Awesome table coding!

Apple’s made it official: the iPhone will have full-blown YouTube integration. According to the iPhone Web site, the much-anticipated handset will include “a special YouTube player that you can launch right from the home screen.” iPhone owners can now load and browse videos from the video-sharing site as well as e-mail them to their friends.

This comes less than a month after Steve Jobs announced that the company’s Apple TV set-top box would also have built-in integration for the wildly popular YouTube.

The iPhone, as we all know by now, hits stores at 6 PM ET on June 29. That’s next Friday!

Source: Extra Tech Blog

Hummer, maker of big and tough super-SUVs, has lent its name to a somewhat smaller product with the announcement of the Hummer HT1 mobile phone. Crafted by first-time handset designers ModeLabs and modeled off the wheels and grille of Hummer vehicles, the HT1 slider handset features styling similar to the Motorola MOTORIZR line and is available in three Hummer-style colors.

Specifications for a handset bearing the Hummer name could never be lightweight, with some solid features backing up the robust design. A 2.0MP camera features on the back of the device, partnered with a microSD memory expansion slot for storage of photos and MP3 music for the built in media player. USB and Bluetooth provide connectivity options for the Hummer HT1, with the device also capable of managing PIM data and email.

Pre-installed on the Hummer HT1 are 10 Hummer-themed wallpapers and two videos, and each handset will be bundled with two camouflage battery covers, insuring you can stay inconspicuous when trekking over enemy lines with the device. No details on pricing or regional availability are available at this time.

Source: MobileBurn

Piclens is a new plug-in for your Firefox Internet browser that lets you launch into a full-screen into a slideshow while browsing photos.

After you download PicLens, here’s how it works.

First, let’s say you want to look at all the pictures on Flickr taken by your friend while she traveled New Zealand.

You can then see a slideshow of them on your desktop by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images on her album (you have to mouse over the image to see the icon, as shown below). Once you click, your screen changes into a full-screen slide show.

The image you clicked on blows up to fill your screen, and a strip of thumbnails below shows the other images next in line. You click on a play button, and PicLens scrolls through each of the pictures — blowing each image up to their full size on your screen. It does the same for images on Google and Yahoo, and Facebook photo album images. It will do this for any site that supports the Media RSS format.

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Media RSS is a format created by Yahoo, but which is now an open standard and free for others to use. Web site owners can make their sites compatible with PicLens by pasting some code within their site, which specifies the content displayed. Emily’s Photo Site is an example site that supports Media RSS. See the code below for what this looks like.

Search for “flowers” on Google images, for example, and you can then see a slideshow of Google’s entire inventory of flower images by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images.

To our knowledge this isn’t offered by anyone else. Slide and Rockyou offer slideshows, but to view them you have to store images on their site, or have them embedded in a widget. PicLens brings the experience to your desktop.

The company doesn’t have any plans to monetize this yet. They want to distribute the product and worry about that later.
There’s a raunchier use for this, of course: Use PicLens while searching Google images for “Alessandra,” or any other female name for that matter, and you’ll quickly grasp how a good portion of Piclens’ users are likely to use this product. Let your mind wander from there. Even then, we’re not certain how money is to be made.

It is the latest product offered by Cooliris, a Palo Alto start-up launched last year. Piclens was first released last year for Safari browsers only.

Source : VentureBeat via Blogforward

(Courtesy: Gear Diary)

If there’s a potential disaster awaiting Apple’s iPhone, it’s that the smart cellphone lacks a mechanical keyboard.

It forces users to use a touch-screen keyboard, something that may throw of millions of young people accustomed to texting quickly on basic phones and, for that matter, also older professionals used to typing slowly on a full keyboard offered by a Palm or Blackberry.

There’s a story about this “billion-dollar gamble” in the NYT today.

Also, check out the experience of the Taiwanese company HTC, which recently released a new model, the HTC Touch. Its “TouchFLO” technology, which enables the owners to swipe up, down, and diagonally across the screen to navigate, has been billed by some as a direct challenge to the iPhone’s new approach (however, we caution here because this piece is written by the same author who wrote yesterday’s Times story about Facebook, which was inaccurate). Indeed, there are less hyped reports that reveal the HTC just isn’t working.

Source: VentureBeat via Blogforward

Chief exec Steve Jobs said Apple would release a version of the company’s Safari browser for Windows. Safari will also help with mobile applications for the iPhone, he said: “It’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone…And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps… don’t worry about distribution, just put ‘em on an internet server.”

Critics were disappointed, however, that this means developers will have to write two separate programs, one for the Macintosh computers and one for the iPhone. There’s more detailed coverage at Engadget, which carries the iPhone comments at the bottom.

Releasing iTunes on Windows has benefited Apple tremendously, so this is an extension of Apple’s strategy to embrace Windows.

Jobs also talked about Leopard, the company’s update to its Mac OS. Dean Takahashi of the Merc has a more succinct summary than Engadget’s live coverage — providing a look at the “Finder” and “Quick View” features, which make for easier file sharing and previewing compared to Microsoft’s Vista. Leopard’s widget feature, which lets you track changes at various Web sites directly from your desktop, is also more sophisticated than Vista’s equivalent. Leopard includes “BootCamp,” a way to let Mac users choose which operating system to run when they start their computers — Windows or Mac OS (see story by Troy Wolverton).

Source: VentureBeat via Blogforward

Wazap a fast-growing search engine focused exclusively on games, launched in the U.S.

Until now, the Berlin, Germany company has versions German, Japanese and Chinese. Wazap’s entry into the U.S. puts pressure on the other leading video game search engine, Ziff Davis Media’s Gazerk. Since we first profiled Wazup in January, its unique user base has increased to 16 million uniques a month worldwide, up from 11 million. Thom Kozik, formerly of Yahoo Games, launched the U.S. site from Los Angeles.

If you’re searching for a game on Gazerk or Wazap, both will give you results with names of the games, cheats, news and reviews. However, Wazap tries to go further, adding more community features. It lets users rank the results, add their own comments and lets them build their own profile specifying game and console preferences.

The U.S. version adds games to its index that American are most likely to play. More features for hard-core gamers are coming.

The company said it had $1 million in revenue last year. It has raised almost $11.9 million from Partech International and Wellington Partners.

Source: VentureBeat, Blogforward