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Qik brings simple post-production to Android.

Qik’s editing mechanism comes in the form of a slider tool. It’s not immediately clear how to get to this point. You’ll need to film in offline mode for a start, then post-filming, tap on the “review” thumbnail to pull up the playback screen. From there, you press the “trim” button to see the tool. Though you can shave off each end by tapping endpoints and dragging them along the timeline, editing is not advanced enough at this point to support splitting. Once you reinstitute online mode, Qik will automatically shoot the edited footage up to your online account.

Qik for Android alpha is freely available from the Android Market, but be aware that you may encounter bugs and other instability issues during your evaluation.

Even with the sharing bar, Qik still boasts an uncluttered interface. There’s plenty of room to grow to give users total control about the video capturing and creating experience, but these two features are significant steps forward.

Article updated 8/5/09 at 3:00 pm PT to clarify Qik’s YouTube uploading capabilties.

In addition to basic editing comes sharing. Qik’s settings now contain a sign-up dialog for entering Facebook or Twitter credentials. (There’s also a YouTube set-up, but that refers to a preference you’ll need to spell out online; Qik for Android can’t currently upload individual videos on a select basis to YouTube.com from the Android phone the way you can from Qik on other mobile platforms.) A fourth setting, shortcuts, lets you add people from your phone’s address book to a new sharing ribbon on the bottom of the app. Along with the icons for your social networks, this area serves as a kind of speed dial for alerting friends about your video broadcast via e-mail or SMS. Clicking on a social network will upload the video file to Facebook and YouTube, and will send the Qik link to your Twitter feed. New settings make it possible to enter a default tweet from the phone, and to program the app to automatically upload all videos to Facebook. Better keep it clean.

Related: Qik announces streaming video for BlackBerry

It’s been about a month since Qik for Android became available on the Android Market as an open alpha version. Since then, Qik has been feverishly updating its video streaming and broadcasting app. Starting Wednesday, Qik for Android (version 0.1.3) lets you trim captured videos and more speedily share them with friends, or post them to social networks.

(Credit:
Qik)

BuddySchool lists several tutors for you to consider.

Half.com features some nicely discounted textbooks.

TuitionCoach TuitionCoach is a resource for any college student who might be concerned about paying for college.

1. NoteMesh: Collaborating on notes is quite appealing with NoteMesh.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

BuddySchool BuddySchool helps you find tutors that can assist you with some of your difficult class subjects.

2. Tutorz: Finding a tutor to help you with any class is best done with the help of Tutorz.

That’s why I’ve compiled a list of resources for students to use when they head back to college. Whether it’s finding textbooks or getting help with tough subjects, every student should use at least some of these sites.

Half.com eBay’s Half.com is a great place for students to find textbooks. The site allows students who already completed a class to sell their books. Students entering those same classes can buy them from those students at a discounted price.

When you get to the site, you’ll need to find the class topic you’re having trouble with. Once you find what you’re looking for, BuddySchool lists several tutors on each subject. Those listings include a brief synopsis of the tutor’s expertise, how they can help, and how much they charge for their time. If you like what you see, you can set up a time to be tutored. All payments are sent through the site to ensure the tutor is getting paid before they help. The site also features a review listing, so you can determine if other users’ experiences were positive or not.

College tools

I was genuinely impressed by the sheer number of textbooks Half.com lists on its site. From accounting to literature, the site has just about anything students might be looking for. Its search function works well. The site’s design makes finding textbooks quick and easy. And since all the textbooks listed on the site are categorized based on their condition, students can choose just how much they’re willing to pay for that psychology textbook. It’s a great service.

CollegeClassifieds features several listings on its site.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Tutorz Tutorz is a site that’s designed to help you with difficult subjects.

3. GradeFix: If you need help managing your time, GradeFix is the site for you.

GradeFix If you’re having trouble optimizing the amount of time you’re spending on homework, GradeFix is the place to be.

It’s almost time for college students to head back to class. It’s an exciting time for both the students and those who want to see their loved ones succeed. But doing it alone with no help from the Web doesn’t make much sense nowadays.

TuitionCoach asks you to input your personal financial information.

