Barnes & Noble has unveiled a new B&N Bookstore application for the Apple iPhone.

Providing access to millions of books now at the touch of your finger, Barnes & Noble worked with software partners Evryx Technologies and Spotlight Mobile to design, customize, and launch the new app, which is a red-hot download so far this week.

The app lets users take a photo of a book cover and, seconds later, the user gets all the information his or her heart could possibly desire about the title, author, publisher, etc.

More importantly from a business standpoint, however, consumers can use the app to purchase or reserve a copy of their desired title directly from the application.

The decision to plunge into the mobile realm isn’t new for the book giant. B&N recently bought digital book retailer Fictionwise for close to sixteen million dollars.

Given that Barnes & Noble operates nearly eight hundred bookstores in all 50 states, there is huge potential for this seemingly long-overdue app.

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Visual search is a new concept aimed at making the overall search experience more user-friendly, interactive and quicker for the end-user.  While there are visual search engines on the traditional Web, the concept has been better received on the mobile Web- where quicker and more visual search results are more welcomed given the nature of the devices used.

To heed this trend, Searchme has been busy introducing mobile applications that bring mobile visual search to the various mobile platforms.  While an iPhone, Android and even Nokia Ovi Store version already exist, the Windows Mobile platform has lacked an app.  That’s now changed with Searchme’s debut of a beta version of its mobile app for Windows Mobile users.

Instead of a list of blue links, Searchme delivers images of web pages, videos, music and products that play right on the search result page making it easy to find and consume information on a cell phone.  Searchme offers significantly improved performance for searching on a phone because it runs as a native Windows Mobile application, rather than in a slow-rendering web browser.  Unlike other search applications, Searchme supports a full touch screen interface.

In the beginning, I have to say I wasn’t impressed with the idea of visual search.  It’s a slower process and I found it harder to find exactly what I was looking for given the plethora of media that’s presented with each search.  Text-based search results just feels more natural.  With the advent of bringing visual search into a separate mobile application, the idea seems much more viable.

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The death of Michael Jackson nearly stalled the world wide web.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up. Read the rest

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go2 Media, as we’ve seen, has been busy launching a new mobile advertising service called “Dynamic Content Marketing.”

With a heavy slant on all things local, the mobile site for go2 delivers local entertainment and information to users. And because the new service allows for front pages to be “branded,” the feature bodes well for the movie industry, for whom that service is exclusively available for now.

The first campaign underway is for the Transformers sequel, “Revenge of the Fallen.”

Cutting to the chase, Transformers is an enormous beta test for go2, which is stepping up efforts considerably to brand the movie on its site and allow a one-click link to local showings of the film.

It obviously isn’t much, but it’s a start for Dynamic Content Marketing.

And if things go well for the Transformers campaign, you may very well come to see more of the same at a theatre near you.

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Twitter, the social media service that lets us share our thoughts in 140 characters or fewer, has grown so diverse among its users and its content that we apparently now require assistance finding exactly what we’re looking for.

As a result, we now inhabit a world with “Twitter search engines,” the latest of which is CrowdEye, a search engine launched yesterday that was developed by former Microsoft employees Ken and Becca Moss from their home office.

Ken Moss, who has been working on CrowdEye since September, ended his two-decade long distinguished career at Microsoft late last year to, among other things, pioneer this venture.

As a result, the Mosses have embarked on a mission that has actually yielded a pretty cool product.

Twitter users can now search and browse through Twitter status updates, and hone in on their unique interests by filtering results. CrowdEye also shows the most-tweeted topics within a search.

As of the launch, Moss said he’s “happy with the response to CrowdEye” and elated to see feedback comparing it to other Twitter search engines like Topsy and OneRiot.

It’s definitely worth checking out. You can do so at http://crowdeye.com/

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Amazon.com search subsidiary A9 has scooped up SnapTell, a company, as we all know, that allows mobile users to take photos of products or advertisements to get special deals or more product info.

Although no dollar amount was ascribed to the acquisition, the development can prove quite valuable to SnapTell users, particularly those who download the application to their iPhone and then use their phone camera to snap a picture of an advertisement or a product and then send it to SnapTell in return for a variety of information about the product or the company that produces it.

SnapTell also has a database of “millions” of pictures of DVD, CD, book and video game covers. When end-users snap a photo of a cover and send it to SnapTell, they get information back about prices for the product at stores.

Looking to build upon their popularity, SnapTell is now taking their brand one step further.

“One of the most heard requests was how we could integrate better with Amazon’s fabulous shopping experience,” SnapTell said in a public commentary regarding the acquisition. “We should be able to do so pretty well now.”

Amazon created A9 in 2003 to develop search technologies, including Search Inside The Book, which lets users search for a book by character names or even obscure phrases.

SnapTell fits with A9 like a glove.

For more information, check out www.snaptell.com

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The new Opera Mobile 9.7 beta has a lot of people talking and taking further attention away from competitor Safari, which lost its edge in the worldwide lead in mobile web browsing last month.

Now, Opera is aiming to “accelerate the mobile browsing experience” for Windows Mobile-based phones.

What it all boils down to is speed, fitting with the theme of Opera’s recently launched technology for faster surfing called Opera Turbo. Basically, the Opera Mobile 9.7 beta features a mobile version of Opera Turbo. Read the rest

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