Bing’s iPad app goes live in the Apple App Store this morning, with Bing’s signature focus on visual search in full force. The new app will feature a different high-resolution homepage every morning, with more details about the image revealed through image hotspots.

The app amplifies Bing’s strengths, namely its visual and design aspects. It offers a grid view of searches and full page image previews. Content like weather, news, stock quotes is visible from its homescreen. Finance nerds can monitor up to 18 ticker symbols at a time, and keep tabs on their stocks also from the page.

The map search option also provides a variety of map views such as bird’s eye, road and aerial and a new “Trends” feature, exclusive to the Bing iPad app, gives you a visual display of the top ten trending Bing searches.

Engineered around touch, the “magazine-inspired” app also allows you to swipe between search results and the web underscoring the iPad’s potential for providing a new kind of browsing experience. Emphasizing this even further is the fact that you can now search with voice.  Yes, voice.

You can download the app here.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-u..." target="_new"title="Touch and Decide: Introducing Bing for iPad">Video: Touch and Decide: Introducing Bing for iPad</a>

As we wrote in December, LinkedIn finally gave users an Android app after launching apps for iOS and BlackBerry platforms. Today, LinkedIn’s Android app has exited beta and arrived on the Android Market.

The free application features six modules, including the ability to view updates from your professional network, including updates from newly established connections, changes to people's profiles, and articles and information being shared by your contacts. The sharing and social features of the app are new, and you can now share news updates to Twitter and comment on shared items. The app also includes unified search across both direct connections and the entire LinkedIn network.

The app allows users to access the profiles of your connections, and you can send connections a message directly from the application. Messaging has been fully integrated in the app in the new version, and you can now send and receive messages from the app. Additionally, you can accept outstanding network invitations.

Another new feature is the addition of the "People You May Know" feature, which provides suggestions for new connections. In addition, this is the first launch of the app on Google’s marketplace; previously the app was only available via LinkedIn’a Android group.

While I haven’t tested the app out yet, the potential for LinkedIn to create a sleek, feature-rich app is great after the network snagged Android senior software engineer Cedric Beust from Google last year.

Managing freelancers and projects can be a challenge and a new startup is launching today to help managers sort through the chaos of the freelance hiring. FrankWorks, is opening up as an enterprise site that allows producers to manage freelance staff and projects.

Frank’s recruiting module allows you to import your contacts into the platform so that you can assemble all of your freelance contacts in a single place, see their current availability, and reserve them for project needs. FRANK's intuitive interface lets you organize your freelance contacts by specialty, location, and rate.

You can then book freelancers for upcoming jobs, through the platform (FrankWork will send freelancers emails to join the platform). It’s important to note that FrankWork is purely focused on hiring and managing projects vs. paying freelancers.

FrankWork was founded by Lance Sanders, who got the idea for the platform having been a freelancer and having managed freelance resources for the entertainment sector in LA. He said that the freelance hiring process can be very disjointed when it comes to production work, and built FrankWork to suit these needs. While Freelancer.com helps you source Freelancers, Sanders says that the web is lacking an actual management platform for sorting through hiring your contacts for various projects. FrankWork is based on a subscription model which ranges from $19 to $99 per month.

One of the biggest startup cliches is that every other startup wants to become a platform for other startups to build on. But to Christopher Poole, the founder of Canvas and 4Chan, that is the wrong approach. “People get caught up in trends—game mechanics, building a platform,” he tells Chris Dixon in the Founder Stories video above. Instead of trying to copy what works for others, founders should “focus on building what you love, focus on the product and building the community.”

He doesn’t understand “this obsession with building platforms. Focus on building something worth scaling. You don’t even have something worthy of an API yet. Focus on users and have them fall in love with your thing.” Amen.

Poole (aka Moot) also talks about his “boring” Internet habits and how he went to California to recruit the team to build Canvas, his current startup, and brought them back to New York City. In the video below, he talks about how he’s helping to “keep kids off the street” and into startups with HackNY, which is doing a student-only Hackathon this weekend (sign up here), and his work as an adviser to Lerer Ventures.

