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In a recent interview, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told technology reporter Om Malik that his company was “very bullish” on mobile, even going so far as to say “we will embrace every device.” That’s a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment for years but has yet to launch anything for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site. Now, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there’s a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. “We don’t think about one device only,” Kilar said. However, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it’s not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard. Sponsor Problem A: Hulu’s Business Model Needs Work The fact that Hulu exists at all is somewhat of an amazement. Through tenuous connections with major studios, the collaborative, experimental effort to bring streaming TV to web (and make it profitable) has managed to attract a number of users in the U.S. Although the audience size varies widely depending on who’s counting, the company has managed to become a household name thanks to eye-catching commercials on NBC featuring actors from the network’s top shows. But there’s a problem facing Hulu: in-video advertising is, apparently, not as profitable as once hoped. In fact, it’s just too expensive , says Marc Ruxin, the Chief Innovation Officer for ad agency network McCann Worldgroup. Hulu has been aware of this problem, though, and has been hinting towards the launch of a subscription service , with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch telling an investor conference last fall that the company, was looking at “adding subscription services and pay per view” options. Through the subscription model, Hulu could potentially generate enough revenue to keep the studios happy and maybe even encourage them to offer up more programming. Unfortunately, the subscription model has yet to launch and the profits from video ads have been far too lean for some Hulu participants. Recently, for example, Viacom pulled two of the top shows – The Daily Show and the Colbert Report – from the site, claiming that they simply weren’t earning enough money via the advertising model currently in place. Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said that “on the current economic model for Hulu, there’s just not much in it for us to continue at this time.” And so the situation degrades. So what is Hulu doing now? It’s trying to attract more viewers to its site with the launch of ” If I Can Dream ,” an original series that premiered earlier this month. The fact that they’re now making the foray into this sort of online programming is somewhat worrying. After all, if hit video webisodes alone made for a profitable service, then YouTube would have achieved profitability ages ago, instead of (maybe) getting there this year , five years post-launch. Let’s face it, original programming is a bonus for Hulu users, but it’s not going to take the place of hot shows like the now-departed Comedy Central fare. Problem B: Will Apple Allow a Hulu App on the iPhone/iPad? Another problem? Hulu has been planning to delay its iPhone app launch until a subscription model was in place, according to earlier reports . But with the biggest names pulling out, subscriptions could be a harder sell. Still, even if Hulu was able to make subscriptions happen, there are no guarantees that Apple would ever allow them into the iTunes store, especially considering they’re offering a competing product. (See: Google Voice banishment from the iPhone , for example). Meanwhile, Hulu’s online site doesn’t work in the iPhone’s web browser because it was built in Flash. If Apple rejects the Hulu app from iTunes, the company’s other option is encoding all their site’s content in H.264 and make that available via HTML5, the new web language that offers streaming video sans plugin. Since this has already been done, a Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5 – video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That’s no simple process. What’s Hulu Doing Now? So is this the plan Hulu has decided on now? It’s hard to know for sure. Like Apple, the company is incredibly secretive about their plans and product roadmap, often refusing to respond to calls and emails entirely, even to say “no comment.” And yet, the Hulu iPhone app exists. We’ve spoken to someone who’s seen it…but that was ages ago. For all we know, iPhone/iPad app plans have since been scrapped to work on a new solution that works around any potential Apple restrictions. But sources inside Hulu have clammed up lately, meaning they’re either building something top, top secret…or perhaps nothing at all. We hope it’s the former, because frankly, an iPad without Hulu is a sad, sad affair. But will we ever see a real app? At this point, we’re not holding our breath. Discuss

