Today the DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer and iStrategyLabs announced the winners of the Apps for Democracy Contest. Within the final week, the program received a large influx of new submissions resulting in 47 total submissions with the winners announced this morning by Adrian Fenty at One Judiciary Square.

This was the first large new media contest by the Office of the CTO and I’d expect more of these to come in the future. If you are looking to still have an influence in the contest, there is the People’s Choice Award which will come from users voting on the Apps for Democracy site. You can head over and vote if you are interested in participating.

Tomorrow night the People’s Choice Award will be decided at 7 pm. Tonight there will also be an awards ceremony and celebration downtown. This is a really exciting event for D.C., emphasizing the government’s commitment to supporting local technology innovation. I had the opportunity to speak with Vivek Kundra, CTO of D.C., last month and he emphasized his ongoing commitment.

In the coming months there will be some very large announcements related to building the D.C. metro area’s emerging digital economy. I’m personally excited to be part of this growing community. For those of you wondering about the contest winners, the top two are below, and the rest have been posted on the Apps for Democracy website.

Indie Gold
iLive.at

Agency Gold
DC Historic Tours

This morning Zynga, the leading social gaming company, announced this morning that they have launched their “Live Poker” iPhone application. The company claims that this is the first “live game” on the iPhone, meaning that it’s the first to interact with other players in real-time. I’ve actually played a version of the classic game Connect Four in real-time but perhaps this is the first high-end live game. I’m guessing that they mean this is the first live poker game on the iPhone.

The application lets you play with other players that are actively playing the company’s popular Texas Hold ‘Em game across other social networks including Facebook and MySpace. Also of interest is that this is the first iPhone application to leverage Facebook Connect. The free version of the application, which you can access here, provides you with 1,000 free chips a day.

If you wish to upgrade you can purchase the $10 version of their application and you’ll have 40,000 chips daily. As Erick Schonfeld points out, trying to get any more chips on a daily basis will be challenging since the iPhone platform doesn’t allow for micro-transactions yet. Zynga is the first social gaming company which continues to grow on other platforms while extending on to the iPhone platform.

Social Gaming Network (SGN) has experienced massive success on the iPhone platform but it has appeared to sacrifice their social platform games at the expense of their mobile games. Playfish, the current leader on Facebook (according to Adonomics and Developer Analytics) has yet to expand into the mobile space. When I interviewed Sebastien de Halleux back in August, I asked him about whether or not they planned on expanding on the iPhone.

He said that they were looking into it but didn’t provide anymore details. It’s clear that the social gaming space continues to heat up and Zynga continues to be one of the leading competitors in social gaming.

For those interested in using MySpace for business, the company has just launched their application on Blackberry devices. This now extends the company’s mobile presence from their existing platforms which previously included Sidekick, iPhone, and Android. Facebook on the other hand has decided to avoid Android for the time being as they are sticking completely with the iPhone.

Honestly, Facebook is making a bad decision but at least the company has had a presence on Blackberry for at least a year. You can download the MySpace application by visiting www.blackberry.com/myspace or m.myspace.com. I have been skeptical about the use of MySpace for Blackberry as I wrote over a month ago when they first announced the service.

I had a chance to test out the application briefly and it’s fairly robust. The application includes access to your inbox, friend requests, profile comments, friends, and photos. Given that we’ve already covered the application previously, I’ll spare the thorough overview and instead point you to their mobile site where you can download the application. Also, if you are an extremely avid user of Blackberry, check out the Blackberry community where you can talk about your experience.

Will you be using this application? Do you currently use MySpace and would you use it for business purposes?

This morning MySpace announced their new Primetime application which brings in all of Hulu’s content and makes it accessible to the MySpace user base. This agreement also brings in an additional 150 million pages to MySpace for them to display advertisements on. This is a huge agreement for MySpace as the company has been releasing a number of new video services for users that benefits the primary content owners.