This is Part III of this interview. Watch Part I and Part II, or the entire uncut interview. (Subscribe to Founder Stories on iTunes).

SohoOS is a cloud platform for small businesses where they can manage everything from invoicing to billing (without the need to open a merchant account), CRM, email and SMS broadcast, a sales flow manager, as well as document and project management. Since debuting on TechCrunch nearly a year ago, over 20,000 businesses have become active accounts on SohoOS's platform.

In Tel Aviv for Techonomy3, I caught up with SohoOS’s Ron Daniel, founder and CEO, and Orit Mossinson, CMO.

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Barnes & Noble just announced that they’re opening their Nook platform to developers and will now begin accepting apps. If you thought this was a great opportunity to submit your “Fart Blaster” or “Ragdoll Boobies” app, think again: B&N will be running an “app review/acceptance process that will follow the company's content acceptance policies as with books to ensure the content is appropriate for the Barnes & Noble customer.”

Developers also have access to more debug modes on the Nook and a set of forums to talk about programming tips and tricks. All of these will be available at NookDeveloper.com.

Read more…

Few folks seem to remember that it was a just a few years ago that a consortium of handset manufacturers got together to form the Open Handset Alliance, an effort to create an open, free platform. This effort would eventually become Android and, back in 2007 when the OHA began, the platform’s success was far from secure.

Between 2001 and 2007, phone manufacturers had a problem. They had very few options when it came to operating systems and Windows Mobile and Symbian were in the catbird seat when it came to popular smartphones. Palm OS was still kicking during that period but if you wanted “smartphone” or, more precisely, “PDA phone” features you went with one of those two platforms.

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Ever wanted know the best way to get from point A to point B? rome2rio, headed by two ex-Microsoft engineers, is a search engine that attempts to do exactly that. Like an international Zoombu.co.uk or FromAtoB.com, the search is basically Google Maps with an added layer of multi-modal travel options.

“The airport to airport thing has been solved really well by Kayak and Hipmunk, so we want to do the other end like from the airport to where you want to go, cause no one goes on holiday at an airport,” says founder Michael Cameron.

Users can enter their starting point and destination in rome2rio’s map based UI, and rome2rio searches through flights, ferries, trains and driving routes to show you your transportation options for every leg. For example for a trip from San Francisco, CA to Athens, Greece rome2rio has presented me with the drive from my house to SFO (13.1 miles), a flight directly to Athens airport, and then a drive directly from the airport into Athens (42.9 kilometers) for $926. It also gives me the option of going through the airport in Thessaloniki and then taking  a train to Athens for $1,078+ dollars.

Searches on rome2rio like that from Budapest in Hungary to Antwerp provide you with a massive graph of all the different routes, and you can hover your mouse over the options and see specific airline flights before you even put in a date. Once you put in a date rome2rio crawls Kayak to find prices for 670 airlines around the world and as well as train options for Europe, China and India currently.

Founders Michael Cameron and Bernie Tschirren tell me that this service was inspired by the European plane vs. train dilemma, and a crop of startups searching across multiple modes of travel have popped out of Europe since oftentimes taking a plane versus a train there can mean a difference of hundreds of dollars. For example a search for Quebec City to Brussels on Orbitz provides you with airport to airport multihop flights that are over a $1000, Rome2rio suggests that you fly to Paris and then take the train, the total trip costing around $400.

Cameron and Tschirren plan on monetizing the service through commissions from flight sales, and like Hipmunk, want to avoid ads. They’re also planning on increasing their coverage area, to ground transport and trains in the US and want to provide more options like taxi services rates if you’d like to get a taxi from the airport. A version of the site for disaster events that impede travel, like the volcano eruption in Iceland, is also in the works, “We’ve got the data to be able to get you out of there … but we also have to wait for a disaster to happen.”

rome2rio is currently bootstrapped.

