Early last month, Apple changed the terms of service agreement on its software development kit for the iPhone and iPad to include section 3.3.1, which effectively prohibited developers from using Adobe Flash on it’s mobile devices.

Today, the New York Post is reporting that this move may have brought about some unexpected results – an antitrust investigation.

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According to the Post article, “the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.”

If you are friends with any iPhone developers, then you’ve likely heard all about last month’s changes to the SDK terms of service, which states that all applications “must be originally written in C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs”. This meant that any other workarounds to bring Flash-based applications to the iPhone, such as compilers, were suddenly outlawed.

As Nick Bilton of the New York Times’ Bits Blog noted last month, this change was “sure to set off a brush fire at the headquarters of Adobe Systems” and now it seems to have done more than that. So, although Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned a long explanation last week as to why Adobe’s Flash would not be allowed on any of Apple’s mobile devices, it looks like security flaws and technical glitches may not be reason enough.

According to the Post, the decision on which agency will launch the antitrust inquiry is just days away and “doesn’t necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers.”

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It’s hard to believe that it is May already as a third of the year is complete and summer is almost here. With graduation season upon us, perhaps the entrepreneurs of tomorrow will want to take a look at the most popular startup stories from this week in our Weekly Wrapup. This week we’ve got more pitch deck suggestions, dealing with PR disasters and learning from failure. Also, we discuss some new data surrounding angel-backed companies, founders as long-term CEOs and how intellectual property effects innovation.

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How to Avoid Making PowerPoint Your Enemy: Tips for Your Pitch Deck

The idea that PowerPoint is evil is not new. But on Monday, the New York Times rekindled discussions about the pitfalls of its use during presentations when it published a story on the U.S. military titled “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.”

The article details both the complexity and the duration of the slides the military utilizes for its briefings, and contains the rather damning quotation from General McChrystal, leader of NATO forces in Afghanistan, who when shown a particularly convoluted graphic (see below) during one briefing said, “When we understand that slide we’ll have won the war.”

What to Do When a PR Disaster Strikes Your Startup

Thursday was a good PR day for the social buying site Blippy. They were featured in two New York Times articles. But Friday wasn’t so great, as the major technology blogs reported that credit card information from its users were found on Google. An hour later, Blippy responded with a post on its blog, explaining that the leak was months old and affected only four beta users, not current Blippy users. Later, they amended the blog post to include an apology. News of more credit card leaks continued on Saturday. Of course, Blippy is by no means the only startups to suffer from potential public relations disasters, and it remains to be seen what, if any, impact this has on the site.

Blippy’s response, including the need to re-edit its official announcement, demonstrates the importance in responding quickly and correctly to a crisis.

Learning From Failure: One Startup’s Story of What Went Wrong

Devver, maker of developer coding tools and TechStars 2008 graduate, announced last Monday that it would be shutting down after being active for nearly two years. News of a startup closing up shop is never a fun thing to hear about, but fortunately many lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of the entrepreneurs. Today, co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff provided just such lessons with an insightful blog on the Devver journey and why he and co-founder Dan Mayer are choosing to move on.

Angel-Backed Companies More Likely to Succeed, Says Harvard Study

A new study published by professors at the Harvard Business School shows that angel-backed companies are more likely to succeed and show more growth than those funded by venture firms alone. Researched and written by William Kerr and Josh Lerner, the report found that companies with angel funding see between 30% and 50% higher growth figures in terms of website traffic, are more likely to survive for four years, and are also in a better position to receive further rounds of funding.

For the Long Haul: Do Founders Make Better CEOs?

Ben Horowitz of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote an interesting piece Wednesday on why he and partner Marc Andreessen look for strong founding CEOs when investing in companies. Founding CEOs are the kind of entrepreneurs that run their companies from the early development stages and are not replaced by a professional CEO as the company grows and builds. In this lengthy but worthwhile read, Horowitz provides insight into what makes for a great founding CEO, and why he believes they are more likely to help a company succeed than a professional CEO.

