Information Week has a nice article on Beyond411 called 7 Web Browsing Tricks to Make Your Smartphone Act Like An iPhone:

Steve Jobs’ introductory demo of the iPhone from the stage at MacWorld in January was a virtuoso performance of 411: the ability to quickly get information such as phone numbers, addresses, driving directions, and store locations. But you don’t need an iPhone to get good 411. One of the best ways is called Beyond411, runs on the BlackBerry and costs considerably less than an iPhone — 100 percent less.

The free Beyond411 application offers White Pages and Yellow Pages searches;, news, sports, and weather localized to your address; Web searches; maps; driving directions; and localized shopping information. If that’s not enough, you can even write your own search plug-in or download one of the 270 that already exist.

Beyond411 is not, technically speaking, Web browsing. Think of it as a client application written for the BlackBerry platform that consumes Web services and reformats them, using its own markup language, for optimal display. This makes integration easy, so that Beyond411 can add the result of a successful search directly to your address book, or email it as a vCard. And if you’re lucky enough to have one of the 8800-series BlackBerrys with GPS, Beyond411 will automatically base its searches on your current location.

The information Beyond411 delivers comes from the Yahoo Web search API Mapquest and the Yokel.com local-shopping database. And if you ask to open a Web page, the app gives you the option of running it through Skweezer.net.

Brian over on the Jobster blog has a rundown of the new features we shipped last night on Jobster.com and Facebook.

Some highlights from Brian’s post:

•    We’ve added the ability to choose superstar skills that you’d like to appear in your profile. The Jobster Robot gives you a list of skills to choose from based on your Facebook profile data, and then you choose friends to vouch for them.  Friends need to vouch for skills for them to appear your profile.

•    Job search results are now returned inside the Facebook application instead of taking you to the Jobster.com site, for a more self-contained Facebook experience.

•    We added a new way to create an account on Jobster – through a LinkedIn profile import.

•    We now support bulk job postings with a new flat-rate unlimited applicant pricing.

In her keynote address at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Marissa Mayer of Google highlighted Facebook, the capture of social graphs, personalization, increased mobile usage, and the iPhone.

During her keynote she also talked about the parallels between Google’s Gadgets and iGoogle, and Facebook, which she said is her favorite non-Google product… “There is a similar vein between both programs in that they are open platforms,” and thus get broader distribution, she said. “Anyone can create a Gadget or create a Facebook app.” She said such applications are a “new form of advertising that’s free.”

Mayer likes the way Facebook collects information about relationships between people, including when they met and how they know each other. “The type of information they’re building about the social graph between people is something that is intelligent and will be particularly useful in the future,” she said.

For general Web search, personalization is the future, Mayer said. Ten to 15 years from now search sites will understand more about searchers, where they are located and what their personal preferences are, she predicted.

Mayer said one of the most important data points for improving search relevance based on personalization is the previous query, although Web history and address books could also be helpful “signals” to the search engine.

It is important that the ads are personalized too, she said. The company is looking at changing the presentation of its Universal Search page “to guide users’ eyes” so they can see the results and the advertisements, she said. “My philosophy is that the ads and the search results should match.”

And when it comes to targeting, Mayer added, “For me, search and ads are almost the same.”

Meanwhile, mobile is taking off. This year was the first that Google noticed an increase in the use of Google mobile applications during the summer instead of a dip, she said. Usually Web searches drop during the summer months as people go on vacation or spend more time outside in the nice weather. “You could see people almost switching off their computers and switching on their handhelds,” she said.

Usage of Google mobile apps rose 10 percent each week for the first three weeks in June and saw a 40 percent to 50 percent spike almost overnight after the iPhone was launched, Mayer said in comments after the keynote.

I spent ages contemplating the BaconSalt web site, trying to figure out if it was real or a joke. 

Dave Lefkow, one of the founders and self-described “Bacontrepreneur”, has previously been known as a force in the recruiting world, but not as purveyor of pork-flavored condiments.  Kosher, bacon flavored salt– could it really be?

Well, friends, I can now report that BaconSalt is real, very real– it’s salt with an intense bacon flavor that will permeate your very soul. I dropped by Christian’s desk and tried a sample which still lingers on my taste buds. 

BaconSalt has been featured in the November issue of PC Gamer magazine as well as numerous kosher publications, and is clearly on its way to internet-fueled world domination.  Get in on the ground floor while you can. 

