moose

Poor, poor Jeff. He attended last night's PEPCOM event, a showcase of this holiday season's tech goodies, and left without snagging a free Jawbone headset. Not to rub it in, but I, Dan the Mantern, will be testing mine out this evening. It was a slow news week for The 404, but today's show gets a pick-me-up from B-Sox and Morning Moose, rock jocks for Lazer 103.3 FM in Des Moines, Iowa.

B-Sox and Moose, we love you guys, you're multitalented and witty, but you blew whatever shreds of decency were left at the 404. We know it felt great to be free from all those censorship rules and regulations on a "licensed" broadcast station (they can't even say "goddamn") but, come on, think of the children. All jokes aside, it was a hilarious show, the guys "went there," and we all had a good laugh. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday, if we're not canceled...

Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.

Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.

9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.

Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.… Read more

The Smart Surveillance System (S3) from IBM integrates video search with real-time analysis.

Previously used in testing by governments, law enforcement and businesses, IBM announced Tuesday that the S3 is now available to the public. The S3 can be used to search through hours of stored surveillance video for a specific object or action, or be set to notice when that item appears on the screen.

"One of the coolest things is that it allows you to describe what's interesting. One of the biggest problems with surveillance is that 99 percent of it is boring," said Charles … Read more