Whenever a platform becomes a standard, there are usually other companies that create platforms atop this initial one in order to help facilitate the available actions between third party developers and that platform. Such is the case with AdWhirl, which has announced a $1 million round of funding led by Foundation Capital.
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Are you interested in location-based hook ups? SNAP Interactive, the company behind the Are You Interested application on Facebook, is going mobile with its new app that’s now available for iPhone users (get it here). With over 12 million monthly active users on its Facebook application, SNAP is looking to convert a lot of those users to the mobile realm, giving a new meaning to instant gratification.
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Zynga’s at it again. The social gaming company has launched a mobile version of Scramble Live for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

The game itself, if you’re unfamiliar, is a grid of letters that can be connected to form words (think word search with options for all-directional word creation). While the words themselves cannot be re-ordered, the grid can be rotated in its entirety. This gives you additional perspectives in order to find your words. As with many other Zynga games made for the iPhone, Scramble Live takes advantage of the accelerometer, though this particular use case may not be as exciting as an action-oriented video game.

I gotta admit this game is pretty addictive for me in its online Facebook app version. I know… I’m a sucker for word games and they’re of the few things I get viciously competitive about. So I’ll be happy to take advantage of some of Scramble’s social features in order to beat all of you.
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Application developers like 12seconds can’t yet tie in the iPhone’s video capabilities, so what’s a video-based service to do? Since 12seconds.tv has taken the Twitter model and applied it to video updates, it’s almost necessary for the company to have a viable mobile accompaniment for users that are always on the go.
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Like to play basketball? Then you probably won’t like the new iPhone app from SGN, called iBasketball. Even though it’s a fun game, it’s Wii-like movements with your iPhone aren’t good substitutes for the real game. I know that could be said about the majority of the Wii-like games made for the iPhone, but in testing the game out myself and speaking with a few other seasoned game players, the movement of shooting a basketball with the iPhone is a little more drastic than say, bowling.

Are mobile game makers over-doing the apps that require movement mimicking the real sport? Is the mobile market really the best venue for such games, seeing as there are a limited number of places in which most people will feel comfortable “throwing” their phones around in the act of playing basketball?
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Over the past few years there has been a tremendous shift toward open platforms and now there are limitless tools to connect with your friends, increase your productivity, and waste your time. Facebook was a tremendous catalyst for this but now there are millions of applications on the web, some useful, some not, most of which now provide developer APIs. For those of you not aware of what APIs are, they enable developers to quickly integrate their own features directly into another service or build upon existing application functionality.
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A couple weeks ago I wrote about SGN launching the iGolf game. The game went on to become the most downloaded free iPhone application for at least a day or two. The company has decided to move forward with their iPhone development and has released a successful game which leverages the iPhone accelerometer. That game is called iBowl and it’s a wii-like bowling game.

I downloaded the application and tried it out and it’s not too bad. The only problem with the application is that it isn’t very sensitive when it comes to putting spin on the ball. I have a feeling that the company will improve the sensitivity in their next release. The other interesting feature that I tried out was the “invite your friends” feature. Unfortunately this simply send them an email to check out the game on the iPhone.

Right now the iPhone doesn’t have many social features but once Facebook Connect launches, I think it will be a lot easier to integrate social features into the games. Alternatively, Apple could decide to add their own iPhone profile feature which lets users build their own profiles and connect with their friends through the phone. While this would be competition to Facebook and other social networks, it would be a quick way to enter the social networking space.

Fortunately for Facebook, I don’t think Apple has any plans to launch a social network on any platform, anytime soon. The game is extremely simple and my guess is that they will roll out new features quickly as they did with the previous application. The key to success in software is typically release and iterate as quickly as possible. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s the approach they take on this one.

Check out the iBowl application and let us know what your thoughts are!

The big news last night was that the live streaming video solution Qik.com released their iPhone 3G compatible application. The only problem? You need to hack your phone to make it work. Talk about a crappy solution. The reason that you need to hack your iPhone is that the iPhone 3G currently doesn’t provide video support. This is a huge problem with the phone. When I first heard that the iPhone was 3G, I was excited to be able to begin streaming video.

Soon enough I found out that this wasn’t possible. Then again, given the current battery life, I’d imagine the video streaming time to be exceptionally short. Soon enough video streaming from mobile will be ubiquitous in the United States. We are still at the early stages but my hopes were high when I saw that Qik was now offering video streaming on the iPhone 3G.

Unfortunately those hopes were dashed when I went to view how to install it. It could be months before this application is accessible without jail-breaking the iPhone. I don’t have experience in cracking the iPhone or installing “Cydia”, the application that’s necessary to install this app. Check out how the Qik application works below. Have you experimented with jail-breaking your iPhone?

This afternoon I decided to try out the Evernote application for the iPhone. In the process of installing the application, I had to go through a registration process. As I went through the process, I got to a reCaptcha form as displayed in the screenshot below. Why on earth would an iPhone need to display a captcha form on an iPhone only registration form?

This was probably one of the most annoying steps in the registration process. Typing a captcha form on an iPhone is especially annoying. Perhaps that’s because iPhone has a less than intuitive keyboard. Whatever the reason, I’m not quite sure why an application would place this on an iPhone registration form. Have you had this happen to you?

While I think that iPhone applications have transformed the mobile industry, I don’t think that all the applications have been developed with the end user in mind. Applications should make it extremely easy to register (if necessary) via a one-click registration method. Is there some type of spam that iPhone applications are subject to that I’m unaware of? Who are these unknown iPhone spammers?

Today the iPhone application directory crossed the 1,000 applications milestone. It’s a significant announcement for any new platform and the iPhone appears to be racing to the forefront to potentially become the leading mobile platform for developers. One of the most buzzed about platforms recently is the Facebook platform which has, according to Facebook’s statistics, attracted over 400,00 developers. The iPhone platform is rapidly proving itself to be a significant opportunity as well.

The most significant challenge for the iPhone platform is user adoption. While Apple was able to sell millions of iPhones, the number of total users pales in comparison to other platforms. That doesn’t mean that the platform is one to sneeze at though. Just last week it was reported that the iPhone Facebook application had been downloaded by 1 million users.

While nowhere near the more than 90 million users installed by top Facebook applications, these numbers are still significant for an early platform. Numbers aren’t all that matter though when it comes to comparing platforms. If you take a look at the quality of applications being developed on Facebook versus the quality of applications being developed on the iPhone.

On Facebook, most of the top applications are relatively simple (although they have been improving in quality since the initial launch). At launch, the iPhone provided an immense number of applications which have proven to be extremely useful or at least entertaining. Whether I’m using Shazam to figure out what song I’m hearing in a bar or restaurant, or looking to waste some time playing Labyrinth, BubbleWrap or Monkey Ball, there is a huge value offering.

Also while I was eating lunch in Miami this weekend, I was able to figure out what we would be having for dinner by pulling up the Yelp application and finding nearby, top rated restaurants. The bottom line is that there is a huge value proposition for the iPhone platform regardless of the number of users that have purchased it. Apple will most definitely fill this gap by continuing to sell out of iPhones for the foreseeable future.

As forecasted by many, I believe that the iPhone is the phone to transform the mobile industry in this country and help mobile computing take a huge leap forward. While venture capitalists are warning entrepreneurs not to invest everything in the iPhone, at this point I think it is too large of an opportunity to ignore.