A ReadWriteWeb Guide OMG! Kevin Rose just touched my shirt! Don’t lie – we know you get butterflies at the thought of bumping into iJustine or Robert Scoble at a tech conference. We’ve pulled together a nice little cheat sheet just for you, friends. Whether you want a simple handshake, and autograph on your iPhone or a chance to pitch your idea for the Next Big Web App, here’s ten places, panels and parties where you can track down the Internet famous at SXSW 2010. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments! Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine Longtime lifestreaming queen iJustine is famously an Apple fangirl, but it’s Intel that’s giving you the key to tracking her down at SXSW. She’s and Intel Insider, and she might be stopping by some of the Intel Insider events , like Frank Gruber’s Johnny Cash party or Chris Heuer’s Social Media Clubhouse . We don’t have hard and fast details on Ezarik’s whereabouts, but wherever she is, she’ll probably be tweeting, so keep an eye on her Twitter accounts . Christopher Poole Pool may not be a household name in and of himself, but there’s nary an Internet user who hasn’t been in some way effected by the fun and foul play on 4chan. “4chan – often referred to as a ‘meme factory’ – has been responsible for the creation of countless Internet memes but is perhaps best known for its exploits. In this conversation, we’ll explore the game mechanics of online communities. What fosters creativity in an online community? What design elements can we incorporate to increase interaction? How is the game played?” Baratunde Thurston In “How to Be Black,” The Onion web editor and star of Popular Science’s Future Of series Baratunde Thurston will “touch on the black online experience (if there is such a thing) included memes, statistics on usage patterns, popular destinations and issues of representation. For example, are black people as represented among the creators, developers and builders of our future or are we more consumer oriented than average?” Violet Blue Our favorite sex blogger will be kicking off SXSW with a presentation on “How to Not Be a Douchebag at SXSW Aimed at both first-time and long-time attendees to SXSW Interactive, this biting and humorous, yet useful panel takes a look at the common actions and behaviors to avoid if you don’t want to be described as ‘doing it wrong.’” Kevin Rose This year, the Digg founder returns to host Diggnation Live at Stubb’s. The Bigg Digg Shindigg was certainly one of the largest events at SXSW 2009, with fans crowding around the large outdoor stage to take pictures and watch Rose shoot the Diggnation episode. But don’t expect to meet the man himself unless you’ve got VIP status for the party. Chris Messina In his talk, “ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?,” Messina will explore the nuances of the real-time web. “From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the ’stream’ has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.” Leah Culver This young developer and successful entrepreneur will be hosting the Web Framework Battle Royale. “Which web framework will rule them all? As an audience member you pick the winner! We will present an introduction to a variety of web frameworks including Rails, Django, Catalyst and Sinatra. You can vote for the best web framework in categories such as URL handling, database integration, forms, HTML templating, documentation, testing and deployment.” Gary Vaynerchuk The WineLibraryTV founder is a true Web guru and an inspiration to entrepreneurs and content creators around the globe. He’ll be giving one of his signature, unforgettable presentations again this year as part of the Interactive Speakers Series. Evan Williams Three years after his web app hit it big at SXSW 2007, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams takes the main stage to be interviewed by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque in front of a live audience . All we have to say is that you’d better get there early if you don’t want to get stuck watching a simulcast in an adjacent room! Molly Wood A last-minute stand-in for Natali Del Conte at this event, BOL founder Wood has a fanbase of her own. “CNET’s Buzz Out Loud will broadcast live from SXSW. While discussing the day’s tech news, hosts Tom Merritt, Jason Howell, Molly Wood and others will chat with the audience and invite special guests to talk about what’s happening at the show and beyond.” Bonus Round! If you stalk him on Twitter, Foursquare, Plancast and Gowalla, you might get to bump into Robert Scoble , as well. Or, you can catch him at the Rackspace party Monday evening. And of course, while we don’t consider ourselves celebrities, the RWW crew will be present and accounted for at the PBS/NPR/RWW party Sunday night ! Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for web celeb stalkers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we’ve mentioned in the past , Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that. Sponsor With the relaunch of their iPhone app, Layar rejoins acrossair , Wikitude and others now vying for elbow room in the mobile AR space. Layar boasts one of the largest collections of points-of-interest (POI) data sets and now that library is available again on the iPhone. The usual suspects can be found on Layar, such as Flickr photos, Google search, YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles, but one of the more unique layers on the app is Foursquare integration. Users can use the Layar AR viewfinder to find nearby Foursquare locations and by linking the app to their account can check in without leaving Layar. There is also a feature in each layer to view entries on a map, or in list view. The map is especially handy for Foursquare integration because Foursquare’s own app disappointingly doesn’t support a map view. An equally interesting layer to investigate is the Recovery.org layer which shows you which U.S. organizations in your area