Exclusive - Boulder-based smart toy company Orbotix has raised $5 million in Series B financing from Foundry Group and Highway 12 Ventures as it prepares for a Fall launch of its Sphero, a robotic ball that can be controlled by iOS and Android smartphones.

Sphero is billed by the company as a new kind of entertainment device that combines play in the real world with games in the virtual world, creating a ‘mixed-reality experience’. Check out CrunchGear’s hands-on with the ball at CES 2011.

A 2010 TechStars graduate, Orbotix says it hopes to launch the Sphero by this year’s holiday season (reserve yours here). What you’d use it for, you ask? Just watch the video below.

Anyone with an iOS or Android device will be able to control and run programs for Sphero, courtesy of Bluetooth technology, and an open API will also allow developers to build their own programs for the little robotic ball, which, by the way, can glow in the dark in “thousands of different colors”. Cats and dogs worldwide will be enamored by this little bugger.

At launch, Sphero will be priced around $130, and include multiple games and applications.

Mark Solon of Highway 12 Ventures will be joining Foundry Group's Brad Feld on the company's board of directors as part of the financing deal.

Vaguely related: Finnish startup throws small ball at gaming console giants (video)

I can’t help but be amused that the personal-security platform Guardly, which launches today, was born in virtually-crime-free Toronto, where I live, and where I’ve never encountered anything more fearsome than bad weather. (Q: How do you get 20 Canadians out of a pool? A: “C’mon, guys, get out of the pool.”)

Security is a big market, though: there are a lot of people out there who do have reason to feel unsafe. For instance, a few years ago I visited a friend who had to vary her routes to and from work every day, and check in with security by radio every night, for fear of kidnapping—because she worked for UNICEF in troubled Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A personal-security app that integrated into UNICEF’s systems would have been a big help. I expect NGOs and multinational corporations would be eager to deploy such a system for staff in crime-ridden cities like Nairobi, Port Moresby, and (God help them) Oakland.

Guardly is both platform and app. The platform will let authorities and a person’s “personal security network”—maybe friends and family, maybe corporate security—collaborate with them in real-time during an emergency situation; the app lets you alert both groups with the push of a button when something goes wrong. You can also use it to message your  emergency contacts, and share photos or other media with them. (Yes, that’s right, it’s both YAGMA (Yet Another Group Messaging App) and YAPSA (Yet Another Photo Sharing App). Would someone please write some common protocols for the YAGMAs and YAPSAs? This is getting ridiculous.) The iPhone version is available now, and Android and Blackberry are on tap shortly.

The platform is more interesting than the app: it makes sense not just for personal security, but for medical crises, natural disasters, and the like. (The vast majority of those rescued from the terrible earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 were saved by friends, family, and neighbors, not emergency responders.) Their freemium app model probably won’t sell like hotcakes in Toronto… but Guardly are wisely planning to internationalize to places like Mexico and Venezuela. Personal security networks—and apps—suddenly make a lot of sense in nations where the wealthiest 10-15% of the population have First World income and Third World security concerns, including corrupt and/or incompetent police.

Guardly are funded by a seed round raised from made-in-Canada consortion of Extreme Venture Partners and seven angel investors. Competitors: SOS Link (created in response to Vancouver’s nonstop random violence), Rave Mobile (spawned from the brutal gunplay of Framingham, Massachussetts), and JTrek (born of the bloody suburban horrors of Barrington, Illinois) all play in this space too. Guardly seems to be working hardest to integrate their app with security agencies, police services, the National Emergency Number Association, and corporate/university operations around the world, though — and for a security/emergency-management app, that integration is the killer feature. So to speak.

Innobell launching a texting app for Android phone, that adds another layer of apps on top of chat by allowing users to add and share maps to chats, YouTube videos, games and more. You can also wire money via PayPal within the app, send links and access and post Facebook photos to the group chats. You can access the app here.

