By default, the app is set to active late night in the weekends when activated, but you can adjust for daytime hours if you’re an alcoholic, or on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

fring is a VoIP application that lets you use Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo!, and AIM clients to chat and instant message. Well, the good news is that fring is available now for free in the Apple App Store and can be loaded on your iPhone without any jailbreaking required.

fring will run on your iPhone or iPod Touch and works over the WiFi network. You can even make SkypeOut calls with fring so if you are traveling fring may be the application you want to make low cost and free calls on the road.

SGN’s Wii-like Golf And Bowling Games

No surprise that SGN’s iPhone games are doing so well – they’re fun to play and they’re free. iGolf is at no. 7 on the top ten apps list and has, the company says, more than 1 million downloads. The newly launched iBowl is at no. 8.

The M2E (Movement to Energy) kinetic battery converts the kinetic energy of someone walking around to clean energy.  M2E claims that 2 hours of light movement can charge about 1 hour of talk-time in a cellphone, and the plan is to make the travelling battery available to a variety of mobile and portable devices. Planned for release mid to late 2009.

ZDNet reports that Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman is taking Apple to the government’s Market Council in an effort to force the company to open its iTunes store to all mp3 players…

Good luck – Europe has been trying to collectively force Apple’s hand with this for two years now – however, Apple ha until early November to respond to the complaint and talk DRM shop with Norway Authorities. A binding legal decision from the Market Council won’t be available to next year, however.

For a full write up check out Check out TechCrunch UK for a fuller write-up but the winners were:

BaseKit (UK)
This is a deceptively easy way to create complex web sites and applications, which saves time building simple apps and demos.

Kyko (UK) (no site yet)
Currently in stealth mode, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty good for a 21-year old founder.

Mobclix (US)
A “comscore with an ad network for iPhones apps” said the judges.They were also a TechCrunch 50 company. They are considering moving to Europe where the mobile scene is hot right now.

Soup (Austria)
This is Tumblr for the rest of us. It has a Twitter-like interface enabling feed imports/ lifestreaming, bookmarklets, you name it.

Stupeflix (France)
This is similar to Animoto but where that site takes hours to convert video Stupeflix does it in real time on a massive scale.

Toksta (Germany)
This is white label IM and video for social networks, so socnets don’t have to create it themselves. This adds stickiness and increases user activity.

uberVU (Romania)
uberVU keeps track of context from all over the Web (responses, comments, trackbacks, diggs, etc.) around a story so you can see what people are saying about it on different sites and services. The founders say they are “mapping the conversational graph” – pretty cool stuff for three guys from Romania, not known for many startups.

You guys may aready know about this, but it was news to me. The Hive Logic “Enkoder” is a really handy little utility that converts email addresses into encrypted Javascript code which hides them from bots and scrapers, but keeps them visible to humans. Run the enkoder to generated the javascript code and paste it into your sites. No more ugly name [at] email [dot] com addresses!

http://hivelogic.com/enkoder

More here.

Makes for interesting reading, especially the part when Ouellette describes a meeting he had with EMI about the future of Muxtape:

“I walked into a conference room and shook eight or nine hands, sitting down at a conference table with a phonebook-thick file labeled “Muxtape” laying on it. The people I met formed a semi-circle around me like a split brain, legal on one side and business development on the other. The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (“you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (“assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”). I asked for two weeks to make a proposal, they gave me two days.”

It’s this kind of mentality that suggests that models like Muxtape remain an unknowable center of growth or diversification for major labels…

And being backed into a corner, Muxtape’s future now lies in a redesigned functionality offering upload and hosting direct to bands. Which, as much as it pains me to say it, is shit.

Ah well, at least there’s still Mixwit, which I’m listening to while writing this; check out this hip hop listing, it’s a good ‘un.

Today T-Mobile G1 with Google announces the T-Mobile G1 $179. The first phone powered by Android, an Google’s mobile software platform. The T-Mobile G1 included a 3-inch touch-screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a one-handed navigation button. It also has a 3-megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G radios. It features let you experience web service that includes popular Google services such as Google Maps Street View, Gmail, YouTube and others. The T-Mobile G1 will launch on October 22 for $179 with a two-year contract.