see not only electricity flowing to cars from the grid, but also the flow of data between cars, the grid, home energy management systems, utilities and third-party service providers.

As Ford’s director of connected services Doug VanDagens told us recently (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), “For electric vehicles, connectivity to the web and data are “required over and above what gas engines require.” Apps can use data — about topography, traffic, battery and vehicle health, infrastructure availability, driving behavior — to help orient drivers in the nascent world of electric mobility, both in and out of their vehicle.

While these tools and technologies could help reduce fuel consumption, make electric vehicles more convenient, and enable utilities to prevent excess strain on the power grid as plug-in cars create new demand, that shift to an increasingly digital transportation system brings with it (as Katie has explained in the context of the smart grid buildout) one of the banes of the Internet: hacking.

The stakes, of course, are very different. Certainly nobody wants a virus on their PC. But the prospect of a hacker seizing control of some aspect of a car — a ton of metal capable of going 60-plus MPH, that costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that maybe has a battery in its belly that requires a sophisticated system of thermal controls – is a far scarier thought.

The potential consequences of cyber attacks on a digital power grid could be similarly frightening. Andy Karsner said back in 2008, when he was with the Department of Energy: “This isn’t the cyber-attacking that you think of just for passwords. This is the capacity to destroy hardware in your home, at airports, at military bases, your car, if its connected through the grid.”

We should note that remote immobilization systems like the one involved in the Austin incident have been in use for a decade or more, and yet we have not seen vehicles crippled en masse by hackers. But companies should realize this could be a sensitive issue among consumers, while both companies and regulators need to recognize risks that go along with the transition to increasingly digital and connected systems for transportation and power.

Image courtesy of Defragged’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons.

Once upon a time, you had to bring travel guides, maps and paper tickets on every trip. Today, you can just take your smartphone and get access to all of this information without having to lug a couple of books and magazines around with you. Today, according to a new study by analytics firm Compete, 38% of smartphone users conduct travel research on their devices and 28% use their phones to book at least some of their trips and travel activities.

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Compete found that the most popular travel-related activity for smartphone owners is finding more information about a destination while they are already traveling (34%). Close to a third of smartphone owners who responded to Compete's survey also use their phones to check up on the status of their lodging and transportation reservations. For most smartphone owners, this probably means checking up on the status of their flights. A quarter of smartphone owners also use their phones to research lodging, destination and transportation options. Marketers will be happy to hear that 22% of users look for a specific transportation company's or hotel's website and 21% use their devices to do research on a specific travel agency's site.

Interestingly, though, while about a third of smartphone owners use their devices for travel-related activities, only one-fifth of all smartphone owners have installed travel apps on their devices yet. Those who haven't installed travel apps yet are looking for comprehensive services that can notify their users of unplanned schedule changes (52%), notify users of rate changes (48%) and consolidate all travel reservations into one itinerary. While there are already numerous apps like WorldMate and TripIt that solve these problems, there is clearly an opportunity for these companies to market their apps to a wider audience that isn't aware of them yet.

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News broke yesterday that popular online Q&A startup Formspring.me had raised some $2.5 million in venture funding and would be relocating to Silicon Valley from Indianapolis. As a user and fan of the service, I am happy to see the company rewarded for its success, and I am excited to see how they can improve their already great product. However, as a follower of the national and global startup culture, it is a little disappointing to see the company leave their home and head west to the Valley.

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Formspring.me was spun out of Formspring.com, a platform for creating online forms, when users began creating forms to answer personal questions. According to the New York Times' Brad Stone, Formspring.me has raked in $2.5 million from investors based solely in Silicon Valley. VC firms Baseline Ventures and Freestyle Capital teamed with angels Kevin Rose, Dave Morin and Ron Conway's SV Angel to provide Formspring.me with some well deserved, and high profile funding.

Silicon Valley is certainly the mecca of venture capital and social web applications, and in many ways, moving the company to the Valley is a smart move. As we mentioned back in January, Formspring.me plans to rewrite its application to scale more efficiently as the product grows in popularity - something that requires talented programmers. The company has already listed four job openings in San Francisco for a pair of developers, a designer and a data analyst.

By moving to the Valley, Formspring.me will be able to tap the enormous talent pools to find top tier programmers and designers to take their app to the next level. If they want to build out an API and create mobile applications for their app, they are in the right place to do it. When the time comes to look for further funding, having set up shop in the Valley will certainly benefit the company in their efforts.

For other cities outside of the Valley looking to build competitive startup and venture capital communities, these are unfortunate truths. It is not uncommon to see successful startups leave their cities of birth for the Valley to find talented employees and raise their chances for finding funding. We recently discussed Chicago's growing startup scene, which is not far from Indianapolis, but the opportunities in the Midwest do not yet compare to those available in other booming startup cities.

Had Formspring.me been founded in a city like Austin, Boulder, New York or Boston, they would have likely remained there upon receiving funding. That is, perhaps, if they received funding locally. While the Midwest is growing its startup culture, there are far fewer VC firms, and far smaller talent pools when compared to other locations. Until more cities have their own thriving startup scene, stories like Formspring.me's will continue to play out across the country.