Intellectual Property and Innovation: Who’s Got It Right?

Companies that rely on fair use generated $4.7 trillion in revenues and $2.2 billion in value added – roughly 16.2 percent of U.S. GDP in 2007. This is among the findings of a report released yesterday by the Computer and Communications Industry Assocation. The report based its findings on what it dubs “fair use industries,” which includes educational institutions, software developers, Internet search and Web hosting providers, and manufacturers of consumer devices that allow for the copying of copyrighted programming.

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The hyperlocal news site Fwix launched a revamp to its service yesterday, allowing readers on its website to customize and socialize their news feed. Fwix users can follow local and hyperlocal topics, as well as follow other readers who share their interests. Taking advantage of Facebook’s recently released Open Graph API, Fwix now allows likes, comments and sharing of news stories. Noting that Facebook currently doesn’t “do location,” Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shirazi said that the updates to Fwix allow them to connect local data to the social graph, creating an ecosystem of real-time local and hyperlocal news.

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“Linking ‘social’ and ‘news’ has been a goal since the beginning,” said Shirazi. “Now that we’ve built a robust and well-trafficked content network, we are making that goal a reality. The next step for local news is making it social, and we’re excited for this launch.”

Fwix aggregates local news articles and blog posts, and delivers content to readers based on their geographic and topical interests. The San Francisco-based company is less than two years old and in March inked a deal with the New York Times Company to deliver its content to its regional news sites. Initially covering 80 cites, Fwix now boasts a network of more than 200 markets worldwide.

While major newspapers have cut thousands of jobs, the rise of hyperlocal news services like Fwix, Outside.in, and EveryBlock demonstrate that readers are keenly interested in tracking local news, but want to be able to filter that information based on the topics and neighborhoods that matter personally to them.

As we wrote last week, the hyperlocal is already an important site for new startups. The updates to Fwix point towards more services that are not just acutely hyperlocal, but deeply socialized.

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Apple and Google are becoming increasingly competitive, and it would seem that they’re even competing for who can acquire the most companies in the shortest amount of time. Apple has now acquired Siri and Intrinsity.

Siri is a voice command-based personal assistant app that lets you tell it what you want to do, and it will do most of the work for you, whether that be find the right restaurant and book a reservation, get a cab, or whatever. Watch this clip to see how it works:

Based on the clip, Siri does a pretty good job of interpreting your voice commands. One example shown is, "Take me drunk, I’m home." It interprets it how it was meant and finds a cab.

Some in the geek community view this as a big gain for Apple. Robert Scoble, who broke the news of the acquisition calls Siri the "Future of the Web."

"The value in unlocked is huge. This shows Apple is very willing to buy its way into the new mobile web and the new API-driven web," he says. "This also could be a major cornerstone in how it competes with Google."

Intrinsity, the other company Apple acquired, is a chip-maker, and is reported to make particularly fast ones. The New York Times calls the acquisition a way for Apple to "gain an edge over its competitors." You may recall that Google also just bought a chip maker, run by former Apple employees.

Apple and Google are becoming increasingly competitive, and it would seem that they’re even competing for who can acquire the most companies in the shortest amount of time. Apple has now acquired Siri and Intrinsity.

Siri is a voice command-based personal assistant app that lets you tell it what you want to do, and it will do most of the work for you, whether that be find the right restaurant and book a reservation, get a cab, or whatever. Watch this clip to see how it works:

Based on the clip, Siri does a pretty good job of interpreting your voice commands. One example shown is, "Take me drunk, I’m home." It interprets it how it was meant and finds a cab.

Some in the geek community view this as a big gain for Apple. Robert Scoble, who broke the news of the acquisition calls Siri the "Future of the Web."

"The value in unlocked is huge. This shows Apple is very willing to buy its way into the new mobile web and the new API-driven web," he says. "This also could be a major cornerstone in how it competes with Google."

