The summer flick “Transformers 2,” most agreed, was terrible. So naturally, one wonders: how much better would the movie be playing on the 2.6-inch screen of a mobile phone?

On Tuesday, mSpot, a five-year-old mobile entertainment company based in Palo Alto, Calif., will resolve that pressing question with a new service making full-length feature movies available on demand to 40 million cellphone subscribers. Owners of 30 different high-end phones, including the iPhone, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Tour and Storm, on all four wireless carriers, will now be able to enter m.mSpot.com into their phone browser for the pleasure of streaming what the company promises will be an expanding roster of films.

The company says it has signed deals with Paramount Studios, Universal Pictures and the Weinstein Company. It also says it is in talks with the other major studios. Movies will be available a few weeks after they become available on DVD, just as the pay-per-view movies are.

The rental charge is $4.99 per film. The amount of time you have to view the film varies by film and studio. At the present time, the service is only available in the U.S.

We wonder when services that offer downloadable digital movies to library patrons will begin doing the same thing. It was just a few weeks ago when nwe posted the Overdrive will begin offering over the air downloads of digital content with an iPhone app is in the works.

Source: Bits Blog (NY Times)

CrowdEye, one of the new Twitter-based real-time search engines that has launched this year, has just upgraded its service with several new features that will remind you of … Google? It’s true. The service now includes a PageRank-like measurement system, a customizable home page (sorta like iGoogle), and the ability to perform site: searches like you would on Google.

Matt continues to review (with screen caps) the new features including:

+ Personalized Home Page
+ CrowdEye Rank
+ Site: Searches

Source: Search Engine Land

Surchur has been around for more than a year, but its recent facelift aims to take real-time search toward a new idea: real-time discovery.

[Snip]
…Surchur is going a lot further with its new home page. Founder Todd Hogan calls it a merger of real-time search with real-time discovery.

The home page is now positioned as a “Real-Time Board” that shows trending topics from Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Bing xRank, CNN Popular Stories, Twitter, and Technorati. This is the discovery aspect: There’s no need to search for what’s hot when Surchur is doing it already, and ranking what it finds from a number of sites. The hot terms are divided into two categories: Hot Topics, which is based on an overall score, and Catching Fire, which lists the fastest-growing terms. As you’d expect, there’s occasionally some overlap in the two categories.

Hogan says the Real-Time Board is updated every 20-50 minutes. For each term, it ranks the popularity on a scale of 1-10, with separate marks for how hot the term is on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and on Surchur itself. A fourth column reveals where Surchur found the hot term.

Access Surchur

Much more in the review (with screen caps) here.

Source: Search Engine Land

+ A location-aware homepage greets you with a real-time traffic summary for your city or most recently viewed city area

+ An enhanced easy-to-use interface gives you quick links to site features and content

+ New “Search Map” and “Browse Traffic” tabs allow you to easily find the information you need

+ One click “Save This Drive” buttons make it fast and easy to personalize your MyTraffic alerts

+ New, more detailed maps display color-coded traffic flow and new incident icons pinpoint hotspots

+ A real-time news ticker alerts you to severe incidents in your city

The NAVTEQ Traffic.com website is part of the NAVTEQ product family. And, as part of the new website design, you’ll see new links to NAVTEQ.com resources, as well as a new NAVTEQ Traffic.com logo.

In addition to new traffic features, you’ll find familiar traffic planning tools like “Check Your Drive Time” for traffic-informed alternate routes and driving directions.

To learn more about our new features, browse our Features overview webpage.

Direct to Traffic.com

Source: Traffic.com

See Also: Phone-Based Customized Traffic Reports at 1-866-My-Trafc

Orb Networks today announced the availability of Orb Live Events, a customizable iPhone application that enables any content owner to broadcast their live content on these popular handsets. Live Events provides content owners with a proven iPhone player, already approved and available in Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch. In contrast to using other solutions, which can cost millions and take months to implement, a content provider or broadcaster can get up and running in as little 24 hours with the Orb solution.

Learn More About Orb Live Events

Source: Orb

Here’s Web 2.0 at its finest: A Yahoo programmer has combined his own project, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), with Twitter and Google App Engine to create a new way to determine what news is both new and important.

