Streamcaster is a new application that allows you to subscribe to video podcast feeds and watch them on your iPhone or iPod Touch. When you open Streamcaster, you will get the main menu. To add a podcast’s feed to the application, select the + icon in the upper right corner. This will bring you to a screen where you can enter the feed’s url (don’t forget the http://). Once you have entered the feed url, you will be brought back to the main menu where you will see that your podcast has been added to the list. … [visit site to read more]Related Articles:

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EasyLoan is an application that allows you to quickly calculate monthly payments based on loan information that you enter into the application. When you open EasyLoan, you will be on the main screen. Here it will display; Amount of Loan, Annual Interest Rate, Number of Years, Monthly Payment, Amortization Schedule, First Payment and Calculate Monthly Payment. In order to calculate a monthly payment, you will need to fill out the first three blanks (Amount of Loan, Annual Interest Rate and Number of Years). Once you have entered the information for those three things, you can select Calculate Monthly Payment at the bottom of the screen. … [visit site to read more]Related Articles:

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PayPal is acting responsible or at least pretending to be by helping parents tighten their children’s spending. The new system, PayPal Student Account, provides parent with an easy way to give their children some financial independence (a check on their spendings to be precise). It lets parents create up to branch their main account into four divisions (at most)  and thus distribute an amount in cash at one time or fix it up as a recurring one (pocket money). The money children have can be spent on any Web site that accepts payment via PayPal. It also facilitates easy transfer by simply texting get $(followed by the amount) to PayPal, which upon approval from the parents is transferred.

Call it saving parents from the every day squabble when it comes to their children asking for cash or putting some sort responsibility upon the young ones to spend money efficiently, I think it’s going to work both ways, until the bright kids figure out a way to transfer cash at will (you know what I am talking about).

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The brainchild of Culver and Digg founder Kevin Rose, Pownce launched with much fanfare in 2007. But despite the early buzz and in many ways a superior feature-set, the service hasn’t been able to gain nearly the type of traction as the darling of short-form messaging – that of course being Twitter.

It doesn’t sound like Six Apart has aspirations to revamp Pownce and take on Twitter either. They echo the sentiment that this deal is more about acquiring talent from Pownce, writing, “we are very sorry the site will be closing … We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.”

Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will also be joining Six Apart as advisers as part of the deal.

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Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.

It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.

"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15," Culver wrote. "Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function...(you can) import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."

Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzzworthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share.

Additionally, we heard that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. This is, after all, not a great time to be raising money.

Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox. "We hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future," Six Apart's Chris Alden wrote on the company blog.

Pownce's two other co-founders, Rose and Daniel Burka, will become Six Apart "advisers."

Not all companies have suffered a decrease in the amount of traffic coming to their applications. Causes, which I previously featured, has seen their traffic soar 1000 percent in the past three months. One of the main reasons that is that the application is one of two members of the great applications program that Facebook announced at f8 earlier this year.

Their traffic has appeared to slow over the past few day though and while Causes is by far the largest individual application (2.5 million more monthly active users than second runner SuperWall), it is the company’s only application. RockYou and Slide still dominate the developer leaderboard going back and forth with each other for the top spot.

It it surprising to see the two companies which were the first widget developers on social networks retain the lead positions? I don’t think so. The companies clearly have the most resources allocated to developing on social networks with large funded social gaming following close behind. For now it looks like RockYou is on target to eclipse Slide in relative size on Facebook but it’s clear that the two companies remain neck and neck as the fierce competition continues.

It’s a long road to a victory in the browser wars. Just ask Firefox. The open source browser which launched in 2004 just cracked the 20 percent threshold of the market share for November, according to Net Applications, pushing it a step closer but still miles away from IE.

Recently a few new players have also thrown their hats in the ring, including Google with its much-hyped Chrome and the lesser known, Mozilla-based social web browser Flock, which released its 2.0 version this past October. But do these newcomers even stand a chance?

The Basics

Firefox is gaining ground for good reason: it’s simple, reliable and secure. Its tabbed browsing led to a similar remodel in IE and it has a slew of add-ons that give it a leg up over the competition. It’s slowly becoming the new standard with a steady audience, and that will be hard to beat anytime soon. And its open source platform leaves room for alternatives and experimental niche browsers like Flock.

Flock 2.0 is basically a Firefox with a lot of perks and pre-installed add-ons for those heavy into social networking.  Think of it as a FriendFeed of the browser world, which brings all of your friends from 23 various networks together in a sidebar. It is also one of the first browsers to incorporate media feeds for photos and videos.  Flock is all about sharing what you find on the web as you surf, and it allows you to accomplish this pretty easily by dragging and dropping them either into an email or onto a friend.

Chrome is the polar opposite of Flock, and its big advantage is that it’s even simpler than Firefox, or any other browser out there right now.  The search bar is also integrated into the address bar, which seems to be the wave of the future, at least for those who swear by Google search and don’t need any bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Chrome’s only available for PCs at the moment.

Usability

Chrome wins hands down on getting the job done.  It’s quick and painless with a clear focus of searching for information using Google’s engine.  Dynamic tabbed browsing is a staple now, and if anything crashes, only that tab will go down, not your entire session, which is nice. But if you want a richer web browsing experience stick with Firefox or Flock.  There’s also no easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds from the search bar as there is with Firefox.