The fact that Formspring.me attracted funding from the Valley before relocating raises the question of whether the decision to move was theirs or if it was a recommendation or stipulation of the investors. We have reached out for comment on this question and will update this post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Formspring.me or any other startup moving to the Valley in the comments.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb

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For many people, Twitter offers a larger, more diverse stream of constantly flowing data than they've ever had to deal with before in their life. Depending on how many people you follow and how much they tweet, the information can become unmanageable. To that end, we have user lists, third-party clients, Twitter tools and search.

And today, it looks like Twitter has begun working on making this last option - search - more useful for its users by offering the ability to percolate popular search results to the top of the page.

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Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable noticed an update in the Twitter API Google Group this morning that alerts us of a soon-to-come search feature - popular tweets.

From the post on Google Groups:

Until the popular tweet feature all search results have been sorted chronologically, most recent results at the top. If a search query has any popular results, those will be returned at the top, even if they are older than the other results.

Basically, the API will now offer a variable named "result_type" that can will return either "popular" or "recent". Programs will be able to use the variable to either return search results with popular tweets at the top as default, show only popular results or show only recent results.

Also added to the Twitter API this week are two other variables for the retweet API.

The first will return up to the first 100 user representations of those who have retweeted the tweet specified in the url by :status_id.

The second will return just the ids of those retweeters for the cases where
that's all you care about.

Perhaps these have some sort of implication in how tweets will be deemed popular, but even if not, it could be useful in watching the trickle-down spread of a tweet.

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There are only a few weeks left until the iPad’s April 3 launch date, and Apple has just started reaching out to developers to say that they’re now accepting applications that were developed especially for the much anticipated device. We’ve included the Email below. The key takeaway: If you’re looking to have your app available at launch, you need to submit it by March 27, at which point Apple’s team will let you know if your application is ready for the grand opening.

The first few weeks after the iPad is released to the public will be a huge gold rush opportunity, as users look to try out the device’s large screen for the first time. In short, if you can make it to one of the App Store’s ‘top apps’ lists, you’re likely to do very well for yourself. The only problem is that the vast majority of developers have never had access to an actual iPad — they’re all working off of emulators, save for a handful of extremely lucky developers who literally have their iPads chained to a desk. Developers can tweak their applications all they want on their computer monitors, but until they’ve actually gotten to try it out for themselves, they’ll have a hard time figuring out if their apps feel right.

I expect most developers will scramble submit what they have ready to Apple by March 27, and that we’ll then see numerous updates within the following days as developers tweak button placement and other interface elements. Some developers may choose to simply wait until they have a device in their hands so that they can try out the app before submitting at all, but the App Store’s discoverability issues make this a risky move.

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave. This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts.

Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.

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The service resembles platforms that we see emerging. It has a real-time activity stream. People may create their own groups within an activity stream. Groups may also be created with external communities such as partners or customers. Pulse will be available as a SaaS or on-premise.

The service includes a co-editing feature, much like you see in Google Wave.

Novell Pulse looks like a viable alternative for the companies and government organizations that want a platform they can modify without concern about proprietary constraints. Still, it is clear that Pulse is in its infancy with a host of features needing integration.

We question how many people may use the service simultaneously. Google Wave has received criticism for its inability to handle large numbers of simultaneous users. Novell says it will see how many people the platform can handle. Of note is that the beta is so limited. It will essentially only be open to a very limited subset of the market. Perhaps it will spread through invites. We'll see.

Its open-source roots make Pulse most compelling. The approach fits with the company's roots. Novell sees an opportunity to federate with Google. The larger question will come down to how well the integration works with Google Wave.

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Nuance is killing the SpinVox service, informing its users, which are located in the UK, via text that their accounts will expire within a week. The move — which prompted an outcry on Twitter — marks the end of a very popular voice-to-text service from a very controversial company.

SpinVox was founded in 2003 as a London-based startup aimed at transcribing voicemails into text. The company landed $200 million in funding — including $100 million at a $500 million valuation two years ago — thanks to a customer base of large carriers, which resold the service to their users. But the wheels started to fall off last year when SpinVox struggled to repay a $48.8 million loan and allegations surfaced that transcriptions were being done by call center staffers — not a speech-to-text algorithm, as the company had claimed. Nuance ended up pocketing SpinVox last December for a mere $102.5 million in an effort to better compete in the voice recognition space against Google and Microsoft.

The acquisition was largely driven by SpinVox’s list of corporate customers, which includes Bell Mobility, Rogers Wireless, Vodafone Spain and Skype. Nuance, in explaining its decision to shut down SpinVox’s service, said its mission is to market offerings “as a standard feature in mobile service plans locally and globally.” Indeed, pulling the plug on the consumer service is logical given SpinVox’s inability to develop a viable business model. But as all those tweets indicate, investors aren’t the only ones hurting from SpinVox’s demise — so are many of its soon-to-be former users.

Related content from GigOM Pro (sub req’d):

How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use

Image courtesy Flickr user jp.ubiqua.

One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist how headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week.

Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook.

Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Venture Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.

CrunchBase InformationSam PullaraYahoo!Information provided by CrunchBase