A lot of cool things came out of SXSWi this year. Swindlr, LLC announced the name of their awesome new web service, Zappn.com, for starters. Launch day is still a ways off for them, but a friend of mine tipped me off to a brand new (and readily available) iPhone app used for “letterboxing”, called Gowalla.

From Wikipedia: “Letterboxing is an outdoor hobby that combines elements of orienteering, art and puzzle solving. Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and distribute clues to finding the box in printed catalogs, on one of several web sites, or by word of mouth. Individual letterboxes usually contain a logbook and a rubber stamp. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox’s stamp on their personal logbook, and leave an impression of their personal stamp on the letterbox’s logbook—as proof of having found the box.”

Gowalla forgoes the finding of a hidden box by following clues. Instead, it provides users with a location on a map. Users are rewarded for reaching the spot and using the iPhone’s GPS to verify that they’ve arrived. When you visit a new spot, you are rewarded with the ability to pick up one of the “icons” that have been left behind by other visitors. Icons are virtual items that you can collect by visiting various spots. If you visit a spot someone else commissioned, then you trade one of your icons for one that has been placed there. If you commission your own spot, you merely leave an item behind for others to find. For instance, when I signed up, I was given two praying mantis icons. So when I created my first spot, I left one behind for the next visitor to pick up. However, if you really like a certain item, you can vault it to keep it in your collection forever. You can also get new items by visiting lots of spots, as some will, just for visiting, give users a free icon for which they don’t have to trade.

The Gowalla team is working on a variety of new features that will spice up the game. Personally, I hope to see location-aware leaderboards for users that have the largest collections (or collections worth the most points, as each icon has a different value). They’ve also mentioned that they plan to allow users to create their own trips and to report problems for spots that are duplicates (and with luck, dangerous, incorrectly placed, located on private property, or just flat out inaccessible).

One feature that isn’t available in Kansas City yet is “trips”. Trips are a series of locations that are all tied together. If a user visits all of them, they earn a special “pin” to commemorate the activity. One of the trips currently available is an Austin Pub Crawl.

Suffice to say, this is the type of application for which the iPhone was built. I can’t wait to see what additional surprises the team has in store for us and if you have an iPhone, please please PLEASE download the free app.

I must admit, that when I first heard about ACU’s plan to issue an iPhone or iPod Touch to all incoming freshmen at the start of this school year, I was rather excited. When the announcement was first made, iPhone 2.0 had not yet been announced, the 3G was yet to be seen. Only the original iPhone and iPod Touch were available and my brain-parts ran rampant with ideas on how awesome this could be.

Obviously, with the advent of an official Apple SDK, much of the theorizing about ACU’s plans fell by the wayside, but I was still very interested to hear how it all turned out. So, I’ve decided to gather a few links together to let interested parties read about how the first year of ACU’s greatest technological experiment has worked out so far.

iPhones go to front of the class at Texas university
Abilene Christian U. Will Continue iPhone Giveaway, but Gadgets Add to Worries About Cheating
iPhone University: At ACU, Students Navigate College Life via Apple iPhone

A video podcast that shows off ACU’s web portal developed specifically for the iPhone is also available.

Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing more widespread adoption in additional universities and corporations. It’ll be a great thing to be able to actually leave laptops behind in favor of specially designed web (and native) apps on what I firmly believe to be the most important handheld device of our generation, and certainly the most influential since Apple unveiled the Newton.

(Those of you now looking at your Palm devices, step back cause the Newton pioneered all of that.)

I’ve been getting quite a few visitors from my interview over at InkKC the last couple days, so I just wanted to put a note up here for those of you that are visiting from there.

First off, thanks for stopping by my little place on the Interwebs. Have a nice stay, but please don’t break anything.

If you’re looking for iPhone app reviews and news, you can find all of them by clicking on the iPhone category to the right. Feel free to browse, leave a few comments, or even shoot me a message if there’s an app you’d like to hear about but don’t see on here yet. I’ll be glad to give you my opinion, or maybe even write up a post all about it if I feel I can be informative enough.

That said, come back soon.