Flock can feel a bit overwhelming at times with all of the sidebars of information, but once you get everything set up and get the hang of it, it’s pretty convenient and preferable to keeping a million tabs open for sites like Twitter and Facebook. The drag and drop interface is great.  When you just want to email a YouTube video or picture it’s much easier than copying any URLs, although it does also seem a bit too easy to share something that you might not want shared.

The only other problem with the social networks is that you can’t really fit all of that functionality into a sidebar.  It’s a good way of consolidating friends, but it’s more like a giant address book than anything else. Simple things like posting tweets are a bit confusing, with no clear box for entering in text. When a friend adds content, however, it will open up the profile in the main browser in full view, so you still need to go back to the source.

Speed

Despite the extra features, Flock is surprisingly just as fast as Chrome or Firefox, at least on a medium grade PC.  Looks like they’ve improved upon this concern in the latest release. And Chrome seems to have Firefox beat in this category but the difference isn’t anything drastic.

Privacy

Incognito — aka “porn mode” –  is the new way to surf, as every browser is picking up on this private surfing option that Safari first initiated.

Chrome has faced some privacy concerns at launch with its Omnibox monitoring and recording too much information, but this can all be prevented by changing the default settings and going Incognito.

Expandability

Chrome doesn’t support any extensions or add-ons yet, so Firefox still dominates in this area.  But if you are looking for simple, you probably don’t want much more than Chrome already offers.

Final Thoughts

Firefox is here to stay, but there will always be a long tail of niche alternatives like Chrome and Flock.  When Chrome moves into Mac realm it could pick up some market share from Safari.  Flock will be there for social network junkies who want to try something new, but the first step to making Flock mainstream will be for more of the social networks themselves to go mainstream. Twitter is on track, but still has a long way to go before it’s a household name. If you’re only on Facebook or MySpace, you probably don’t need to worry about the extra sidebars and features.

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For all those who are still not sure what Cooliris is, it is a browser plugin that enables you to surf the Web with a cinematic style. The wall on which it shows thumbnails of images, videos, news pulled from various sources and so on, allows you to be fully immersed in a 3D environment. You can easily surf the Web simply by dragging, sliding, clicking and selecting the thumbnails with your mouse.

On the iPhone, you will get a similar experience to that in your computer browser. There is the same 3D wall loaded with rows of picture thumbnails. What is different is that you are using your finger to slide, click and select rather than using the mouse.

To slide the 3D wall across the screen, you just need to do a ’swipe’ left or ’swipe’ right with your finger. Alternatively, if you are too lazy to use your finger, simply tilt iPhone up, down, left, right and you can see the wall move accordingly to the direction you tilt.

When you tap on a thumbnail, Cooliris will zoom the image and position it to the center of the screen. Description of the image and its URL will be loaded at the bottom of the screen. There is also an ‘email’ and ‘download’ icons so that you can easily share the image with your friends.

To checkout the image’s URL, simply tap on the URL and the mobile Safari will load within Cooliris. Once you are done, tap on the ‘Webview’ and it will bring you back to the Cooliris interface.

There are two main features in Cooliris for iPhone: ‘Discover’ and ‘Search’. The Shopping function that is found in the browser version is not available in this iPhone version.

In the Discover section, Cooliris can cleverly detect your location and serve you the information that is closely related to your locale. It is just like an image-based StumbleUpon for iPhone, except that it is more customized to your preferences. You can also select from the channels to get it to display interesting images/videos/news. Personally, I like to use the Wallpaper channel to discover and download new wallpaper for my iPhone.

The Search function allows you to search from a variety of sites, including Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Flickr, deviantArt and SmugMug. I do not have any success with the YouTube search. When I perform a search in YouTube, nothing loads up even after 5 minutes of waiting. I have no problem searching and playing video in the in-built YouTube app, so I guess this is one of the bugs on the Cooliris app. Other than this, the search on the rest of the search engine works perfectly fine.

Cooliris for iPhone has given a new definition to Web surfing on the iPhone. This is not just another app that you use to ‘wow’ your friends, but an app that truly maximizes the touch action and accelerometer of the iPhone and brings your Web surfing experience to the next level. This is definitely the app that I would recommend to everyone.

Cooliris for the iPhone is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and can be downloaded for free in the iPhone App store.

(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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Mr. Ha at VentureBeat has a good overview of the deal and what it means for the team. Ha notes, "Culver and Mike Malone, who were Pownce’s main developers, will move on to similar roles at Six Apart. Though Pownce won’t be a part of Six Apart, you can be sure the two will be working on something related to the “rebalancing” effort that Six Apart chief executive Chris Alden mentioned." Apparently Kevin Rose will remain on as a Six Apart advisor.

The sad reality here is that Pownce had a HUGE opportunity that was wasted by Pownce co-founder Kevin Rose. Instead of Kevin using his huge network to push Pownce, he pushed their biggest competitor Twitter. With 75,000 followers on Twitter, Rose could have easily moved (at least a large percentage of) them over to Pownce and made the service more active. I've watched how loyal Rose's fans are and they would have helped to build Pownce up, instead of allowing it to be sold for scraps. It's a pretty shocking business strategy.

I can't imagine how the team must feel building a tool that one of the founders doesn't even actively promote! Take this as a lesson for your startup, actively use your own service or watch it fall apart!