After you sign up for GradeFix, you’re asked to input all the classes you’re currently taking. Upon doing so, the site lets you add all the assignments you have yet to complete. Based on the work you need to perform, when it’s due, and how long you estimate it will take to complete it, GradeFix charts your homework schedule until it’s complete. You can also tell the site when you have tests, so it can help you determine when to study for exams. It’s a great time-management tool. My only complaint is that it’s not easy to tweak your homework settings. And if you have more than seven tasks, you’ll need to get the paid plan, which will set you back $5 per month.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

GradeFix helps you chart your homework schedule.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top 3

CollegeClassifieds If you’re looking to find some on-campus merchandise, CollegeClassifieds is for you.

To sign up for NoteMesh, you’ll need to have a college e-mail address. After you sign up, you can immediately start adding your classes to the site. In some cases, classes are already available for particular schools. If your class isn’t yet included in the database, you can quickly add it to NoteMesh. From there, it walks you through five steps to take notes in your class. Classmates can then look at your notes, modify them as they see fit, or add items to the notes you might have missed. Of course, NoteMesh requires you to have a laptop in class. If you do, it’s a fine collaborative tool to try out.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

NoteMesh will help you collaborate with friends on notes.

As the name suggests, CollegeClassifieds provides classified listings from college students on your campus. Simply find your school, choose the listing topic you’re looking for, and you’re all set. You can even subscribe to each listing’s RSS feed, so you don’t miss when new products are added. It’s a great idea, but unfortunately, not too many colleges are listing products. That said, larger schools tend to have more listings. Your mileage may vary.

NoteMesh NoteMesh is a great way to collaborate with other classmates on notes.

When you get to the site, you can immediately input your personal, non-identifiable financial information. It asks how many people live in your home, what your household income is, and more. It then calculates an estimate of what you’ll likely be asked to pay out of your own pocket for college. Once you figure it out, you can use TuitionCoach to help you find special grants or loans you might qualify for to reduce your attendance cost. I wasn’t able to dig too deep into its savings methods (it asked for school information that I obviously don’t have), but it looks like it might be a handy tool worth checking out.

Unlike BuddySchool, Tutorz has an extremely simple, nice design to help you find local tutors. Simply input the class you’re looking for help with followed by your ZIP code. The site will then list tutors living in your area. They also tell you how much their service costs. The site has several tutors. You’ll find someone to help you in just about any location, regardless of how close you are to a major metro area. If you like what you see, you can contact the tutor from the page. Tutorz is simple and convenient.

Tutorz will help you find tutors on a variety of subjects.

But for search, the Linux contingent of the open-source community seems settled on Google.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It’s therefore somewhat telling that Linux users overwhelmingly choose Google as their preferred search engine, according to data released today by Chitika, an online advertising network. Chitika analyzed data from 163 million searches across its advertising network between July 30 and August 16, and came up with the following:

(Credit:
Dan Ruby, Chitika)

Despite the concerns about Google and privacy and despite Microsoft’s rising relevance in search through its Bing “decision engine,” Google wins over Linux users 94.61 percent of the time. While it’s not surprising that Linux users would shun a Microsoft-sponsored search engine, it is surprising that they so heavily congregate around just one search engine.

After all, this is the crowd that has created (literally) thousands of Linux distributions. For a community so devoted to choice, it’s telling that such a disparate community would unify on Google search. Perhaps Yahoo’s apparent willingness to prostrate itself before Microsoft has turned off the Linux crowd, but there are other alternatives.

Open source, after all, is all about alternatives. There are open-source alternatives to Google Analytics (Piwik, Open-Tube, etc.), Google Search Appliance (Lucene/Solr), Google Docs (OpenGoo), Google Earth (World Wind), and more.

Linux users are known for being a somewhat finicky lot. Despite broader application support for Windows and a better user experience in Mac OS X, Linux “desktop” users swear by the open-source operating system (and sometimes swear at its competitors).

(Credit:
Lena Foundation)

The Lena System, a home device that records 16 hours of audio from a toddler's shirt pocket, appears to predict autism in children as young as 24 months with 91 percent accuracy.

The home kit, which includes a digital audio recorder, an outfit to hold the recorder, and a questionnaire about the child’s development thus far, costs $699. (The one-time language and autism screen, on the other hand, is $200.) The foundation, which develops technology for the screening of several types of language delays and disorders, says the kit works for children as young as 24 months.