Intrinsity, the other company Apple acquired, is a chip-maker, and is reported to make particularly fast ones. The New York Times calls the acquisition a way for Apple to "gain an edge over its competitors." You may recall that Google also just bought a chip maker, run by former Apple employees.

Thursday was a good PR day for the social buying site Blippy. They were featured in two New York Times articles. But Friday wasn’t so great, as the major technology blogs reported that credit card information from its users were found on Google. An hour later, Blippy responded with a post on its blog, explaining that the leak was months old and affected only four beta users, not current Blippy users. Later, they amended the blog post to include an apology. News of more credit card leaks continued on Saturday. Of course, Blippy is by no means the only startups to suffer from potential public relations disasters, and it remains to be seen what, if any, impact this has on the site.

Blippy’s response, including the need to re-edit its official announcement, demonstrates the importance in responding quickly and correctly to a crisis.

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As Jacob Morgan writes in a post on “The Social CRM Process,” it’s important to have both a macro and a micro response to this sort of situation, addressing both the individuals involved and the public-at-large. “Remember the whole Southwest Airlines and Kevin Smith debacle, where they kicked him off the flight for being too fat? Southwest Airlines took both a micro and a macro response. They interacted with Kevin Smith directly via Twitter, email, and telephone; a micro response. In addition Southwest Airlines also wrote a public post on their blog which addressed their community as a whole, a macro response.”

Some advice:

Of course, sometimes companies opt to do nothing, and hope that the bad press is quickly forgotten. Others hope that it’s true that all publicity is good publicity.

Nevertheless it’s best to try to cultivate some good publicity, as trust and credibility are vital for a startup’s success. Transparency and openness are important, even if it means riding out a difficult news cycle.

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Google continues down its path of acquisitions, as it has now scooped up the mysterious tech startup Agnilux. It’s mysterious because there is very little information about it on the web, and even publications like the New York Times have had a hard time uncovering much information about it.

It has been revealed, however, that Agnilux was founded by former employees of P.A. Semi, the chip manufacturer that Apple acquired a couple years ago, which produced chips for the iPhone and iPad. Some of P.A. Semi stayed with Apple, and others went off on their own and formed Agnilux, as the story goes.

This Google/Apple competition story just gets more and more interesting. Nobody knows exactly what Google’s plan is with Agnilux, or even what Agnilux does exactly, although the New York Times recently got word from a former P.A. Semi employee that Agnilux was working on "some kind of server, and that the company has a partnership with Cisco."

Agnilux has people who have worked at P.A. Semi, Apple, Cisco, IBM, TiVo, Real Networks, Boeing, and various other tech companies, according to varioud LinkedIn profiles listed under the company. 

Google has been giving out generic statements like: "We’re pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don’t have any additional information to share right now." At least that confirms the news is real. "

The Google/Apple story is is one of a friendship gone sour. MG Siegler has a pretty good recap of it up until now. Essentially, it boils down to competition in smartphones, mobile advertising, and soon to be tablets/netbooks. "Who knows, maybe this move was a response to Apple snatching away RJ Pittman, Google’s director of product management," he says.

Either way, the gloves are pretty much off at this point, and it’s going to be very interesting to see where Google is going with this acquisition, and what Apple’s next move will be.

Apple posted record non-holiday-quarter earnings this week.

Google has purchased Agnilux, a chip startup run by Apple refugees. After P.A. Semi was bought by Apple in 2008 for $278 million, several of the prime movers of that company, including Amarjit Gill, Executive VP of Sales and Business Development, along with several Apple employees, jumped ship and started Agnilux. A former Tivo executive also joined the company.

P.A. Semi produces the chips that run the iPhone and iPad. Speculation has surrounded the theoretical Apple intel that might come with the company, the entertainment media background of some of its executives and the extraordinary secrecy of Agnilux.

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Despite investigation by the New York Times, very little information is available on the company. In February, NYT talked about the company’s website. That website no longer exists. When it did it had little information.

