AOL launched what they’re calling the AOL Tech Network this evening. It’s a grouping of existing blogs – the Engadget sites, Switched, TUAW and Download Squad, under a new tech content group.

Unike AOL Games, AOL Entertainment and other sub brands, AOL Tech is being branded without “AOL.” A new link on the AOL home page links to Switched, which will now syndicate in content from the other blogs in the network.

This is partly a streamlining of the organization, but it’s also a way for AOL’s sales team to pitch a tech brand to advertisers that has a big footprint. The combined blogs bring in nearly 5 million combined monthly visitors, making it about twice the size of Wired and in the same ballpark as Yahoo Tech.

Of course, 100% of the Switched content is coming from blogs, unlike those other sites.

Engadget has more, and talks about a new design as well.

YouTube has quietly launch a new layout on video pages with a new tab focused layout and video statistics (pic above).

The first change in the consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting sites (notably including Mixx), the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email.

Commentary (comments and video responses) is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” Statistics provided are video honors (YouTube awards) and video referrals. It would appear that users can hide site referral statistics but they are turned on by default, at least for existing videos hosted on YouTube.

(thanks to Rahul Kumar for the tip)

Things are moving fast in the Yahoo-Microsoft drama. All the different forces are aligning for an endgame. The latest twist: The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo is close to signing a deal to combine with AOL.

This at the same time that Yahoo is doing a limited test to place Google ads in its search results. Meanwhile, News Corp, which Yahoo once hoped would be its white knight, is said to be turning on Yahoo and talking to Microsoft about joining its bid. Obviously a lot of balls are up in the air right now, and anything is possible.

Here is how the AOL-Yahoo combination is shaping up, according to the WSJ:

Under the terms being discussed, Time Warner would fold its AOL unit into Yahoo and make a cash investment in return for about 20% of the combined entity, the people said. The deal, which wouldn’t include AOL’s dial-up access business, would value AOL at about $10 billion. As part of the deal, Yahoo would use the Time Warner cash and additional funds to buy back several billion dollars worth of its own stock at a price somewhere in the middle of the range between $30 and $40 a share

Tellingly, that $10 billion valuation is half of what AOL’s business was pegged at when Google invested $1 billion for its 5 percent stake in AOL a little over two years ago. (But that does not include the dial-up business). What we are witnessing is all sorts of contortions on both sides to make the numbers work. We’ve believed all along that Time Warner will put an offer on the table, but it will be difficult to make it pencil out, especially if an AOL-Yahoo combo is up against a three-way Microsoft-MySpace-Yahoo deal.

Each of these potential deals would create integration nightmares, but a three-way tie between Microsoft, MySpace, and Yahoo would create an entity with so much traffic and advertising inventory that it might not matter. The chances of such a complicated deal going through, though, are small. The most likely outcome is still Microsoft buying Yahoo, and this is all just fodder for the negotiations.

Web chat startup Meebo has been working with investment bank Montgomery & Co. for the last few months to either find a buyer or raise a big new round of financing. The rumor was they were looking for a $250 million valuation.

A couple of sources have told us that eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL all took a long look at the company, but ultimately passed based on the price and the fact that the company has done aggregate revenues since launching of only $1 million or so.

So instead of selling, Meebo is closing a financing round valuing the company at $175 – $200 million. The company wants strategic investors as well as the inevitable private equity funds that would be willing to pay this kind of valuation (traditional VCs won’t touch a deal like this). The rumor is that Fox and/or AOL may be investing in the round.

Meebo’s big selling point is the success of Meebo Rooms, which essentially turns chat rooms into a web service. Also, Facebook just jumped into the chat space; other social networks can quickly add the feature via a partnership with Meebo.

The deal has not yet closed, according to our sources, although we hear Meebo has a big announcement scheduled for Thursday morning, Our guess is that it isn’t the financing, but we’ll see.

News Corp is said to be in talks with Microsoft about joining its bid for Yahoo, according to sources quoted by the New York Times.