The only problem with the application as far as I can tell, is that MySpace doesn’t provide substantial promotion for Hulu from the site’s navigation bar. Additionally, the video player (as pictured below) appears to be limited in size, whereas the Hulu.com video player is displayed in widescreen. It’s somewhat odd that there would be a distribution agreement without a promotional agreement.

MySpace has been one of the most aggressive social networks in signing media partnerships to provide new distribution and monetization opportunities for all involved. This partnership with Hulu is only the latest in the company’s aggressive pursuit of new monetization and media distribution opportunities. It will be interesting to follow the growth of this application to see how both parties actually benefit.

Last night Bebo announced a new program for developers which rewards them with more exposure. The announcement came on the same day that Facebook announced the voting round for the fbFund which will reward applications with $250,000 each for the five finalists. If you prefer the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen over $250,000 from Facebook, then I highly recommend checking out the Bebo competition.

I don’t mean to give Bebo such a hard time but announcing the competition on the same day that Facebook announces a new round fbFund doesn’t seem like such a great idea. Bebo isn’t slacking on their platform development though. Yesterday the company demoed new metrics and engagement tools. I’ve reached out to Bebo for comment on what the new metrics are but have yet to hear back.

It’s clear that Bebo is taking their platform seriously, and while application traction may not be as high as competing platforms like Facebook and MySpace, top applications have attracted hundreds of thousands of users. The top application on the site, Stickerz, currently receives over 50,000 active daily users. While it’s not anywhere near the more than 1 million active daily users that top Facebook applications attract, there is still a solid enough user base to generate consistent advertising revenue.

So for those active Bebo developers, the new metrics tools (whatever they may be), will most definitely be welcomed. If we receive any updates from Bebo I’ll be sure to post screenshots of the new tools and details about them.

Update
I just spoke with Jessica Alter from Bebo who gave me an update on the Bebo developer update. There are a few things to mention. First, the competition prizes will include “valuable items from Sun Microsystems” which we can only imagine to be servers or something of that nature. In regards to the metrics available to developers, they can now have access to time spent and percentage of returning users from the developer application.

The purpose of the new metrics is to reward developers that are building engaging applications. Those that succeed at building engaging applications will be rewarded with the ability to send newsfeed items to non-app users. There will be more incentives announced in the future. So far 60 applications have been submitted to the contest and January 6 will be the last day for submissions. The main purpose of this contest is to underscore Bebo’s commitment to engagement.

Hopefully that clears some things up!

MySpace rolled out their new profile to Canadian users a few weeks ago and has announced that the profile is now available to all users globally. The primary change to the profile is that users now have a simple to use template system from which they can easily manage their profile layouts. This rollout comes soon after Facebook launched their site redesign.

In contrast to Facebook which basically crushed a lot of the widget-based applications with their new design, the new MySpace profile shouldn’t as significantly impact applications. The first version appeared to also let users manage their applications but that has since been removed. The new template system won’t affect applications significantly as they still are displayed on the profile page.

The key with the new design is to make the general site interface a lot easier to use. Also previously users had to hack their profiles by putting HTML in their profiles which gave rise to a relatively large MySpace profile layout industry. Unfortunately they don’t allow for customized profile submission in the new template system but I would imagine that this could be a future feature.

For now it appears to be focused on a simple templating system but it’s great to see that MySpace is focusing on improving the overall user experience. Honestly at this point they have no option. As Facebook continues to gain momentum by innovating on their user experience, competitors have been forced to innovate as well.

Sporting the standard geek suit (jeans, blazer, black shoes, and collar shirt) Evan Williams, CEO of Twiter, told Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, that he doesn’t think making money is that big of a dilemma. In response to a question about how Twitter plans on making money he said, “Ummm”, followed by silence and laughter in the crowd. He continued, “I don’t think it’s that big of a dilemma.”

Later in the conversation, Evan made suggestions of what their future business model would be. “Our revenue is not advertising per say, Twitter’s model is very different. Our system is entirely opt-in.” He continued to state that if users want commercial content, they’ll opt-in for it, if they don’t, they won’t. We can provide a very valuable communication channel for these groups and charge for it.