“Hop over to the Agnilux Web site and you’re told very little about the company beyond the location of its offices and the derivation of the company’s name. Agni is Sanskrit for fire and Lux is the Latin for light.”

An anonymous source told the Times he thought the company was producing a server.

Prior to accepting the Google deal, Agnilux held conversations with Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. It’s uncertain whether they spoke with VCs or other investors.

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In an email to staff yesterday, new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal wrote that “When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.” With that, he announced Ning would be abandoning its longstanding business model and discontinuing non-paying sites on its network. In light of this, is it time to reevaluate and reign in some of the excitement about the freemium model for startups?

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Offering free services for a product alongside premium fees for advanced or special features – the freemium – has been touted as a promising business model for startups for several years now: “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.”

The Freemium Summit in San Francisco last month featured many companies who’ve been able to leverage the freemium model to great success, including Evernote, Pandora, and Dropbox. A recent New York Times article predicts Pandora could reach $100 million in revenue this year.

Finding the balance between what to offer for free and what to charge for is not easy. The trick is to put enough in the free version to get traffic and usage, but not so much that there is no incentive to upgrade. Companies who use the freemium model need to integrate their free service or product into someone’s routine so fully (either by making sure it’s accessible on their computer and on their mobile phone, for example) that users reach the point where they feel they simply must pay.

In yesterday’s press release, Ning noted that 75% of its users do pay for some sort of premium service. It may well be then that Ning’s announcements are less a reflection on the freemium model than on the company itself. Despite over $120 million in VC funding, Ning has been unable to develop a sustainable business. Yesterday’s announcement about the end to free Nings was accompanied with news that 40% of their staff would lose their jobs – an indication perhaps that the company’s overhead was simply too high.

Nevertheless, the news may serve as a cautionary tale for those startups who think the freemium model guarantees success. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a post on 37signals, “Eyeballs Still Don’t Pay the Bills.” It remains to be seen if Ning can pull through this reorganization and turn a profit, or if they will also serve as a lesson on what happens when a business that’s used the freemium model dumps all those “freeloaders.”

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Google has launched a very interesting new search option, with its Twitter archive. What this does is let users search for a topic, and look at all available tweets about that topic in chronological order. If you want to see tweets about President Obama for example, you can do so by going to any year, month, or day and seeing what was said about him on Twitter. Google can do this since it has access to Twitter’s info, which allows Google to index its real-time Twitter results. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews it would be possible to do something similar with other sites through PuSH.

To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

“It’s not about the value of the task, it’s about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore.” That’s how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands, his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.

Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person.

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Roden says the people he’s hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha. He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company’s own service providers to select new hires in the future as well.

Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He’s a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O’Reilly book about building real-time websites, due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo.

Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He’s bootstrapping it himself “and my wife says it’s ok,” he says.

Casting The Tasks

Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a “sweater bag” to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully.

Roden says that for now he’s doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He’s got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it “the eHarmony of Getting Things Done.”

In that way it’s a little reminiscent of Aardvark, the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars.

At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work.

The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he’s hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work.

This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with “Bob’s Heating System Repair” and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with “hello, Bob’s heating repair, this is Bob.” And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity.

He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because “we’re a brand new company, just starting.” I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business.

These Hands Are Fancy

People familiar with this kind of “human powered micro-outsourcing” will no doubt be familiar with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It’s a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of.

These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That’s just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience.

There’s something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There’s something intriguing about that.

For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. “If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands,” he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds.

Photo by Justin Ouellette.

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After a surprisingly short wait in line at our local Apple Store, where about 100 people lined up for their reserved iPads – and another 100 who didn’t have a reservations – we finally took possession of our very own Apple tablet. We will take a closer look at all the apps, hardware and iPad-optimized web sites over the course of the next few days, but here are our first impressions after spending some quality time with the iPad.

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It’s Very Fast, A Little Bit Heavy and a Little Bit Magical

Without a doubt, the first thing you will notice is the sheer speed of the iPad. Web pages render very fast, switching from landscape to portrait mode only takes a second – even in image and video-heavy apps like the Popular Science app or the ABC Player – and apps open extremely fast.