News Corp entering the mix may allow Microsoft to raise its bid, putting even more pressure on Yahoo to accept it. It would also remove News Corp as a possible alternate bidder for Yahoo.

A combined Microsoft/ News Corp/ Yahoo would marry Fox Interactive Media and most notably MySpace with Yahoo’s web properties and Microsoft Live and MSN services, creating an even bigger challenger to Google.

According to the Times, the talks between Microsoft and News Corporation are at a sensitive stage, with their source stating that “there’s a long way to go before anything is definite.”

The news comes after another colorful day in the Microsoft/ Yahoo standoff with Yahoo announcing a trial of Google ads against its search results, and Microsoft responding by saying that any Yahoo/ Google tie-up lessened competition.

Update: The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo is close to signing a deal to combine with AOL.

As rumored earlier this week, live mobile video streaming service Qik has raised $3 million in Series B funding from Marc Benioff, Arjun Gupta, and George Garrick.

Qik allows users to stream video from their camera-enabled phones to a number of platforms including TV, gaming consoles, and the web itself. Currently only a subset of Nokia phones work with Qik, although the company has plans to support all smart and Java-enabled phones.

Competitors include Mogulus and Kyte. Qik has raised a total of $4M to date. The company recently joined up with Justin.tv to provide that lifecasting service with mobile capabilities.

Geek chick celebrity Veronic Belmont has signed to co-host Revision3’s Tekzilla show.

Belmont resigned from the Mahalo Daily podcast last week after only 5 months, with a relatively cool send off from Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Prior to working for Calacanis, Belmont worked for CNET.com, where she produced and co-hosted shows including Buzz Out Loud, MP3 Insider and Crave. She also regularly appears on programs on DL.TV, MSNBC, CNBC, the G4 Network, PC Gamer, and This Week in Tech.

Belmont featured in our list of geek chicks to watch March 21.

image credit: Veronica Belmont

Microsoft has responded to news earlier today that Yahoo was testing Google Adsense ads on their search results.

From Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel:

“Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.”

The 90% market share in the first line is where the deal may well come unstuck (presuming its expanded). Will Government regulators sit back and allow Google to take a 90% market share through a deal with Yahoo?

Warning: some people may find some of the content in this post offensive.

If you are a fan of The Onion and can never seem to find just the right ecard to send to friends and family, you’re going to love Someecards. The company is announcing a seed round financing today – more details below.

The company was founded by former Onion writer Brook Lundy and Duncan Mitchell, and quietly launched in April 2007. It’s fairly straightforward – they create simple ecards like the one above with Onion-style humor, and let people email them to each other. Without any launch notice, press or marketing, the site has grown virally to 1.5 million unique monthly visitors, who are pretty passionate about the site. A few recent emails that the team have received:

• “I think you guys should come stay at my sorority house and do a presentation or something. If you guys are located anywhere near San Francisco by September, let me know and I will work for you guys for free.”
• “your website has got me laughing out loud and getting wet at the same time. i think you should make an ecard that says: this website has got me laughing out loud and getting wet at the same time.”
• “I really believe your site is of some sociological importance. Someecards lifts the veil of political correctness, denial and social mores.”
• “I would just like to thank you for providing what I consider to be one of the best websites of all time. Not only do you have a card tailored to everyone I know (and wish I did not know), but my productivity at work has dropped to a mere 30% during the day which is always a plus as I am constantly looking for something new to distract me. Thank you, thank you, a million times, thank you.”

• “I just found someecards today. My life is a better place to be. If this site closes
  down anytime in the next 50 years (before I die) I will shoot myself. Please
  let me live.”

To date, the team, which includes six part time writers, has created 1,900 cards. The most popular are here, but, really, you could spend a happy afternoon reading all of them. I’ve put three of them in this post.

The site was a part time project for the two founders, but the unexpected popularity of the service led to them to seek outside funding so they could quit their day jobs. Today they’re announcing a $350,000 seed round, led by Betaworks and notable angel investor Chris Sacca.

