Fwix provides local news, and wants you to be an iPhone correspondent

Fwix, a web site that wants to give you a blend of traditional local news and user-contributed stories, also plans to let people submit news from their iPhones (via an application it says it expects to be approved by Apple this week).

[via DigitBeat]

More on Fwix from ars technica.

U.S. Will Consider Single Rating System for TV, Phones, Games

U.S. regulators will consider a single ratings system that would warn parents of programming on television, video games, and wireless telephones that could be inappropriate for children, officials said.

[via Bloomberg]

Mobile TV 'very slow' to take off

Mobile TV has so far failed to deliver on its promise of ubiquity, but analysts expect worldwide user numbers to increase to 54 million in 2009. The BBC reports.

Analysts also predict that by 2013 there will be about 300 million people watching analogue TV on the so-called third screen, their smart phone.

Industry watchers said the biggest potential will be in emerging markets.

... The study was conducted by In-Stat, which is part of Reed Business, and Californian chip maker Telegent Systems. It revealed that mobile TV users watch at least three times a week, with 20% watching daily.

Two-thirds of respondents in the white paper said they watched mobile TV for 30 minutes or more on the days they tuned in.

By comparison, in the leading markets of Japan and Korea, viewers are glued to their third screen for over an hour.

Read full article.

U.K. government looks to smart ticketing for transport

According to The Industry Standard, the U.K. aims to have a plan by the end of this year that lets people use their mobile phones or smart cards to pay for travel across England's public transport system.

The government calculates such a system could save £2.6 billion (US$4.3 billion) per year in cash, convenience and the reduced use of motor vehicles.

The smart cards and mobile phones would use near-field communication (NFC) technology, with embedded microchips storing transport credit.

Read full article.

DailyBooth, a photo twitter

DailyBooth a social network which is somewhat similar to Twitter. The major difference is that the focus on DailyBooth is photos.

Users upload their photos as a mean of status updates.

The service was launched in January and it already gets more than 3 million unique visitors every month.

[via stuff techwack via Raphael Hunold on Twitter].

ShakeItPhoto, Turn Your iPhone Into A Polaroid Camera

Spotted on Laughing Squid, a rave review of ShakeItPhoto, an iPhone app that emulates a Polaroid camera.

You shoot a photo with the app, it gets ejected onto the screen with the classic Polaroid sound and then you have to shake the iPhone in order to “process” the photo.

Be sure to check out Tryntje’s awesome ShakeItPhoto gallery on Flickr.

iPhone to Become #1 Camera on Flickr

For the longest time, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi has been the most widely used camera on Flickr.

But while Canon has dominated, there’s another camera that’s been zipping up the Flickr charts, it's the iPhone, according to according to Flickr’s Camera Finder graphs.

[via Mashable]

New camera for narcissists has front-facing LCD

Samsung's new digital camera called the TL225 helps you take pictures of yourself.

[via The RawFeed]

Live TV on the iPhone

Livestation has launched a streaming video solution that allows any broadcaster to deliver live TV to the iPhone.

ReadRightWeb reports:

Livestation quietly launched their first mobile application streaming live content over a month ago with the release of BBC World News, which debuted in June 2009. This iPhone application delivers live TV news to viewers in 16 European countries but is sadly not available in the US as of yet….

In the U.S., Livestation also began offering Al Jazeera English Live last month, a live TV application built using the same technology. As with BBC News, the live TV channel is available over both Wi-Fi and 3G. Around the corner, NASA may also be launching a live TV streaming application using Livestation’s technology.

[via Cyberjournalist]

Phone that recognises tube stops

In a video demo on the BBC, Zoe Kleinman tries out software that uses a phone's camera to tell you where the nearest London Underground station is.

Acrossair processes GPS data and information from an iPhone's accelerometer - the component that measures the amount that a device is tilted.

It analyses the camera image then tells you which direction to go in to reach the nearest stations.

YouTube's Mobile Site Gets Updated

YouTube has updated the version of its web site for smartphones. The goal of this new version is to let users log into their account, view their favorites, and share new videos quickly and easily. [via Brightland and YouTube Blog]

The mobile edition of this social networking site lets users of most phones view the videos that have been uploaded by the millions of other users.

YouTube says that this new version has been "specifically designed to access YouTube on smartphones with capable browsers; phones like the iPhone, G1 and Palm Pre."

Asian Fan Phones

The Lightningbug concept phone design by Yong-Hwan Kwon opens at the top and fans out a screen which can be used to watch videos, surf the internet and see media on a larger scale.

The design is fun because it provides a screen bigger than usual mobile phones, but the actual phone doesn’t increase in size. Take a look at the smart phone design above.

[via Trendhunter]

Apple Streams First Live Concert to the iPhone

Friday night Apple produced its first-ever live event streamed to the iPhone: a concert by the electronica band Underworld.

[via NewTeeVee]

Back August 8th

Off to St Petersburg and Moscow. Back on Saturday August 8th.