I caught this on the Daily Show, the irony would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. (Updated the video to a more complete snippet.)

BBC News writes of a supercomputer proof that a Rubik’s cube can always be solved in no more than 26 moves, based on some work from a couple of Northeastern University graduate students.

The study brings scientists one step closer to finding the so-called “God’s Number” which is the minimum number of moves needed to solve any disordered Rubik’s cube.

It is so named because God would only need the smallest number of moves to solve a cube. Theoretical work suggests that God’s Number is in the “low 20s”.

This is another interesting example of hard proofs that have only been solved with the help of exhaustive search and supercomputers (despite the mappings between the cube and group theory.)

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has shipped, a mere 9 months after beta 1.  Seems like a long time, but it is a polished and free blogging tool that I use to write a lot of my posts. (Being able to simply paste and thumbnail images is a big time saver.) 

Joe Cheng, one of the developer, has a blog post about the highlights (as well as lowlights), a few of which I have excerpted below.

• Adding categories: Yes, you can finally add categories directly from within Writer! You can even do it while you’re writing a draft offline, since we don’t actually “commit” the new category until you publish. (WordPress users can even specify hierarchical categories!) Oh yeah, Blogger labels work now too.
• Extended entry support: I was embarrassed that we didn’t support this from the beginning, as this is a crucial feature for a lot of users. We probably would have, had we known then it would be nine months before our next release.
• Post synchronization: If you publish a post from Writer, then edit it online, then open it back up in Writer, you used to get just the original post. Now we’re smart enough to fetch the modified version….
• Inline spell checking: Surprisingly difficult to do right, but very important to our users.

Progress in unlocking the iPhone is proceeding faster than I had hoped, with immediate benefits to users.

There is now an easy unlock tool you can run on your Mac to enable third party software to be installed, such as Doom, a voice recorder, and a NES Emulator. 

Hackers in Europe have also discovered how to unlock the iPhone to work with any carrier.

The speed of development suggests that Apple put fairly little effort into truly locking down the platform.  (Compare with, say, Microsoft and the XBox, which was also cracked in slightly longer time.)

Rather than fighting this trend (in a Sysephean, RIAAish struggle), Apple would do well to open the platform just a bit in a safe fashion. 

It occurs to me that Apple should partner with Adobe to create an iPhone-optimized version of Flash.  Flash and the iPhone would be an excellent match, especially with multi-touch support.  (Pinch events could be mapped into mouse wheel events, perhaps)

Flash has a secure sandbox model, and its scalable vector graphics and visual effects are well suited to a device like the iPhone and would go beyond what could be accomplished in AJAX browser apps.

Over on the Jobster blog there’s information on how to become a Jobster affiliate. 

Affiliates are paid $1 per job inquiry and $0.50 for each profile creation that results from their site.

Rather than a pre-rendered Javascript widget, affiliates receive an XML feed of jobs which they can mix into their site content in any fashion they wish. This is a higher technical barrier to entry but allows the jobs to be deeply integrated into the site to maximize revenues.

The new Jobster app on Facebook launched while I was on vacation, so I didn’t have a chance to blog about it earlier, an omission I will now address.

Technically, the Jobster Facebook app is an interesting example of a web services mashup that seamlessly combines three different technologies. 

• The companies and subscriptions in the Jobster Sourcing Tools application are exposed as REST resources using restlets, (implemented in J2EE, Spring, and Hibernate). 
• These resources are consumed by the consumer-oriented Jobster.com site (implemented in Rails)
• Jobster.com integrates this data with the Facebook sites using the Facebook API (implemented in PHP)

Below are screenshots of some of the key features of the Jobster Facebook app.

1,  The job search form searches millions of jobs from across the web, automatically suggesting jobs for you based work experience in your Facebook profile.

2. “Join Talent Networks” provides a categorized list of companies that have talent networks on Facebook, powered by Jobster. Facebook Users can get the inside scoop on jobs from these companies by subscribing to email updates.

3. The “Ask for advice” page slices your Facebook network by where they’ve worked, as a way to help you find career advice and connections when jobseeking.

3. The “Online Resume” page allows Facebook users to create a compelling online that showcases their skills and experiences, using their Facebook work and education history to get started easily.

It’s gratifying to note employers are reporting good growth of their talent networks on Facebooks in the initial weeks the application has been available; .

It’s pretty cool, give it a try or if you’re an employer, learn how to build your own talent network on Facebook using Jobster.