Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

Our top stories this week were about cutting the strings that tie us to our desks. And also about stalking celebrities at SXSW. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format. Sponsor Story of the Week: Leaving your desk for the cloud, a bike or someplace you’d rather not say. Put.io Turns Torrents Into Streams [Invites] Bicycling Directions, Trails Come to Google Maps Chatroulette Creator Coming to America? 6 Thoughts About Location Madness SXSW 2010 for Web Celeb Stalkers More coverage and analysis of location-based technology Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com , Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates – only $295. Mobile Web Twitter Location? Thanks, But No Thanks Is the iPhone Still More Personal than Professional? Japan’s Largest Telco Goes OpenID More Mobile Web coverage Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey , and yours truly, Richard MacManus , ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell , the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City. Internet of Things Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds? More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google Wave Extensions Gallery Launches Chasing Real-Time Raindrops in an Ocean of Content Google’s Mobile Product Search Now Shows Real-Time Local Inventory More Real-Time Web coverage . Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 10 Principles For Not Killing Your Startup All the Small Things: Facebook Demonstrates How to Get Big Results From Little Changes First Look at TechStars Historical Results Data ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. International Blackberry Outage Goes Into Day 2 Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. SXSW 2010 for Cloud Lovers Cloud Religion: Do’s, Do Not’s, and a Glimpse of Nirvana Cisco in the Core: Preparing for the Next Generation Internet That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

Once upon a time, smartphones were mostly about connecting busy professionals with their email accounts while on the go. Now that smartphones have reached the mainstream consumer market, however, people are looking for more than just email access – and a surprisingly large number of smartphones hardly ever leave their owners’ homes. According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home. Sponsor As we noted last October , when they leave their homes, a lot of consumers with iPhones and phones that use Google’s Android operating system are now also using their devices to compare prices and look up reviews while they are out shopping. Compete looked a bit further into this market and found that more than 35% of consumers with smartphones would be interested in receiving coupons on their devices. Another 29% would like to be able to scan barcodes with their phones and get more information about the product as well as access to coupons and other promotions. Location-Aware Coupons While it doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of consumers would like to receive coupons, one surprising result from Competes report is that 21% of respondents would like to get SMS alerts with promotions when they walk by a store. Another 15% also would like to receive ads via SMS. Chances are that a lot of marketers would like to offer these kinds of location-aware ads and coupons that catch a consumer while they are already out shopping and close to a retailer. At the same time, though, most modern smartphones don’t allow developers to create these kind of applications. The iPhone, for example, doesn’t (yet) allow developers to run application in the background, which would be necessary if a developer wanted to create a service that could send out ads via SMS based on your location. Discuss

When MySpace announced earlier this week that they had now established themselves as the number one social networking application on the Android platform and the number three download overall, needless to say, we were a bit shocked. After all, (with no offense to MySpace intended), there are more Facebook users than MySpace users in the world. It’s just a simple fact. So how did this happen? Is the MySpace Android app that much better than Facebook’s? Are Android users more interested in MySpace for some reason? Are they younger than other mobile users and therefore choosing MySpace over Facebook? As it turns out, the truth is that measuring the mobile downloads of official applications may not be mean anything when it comes to measuring the success of social networking sites. Sponsor After scratching our heads for a good ten minutes, we decided to reach out to a mobile expert for help. Peter Farago of mobile analytics firm Flurry had a few ideas, all of which seem more than plausible. Theory #1: Third-Party Apps On the Android platform, there are over ten third-party applications which allow social networking users access to Facebook outside of the Facebook official app or mobile website. This means that thousands upon thousands of Facebook users are downloading other Facebook applications which are not being counted towards the official app’s total. Meanwhile, there is only one third-party MySpace application, so most of the downloads from MySpace users are going to the official app. Theory #2: Facebook Pre-Installs The Facebook application is pre-installed on the Droid, the most popular Android handset. It’s highly likely that those pre-installed copies of the Facebook app are not being counted as downloads on the Android marketplace. In addition, the Facebook application is included on the Android 2.0 mobile platform , alongside other popular apps like Amazon and Pandora. So again, that’s another potential area where Facebook application downloads are not being counted. Theory #3: Mobile Web Use Another theory, (this one ours not Farago’s), is that some Facebook and MySpace users don’t access the sites via apps – they do so via the customized mobile websites. Facebook, for example, has two mobile alternatives to the official app – m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com. For personal reasons, some Android owners may actually prefer accessing Facebook via these sites instead of by way of the app itself – an app which, unlike its iPhone counterpart, points to the mobile website when you interact with some of its functions, a regular complaint among Android users. In fact, many users actually consider the MySpace app to be the more polished of the two. Theory #4: All of the Above MySpace claims that its popularity on the Android is due to “deep integration with the Android platform” and, in their press release , the company mentions the multiple MySpace homescreen widgets for things like voice-enabled updates and photo uploads. The release also notes that the MySpace user base is highly engaged, with 70% of the mobile app users checking in three or more times per day. However, these are probably not the major reasons contributing to the app’s popularity on the charts, where it now ranks #3 overall . It’s more likely that the combination of factors described above have more to do with where MySpace stands today on Android. Mystery solved. Discuss

Urban Airship , a Portland, Oregon based iPhone “push notifications as a service” company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. “We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future,” the company said, “and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them.” If you’ve seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you’ve seen Urban Airship’s service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad. Sponsor Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company’s cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning: We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS. Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry’s own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn’t ready yet. “We’ll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection,” the company says. That’s easier said than done. Richardson: “We’re taking it slow to make sure that we do it right.” The downside to using a service like this of course is that it’s a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that. Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . Discuss

Phonebooth.com , a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile , provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees. Sponsor It’s worth noting that Bandwidth.com , the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company’s VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers. Features in Phonebooth’s free version : Free local phone number for your business Includes an auto attendant (Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support…etc.) Unlimited extensions for your employees or partners Read your voicemail, with VM-to-email & text transcription 200 free minutes of inbound calling (6¢ additional) Includes new Contact Us Plus feature A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth’s basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones. Phonebooth’s users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn’t currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth’s roadmap. Contact Plus Widget In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses – Contact Us Plus – that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth’s VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth’s users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget. Discuss