Apologies for this last one, but it definitely shows the edgy content on the site. Compare this to the American Greetings site dedicated to off-humor stuff, Kiwee (example), and you’ll understand why Someecards has a growing cult following.

In what can only be interpreted as a move in its extended chess match with Microsoft, Yahoo has decided to run a two-week-long trial of Google’s AdSense for Search.

The limited test will see Google placing ads alongside no more than 3% of Yahoo’s search result pages in the US. While Yahoo claims to be simply “exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value”, the company is obviously trying to convince shareholders that a merger with Microsoft would be sub-optimal by showing how well an alternative partnership with Google monetizes.

Yahoo is eager to point out that the trial will not necessarily blossom into a long-term relationship with Google. And so the pushing continues…

Billshrink, the new startup that aspires to simplify the often painful process of choosing and comparing mobile plans (and eventually other services), has launched in beta. While promising, it still needs a lot of work.

The site offers an ostensibly impressive feature-set. Upon entering a cell number and the password associated with a mobile account, the user is presented with a comprehensive usage analysis, including a listing of the user’s most-called contacts and networks. Those wary of sharing their personal information can manually enter data such as “minutes used”, though this is a somewhat more tedious process. Data is compiled and analyzed, at which point a list of comparable (and hopefully less expensive) plans is presented.

Billshrink also offers maps with visual representations of each carrier’s cell phone strength. Users can even enter their home and work locations to determine a “Commute Rating”, which analyzes connection strength over a route calculated by Google Maps.

Unfortunately, many of these features are still buggy. While the usage graphs presented after entering our bill information were impressive, the resulting phone plan comparison was anything but. Our top suggestion featured a T-mobile plan with a data charge of over $185M (obviously in error). The signal-strength map never seemed to materialize over the standard Google Maps view, though the “Commute Rating” feature worked fine. (Update: We’ve tried the phone plan comparison again and it works well now)

Despite these shortcomings, the site is still useful and allows the average beta tester to save $225 annually according to company statistics.

Billshrink is headed by CEO Peter Pham, a former Photobucket executive who joined the company in February.

The ease of comparing prices on the Internet has done a lot to do away with major price differences between individual items at retailers, whether online or off. But where they still get you is when you buy many items from the same store and you throw in the high-margin coffee with the cut-rate shampoo. Higher-priced single items, such as a digital camera or an MP3 player, lend themselves more to online research. Finding the best deal is just a matter of selecting your preferred comparison shopping site (Shopping.com, mySimon, etc.). But what happens when you want to compare an entire cart of groceries across several merchants? Put simply, you are out of luck. Unless of course you happen to be living in the UK and making good use of mySupermarket.

mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s Ocado & ASDA.

It can compare not only identical items (a one-liter bottle of Coke), but also similar non-identical items, such one-liter bottles of mineral water from two separate brands. To accomplish this, mySupermarket classified 100,000 grocery products sold online in the UK according to multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The rules, weightings and relationships between different sub-criteria are incorporated into the company’s algorithms.

Up-to-date pricing is achieved using a combination of proprietary crawlers and manual validation processes to access real time prices from the supermarkets’ own sites. MySupermarket marries those prices with its own image database. It obtains products from the manufacturers and retailers and then uses in-house image production combined with post-processing facilities in Thailand.

The company claims an average online grocery cart includes approximately 50 items, with a total cost of 80-110 English pounds ($160-$220). By finding savings for consumers that average 20 percent per cart, and consumers accepting about half those recommendations, the actual savings average around 10 pounds ($20) per cart.

The way mySupermarket works is that users login to mySupermarket and fill-up a “trolley” (British for “shopping cart”). They are then presented with three types of recommendations:

1. Potential savings from switching the entire cart to another supermarket.
2. Potential savings from swapping items in the cart to alternatives from within the same supermarket.
3. Health conscious recommendations (calories, saturates, fat, salt, sugar) for swapping items to healthier alternatives.

The final step—payment—is actually performed on the desired supermarket’s own payment page. It should be noted that the service is absolutely free to consumers.