Evan Williams statements provided a stark contrast to Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current TV, who proclaimed, “We’re profitable.” Hyatt stated that the company has been operating profitably on an EBITDA basis since their first year of operations. They have a traditional business model in which revenue is generated from cable company licensing fees and advertising fees.

There are user-generated advertisements that are being created for CurrentTV and most advertisers prefer these ads over agency created advertisements. The discussion eventually turned to the transformation of media but what struck me the most was the contrast between the two companies: one a revenue-less startup and the other a rapidly growing (and profitable) media company.

There has been a never-ending discussion about Twitter’s revenue model and it increasingly clear that the company plans on providing a premium version for corporate clients. While it has been rumored to be rolled out next year, Evan Williams provided no guidance. For now, speculators will have to wait and see what the company comes up with.

Last night Techcrunch posted that LinkedIn was laying off 10 percent of their staff. Just a couple weeks ago the company announced that they had raised $22.7 million in a round of funding from SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and McGraw-Hill. At the time it wasn’t clear that the company wasn’t laying people off, simply that they were slowing their hiring process.

Now 10 percent is being chopped. While we may have a new President-Elect, the economic conditions still appear to be worsening for the time being. As such startups are tightening up, cutting back on hiring, and an increasing percentage are reportedly firing anywhere from 5 to 20 percent of their staff. We have no reason to believe that this trend won’t continue.

Just this morning Peter Kafka reported that News Corp is experiencing a softening in their display advertising on MySpace. They are expecting that to continue into the first two quarters of next year. Also this morning, while being interviewed by John Battelle at Web 2.0 Summit, Paul Otellini of Intel suggested that general consensus is the first two or three quarters next year will be hard.

It’s clear that no companies, including social networks, are immune to recessionary pressure. As companies push through the next three quarters, there is a very good chance that we’ll see cutbacks continue.

Peter Kafka is reporting that the MySpace Music CEO is being announced tomorrow. Mike Arrington also just claimed to me that that the report is confirmed. MySpace will be announcing Courtney Holt,who’s currently the head of digital music at Viacom, as the new CEO of MySpace Music. The service which debuted only a few weeks ago (see our posting here), was without a leader.

The service has been successful as the company streamed over 1 billion songs in just the first few weeks after launch. I question what that number really mens though considering that MySpace has offered streaming music via user profiles and band profile pages for years now. This new service is focused on distributing licensed music in an ad supported environment.

Currently those songs are available via Amazon’s MP3 service. Ultimately MySpace Music appears to be a large scale experiment as music industry executives struggle to find a successful business model dues to widespread pirating and sharing of content. Earlier this week MySpace announced a partnership with Auditudewhich enables video content owners to monetize the audience-uploaded content.

Unfortunately that model cannot be as easily converted to their music service. This news also comes as rumors of a Facebook Music revival have been sprouting up. While we’ve occasionally heard chatter about Facebook speaking with music industry executives, so far it has been little more than that. We’ll keep an eye on the MySpace Music and will make updates as news occurs.

Today MySpace released statistics that revealed a surge in traffic on election day. One of the most impressive statistics is the number of new voters registered via the site leading up to Election Day. According to MySpace, over 300,000 new voters registered via the site. That dwarfs still impressive statistics posted by Facebook (over 50,000 new voters registered via Facebook).

MySpace had over 300,000 more pageviews over the previous week. Unfortunately we don’t have statistics that reveal the number of users. Less than an hour ago I posted Facebook election statistics which were also impressive. One thing that has become clear is that social networks have become an integral component of the U.S. election process.

As social networks and politics becomes further entwined, politicians are paying significant attention to this space. Additionally, ignoring the space can significantly damage campaigns. People want to communicate about politics and social networks are helping them do that. It will be interesting to watch how the relationship between politics and social networks become more entangled.