The device itself is light for its size, feels very solid, but still feels a bit heavy when holding it with one hand. Most of the time, we don’t think this will be and issue as you will probably hold the device with two hands, but if you have wrist issues, this is definitely something to keep in mind.

A More Intimate Experience

Apple uses the word “magical” whenever the company talks about the iPad. After using the iPad for a while, we can’t quite call it magical, but it’s definitely a huge step forward for personal computing. Being able to manipulate the web with your fingers directly on the screen, browsing through the New York Times or Popular Science app on the couch and checking up on your Twitter friends in the TweetDeck app just takes on another dimension when you are using the iPad. It is indeed, as Apple calls it, a more intimate experience.

Yes, the iPad doesn’t do multitasking, chances are that you won’t want to use it for heavy content creation tasks and the iPhone was more revolutionary than the iPad, but if you already use your iPhone to surf the web on the couch and keep up with email, the iPad is better at all of these tasks than the iPhone and more comfortable to use than a laptop or netbook.

Read on for more detailed impressions of some of the iPad’s hardware and software features.

Screen

Apple wasn’t kidding when it said that the screen on the iPad would be gorgeous. It’s not just that the extra screen estate allowed developers to build easier to use apps, but the screen really makes colors pop and the viewing angle is close to 180 degrees.

At the end of the day, though, it’s really the size of the screen that makes all the difference when compared to an iPod touch. While some developers have only re-purposed their iPhone apps for the iPad so far, some apps like the Epicurious cooking app are already making good use of this extra screen estate by putting tabs on the side and bottom of the screen.

We should note, though, that running iPhone apps that haven’t been optimized for the iPad isn’t a very magical experience. Regular iPhone apps work just fine, but the blown-up fonts look fuzzy and using those apps just isn’t a lot of fun.

Of course, we don’t have any hands-on experience about the iPad’s battery life yet, but we will update this post later today with more info once we get some more real-life data.

Virtual Keyboard

The iPad keyboard takes some getting used to. On a lap or on a table with the iPad in Apple’s nifty case, typing with two hands is easy. If your hands are big, you can probably use both of your thumbs to type in portrait mode. Typing in landscape mode with the iPad in your hands means that you can only use one hand, however, and the iPad can quickly feel a bit heavy if you are holding it with just one hand.

Apple’s Own Apps

We haven’t had a chance to fully appreciate Apple’s own email, contacts, calendar apps, but our first impression is that they are all well designed, work as advertised and – thanks to making use of the bigger screen – are generally much easier to use on the iPad than on the iPhone. Safari, of course, is the highlight here, where web sites render just about as fast as on a notebook and browsing even non-mobile optimized sites feels perfectly natural (though, of course, without Flash some sites just don’t work very well).

The iPod app now looks a lot more like iTunes, with a sidebar on the right (in portrait and landscape mode). Interestingly, Apple did not include cover flow here.

iBooks

iBooks, Apple’s e-book app, is a very capable e-book reader. Prices in the iBook store are typically between $9.99 and $14.99 (we also found a few books for $16.99 and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged retails for $27.99). It’s worth noting that the store also features a huge selection of free books from Project Gutenberg. We will take a closer look at the iBooks app and compare it to the other e-readers on the iPad later today.

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Discontented with the notion of merely reading about the iPad launch and perusing reviews thereof? Time to stop worrying and learn to love the liveblog. Marvel at our semi-comprehensive list of people in line bruising their thumbs in the service of moment-by-moment documentation of line speeds.

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• 
  New York Times Bits blog: a plethora of Times functionaries have spread out across the nation
• CNET: covering San Francisco, Palo Alto and NYC
• Gizmodo: the kids at Gizmodo are doing a marathon live-app review
• Intomobile: at the Palo Alto store
• PaidContent: at the Best Buy in Manhattan
• Reuters: even Reuters is getting in on the action!
• Tech Crunch: in San Fransisco
• TUAW: representing the Mountain States

If you know of any other liveblogging of the iPad launch taking place around the globe, please drop a link in the comments, why don’t you?