So where does mySupermarket derive its revenue from? Two sources: The first, targeted advertising based on the cart’s contents.

The second, a data service provided to the retailers and merchants which includes price listings, inventory listings (by zipcode), as well as comparison and analysis of products sold within the UK grocery sector. These days mySupermarket is focusing on expanding its UK business, as well as adding features, ad/promotion services and data reporting capabilities.

They are also considering requests to license their technology for non-grocery multi-item comparison shopping.

Google is obviously making big moves into the enterprise. In February, it relaunched JotSpot as Google Sites under the enterprise group, and next week it is expected to announce deeper integration of Google Apps with Salesforce.com, which should help it introduce Google Apps to more business customers. But today, it is taking a page from Salesforce.com by launching its own marketplace for third-party applications and consulting services that enhance Google’s enterprise offerings (mainly Google Apps and enterprise search). Salesforce, of course, has its AppExchange where smaller companies can sell on-demand software to Salesforce customers (and have Salesforce host the apps).

Google is calling its exchange the Google Solutions Marketplace. It replaces a simpler Enterprise Solutions Gallery that Google had before. While Google won’t be hosting the apps (it is just a free listings service), companies can create their own product profiles. Customers can search for Google-related enterprise apps all in one place and rate them. Google needs to create momentum around its enterprise products so that smaller companies will want to develop add-ons and create businesses around them. Right now the offerings seem pretty thin. There are a bunch of syncing tools, identity management offerings, add-on gadgets, and integration with other enterprise apps. But what is lacking is an economic model that would really motivate developers to build on top of Google’s Enterprise apps. The free exposure, though, is a start.

You didn’t really think that Silicon Valley would be immune to the general convulsions in the overall economy, did you? I am not sure it is as bad as the NYT gleefully makes it out to be, but there is growing evidence of a tech slowdown, including M&A deals and IPOs drying up, slower job growth, signs of weakness on Web advertising, cautious corporate IT spending, and rising costs for companies that offshore their labor force due to the decline of the dollar.

The latest numbers from the National Venture Capital Association show that the startup economy was starting to feel some pain in the first quarter. Venture-backed M&A deals hit the lowest level in a decade, with only 56 deals announced in the first quarter, down from 83 in the fourth quarter of 2007. The IPO market also dried up, with only five venture-backed IPOs, compared to 31 in the fourth quarter of 2007. (See chart above). The average amount raised for each IPO was $56.6 million (down 42 percent quarter-over-quarter). And the average M&A deal size was $124.6 million (down 40 percent quarter-over-quarter)

The overall value of disclosed M&A deals in the first quarter was $2.5 billion, compared to $8.4 billion in the fourth quarter of last year:

Diving a little deeper, Internet deals still dominated the first quarter of 2008, with 12 deals valued at $1.7 billion. But the number of deals where investors are taking a loss is going up, and the number of deals with outsized returns of 4 times or more of the amount of venture capital invested is going down. Are our readers in Silicon Valley feeling the effects of the downturn? Please share in comments.

Executive recruiters are still loving Yahoo. Another former Yahoo executive has landed as the CEO of a startup. This time it is Tim Cadogan, an advertising senior vice president who left Yahoo in February. He is taking the helm at OpenX, a startup which distributes an increasingly popular open-source ad server. More details from TechCrunch UK:

London-based open-source ad server startup OpenX is biting the bullet and moving to Los Angeles. In addition, former Yahoo senior vice president Tim Cadogan will take the CEO job at the startup funded by Index Ventures, Accel Partners and others, reports Kara Swisher. OpenX has about 30 employees, including 10 developers in Poland, but not all will head to the US. This is probably a necessary strategic move for the ad company, heading to the capital of media and entertainment, but it’s a shame to see it move out of London.

Cadogan was with Yahoo for five years in its search unit and was later SVP for ad products. OpenX (which recently and controversially changed its name from OpenAds) serves about 30,000 Web publishers on 100,000 Web sites in more than 100 countries. OpenX has raised about $21 million in funding since 2007. Besides Index and Accel, other investors include First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Former AOL head Jon Miller also recently joined its board as chairman.

