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SnapTell: Instant Product Lookup From The iPhone. You Want This.Today

If you have an iPhone, you’ll probably want to check out SnapTell Explorer, a free application now available on the App Store. The premise is simple: take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the application will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online.

I was skeptical when I first saw the app - the iPhone has long had difficulty with image processing for barcodes, and most image recognitions systems I’ve tried on other platforms have been iffy at best. But SnapTell just works. Every time.

The app correctly identified just about everything I threw at it: Xbox games, Pocketbook O’Reilly manuals, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom, Kurt Vonegut novels, and a number of more obscure books (yes, it worked on The Twinkies Cookbook). It even managed to ID a copy of Civilization 4, despite the fact that it was covered in obnoxious price tags and stickers. I actually tried to mess it up by taking photos in poor lighting and odd angles, but the app still stayed nearly flawless. No, it doesn’t have everything - I managed to stump it on a book about Danish Grammar - but it will

Use Google’s Grand Central on a MacToday

Maybe you’re a fan of Google’s Grand Central phone controller. Maybe you also happen to be a Mac addict. So how do you match those two loves into one? Vocito, that’s how.

Savvy to your Mac OS X desktop and things like Address Book, Automator, and the third-party engineered QuickSilver, Vocito manages your management of the multiple phone numbers in your life within slick fashion. In a manner of speaking, it makes easier a process that’s already been quite easy. Way easier, you might say, even if its job is technically more complex.

You could of course use Vocito much the same way you would the browser-based application - albeit doing so within a more Mac-like enclosure. Nothing stops you from heading straight down the usual road.

Open Source Power to the Nth Degree

But power users in the Mac realm might consider that a sheepish use of code. Address Book integration is convenient enough, yes. Yet Vocito’s support for Automator and AppleScript actions, as well as Quick

9 Blunders of VCs Turned EntrepreneurToday

Our guest blogger, Larry Chiang, is an instructive humorist and blogs at Business Week. If you liked “10 Things They Don’t Teach You at Business School” and “10 VC Mistakes,” you’ll like this submission on some all-important mistakes VCs make when they become entrepreneurs themselves.

By Larry Chiang

Jumping from venture-capitalist-board-member to “start-up founder and CEO’ is near impossible for the HBSer / GSBer to successfully do.  The b-school molded HBS-Harvard Business School / Stanford Graduate School Business (GSB) need to navigate eight pitfalls.

-1- Too self indulgent.

Being smarter than a billionaire you met during b-school show-and-tell, does not make you a better entrepreneur.  This fundamental fact sinks many want-preneurs.

Stop the ego massaging and set aside all 170 IQ points and dumb it down.  Robert Downey Jr recommends going, “partial retard” in his character from Tropic Thunder.

Look at the biggest hits:

“eBay” - pretty retarded s

iPhone MMS: Coming to a Carrier Near You?Today

Mobispine, the mobile services developer already responsible for introducing a $1.99 self-titled iPhone application for RSS news junkies, has debuted a white-label option for wireless carriers to deliver to subscribers seeking classic MMS utility from their devices. Just short of an extension of the iPhone’s standard SMS software, Mobispine’s offering is something that just might fly.

Media Sharing Apps Aplenty, But Still No Real MMS

As iPhone users have known since the App Store’s launch, there are already many ways to send MMS (multimedia messaging service) data from the device to Web users. The Mail and optional Facebook applications are just two avenues. And a pseudo MMS service for iPhone, called Flutter, gets iPhone users into mobile-to-mobile.

But white-label - and ultimately carrier-branded - MMS software is something Mobispine seems to be breaking new ground with. True MMS software just does not inhabit the iPhone world. And if any operators are to convince Apple of the efficacy of bringing such an option to the platform, it is the selection of wireless car

Trulia partners with 1020 Placecast for targeted adsToday

Real estate search site Trulia announced Wednesday that it has inked a deal with 1020 Placecast, an advertising company that uses location-based information to target audiences, that will see the site's advertising become location-specific.

Once a user inputs a location they want to learn more about on Trulia, Placecast will access that data and apply it as a key component along with common demographic data points like psychographic information to provide more targeted ads.

"Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad," Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast said in a statement.

In order to deliver that ad, Placecast works with publishers in categories such as travel, events, real estate, and weather to offer advertisements that not only try to appeal to visitors, but make their location a key factor in targeting them.

The partnership with Placecast is extremely important for Trulia. The company is naturally affected by the downturn in the real estate market and it relies on home ownership for success. Realizing that, Trulia executives needed to act and increase revenue as quickly as possible during these suspect times and they evide