So if you are chatting with a contact and want to post your location, you can simply add a map to the chat with your exact location. Or if you are chatting with a friend and want to share a YouTube video, you can access YouTube from within the IM chat, and post the video. You can also use the add-ons during calls with contacts.

Innobell’s founder Shai Magzimof has an interesting backstory. Originally enrolled in Y Combinator’s 2010 program, Magzimof was called for duty in the Israeli army and was forced to cut his program short. He eventually negotiated with the Israeli powers that be to take an extended period of time off (he plans to return to the army at some point his tour), so that he could develop Innobell.

Magzimof says that he is also exploring adding the ability to post Groupons, play multi player games (i.e. Poker), schedule a meetings with calendars, and share to-do lists. The startup hasn’t really managed to figure out monetization yet. For now Innobell plans to make money from affiliate fees from the sale of virtual goods within games, mobile commerce or group buying.

It’s important to note that the combination of calling and the apps will not work on CDMA Android phones, but is functional on LTE phones. The IM and add-on capabilities will work on all Android phones. Innobell, which has raised $100,000 in funding, is also exploring developing similar apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Exclusive - SocialGuide, a New York-based startup building a realtime ‘social TV guide’, has secured $1.5 million in funding led by a group of angel investors including Alex Zubillaga, the former head of digital strategy at Warner Music.

The capital will be used for technology developments and expanding key business relationships.

"The social TV space is nascent and is still being defined," said Sean Casey, founder and CEO of SocialGuide.

"This funding will allow us to continue on the path of creating a true social TV platform that goes beyond check-in, to driving tune-in and creating deep social engagement experiences for consumers and networks."

SocialGuide basically mines, filters, displays and ranks discussions happening on the most popular social networks about TV in real time, enabling users to discover new shows and interact with their friends, fellow fans and stars of their favorite shows.

From the looks of it, mobile apps are ‘coming soon’.

A site that, inexplicably, follows Apple’s retail stores, IfoAppleStore.com, posted a rumor that Apple’s top folks went to Russia to negotiate the rental of a two-floor Apple store in the rebuilt Hotel Moskva, the first in the country.

Senior vice president of retail Ron Johnson and vice president of real estate Bob Bridger visited Moscow at the end of March and toured the three-level retail space in the future Four Seasons Hotel. The two were seen examining a 16,000 square-foot, two-level space as a possible Apple store. At the time, no lease had been signed, but a decision could be made soon, sources say.

Read more…

Exclusively.In, a members-only niche flash sales site for fashion, jewelry and home decor from Indian artisans and designers, is expanding into a new vertical today— luxury travel in Asian countries. As we’ve written in the past, the site features high-end traditional Indian apparel as well as scarves, jewelry, handbags, crafts, paintings, photography and other home goods made by Indian designers.

Exclusively.In's first travel sale "From Palaces to Paradise" features four distinctive itineraries from South Asia. Sales include a stay at a heritage hillside boutique hotel in Udaipur, India; a stay at a holistic beachside resort in Kerala, India; and a vacation at a villa located in Koh Samui, Thailand.

Although the site caters to the Indian diaspora but it will be interesting if Exclusively.In will be able to appeal to a broad audience. Travel is definitely a vertical that could help the site expand. The company's co-founder and CEO Sunjay Guleria says the site has experienced strong demand from a broad base of consumers, not just the Indian diaspora, as "Indian-infused" fashion and decorations go mainstream. And Exclusively.In is growing at a 50 percent month-on-month rate already just in the US.

Guleria says that Exclusively.In, which has raised $2.8 million from Accel and others, will soon expand to selling in other countries, such as Canada and England. I sat down with Guleria to chat about the niche site and its expansion strategy.

Forgive the snarky headline, but history has shown that navigating a once-hot consumer Web company through the trough of the hype cycle is one of the hardest jobs in Silicon Valley. And very few come out with a billion winner on the other side. (Cough, cough, MySpace, Digg, Six Apart…)

But if anyone is going to pull a turn-around off at RockYou, it’s Lisa Marino. Marino joined RockYou in better days, when her husband Ro Choy was the company’s head of business development. Choy left to start his own thing, but Marino stayed on, continually taking on more and more sales and executive responsibility as the company began to crumble.