The Lena Foundation, whose new autism-screening tool hit the market in September, claims that parents who use the Lena System are now able to determine with 91 percent accuracy whether their child is developing normally, has autism, or has unassociated language delays.

The 91 percent accuracy is high, and while Lena researchers continue to fine-tune their software to push that rate even higher, I remain somewhat skeptical that voice alone can determine whether a child is autistic. It is often suggested that Einstein didn’t speak until he was at least 3, if not 4 or 5; I have to wonder how a 16-hour recording of Einstein at 24 months would be interpreted by Lena software.

Analyzing a child’s vocal patterns to screen for autism isn’t new. The three factors that seem to set the Lena System apart from traditional screening methods are portability (the recording device is small); amount of data (16-hour recordings); and the software Lena uses to analyze the recordings parents mail in dutifully each month.

According to Jeffrey Richards, a statistician and database technician for the Lena Foundation, the software first categorizes the 16-hour audio stream into sound types, such as child, parent, or television. The child clips are then further dissected, and analyzed for the phonological composition of each sound, as well as how it is clustered and paired. The resulting data is then compared with the data compiled on children who are considered normal, autistic, or delayed.

“Roughly speaking, autistic children vocalize differently from other children,” Dongxin Xu, manager of software and language engineering at the Lena Foundation, tells MIT’s Technology Review.

Twitter’s servers were on the fritz again on Tuesday, with members receiving server timeouts and third-party applications unable to access the microblogging service. This appears to have begun around 11:45 a.m. PDT.

Outages used to be commonplace at Twitter when the small start-up’s servers were unable to keep up with the massive amount of data flowing through them. They gradually became less and less frequent. But this one’s particularly notable because it happens as Twitter is still reeling from a denial-of-service attack last week that targeted a Georgian activist blogger but ended up knocking Twitter’s servers offline for several hours. Other services, like Facebook and LiveJournal, were also affected by the attack.

More updates when we hear them…last updated at 3:57 p.m. PT.

Twitter posted an update to its status blog when the servers had been in flux for about 10 minutes: “Responding to site downtime. We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more.”

The service was back up about a half hour later. At 12:17 p.m. PT, Twitter confirmed that it was an attack. “We’re back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack,” the company said.

A Google statement to the Associated Press said that the company would discuss the matter further with the authorities in order to “demonstrate our industry-leading applications for protecting the private sphere.”

Perhaps the most interesting snippet of this governmental request is that it appears to coincide with the Swiss newspaper NZZ espying a member of Parliament, Ruedi Noser, on Street View in the company of a lady who was not his wife, but was, praise be, his assistant.

Hanspeter Thuer, the federal data protection commissioner of Switzerland, accused Google of not doing enough to blur faces and license plates. And he demanded that “Google immediately take its Google Street View online service off the Internet.”

(Credit: CC Robert Thomson/Flickr)

Whenever countries in Europe raise objections such as these, it appears that Google finds an appropriately European solution: discussions and talks, followed, no doubt, by the parsing of a few nuances, until the issue seems to recede from the public eye.

Noser’s reaction was charming in the extreme: “There is probably no problem for my wife, as you could also recognize my companion in the picture.” Somehow, the use of the word “probably” offers a hearteningly realistic view of humanity on the part of the Parliamentarian. I think he will go far with such a sanguine view of the world’s workings.

Ah, Switzerland. I have no reason to believe the man on the bike is a member of Parliament.

Google must be used to having its neutrality questioned by now. However, when the alleged home of neutrality comes after you, perhaps you wonder if all this questioning of your motives is ever going to stop.

Not so long ago, it was the Greeks who decided they weren’t too happy with Street View’s prying artificial eyes. Now, according to the Associated Press, it’s the Swiss who are getting nervous about their much vaunted (and much-profited from) privacy.

Then the Google eye can happily go back to work.

Although I still don’t personally enjoy Facebook, I do think that it has potential as a marketing tool. There is clear value in targeting and defining a target audience segment in this way, provided that the application is attractive and well-designed (Flavorcreator is both), presumably leading to higher levels of interest and user interaction.

In addition to voting on new flavors, Flavorcreator lets users play games and win prizes while providing the company with valuable market research and building brand awareness.

