We all know how influential Apple can be. In the first weekend of the 3G iPhone release over one million units were sold. When I was in line for the first iPhone last year, I was standing in line with super-blogger, Robert Scoble. Here’s a post he shot off while we waited in line together. I think Robert Scoble is a pretty smart dude. I asked him how important the iPhone launch was in terms of milestones in technology. I remember exactly what he said (even a year later), “these only come around once in a while - this is as important as the Windows 95 launch.” At the time, I didn’t realize it. But, he was right. The iPhone launch was a big deal not just in terms of gadgetry but in terms of bringing the web, the REAL web to your pocket. The effect of the iPhone isn’t just felt by iPhone owners, it’s also felt by nearly every new mobile phone purchaser. Whether you have the new Samsung Instinct or the Blackberry Bold there are elements that that are uniquely iPhone.

So, last Friday morning I woke up at 5am. My wife looked at me like I was totally insane (and with the loving patience that spouses of gadget freaks must endure) and I set out to the mall to hit up an AT&T store. I arrived and realized I was number 30 in line. Everyone was excited. There were an equal number of existing iPhone owners and new iPhone candidates. I thought that the 3G iPhone wouldn’t be as big of a deal as the original - after all, it’s not that different than the original iPhone. I was incorrect. Hundreds of people filed into the mall. Most of them didn’t get iPhones. I didn’t stick around to experience the disappointment. I got mine. It’s white 16GB and named Snowball. I won’t go through the activation problems I had - suffice to say I was without a phone for about 4 hours (which is unimaginable - I’m jittery just thinking about it).

My iPhone did finally activate and I was in love all over again. The most remarkable change was the new firmware which included the app store. There were over 500 applications. Some seemed better than others. But, there were some real quality apps. A post on ReadWriteWeb really describes this iPhone release - it’s about the apps. Sure, you can have those apps on your first generation iphone, but many of the location-based apps won’t be as fulfilling. Also, the 3G network really adds value to many of the apps.

My favorite app right now is the Pandora app. Pandora allows you to stream music over the web given individual music channels that you create. So, if you really like Elvis Costello you can create an Elvis Costello channel and Pandora will play Elvis Costello and artists like him. They do a great job of playing music you’ll like. I set up the Pandora app on my iPhone 3G, plugged it in to my car stereo and started streaming channels in my car. I drove all over the place, streaming music to my iPhone and listening to it on my car stereo.

I was so excited about it. Pandora streaming to my phone while driving. It’s another one of those moments when I realized that the future is about Web Application delivered to your devices. Always slightly ahead of the curve, Apple is pushing the envelope. It makes me think that Splashtop is really in the right place at the right time. Our emphasis on Web Applications as the core of our lightning fast environment is the right bet. If any of our readers have an iPhone or use iTunes, I’d be really interested in which apps you find exciting.

Just for fun, here’s an episode of “Will It Blend?” featuring the new iPhone 3G:

update: Techcrunch wrote an article today that similarly praised Pandora.

As part of our ongoing series of posts about how to use Splashtop to its full advantage, I wanted to tell you about Mahalo.

Mahalo is a “human-powered search engine” that competes with traditional algorithm based search engines like Google and Yahoo!. The theory behind Mahalo (as I understand it) is that while Google may return lots of relevant keyword results, it is also cluttered with advertisements and spam. Mahalo seeks to avoid spammy results by having actual human people submit and review results for a given search term to make sure they are truly relevant and useful.

If you think that sounds labor intensive, you’re right. But users can sign up for an account and submit results they think make sense; other users vote on the relevance, making it a a very social, user-driven experience. Mahalo was started by internet mainstay Jason Calacanis - we actually met Jason at Blog Haus during this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

Comscore shows that their popularity and traffic is skyrocketing - they have over 2 million monthly page-views now. From their own “about us” page:

We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle

Search results for certain categories, such as products, travel, cars, and health, are cluttered with people selling things, making it difficult to find great information on those topics. We focus on those topics and provide organized results that offer great links for every type of info you could need.

My own experience is that for very generic searches Mahalo has lots of results, most of which are strongly relevant. For very specific or esoteric search terms there may not much in the way of Mahalo results, but they will still display Google results, or returns from other search engines.