She took over as chief operating officer nine months ago, managing layoffs (including possibly RockYou’s founder Lance Tokuda) while she successfully recruited new gaming talent starting with senior VP of games Jonathan Knight. Likewise, she spent nine months cutting expenses dramatically, while managing to grow the top line more than 40% in the fourth quarter. Typically, those two don’t go hand-in-hand.

Presented with a much leaner, faster-growing social gaming company with plenty of cash in the bank, the board was pleased enough with Marino’s job to give her a promotion to CEO. But will these early victories be enough to turn the company around and differentiate itself from larger, sexier players like Zynga?

Marino tells us her hopes and fears for RockYou in the clip below.

GoldSpot Media, a privately held startup that specializes in mobile rich media and video advertising solutions this morning announced that it has closed $12.05 million in series B funding from Exa Ventures and Berg Enterprises. The company earlier raised $3 million.

GoldSpot Media offers a mobile ad platform called miSpot, a self-serve solution for publishers and advertisers to create, manage, distribute and track mobile ad campaigns – both in-app and mobile web – across a wide variety of smartphone and tablet platforms.

Customers include Hewlett-Packard, Audi, Toshiba, KIA Motors, Brother and more.

The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with additional sales offices in New York and Japan, and an R&D center in Bangalore, India.

Japan’s International Rescue System Institute (IRS) unveiled a new rescue robot that can be used to take over the work from humans in high-radiation areas. Not too surprisingly, the institute announced the remote-controlled machines will be used to scope out the situation in various places at the damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

The IRS says the robots can withstand radiation (up to 20 Sv currently) and are also water-proof to a certain extent (driving through puddles, for example, is supposed to be no problem).

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Mobile app promotion is becoming a big business, as brands are looking to boost user acquisition and downloads via in-app promotions. Today, Fiksu, formerly known as Fluent Mobile, is launching a user acquisition platform that aims to help brands attract large volumes of loyal users and slash user acquisition costs.

Fiksu’s platform sits on top of the entire mobile ecosystem, including ad networks (AdMob), real-time bidding systems, and incentivized download networks (i.e. TapJoy), and basically distributes a brand or advertisers marketing spend across these channels and the mobile ecosystem.

The startup’s proprietary algorithm, app store behavior insights and a real-time allocation engine dynamically optimize spend across all mobile marketing channels. In its private beta period, the company has been working with a number of well known brands to promote their apps, including Ask.com, Barnes & Noble, Groupon, Hearst Magazines, PlayScreen, Tunewiki, Where and VH1.

To data the platform’s optimization has helped contribute to over 44 million downloads and more than 1 billion app launches from these downloads. And the average loyal user acquisition costs are less than $1.00 per user, sometimes as low as $0.45 per user. Founder Micah Adler tells us that brands finding that the cost of generating these loyal users is same as what they pay to generate clicks for keyword advertising.

It seems that has the mobile ecosystem grows, it becomes even more challenging for developers to get eyes on their apps for downloads. Fiksu is an easily deployable way to help manage and overcome this challenge. Fiksu has raised $5.5 million from Charles River Ventures.

Video game retailer GameStop is throwing its hat into the social e-commerce ring today with the launch of a Facebook store, powered by, Adgregate Markets. The store is available on GameStop’s Facebook
page here.

For GameStop, a Facebook storefront is yet another move in a string of announcements that are pushing the retailer into the digital world. GameStop just bought Spawn Labs, a startup that develops game streaming technology; and online game distribution platform Impulse. And last year,the company bought Kongregate, a social gaming destination and community site for gamers.

GameStop’s Facebook store features the ability to buy games and view product videos, reviews and ratings, store finders, product carousels, and the ability to like and share products. Fans can purchase "pre-orders" on games for in-store delivery pick up. GameStop's Facebook store also allows its fans to earn and redeem points when making purchases in Facebook via its loyalty program.