One important consideration about such an application is what the end goal is. Coca-Cola, the parent company of Vitaminwater, can obviously afford to spend money on advertising and brand building, but most companies need to figure out ways to monetize applications.

Does Flavorcreator make you thirsty?

(Credit: Vitaminwater)

Beverage brand Vitaminwater, known for both tasty thirst quenchers and creative marketing, on Tuesday launched “Flavorcreator” a Facebook application designed to crowdsource ideas for new beverage flavors. The company plans to announce the new flavor in December, with the product slated to hit shelves next March.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

It would be interesting to see if people would buy virtual Vitaminwater to send to their Facebook friends or to see what would happen if they offered a coupon to every visitor.

The move comes just after Google released its own bookmark synchronization feature in the Windows version of Chrome, but it doesn’t synchronize bookmarks with other browsers or even with the Google Bookmarks service.

Another early extension for Chrome, one for Yahoo’s Delicious bookmarks service, also is available.

Some selected Chrome users who want to synchronize browser bookmarks with their other browsers now can get a start.

Xmarks, whose browser addition can keep bookmarks synced across Firefox, Internet Explorer, and the Mac OS X version of Safari, has released an alpha version of a Chrome extension to selected testers.

Google is working hard on its extensions support in Chrome, but the feature remains a work in progress. Indeed, Aaron Boodman, a Chrome extensions developer, marveled that Xmarks produced even an alpha given the pace of change. “I’m shocked you could get anything at all done with us breaking everything every other release,” he said in a mailing list message about Xmarks’ announcement.

“We’ve been swamped with requests to create a version of Xmarks for the Google Chrome browser. We’re hard at work on that and, thanks to some new APIs (application programming interfaces) from Google, are pleased to report that we have Xmarks synchronization working in the Windows developer channel for Chrome,” Xmarks’ Colin Bleckner said on the Xmarks blog Sunday. Xmarks formerly was called Foxmarks.

“We’re doing this (closed test) so we can catch any serious issues we may have missed before letting thousands of users try it out. Hopefully we’ll be able to ramp up our user count quickly,” Bleckner said in a mailing list message.

Visits to Nokia’s site grew by 203 percent, while Vodafone and O2 also posted solid growth (91 percent and 79 percent, respectively). At the same time, schemes that enable consumers to recycle their old mobiles for cash drove more people to related Web sites for information.

New data from The Nielsen Company reflects some interesting new trends related to both the worldwide recession and the somewhat incongruous growth of Web browsing on mobile phones. In a nutshell, users are looking for mobile phone services, food and cooking sites, and coupons, all of which make perfect sense in today’s economy.

And, of course, promotional and coupon sites remain major themes as we all look to get more bang for the buck.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

(Credit: Screenshot-Dave Rosenberg)

Food and cooking sites (as well as television programming) have taken the place of real estate and home design obsessions as people look for comfort that’s accessible on a lower budget than property or remodeling.

Web sites related to mobile phones–both handsets and services–showed the highest traffic growth in the UK posting 58 percent growth on a year-to-year basis. According to Nielsen:

UK online growth

Of interest is the fact that much of the traffic to these sites is driven by specific marketing program, several of which contain social aspects, such as Coca-Cola’s “Coke Zone,” which offers rewards and prizes by collecting points from specially-marked bottles that can be redeemed online.

From a branding perspective this is good news as companies can tie in programs with online properties that are significantly easier and less expensive to maintain. And, the valuable data they get from consumer behavior can more readily be put to good use once users actions are able to be tracked in a consistent manner.

On Tuesday, Apple’s board of directors will gather to take up the question of who will replace Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Schmidt recently left Apple’s board after three years, citing concerns that Apple and his own company’s businesses were beginning to overlap too much. Both are players in the mobile phone market (Google’s Android operating system competes with Apple’s iPhone) and soon will compete in desktop operating systems, when Google releases its Chrome OS.

Besides Jobs, the board has six other members: Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, J.Crew CEO Millard Drexler, former Vice President Al Gore, Avon CEO Andrea Jung, Genentech Chairman Arthur Levinson, and former CFO of IBM and Chrysler Jerry York.

The board could bring in a new director from the outside, but there has been talk that Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, who assumed the helm for CEO Steve Jobs while he was on a six-month medical leave of absence earlier this year, is at least being considered.