Photo by Justyna Furmanczyk.

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Slightly ahead of schedule and to the surprise of many developers, Apple opened up the iPad store earlier today. As of now, there are already over 2,000 iPad apps available for instant download in the store. Some are iPad-only apps, but there is also a large number of universal iPad and iPhone apps that include versions for both devices.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we are obviously very excited about the launch of the iPad store and have been scouring the App Store for the most interesting apps. Here are some of our favorites apps so far.

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One caveat here, of course, is that we haven’t been able to test any of these apps. We plan to test them all over the next few weeks, but for now, our recommendations are mostly based on the reputation of the developers and the screenshots that are available in the App Store.

News

Wall Street Journal (free download; $17.99/month subscription)

We want to test this app, if only to see the Wall Street Journal’s subscription model in action. While the app will feature some free articles, full access will come at a hefty price: $17.99 a month. The design is very close to a standard newspaper layout.

New York Times Editor’s Choice (free)

There is no full-blown iPad app for the New York Times in the store yet, so for now, this is the closest we will come to seeing the NYTimes’ strategy for the iPad. This app will only feature a selection of stories.

Instapaper Pro ($4.99)

Instapaper is a long-time favorite of the RWW team. A bookmarklet or browser plugin lets you save the text of any newspaper article or blog post you find online and lets you read it offline in a distraction-free, text-centric view. The iPad app is basically a bigger version of the iPhone app (with the necessary layout changes). That’s really all it takes to make us want to buy this app (though if you already own Instapaper Pro for the iPhone, this is a free upgrade that’s probably already on your computer).

NetNewsWire ($9.99)

At $9.99, NetNewsWire, a very popular feed reader for the Mac and iPhone, is rather expensive. On the other hand, reading feeds on the large iPad screen is surely going to be more fun than on the iPhone. NetNewsWire syncs with your Google Reader account.

Productivity

Apple’s iWork Apps ($30)

We assume that other developers will soon offer similar office suites for the iPad, but for now, Apple’s own iWork suite looks like a winner to us. Being able to do Keynote presentations from the iPad will surely win over quite a few iPad skeptics who don’t think that the device will be suitable for productivity apps.

Roambi (free)

We really liked the Roambi iPhone app when it was released in early 2009. This service allows business users to connect and manipulate sales data while on road (including Salesforce.com integration. On the iPhone, this was already a very visual app and judging from the screenshots, the iPad app will be even prettier and – we hope – even more functional.

Things for iPad ($19.99)

Things is a great to-do list app with a focus on the Getting Things Done methodology. It’s a perennial favorite on the Mac and iPhone and the new iPad app looks like a winner as well. The additional screen estate makes it much easier to switch between lists and move items around, for example.

Currently missing from the iPad in the to-do list category are Todo for iPad and OmniFocus for iPad. Maybe these will come in a later update before Saturday.

Twitter

Twitterific for iPad (free)

Twitterific was an early favorite on the iPhone, though the latest version of Tweetie stole some of the Twitterific’s user base. Tweetie hasn’t made an appearance in the App Store yet, but Twitterific is already getting a lot of positive press and the screenshots in the App Store definitely make it look like the must-have Twitter app for the iPad

Streaming Video

Netflix (free download; monthly subscription)

Earlier this morning, we weren’t sure if a streaming video app from Netflix was just an April Fool’s joke or real. Well – now we know and this looks like it could be one of the killer apps for the iPad. After all, if the iPad is really a device for surfing the Internet on the couch, what better way to compliment that by just using it to watch TV shows and movies on the couch, too.

ABC Player (free)

Speaking of watching TV shows. Thanks to the ABC app, you can now catch up on the latest (and last) episodes of Lost without having to turn on your TV.

Head over to the next page for our favorite music, blogging, weather and star-gazing apps.