Software and Technology in World Market

iPhone and iPod touch only: When you see a book, CD, DVD, or game at a friend's house you want to look up and bookmark instantly, fire up SnapTell Explorer on your iPhone or iPod touch and take a photo of it. Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it. SnapTell's results aren't 100% accurate—once it gave me a strategy guide result when I photographed a video game cover—but everything else I tried it on, the results were spot-on. Here's what the result for the Halo 3 photograph looked like.

SnapTell pulls in the official product image and gives you links to look it up in places like Amazon and Wikipedia. If you hit the "Share this product" button you can email the item to someone. (What it needs to do—and maybe in a future iteration—is display prices and details here, with these links below them.)

Your SnapTell results get stored in a single list, called "My Snaps." It would be nice to set up multiple lists (like "wishlist" or "gift ideas for my sweetie") but right now it's only a single list.

One of the most impressive apps we tried on the G1 phone running Android was the Compare Everywhere bar code scanner that does photo-lookups just like this. While SnapTell doesn't offer the same amount of detail and on-the-spot price comparison, for iPhone owners, it's a fast and easy way to instantly capture products of interest. SnapTell Explorer is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Windows only: Winamp plug-in MiniTube adds YouTube videos to your music playlist. Fire up MiniTube when you want to see your music as well as hear it, and it searches YouTube for a video that matches the metadata on your MP3 file, and starts playing it along with the music automatically. In theory this is awesome, but MiniTube's implementation falls short in one main way: the video often starts after the song does, so it's not necessarily synced with what you're hearing. If you can't stand being a few beats behind, however, you can opt to listen to the YouTube audio instead of your MP3 file. MiniTube is a free download that works with Winamp.

Mozilla announced yesterday that they've served up their one billionth add-on since 2005—and that only includes add-ons hosted on Mozilla's servers. Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird have earned a place in many of our hearts thanks to their extensibility, and the one billionth add-on milestone in conjunction with Firefox earning 20% of the market share has us thinking: These crazy open-source/extension ideas just might work.

Mac OS X only: Free Adium plug-in Challenge Response prevents instant messaging spam by requiring unknown users to answer a quick challenge question before interrupting you with their message. Challenges would look something like, "What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?" which requires a response of "7," but you can customize your own question and answer. Once a user answers correctly (i.e., verifies intelligence), Challenge/Response adds that user to a whitelist and they won't be challenged again. There's always the chance that the challenge and response might confuse an actual human enough that they'll just give up on IMing you, but if you're used to a lot of IM spam, Challenge/Response is a must. Challenge/Response is a free download, Mac OS X only, requires Adium. Thanks Jason!

iPhone and iPod touch only: A free, "lite" version of previously mentioned email composition app TouchType—which sells for 99 cents in the iTunes Store—is now available. TouchType offers landscape view (and wider keyboard) for composing email on your iPhone or touch, and even better, can save and load reusable text snippets to reduce your typing and make sending repetitive emails a matter of a whole lot fewer taps. The two differences between the 99-cent version and the free Lite version? Twitter integration and spell check. TouchType Lite is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch running the 2.1 software.

Zune made an awesome addition to the Marketplace subscription today. In addition to the all you can download subscription, you are now able to download and keep 10 tracks per month even if you cancel your subscription. The way I see it is kind of like buying a album every month and getting a free subscription.

As Ina Fried at CNet points out, this is a move by the Microsoft and the labels to drum up subscription rates since they are lower than what they hopped. But subscription is not the only thing hurting in terms of music sales, physical sales are declining faster than digital downloads can keep up.

If you've been enjoying Google's 3D virtual experience Lively—which they released in July—we've got some bad news. By the end of December, Lively will be no more, according to the Official Google Blog. Anyone here care? Commiserate in the comments. [via]

Windows only: If you're eager for a simple, non-browser, quick-starting app that will let you get remote desktop access to your mom's desktop, your struggling friend's laptop, or nearly any other machine, Ammyy Admin is just about perfect for your needs. The 128KB, no-install app opens and gives you a dedicated client ID number. To connect as the administrator, you simply enter the client's ID's number, choose a connection speed optimizer (if needed), and hit "Connect," while the client only has to hit "Start." Unless you use its sister private router product, Ammyy Admin will route its screen-sharing traffic over the developer's servers, so work that requires privacy shouldn't rely on Ammyy. Still, for keeping it simple with one-time connections—or even regular hook-ups, through Ammyy's Windows service option—Ammyy is worth checking out. Ammyy Admin is a free download for Windows systems only.

You shouldn't let the uncertain economy drive you to a crazed bank run, a la It's a Wonderful Life, but it might make sense to keep a decent stash of legal tender at home these days. Consumer Reports' Money blog points out that your mattress is the first place a nefarious intruder might look, but a hollow light fixture, a waterproof bag in your toilet tank, and a few other spots make for more secure hiding spots:

... How about behind acoustic tiles in the ceiling? According to the book Hiding Your Money by Jerome Schneider and Allison Hope Weiner, “The beauty of acoustic tiles is that they always look broken, moved and dirty.”

We've pointed out a few other "hidden safe" ideas involving wall outlets, soup cans, and even pens, but Consumer Reports has a few other inspiring spots. Let's also hear where you might stash a bit of rainy day money (assuming your account has some anonymity to it) in the comments. Photo by markhillary.

The Windows Live SkyDrive Team announces that the online storage service will jump "soon" to 25GB, with lots of photo-friendly tools like slideshows, people and place tagging, and Live Photo Gallery integration (so, why not just make Photo Gallery 25GB?). Pretty impressive space boost, and it might help link all the Windows Live services into a semi-coherent whole. [via]