The service, called TweetNews, presents Yahoo news search results in a different way, using results from the same search on Twitter to determine what should get high placement, according to a blog posting about it by BOSS engineer Vik Singh.

Direct to Tweet News

Source: Webware

pack your social networks in one box

+ mulist

mulist is a web widget, where you can create any type of list you can think of

+ tweetAhead
Coming at the end of the month.

+ monitter

Real time, live twitter monitor and live twitter embed widget. It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of 3 keywords and watch what people are saying.

Source: MoMB & FeedMyApp

21st Century lifestyles and business practices demand value delivery on the move and in many situations. An explosion in mobile services is being fuelled by the availability of powerful media-rich mobile devices and pervasive networking. Successful solutions in this high growth area will be those that can deliver ‘the right thing in the moment’. That is, high value services will be those that are tuned to the user’s situation and so deliver the best experience. Delivering the right thing in the moment changes the way content is consumed and the timing of its availability. It changes the use of space and time and so: the way the creative industries think about delivering content, the way advertisers think about just in time messaging and tracking; and the way information is accessed throughout an organization. This paper considers the implications for technology and application research. We describe the need for: an extensible and scaleable context framework with privacy, trust and security policies embedded; new modes of interface between the physical and the digital environment; and a programme that builds expertise amongst practitioners as the technology develops in its early stages.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 99 KB)

Source: HP Labs

The Los Angeles Fire Department has been the toast of the blogosphere in recent weeks after its efforts at using the micro-blogging site Twitter came to light.

Twitter allows users to post short (140 characters or less) notes. The fire department uses Twitter to post information about fires or other emergencies that it is responding to. These messages are then sent to users signed up to receive the information on their mobile devices.

Source: PC World

The PROFIT 100 table ranks the 100 fastest-growing companies in Canada by percentage revenue growth from 2002-07, while the Next 100 table features companies ranked from Nos. 101 to 200.

Sort tables by:
* Rank
* Alphabetical order
* Revenue 2002
* Revenue 2007
* Growth 2002-07 (%)
* Profit margin
* Employees (number of)
* Exports as % of sales

Source: Canadian Business

+ New Content on Ancestry.com

+ Australian Academic Press reaches preservation agreement with Portico

+ [NY] Times Reader Beta for Mac Coming This Month

Air travelers whose flights have been canceled or diverted can now greatly improve their chances of finding a seat on the next available flight thanks to a new flight availability service from FlightStats.com and mobile.flightstats.com. FlightStats’ availability service will show available seats by class and cabin on planes that are either at a nearby gate or will soon arrive, giving those who use the service a head start and reducing the risk of becoming stranded at an airport.

Direct to Both Services via web and mobile web:
http://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightAvailability/flightAvailabilityByRoute.do

Mobile:
http://mobile.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/flightAvailabilityByNextAvailableFlight.do

Microsoft on Thursday plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams.

The new service’s software technology, called Clearflow, was developed over the last five years by a group of artificial-intelligence researchers at the company’s Microsoft Research laboratories. It is an ambitious attempt to apply machine-learning techniques to the problem of traffic congestion. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets.

Source: NY Times

An online, user-friendly map that tracks flood conditions has been developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

As expected rains drive flood waters higher along the Mississippi River Valley, USGS crews are in the field collecting data needed to update the flood maps, prepare forecasts, manage the flood and warn communities

Source: USGS

Source: USFS

+ Huntington Beach (Orange County), CA
2 cams.

+ Sydney Harbour, Australia
Tilt, pan, and zoom. Requires Flash and Java.

+ Niagara Falls, ON
4 cams including a tilt/pan cam. Streaming video also available.

+ Various views of ships using the Panama Canal

+ Five Live Webcam Images of Vatican City

Sources: Various

See Also: More Webcams and Real Time Information Resources.

+ Boston: MBTA Service Updates
Rider alerts and advisories for the entire MBTA system.
See Also: T-Alerts

+ New Jersey Transit: MyTransit: Alerts Sent to Mobile Devices

+ Montreal: Buses
The service is called AUTOBUS.

+ Philadelphia: SEPTA Trainview
Learn More.

You can register for the free service on this page direct from the Secretary of State. You can also access Georgia returns on this SOS web page. Look for more info on real-time returns in upcoming posts.