As we heard yesterday, the retailer is also considering building an iPad competitor of its own, in the hope of getting into the tablet business.

Security software juggernaut AVG this morning announced a brand new service that lets users store, sync and share files in the cloud from a variety of channels and devices.

Dubbed Livekive, the solution sounds extremely familiar to anyone who’s ever used similar services like Dropbox or Box.net (yes, I’m aware there are plenty more competitors).

Livekive comes with automated syncing functionality, which works on both Apple and Microsoft platforms. All (encrypted) data can be accessed and shared from any web-enabled device, including Android, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.

AVG offers Livekive users three tiers of storage options: there’s a free 5GB offering and two paid versions, providing either 25GB for $49.99 per year or ‘unlimited’ storage (the company’s fair usage policy applies) for $79.99 per year.

For you comparion, Dropbox offers 2GB free of charge, and you can get 50GB of storage for $99 per year year or 100GB for $199 per year. Box.net offers 5GB of free storage and lets you upgrade to a premium version that offers 500GB of storage for $15 per month ($180 per year).

AVG was originally founded back in 1991 and just two weeks ago announced a $235 million financing deal. The company has a vast user base to be reckoned with: AVG says it currently protects more than 110 million consumers and small businesses from viruses, spam, cyber-scams and hackers on the Internet.

There are a plethora of startups that offer a social, second-screen experience to watching televsion including TV Tune-In, GetGlue, Miso, and Tunerfish. Today, a new player is throwing its hat in the ring, but adding a new twist—the ability to share clips of video from television shows. SnappyTV is a social tune in platform that lets consumers clip video while they are watching and send to their Facebook and Twitter friends.

Like the competition, SnappyTV is a second-screen experience for television shows, meaning that it is meant to be used on a computer or mobile device while watching a show on an actual television. While some startups have focused on the check-in, or games in the TV tune-in world, SnappyTV is focused on encouraging users to share snippets of video from TV partners. So a users who is watching Top Chef on Bravo will be able to access clips of the show on SnappyTV, and share these clips directly to Twitter and Facebook.

The beauty of the platform is that the user can actually select any scene or period (the maximum clip lasts for 20 seconds) within a TV show and create a mini-clip to share with their social graph. The startup has actually created a lightweight video editing tool that allows a viewer to use arrows to move forward and backward in a video clip to get the exact moment. The user can send out a message with a link to the clip, and the video can then be viewed within Facebook or will lead viewers back to either SnappyTV or the content provider’s site.

The startup, which has raised $2 million in angel funding, has launched with a number of big-name TV content providers including Fox and Bravo. For these channels, Snappy gives them insight into the most compelling and shared areas of a show.

And the big pitch for content owners and networks is that it provides a second-screen experience that actually disseminates and advertises actual content (and they have control over which content and how much content is shared because of the clip limits). SnappyTV also offers an API to networks that allows them to embed and white-label the startup’s technology on content provider’s sites.

The startup’s founders also founded online video editing software Jumpcut, which was sold to Yahoo in 2006.

Microsoft has announced that Khalid Elhasumi, country manager for Microsoft Libya, has been held in custody by authorities in Tripoli since the evening of Saturday, March 19th.

Microsoft says it hasn’t been able to find out the reasons for Elhasumi’s detention, but that they have been working with his family and various international organizations to ensure his safety and help get him released.

Ali Faramawy, Vice President Microsoft Middle East and Africa, comments:

"We are hopeful that the authorities will release Khalid soon. We are in close touch with his family and are actively working to provide support and ensure his safety."

Elhasumi joined Microsoft in 2010 and manages the software company’s operations in the North African state of Libya, where it set up shop in 2006.

Our thoughts are with him and his family, and we sincerely hope he will soon be able to rejoin them.