Current CEO James Bilefield, another former Yahoo exec and British national, will stay with them “through the transition and as an adviser to the company” – which doesn’t exactly sound like a long term arrangement.

His first act should be to change the name back to OpenAds. OpenX is simply too vague and awful (although it does signal that the company may try to expand beyond simply serving ads).

The trend of searching your social network for information is going to be with us for a while. Facebook is clearly interested in improving its own search engine to provide a relevant social graph for each individual. And others in this space include Search Wikia, Rollyo (search sites you trust) and Eureskster (customize a search a topic, and share and distribute the social search widget). In the UK, new startup RecommendBox is taking a different approach – building a database of searchable recommendations in a private network. Evernote (US) and Spheers (UK) are yet more attempts at this.

The latest entrant to this space is Nsyght a boostrapped UK startup now in public Beta which launched a low-level Alpha back in October. Nsyght wants to take your bookmarks and social network and use those to create more relevant search results.

The site features ‘Social Network Portability’ (xfn+hcard) support, so users can import their profile and friends data from digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. Users can also import or export to del.icio.us or ma.gnolia and simpy.

Try a search on “iPhone development” across Wikia, Nsyght and Google. Nsyght comes off pretty well – and they don’t have anywhere close to Wikia’s funding.

The new public beta has a clean, Google-esque interface and a number of new features like Tag support and integration with the new Clickpass service. I’d say this is still a site for geeks/early adopters, but definitely one to watch. There’s a longer review on TechCrunch UK.

Sign up now for the CrunchNetwork Mobile Meet-up for free booze, prizes, and a chance to rub shoulders with the members of the TechCrunch, CrunchGear, and MobileCrunch teams.

We’re holding it upstairs at Red Sky @ 47 E 29th St in Manhattan [Map]. Doors open at 7pm, May 1, 2008 and close whenever our booze runs out.

The event will feature a special Nokia Demo Space with loaner N95s to document your revelry as well as giveaways from Nokia, Samsung, and a few other companies who shall remain nameless. That said, if you’d like to sponsor the event or supply giveaways, drop us a line at tips @ crunchgear dot com.

RSVP here and I look forward to seeing you at our par-tay.

Gold Sponsor

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Yahoo has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Tensa Kft., better known as IndexTools.

IndexTools offers web analytics software with a focus on delivering a “highly customizable and scalable analytics platform.” The service competes with other analytics providers as well as Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics.

Yahoo said in a statement that upon completion of the acquisition, IndexTools’ assets well be used to expand Yahoo’s set of online marketing services, with additional capabilities enabling third-party developers to monitor and optimize the traffic performance of their applications to follow later in the year.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed with the deal expected to be closed no later that June 30.

Meetro is finally coming out of the closet with the hosted forum solution we anticipated last October, and it’s pretty much what we expected it to be: a white label platform like Ning except without all that social networking humbo jumbo, just good old fashioned discussion threads.

The product, once codenamed “Makaha”, is now officially known as Lefora. The team behind Meetro has effectively abandoned Meetro for Lefora, dropping all development and support for “the world’s first location-aware IM client and real-time social network.”

Much of Lefora’s feature set should be familiar to anyone who used forums in the 90s (they haven’t changed much since then). But it also supports capabilities not found with many modern-day forum solutions, such as the ability to easily embed YouTube videos, files, and images. Lefora uses Amazon S3 storage to host files uploaded to its forums, currently with no storage caps.

Lefora also surfaces the hottest topics and most recent activity on a special homepage, in addition to providing the standard structural overview of a forum. Membership to one Lefora forum can be easily extended to membership of another, since all of them access the same user base.

The look and feel of Lefora forums can be customized extensively with CSS modifications, pre-made themes, and color adjustments. Categories and widgets, such as those for polls and hot topics, can be managed via drag-n-drop. The company’s working on an API that will allow developers to add their own widgets to the gallery, although you can already add your own custom, HTML-based widgets.