Another very worthwhile feature of Mahalo is Mahalo Daily, a video blog hosted by internet personality Veronica Belmont. Mahalo Daily videos are usually tech-related and very topical. They’re also pretty fun. Here’s todays:

Splashtop, as you know, allows you to instantly boot up your computer and access the internet. Our full-featured Splashtop browser will let you make use of the whole variety of rich internet applications available out there in the ether. Mahalo is one such, and well worth visiting.

Splashtop doesn’t have much in the way of storage space for files and media in the current version shipping on Asus Motherboards. That’s not to say, it won’t in the future! But right now you can’t access much unless it’s online. I tend to look at this as a case of the glass being half-full given the plethora of online productivity tools on the market today. If you haven’t given one a shot yet, whether you’re a Splashtop user or not, I highly suggest trying to create you next document in one of the two productivity tools I’m going to review over the next couple days. Today, I’m going to review a couple of the offerings from Zoho.

Zoho Writer

Don’t be overwhelmed when you get to the Zoho homepage. They have a myriad of online apps, all of which work fairly well. If Zoho CRM doesn’t mean much to you, I might suggest starting out with Zoho Writer. The image pictured below is of a Zoho Writer Template for a resume. As you can see, this online tool does 90% of what Word or OpenOffice does. Importing documents is also very easy. This is important if your document started in another format. I imported a document that was larger than 1MB and Zoho handled it well. There is currently no limit to the amount of storage space you can use for your documents. However, Zoho claims it will institute a 1GB limit once they are out of beta. My only criticism of Zoho Writer is the look and feel of the interface, which feels somewhat disjointed. However, this is a small criticism given the overall utility it provides for free.

Zoho Sheets

In my opinion, Zoho sheets excels in every way (come on, that’s a great pun). Whereas, the look and feel of Zoho writer feels a bit disjointed, Zoho sheets is as close to perfect as any online spreadsheet program. I get the distinct feeling that this was developed by a completely different team, led by a UI-focused Product Manager (who wasn’t afraid to borrow interface cues from Microsoft). I imported several different spreadsheets into Zoho Sheets, some with multiple tabs and the application handled it perfectly. With over 300 functions, I’m guessing Zoho can handle most of what you might want to do with a spreadsheet. For me, calculating expenses and the occasional revenue model is about all the spreadsheet power I need.

Give Zoho a shot for your next document or spreadsheet. Both of these programs allow for document sharing and collaboration. This makes more sense than emailing documents back and forth wondering if you have the latest version. Tomorrow, I’ll review Zoho’s biggest competitor - Google Docs!

Thanks, Rick, for the post inspiration!

Review by CNet/Webware
Hardware for Webware: A motherboard with embedded Firefox

-Splashtop.com Admin

We weren’t supposed to launch until Wednesday but a bunch of articles have already started to surface about Splashtop. We are a bit overwhelmed by the attention and excited that readers of popular publications such as Engadget and BoingBoing are interested in our Instant Desktop environment. We are trying to track both the enthusiasm and the suggestions in order to create a better product. We haven’t even launched and I already feel like we’re behind on features.

Nonetheless, please keep the commentary coming. I will publish every comment on this site unless it is vulgar or inappropriate (those just go to close friends). Here’s a quick breakdown about where we’re at and what Splashtop is about…

Also, to clarify one thing: Splashtop is branded as Express Gate on certain motherboards built by Asus. These are rather high-end motherboards and are the first products to market with our technology inside (positive comments on blogs greatly appreciated). Our goal is to have Splashtop on many more notebooks and desktops by Q1 of next year.

The point of Splashtop is to get you surfing the web seconds after you press that power button. Many people have asked what other applications we might support in the future. While we’re excited to support many more applications, we’re starting with two (Splashtop Browser and Skype) and we will add more in the future.

Some things I hope to address in the next couple of days are important subjects which have been brought up by the press and user commentary. These include allowing outside developers to build complementary applications and being able to update the Splashtop environment from within Splashtop itself. Thanks for your interest in Splashtop and keep the comments coming.