I just received the most awesome junk e-mail ever. I highly recommend reading it. I have broken the text into paragraphs to make it easier to read, but have not edited any of the content.

The part below the centered date is an attached link to a news story that came with the e-mail that has nothing to do with clones or anti-Christian values, but instead an article about Scarlett Johansson and love. Any ? marks in the text were likely “smart quotes” that got destroyed when going from rich text to plain text.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

IT IS NOT A SPAM, but if you received that message second and plus time JUST CLICK DELETE button and have a nice day. Don’t feel bad, please understand original Scarlett’s family very desperate to shut down that humiliating antichristian “actress” clones line career development.

Hello dear Ladies and Gentlemen! I would like inform you that Scarlett Johansson ?actress? actually is a clone from original person Scarlett Galabekian last name, who has nothing with acting career, surname Galabekian, because of adoption happened in 1992. Clones was created illegally by using stolen biological material. Original person is very nice (not d**n sexy),most important – CHRISTIAN young lady! I’ll tell you more,those clones (it’s not only one) made in GERMANY – world leader manufacturer of humans clones, it is in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Mr. Helmut Kohl home town. You can not even imaging the scale of the cloning activity. But warning! Helmut Kohl clone staff strictly controlling all their clones (at least they trying) spreading around the world, they are very accurate with that, some of them are still NAZI type disciplined and mind controlled clones, so be careful get close with clones you will be controlled as well. Original person is not happy with those movies, images, video, rumors and etc. spreading on media in that way it would be really nice if we all will try slow down that ”actress” career development, original Scarlett will really appreciated that.

Please remember that original Scarlett’s family did not authorize any activity with stolen biological materials, no matter what form it was created in it was stolen and it is stolen. It all need to be delivered to authorize personals control in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Original Scarlett never was engaged, by the way! Her close friend Serge G.

P.S. CONTROLLING ACTIVITY OF ANY CLONES IS US MILITARY OPERATION.

Check also here: [Link abbreviated to aid formatting] H.R. 534, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003, was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on February 5, 2003. After discussion, it was passed on February 27 by a vote of 241-155. It now moves on to the Senate for consideration. This bill makes it unlawful for any person or entity to perform or participate in human cloning, or to ship or receive embryos produced by human cloning. The penalties are imprisonment of up to 10 years and fines of $1 million or more. These now join other nations as diverse as Norway, Australia, and many other countries, which had already added cloning for any purpose to their criminal code. And in Germany where it carries a penalty of five years imprisonment they know a thing or two about unethical science.

2/13/2009 12:00:00 AM

Lessons in love

Bob Thompson, Financial Post
Published: 2/13/2009 12:00:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

My gorgeous and talented friend Alex posted this video on her Facebook profile recently and I was lucky enough to stumble across it last week. It stars TJ Thyne, whom you may recognize from the TV show Bones (or if you’re really hardcore, from season 5 of Angel) as a parking attendant that just wants to see you smile. It’s a brilliant film and very entertaining. If you want to see it larger without going fullscreen, click the direct link below.

Direct link here.

I haven’t mentioned these guys yet, because I’ve been kind of waiting for them to get into a private beta of their service before I gave them a shoutout. However, they’ve been doing an awful lot of updating over at their site since they went to SXSWi this past week, and I felt it was necessary to give them some press.

I can’t reveal any details yet about what Swindlr is working on, but they have announced the name of their new service: Zappn.com. When they’re ready to reveal what Zappn does, you’ll be able to find out at the site, or at the team’s blog.

Several weeks ago, my friend Chase of Swindlr & Zappn fame, gave my name to a reporter for InkKC that was doing an article on iPhone apps. Well, yesterday the article was published and can be picked up at any InkKC kiosk in the Kansas City area or viewed online here (article no longer online).

The nicest thing about the article was that my blog got a mention, so any of you that are coming here from that article, you can check out my iPhone articles here, or in the future by clicking on the iPhone link in the Categories section on the right.

No, really. Google Voice is awesome. At least, if you like the concept of GrandCentral, which I did and is why I signed up for it. But even better is that Google finally made some changes to it and they rock.