Moderation is an important element of forum management and Lefora has decided to build their own spam detection engine from the ground up. The engine is similar to Akismet and that used by Gmail in that it leverages data from many properties to detect and eliminate spam more effectively.

When we first wrote about Meetro’s plans, many commenters were skeptical that the web needed a Blogger for forums. CEO Paul Bragiel insists that forums are still very popular, with the top 2,000 forums boasting over 200m registered users.

He believes Lefora will not only make it easier to create forums, but it will “light them up” as well since the platform has been designed with SEO optimization in mind. Threads are given URLs that reveal their topic, as with blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of ones that look suspicious to search engines. If Lefora takes off, we might expect to see even more search results point to discussion threads.

In its current form, Lefora is a pretty solid product but not without its quirks, bugs, and inconveniences. The design editor could use some UI improvements and there’s no simple way to reset your password as a user. Also, Lefora has yet to feature some premium capabilities that more serious customers will demand, such as domain masking. But all in all, the service is off to a good start.

Join a test TechCrunch forum here.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for more than a few months knows I’m bullish on mobile social networking.

The space is wide open at this point – no one has created an application that has gotten enough traction to go mainstream. That’s partly because of tech limitations – browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations.

But it’s coming. A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

That requires a social network that has presence, location and contextual information about you. It needs to know where you are (via GPS or triangulation), if you are in business or personal mode, and similar information for the people around you. It also needs, at a basic level, the ability to sort and browse the people around you based on their picture and name, and what they are looking for (dating, investments, job, friendship). Once this network is established, you’ll know everyone’s name who’s around you (if they choose to share it), and enough basic information to jog your memory if you know them, or meet them if there’s mutual interest. Poking someone on Facebook is great, but “poking” them when you’re in the same bar as them can result in much more immediate social gratification.

The mobile social network that wins will go way beyond, say, Facebook’s iPhone site, which doesn’t leverage location information, or help you meet people around you.

So when mobile social network startups reach out to us, we give them a lot of attention. I waded through a bunch of them in September 2007, and followed up with a look at LimeJuice in December.

Frankly, MySpace and Facebook could lock up this space simply by focusing on it, but as far as I can tell from discussions with execs at both companies, they’re more focused on each other than in dominating the mobile space. That creates an incredible vacuum for a startup.

Start With The iPhone

In February I wrote a post called “Will There Be A (Successful) iPhone-Only Social Network?” and presented an argument that the iPhone SDK presented a compelling opportunity to launch a mobile social network while avoiding the chicken and egg problem that any new network, and particularly a mobile network, would encounter. iPhone penetration in Silicon Valley, and among early adopters, is so high that the application could spread virally among those communities. As the network gains traction, it could expand to Google’s Android platform and grow from there.

iPhone users are the perfect group to launch the network to. They’re passionate and elitist, and will like the idea of being in an iPhone-only club. Go to a party and see a picture and first name of everyone there who’s holding an iPhone – then meet them and add them as friends. Then, once mutual friendship is established, see those people wherever they are in the world, along with presence information telling you what they’re thinking, or up to.

I believe in the idea so much that I explored putting together a team to build a basic network on top of the iPhone SDK. But I abandoned that idea last week when I saw a live demo, on the iPhone, of an upcoming social network that does everything I called for in that February post.

It’s Coming

The startup behind the new application won’t let me disclose their name yet. But the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.

Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going. And the startup thinks they’ve found a way around the fact that third party iPhone applications can’t run in the background (meaning you’d have to have the application open, and not use any other iPhone features, to run the social network and see others). They explained the work around in general terms to me, but asked that it remain confidential for now.

As I said, I saw the app running on an iPhone and even the early prototype left me speechless. It will, I believe, prove to be very popular, and very valuable.

The image shows a mockup of the functionality I saw working live on the phone (I should be able to show a photo or video of it running in the next week or two as well). Look for a launch when the iPhone app store opens this summer.

Credit for that awesome image at top of post is to Hank Grebe at MediaSpin.