Today we’re incredibly excited to announce an entirely new product from GoSquared – FutureStats.

We’ve been working on our second app for many many months, and we think you’re gonna love the features we’ve been sweating over. FutureStats is the ideal companion to anyone already using LiveStats.

Spike Prediction

One of the most challenging issues of the web 2.0 era – the traffic spike. Until now it’s been impossible to predict when you’re going to receive your next flood of traffic from Digg, a Fireball, or Twitter. Worry no more.

Twitter Reaction Forecast

Worried that what you’re writing will be controversial, poorly received, or simply just ignored? Find out in advance how the Twitterverse will react to your Site’s content, even if you haven’t written it yet.

Member Prediction

Accurately predict the number of new users you’ll receive tomorrow, next week, or next month. Even find out their names and emails before they ever signed up. All you need is FutureStats.

PredictionEngine

Patent Pending technology to predict the future of your Site’s Stats with 100% Accuracy.

As you may know, dividing by zero can have dangerous, dramatic, and undesirable effects. Don’t believe us? Go and try it out, but don’t write to us if your computer explodes and destroys your entire neighbourhood). At GoSquared we discovered that if we divided by zero under specially controlled conditions, we could create a small but effective wormhole in the fabric of time and space. By maintaining this wormhole in a high-energy plasma state we are able to pass electrical signals between here and any time in the future we wish. And by ensuring that the other end of the wormhole is continuously connected to a high-speed internet connection, we are able to retrieve browsing data for websites at any time in the future.

In order to cover our energy costs, however, we are not able to enter the product into a free beta to begin with*. From today we are introducing a basic plan (two weeks into the future) which starts at $50,000/month, scaling up to our unlimited plan (watch your browsing stats right up to the end of the universe), priced at just $1337bn**.

Update

This, in case you didn’t pick up on it and were blown away by our sudden ability to predict the future, was an April Fools joke. We’ll keep the page online, though, for the memories.

Our elevator pitch with Hermione Way of Techfluff.

What a way to kick off 2010 – our first video appearance on YouTube.

Check out LiveStats if you haven’t already, we hope you like it.

Apple’s latest version of Safari is out (in beta), with some evolutionary interface changes, and a dramatically faster javascript processing engine. The release of Safari 4 was not anticipated by any of the typical rumour sites, so it came as a surprise to just about everyone. As always, though, it was no surprise to see Apple’s bright and simple marketing pages selling the browser as the best thing since sliced bread.

The Mac maker’s marketing team appear to have had a field day promoting all 150 of the fantastic new features of their latest browser. But is everything they say completely true? Have they pushed the boundaries of honesty with their sensationalist slogans? Taking a look at the list of new features, I started to get a little suspicious. Just about none of the new features listed on Apple’s website are original – most are already out there in other browsers, having already been invented by the likes of Google, Mozilla, and the open source community. Or they’ve actually been features in Safari already, but Apple are drawing more attention to them in this release.

Read the rest of this entry →

280 North, the guys that brought you 280 Slides (the slickest web app yet for building Keynote style presentations) and the next generation web app development framework Cappuccino, have just announced their latest creation – 280 Atlas.

280 Atlas is a web app, built with Cappuccino, designed to make it easy for others to build advanced, beautiful web apps with unrivalled ease. Check out the video to get an idea of just how simple they have made the UI design process. It in some ways makes me think of Interface Builder in the development tools that come with OS X, but I have to remind myself that these are online. It’s not this easy to build web app interfaces in any desktop apps I can think of.

When you think of what Adobe is doing, attempting to make it easier for design professionals to get building applications on the web and the desktop (via AIR), this puts them to shame. The web will be a better place with more web apps built on open source technologies like Cappuccino. If the next round of web apps are anything like 280 Slides, then things are going to get very exciting around here.

Keep your eyes on 280 Atlas, and the 280 North team. They are moving the industry forward at a staggering pace, and it’s up to us, the developers and designers, to start building web apps that not only compete, but outperform what’s on the desktop.

There’s a lot going on in the UK and Europe. So much of the news we read online right now is focussed on the USA, and what’s happening in the Valley, but a bunch of cool guys (and girl) recently started a video podcast to change that.

Techfluff TV is a great way to find out about what’s happening on the UK and European tech scene. Essentially they cover the same kind of news as sites like TechCrunch, but focus on Europe, in a friendly, quirky video every week. Presented by Hermione Way, it makes for an amusing, light hearted way to catch up on the week’s industry news in a few minutes.

Check it out, we’re fans already!

I’m not too sure how long this has been available, but it would appear that Google are now putting a search field inside the embedded YouTube video player that you see everywhere. I tried it again just now and the search bar didn’t show up, so I would give an educated guess and say Google is still playing with the idea and testing it out on a selection of videos.

I found thus just as I was browsing around after checking my thousands of RSS Feeds, I decided to pop over to MacRumors and read up some more on the upcoming Classics app. It’s gonna be fantastic – plus it’s had the influence of awesome designer Sebastiaan de With which can only be good thing.

Read the Top 100 Requests on Dear Adobe and see if you agree.

Adobe has a lot of work to do to please their customers. This is a site that has been set up for us poor developers, designers, animators, and general creatives to vent our anger at Adobe – the company, the products, and their pricing. If Adobe ignores this site, and sees it as a small number of angered individuals determined to destroy Adobe’s reputation they will be much mistaken. This site has comments from some of the most loyal users of Adobe products, from the people that genuinely care about their business, and these are also the most vocal – they are the core users that matter most to Adobe.