received funding (and the amount they received) from the Recovery Act. “The new Layar Reality Browser has a re-engineered engine under the hood. This new engine makes the application light, stable and very quick,” the company said on its blog. “It is ready to handle all the current layers and it is a good base to realize all of our exciting future plans.” Layar’s return to the iPhone platform comes just in time for the company’s new layer marketplace which will allow developers to charge users for their content; in other words, an App Store for mobile AR. If Subway wants to create a layer with all of their locations and charge $.99 for it’s use, they or any other company will easily be able to do that. One could assume that Layar will make use of Apple’s in-app purchase functionality on the iPhone, but it would be sad to see Layar lose a percentage of their cut on the purchases to Apple. If anything, that could raise prices on the layers themselves, but that’s a whole other argument. This could be a huge step forward for the mobile AR space. As these applications become more useful, more refined and more popular, companies will be excited to participate in providing branded content in an AR experience. Expect an announcement from Layar in the next few weeks about the launch of this exciting new platform, but in the meantime, iPhone users (3GS only) can go snag Layar’s free app (iTunes link) in the App Store. Discuss

What’s the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there. We’ve already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November , but Cascaad’s SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates. Sponsor Cascaad has released its first beta of the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization , including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”. The SuperTweet provides users with “an at-a-glance view of additional information about stories, things and places discussed in the message, without forcing them to leave your application,” according to the API documentation . The API allows developers to parse a tweet, identify separate “entities” and then gather external contextual information on those entities. It then adds this information to the original tweet to create a “SuperTweet”. If a tweet mentions Lady Gaga, for example, the name “Lady Gaga” becomes a link to a biography pulled from semantic-web database Freebase . Next to that, the SuperTweet gives an affiliate link to Amazon, where you can go buy Lady Gaga CDs. And if a link to an article about Lady Gaga is included in the tweet, the SuperTweet provides a thumbnail preview. In addition to wrapping these entities in contextual information, the SuperTweet API unwraps shortened URLs back into the original link so the user has an idea of what they’re clicking on. And, although not yet available in this release, the Conversation API will put the tweet in the context of a conversation, providing access to other public messages in the same conversation thread. The challenging part of all of this is that the API needs to parse a rather variable piece of content – a user created tweet – and find the appropriate meta data. Just like a search engine, it needs to recognize misspelled words or other slight variations to find the proper content. One Twitter developer we spoke with said that, while they like the idea of outside information being added to the base tweet, they have found the contextual results to be hit or miss. It would seem that the concept is solid, but the execution is still in the difficult learning stages. While we like what we’ve seen of the SuperTweet so far, it will only be worthwhile if it can provide accurate results. If we tweet about the iPhone and it links to the Amazon page for the iPad, the service will fall flat on its face. Get this part right, though, and we’re willing to be you’re going to start seeing Super Tweets in some Twitter apps soon. Discuss

Just about a month after acquiring the popular iPhone email client reMail , Google and the reMail team have decided to open source the application’s code. While current reMail users were able to use the app, Google decided to pull the application from the App Store after the acquisition. Given that the reMail team was joining Google to work on projects unrelated to reMail, this looks like a smart move. The source code is already available on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License . Sponsor When Google acquired reMail, we noted that this was a rather strange acquisition for Google, given that reMail is a native iPhone app and that Google is moving away from native apps. If anything, today’s move towards open-sourcing the application clearly shows that Google acquired reMail for the team behind it and not for the application or the technology behind the app (which makes it easier for iPhone users to search their emails). Open Source and the iPhone As reMail’s Gabor Cselle notes in his blog post today, open-sourcing this app will hopefully allow other developers to take some of the app’s core features (handling IMAP, attachments etc.) and use it for their own ideas without having to reinvent the wheel. If You are interested in getting in touch with Cselle about using the source code, head over to the reMail Google Group . Currently, there are only a few open source iPhone applications on the market. The most well-known open source iPhone project is probably the WordPress iPhone app . Discuss