Let me start from the beginning. GrandCentral is a website that lets you choose a phone number to give to friends, family, coworkers, evil overlords, what-have-you. When those people call said number, it rings all the phones you own: your house phone, work phone, cell phone, even the pay phone outside your house if you so choose. If you answer from any of the phones you’ve listed, the call is routed to that specific phone. But, it goes one step further. If you don’t WANT to be bothered, you can listen in on voicemails to try and cut down on your telemarketing pain, block specific phone numbers and even schedule all UNKNOWN numbers to be blocked straight up. Then, voice messages are stored on the server for you to peruse at your convenience and even call back by clicking the call button and selecting which of your phones you’d like the call to be directed to, effectively masking your actual number inside of the GrandCentral number.

Enter Google, whom upon seeing this awesome service said, “WANT!” and snatched it up. They sat on it for a while, not making any changes until just recently when they announced Google Voice. The basic tenets of the service remain unchanged, however there are some spiffy new features. First and foremost is the option to have your voice messages transcribed and then e-mailed to you so you never have to log into the website to check your messages. This feature alone made me drool over the service. But I was made even happier when I discovered that I can log into the site (from my desktop or my iPhone) and send and receive SMS messages from my Google Voice number. And they are all archived online.

Needless to say, I’d love to see an iPhone app that combines all of these features into one place to use wherever I am. And if background notification ever comes to the iPhone, I can effectively rid myself of paid text messages. Thank you, Google. Now merge with Apple so that all of these features can become native to the iPhone. I’ll die happy.

I went to go see Watchmen on Friday and have been digesting it ever since. I know that I have things to say about it, but I don’t have the words to describe the awesome that poured out of the screen into my face. There was a moment in the middle of the movie that I actually stepped outside of myself to realize I was sitting in a theater watching Dr. Manhattan on a 50-foot screen and I had a very meta moment.

I’m extremely disappointed in the reviews coming from the Internet, but I think that many reviewers are attacking the game to stand out from the rest, make a point, or garner attention. There are plenty of movies I’ve seen that I gave a free pass because of the source material, but in this case I didn’t need to do that. The movie was so wrought with the source material, it was almost as though the pages of the comic were woven into the fabric of the costumes and the celluloid it was filmed upon.

That’s not to say that the movie was perfect. The actress that plays Silk Spectre II is not nearly as talented as the rest of the actors on the screen and she’s on-screen a lot. But everyone else shows a great deal of understanding of their characters during the film.

A big thing about the movie that really made me happy was how the director was able to take a graphic novel that had very little action actually depicted (most action was resolved in a handful of frames and takes mere seconds to read), he managed to create a compelling action movie. The meaning of the novel is not lost in the struggle, either. The futility of war, the meaninglessness of death, the struggle for the human race to survive in the face of certain desolation is all there. But even better, most scenes in the film take something from the comic and make sure it’s visible on-screen as a frame of reference. Gorgeous pieces of artwork are placed up on-screen as still images set in motion.

As I said, i don’t have the appropriate words, so I hope that what little I could speak of here will encourage you to see the movie if you’ve read the graphic novel. And if you haven’t, then go see it anyway. If you can, borrow it from the library first and read it, or check out the motion comics on iTunes. Be warned. This film is NOT about heroes saving the day and being shiny and perfect. It’s gritty, it’s dark, it’s violent, and it’s brutal: just like life. There’s still a bit of romanticism to be found, but mostly it’s just a keen view of what our world might be like had the presence of a certain few influenced it.

I stumbled across an application in the App Store yesterday called FileAid. I have been using Air Sharing for the past several months and it’s not bad. But, it’s a $5 app. It was free when I picked it up, but when I tell my friends about it, they’re not always interested in paying money for the app.

But FileAid is free until March 17. It does have some features that I hope to see adjusted in the future. For example, setting the password for wireless access is shown in clear text so prying eyes can see it, and it requires an FTP client for Wi-Fi access and another app for USB access. However, this brings up the point that this app does have USB access, something that Air Sharing and others do not have.

In the event that you miss out on FileAid’s free offer, then be sure to check out Air Sharing as an alternative choice.