Clearspring is powering the widget campaign for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

From Reuters:

Paramount turned to widget provider Clearspring for “Skull,” and will offer a contest with the release of the second trailer. The two fans who manage to distribute their “Skull” widgets most will win trips to the world premiere of the movie and the chance to be red-carpet correspondents in footage that will be streamed onto the “Skull” widgets after the premiere.

The widget will be updated with new media regularly up until the premiere of the movie, so if you grab it for your desktop, social network page or blog, you’ll see the latest stuff as they release it.

Stoyan Stefanov from Yahoo has a great slideshow up with tips on improving your web page’s performance. All of these tips apply to mobile sites as well, and are even more important given the constrained resources.

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There’s a specific section on mobile in there, with a few tips focused mostly on iPhone. Good stuff.

Wanted to say thanks to Mark, who organized the event, and everyone that showed up. We had a diverse turnout – Singlepoint, Acuity Mobile, Squareloop, and other mobile companies were mixed in with the Canadian Embassy and the DC Metro. Excellent crowd.

Everyone was very participative too. Over two hours of excellent discussion went by without anyone realizing it. Thanks to all who spoke up with their questions and offered their experience – it was a very dense two hours.

I recommend Mobile Monday DC events to anyone in the area who is new or a veteran to mobile. It’s shaping up to be a great organization.

Remember Evernote? They had this Windows notetaking software that worked well with Tablet PCs and got some pretty great reviews by some pretty well known people.

I was always interested in it, but as was the case with all notetaking programs, being locked to my PC was too limiting. If it was going to replace (or be a good companion to) the good ‘ol Moleskine, I’d have to be able to input to and read from it from everywhere. Mac, PC, Web, Mobile…

Services have come and gone through the years and I’ve tried most of them. Google Notebook was onto something, giving me access from most places. But it was suboptimal since it was completely web-based, and besides, it really is just a web clipper at heart. I wanted something more.

Microsoft Office’s OneNote made a solid try with the ability to use a shared data file across multiple PC’s, and they released a native Windows Mobile client that was halfway decent. But I still didn’t have mac support, and I felt like I was cut off from my notes a lot.

But here we are in 2008, and Evernote is in the middle of a closed beta of a totally revamped service. It might just be my holy grail.

I don’t want to review it completely here. Just take a look at the screencast - it gets to the point nicely. Here’s the YouTube Version:

Did you watch it? No? Go back and watch it.

Ok did you watch it now? Good. Yeah OCR on pictures really raises the bar here, and being able to shove data into it a million different ways, and then get at it from native apps, the web and mobile rounds out the package.

But here comes the crux of my excitement. These guys have managed to scam themselves a native app for the iPhone without actually building one. How? By creating an IMAP server that sends your notes to you, using IMAP folders to organize your content by tags and searches.

Combine this with the fact that the iPhone natively reads HTML mail, and plays many media attachments, and add to that the ability to send notes to it via email, and you have a full duplex native-feeling interface to your notes from an iPhone.

Let that settle in for a bit. It really is clever.

Oh, you want to search? Well they have a mobile site that works quite well on the iPhone too.

But lets use case this out.

Say you’re at a conference meeting a ton of people. Snap their picture with your iPhone and make sure to have their name card visible, or scan their business cards. Send them through email to Evernote, with a simple text tag and any other tags you want to associate with them.

Evernote will OCR all the images so all the headshots and/or cards are searchable. On your next IMAP update, you’ll have them all there, sitting on your phone, without ever using a desktop. You, my friend, have just eliminated the need to post-process your stack of conference cards, and you will always have them searchable from anywhere. Hell, you can chuck (er, recycle) the cards before you even get back to your hotel room.

Have you applied for a beta invite yet?

Next Monday, March 17th, I’ll be leading a discussion on bringing content mobile, and the associated players involved. It will be hosted by Mobile Monday DC at TeqCorner over in Tyson’s Corner starting at 6pm.

Each Mobile Monday chapter has a very different feel, and this is my first time attending a DC chapter meeting, so I’m excited to see the type of crowd down there.

I’ll be reviewing many of the options people face in bringing their content mobile, including

Content creation / transcoding options
Discovery & promotion
SMS
Multimedia options

I hope I can kick these topics off with some information and general advice, but it’s always best when everyone gets involved and shares their experiences. Anyone who has created mobile content has faced unique challenges that could pave the way for others, so I hope we get a lot of participation here.

As I write this, I can’t even get to the SDK homepage on Apple.com due to all the load.

The portability and reach of web apps is great and all, but just wait and see how the buzz boils up for native apps for the iPhone. Even before we get the OS update that lets us run the damn things, you bet that people will be talking, developing, and gossiping like crazy about the potential for awesomeness with this native SDK.

As I said in my Android development thoughts post, the possibilities of native app development spark creative juices in developers. Web apps have their own draw, but the design process gets so heavily constrained from the outset, that it takes a lot of the edge off. It’s a sandbox that dulls the spirit a bit.

Another example – Nokia S60 and Maemo development. Such creative apps have been developed there. Now imagine similar potential with the added benefit of easy install, an enormous audience that includes the US (because Nokia really doesn’t right now), and a sweet development kit. Both Nokia and Android hit some but not every single one of those notes. But when they’re all put together…. well, if it’s not enough to get your little developer excited, then you don’t have a little developer in you.

So Android – you have to get the install base and the app distribution components in place to match Apple’s move. And Nokia, you pretty much have to do the same, and your choice of development runtimes is excellent too, since you try pretty hard to give each first-class citizen status on the device.

And Microsoft… Well. Your native development requires such an enormous ramp-up time, it doesn’t inspire excitement at all. .NET-CF doesn’t count either. It’s too slow, requires a large runtime and feels like a second-class citizen. If you wouldn’t want to build a game in it, it doesn’t count.

So here’s to native apps with excellent SDK’s, great tools, huge reach, and easy distribution. Some people say you’re a dying breed, but you have a lot of life left in you in my book.

If there was one place Google Gears could really make a difference, it would be mobile.

Now Windows Mobile gets the first version, and I bet the iPhone version will be coming along soon after the SDK hits.

The obvious benefit would be the ability to manipulate Mobile Web-based UIs while offline, syncing the data when a connection is reestablished. However, I’m excited to see it used as a UI accelerator, in both offline and online modes.

Stop making those AJAX calls as soon as the user interacts with a control. Pre-cache data in the background and populate from local stores.

Imagine the excellent Facebook iPhone interface when it doesn’t load each time you navigate to a new tab? Cycling back and forth between Profiles and your Events List, for example, would be immediate.

Load multiple resolutions of photos in the background to create a zoomable picture viewer.

The potential for user experience improvement here is great. I can’t wait to see what the developer community comes up with.