Google has just announced its very first clean energy project investment in Europe, and hopefully not its last. The Internet giant is pumping 3.5 million euros (roughly $5 million) in a solar photovoltaic power plant in a town near Berlin, Germany. Google isn't investing in the plant on its own - it has sided with German private equity company Capital Stage. The company is quick to point that the transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities, and is subject to other customary closing conditions.

Cycleblob, an addictive browser game created by Israeli developer Shy Shalom, went live today. The game ports light cycles, the futuristic vehicles from the legendary 1982 film Tron, to the browser. Nerd power! Of course, seeing as Tron was recently upgraded with a new sequel, it’s only fitting that light cycles should be given a more contemporary setting in which to compete — especially if that backdrop takes advantage of modern web standards and contexts.

In the original Tron, light cycles were matched against each other on a flat grid and were limited to making 90 degree turns, so Cycleblob has set its light cycles in motion on a rotating 3-dimensional field (really, a blob) that floats in space. Just as in the original, if you hit the wall of light left by your or your opponent’s vehicle, it’s game over.

The game lets you choose from 10 different blob-fields on which to compete, and you can compete with up to 6 light cycles at 3 levels of difficulty. Shalom wrote the game exclusively in JavaScript, using elements of WebGL and HTML5 to allow the game to come to graphical life in the browser.

WebGL, which was officially released in March, is a graphics library that basically extends the functionality of JavaScript to allow it to create interactive 3D graphics within ye olde browser. As a cross-platform API within the context of HTML5, it brings 3D graphics to the Web without using plug-ins. WebGL is managed and developed by The Khronos Group, a non-profit consortium of companies like Google, Apple, Intel, Mozilla, and more, dedicated to creating open standard APIs through which to display digital interactive media — across all platforms and devices.

A prime early example of WebGL at work is the Google Labs’ Google Body browser, an interactive 3D model of the human body. Like Cyclebob, it’s a bit buggy, but the ideas behind it are amazing. Next thing you know, Google will be releasing a WebGL/HTML5-enabled map of the human genome.

Shalom said that he created Cycleblob to learn how to best use WebGL and other new open standards and specifications in creating games and to generally explore its applications. Though the applications of these browser technologies are still largely incipient, it certainly looks like Cycleblob’s plumbing could eventually spell doom for Flash. Maybe not. You be the judge. And who wants to bet that, when Shalom develops a mobile app for his 3D game, Steve Jobs pastes it all over the front of the App Store?

To see the game in motion, check out the video below:

So do you remember about a month ago when I wrote that Uber (the order-a-car-from-your-iPhone sensation in taxi-challenged San Francisco) is coming to New York City? (Sure you do. It was a great story.) Well, that day is here. The company soft-launched its service in New York City today. If you download the Uber app, it now works in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

I know because I just ordered an Uber car on my iPhone in midtown Manhattan in the rain, and a big black SUV picked me up in about five minutes. Same great service as in San Francisco. I watched as it located a driver and saw the car move towards me on a street map (see screenshot). My driver, Yosef, was friendly and courteous. He told me he had to pass a rigorous test on his knowledge of New York city streets to become part of the Uber fleet. Everything was charged to my Uber account, and I saw the amount pop up on my iPhone at the end of the ride. I rated Yosef as a driver, and he rated me, and my ride was over.

The total amount from 23rd street to Grand Central Terminal, 20 blocks away, was $15—about twice as much as a regular cab ride. (Uber gave me a $10 credit, though, perhaps to ease New Yorkers into the service). The truth is that even though it was raining, I could have grabbed a cab or hopped on the subway. I saw a few free cabs. New York City doesn’t have the same scarcity issue as San Francisco when it comes to cabs or car service. But the convenience totally outweighs the expense in certain situations—when you are late for an important meeting or want to impress a date or really can’t find a cab. I have yet to test the service in rush hour when it really counts, but I think Uber will find plenty of riders willing to pay twice as much for the feeling of a private driver.

For those TechCrunch readers in New York City, don’t all order an Uber car at once. There are only a few dozen drivers currently on the service.