They are telling Adobe, directly, and in crystal clear English, exactly what is wrong with their current business. They’re even telling them how to put it right.

Dear Adobe, Ignore this site at your peril.

Still exchanging business cards on a daily basis? Surely there’s a better way in this modern age of web communications. There is, in fact there are many better ways than exchanging small pieces of card, but the latest (and possibly greatest) development in this area is a new service called Hello My Name is e.

What is E?

There’s no better description of the service than on their own site:

“E is a service that integrates all your existing social services into an E•ID, which you can share with anyone in the real world. To exchange E•ID’s, you just need an internet-enabled mobile phone like an iPhone or Blackberry. When you exchange your E•ID’s, E makes sure your contacts get added to your other social services like Netlog, Twitter, Last.fm, Soocial, automatically.”

So, essentially, you sign up for E, get an E•ID (a simple 5 digit code), and when you meet someone you want to get to know better, you exchange E•IDs by typing each other’s into your web enabled phones.

Very simple, very convenient. At this point, you may be thinking – WAIT! I can already do this with existing services such as Dropcard. The cool thing about E is that it automatically adds the contact’s details to all available services, so will instantly be following them on Twitter, and checking how compatible their music taste is with Last.fm.

E Connector

There is also a hardware component, to make things even easier, called E Connector.

“Connector is a device designed specifically for the E service. Connector allows you to add somebody to E, and all integrated services, in one simple gesture: Press two Connectors together and you’ve exchanged E•ID’s. It’s that simple.”

Very Apple-esque in it’s simplicity (and design). Nonetheless, I like it, and if enough people start joining the service, this could really take off. However, that is the crux of this concept – unless it gains mainstream appeal, they are going to struggle to survive.

I really hope this concept does well – it would be great to see it develop with more services (Facebook, are you listening?) and gain mainstream use. If I were working at E right now, though, I would be worried. What if Apple were to simply put this feature into a firmware update for the iPhone? Same with Blackberry. Touch two iPhones together, exchange vCards, add to all services on there. Sure there wouldn’t be this level of cross compatibility, but if it ended up in the iPhone, it could turn out that other companies would follow to support the standard that Apple would set.

All together, it looks like a great service. I’ve signed up for the beta and can’t wait to try it out.

Last.fm is a fantastic online service that monitors (scrobbles) the music you play through iTunes, and updates your profile with the latest song information. It then builds on this data by notifying you of trends – who you listen to most, what your favourite genres are etc. and goes a step further to suggest other artists you may like.

Last.fm itself, the website, has just been redesigned and lives up to a very high standard that could draw many similarities to Facebook. The desktop app is also very well designed, keeping the interface simple, only showing what is needed and nothing more. The desktop app also ensures that what is important – the song information – is clearly and prominently displayed.

That’s why when the original Last.fm iPhone App was released, it had a lot to live up to. The original was good, but not amazing, with quite a few features missing, and a less than smooth interface.

However, almost all of the faults of the original have now been eliminated with the latest release of Last.fm for iPhone:

• Major improvements to the user interface all around (tap to zoom album art)
• Ability to tag songs
• Personal tag radio
• Calendar based events view
• Common artists when viewing a user profile
• Lots of other usability and back-end updates

Tag Songs

Probably the most requested feature of the original app was the ability to tag songs. You can now tag any song with as many tags as you wish, and are greeted with an instant search that autofills with suggestions for tags. You can also start a new “station” based on any tag you wish. This is brilliant – they have taken user requests seriously, and not just delivered on them, but have exceeded expectations.

Cover Art Zoom

A nice little UI feature has been added on the “Now Playing” screen – the ability to double tap and zoom in or out of the album art. Simple but sweet.

Beautiful Startup Screen

Normally, waiting for an app to start is an arduous task. However, with Last.fm, the start screen is truly attractive – black to dark grey gradient, with Last.fm prominently displayed in the centre in crisp white. There is also a subtle loading animation – the “as” of Last.fm (and AudioScrobbler) winds around to indicate the app is working. First impressions count, and this is probably the most understated attractive loading screen of any app I have used.

Calendar View

A new view for the Events screen is Calendar View. Essentially this is the same as month view in iCal, and it makes perfect sense to put it here. You can now easily see any upcoming events of the selected artist by simply browsing over a calendar view.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and highly recommend you try out Last.fm for iPhone. Best of all, it’s free, so what excuse could you possibly have!

You could also read Last.fm’s official release post here.

Download Last.fm from the App Store.

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo is back in London for October 8th-10th at the London ExCel Center and boy, it’s going to be one hell of a show!

Speakers include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), Blane Cook (Twitter) plus many more from the likes of Google, Salesforce, AOL, and Mahalo. Also attending (and speaking) are the guys from 280North, creators of 280Slides and Cappuccino that we wrote about a while ago.

We are very excited as we were unable to attend last year’s FOWA and will be there on October 10th ready to chat, share, learn, and party!

Kevin and Alex are also going to be there shooting a live diggnation from the main stage at 7:30pm on October 10th where Google will be providing the (alcoholic) refreshments. After which, the wrap party will get started with Facebook and Digg kicking things off. (I’ve heard that Facebook are going to be sponsoring an open bar.)

The celebrations are going to be epic. We hope to see you all there and look forward to meeting a wealth of interesting people that are changing the web as we know it. There will ofcourse be free wifi for all (probably provided by the Cloud) so you can keep those posts coming even while you’re having lunch.

Get your passes for all 3 days of the event over at Carsonified’s FOWA site.

See you there!