LivingSocial is a social discovery and cataloging network that allows people to review and share their favorite books, movies, television, music, games, restaurants and beer (yes, beer). They’ve just released a free new iPhone app that will make it easier for their almost 7 million users to access their catalog of almost 100 million items. The app also provides real-time reviewing of any item from anywhere and upload photos of favorite items from anywhere. Also, members can access friend’s profiles and catalogued items while shopping to get new gift ideas.

Members can rate and review things like books, movies, TV shows, music, video games, restaurants and their favorite beer. LivingSocial also allows you to create lists of those items that you most want to try such as movies you most want to see or books you most want to read.

In many ways, LivingSocial is similar to services like Blippr which lets members rate and review media for the most part. However, LivingSocial is branching out to include other items such as restaurants which treads on Yelp territory. The ReadingSocial feature crosses beams with many of the existing book services such as GoodReads, LibraryThing or Shelfari.

Despite being similar to so many existing social services, LivingSocial has helped its cause by providing a free iphone app that will only make their service more accessible and valuable to its user base. They’ve also done well to expand the types of things that their members can rate and review. Maybe it makes more sense to belong to one service rather than joining several different services to track your favorite restaurants, movies, books, games, etc. LivingSocial is counting on the possibility that most web users will want to consolidate the number of accounts and logins that they manage and maybe use their service to rate and review these and more items to come soon.

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Source:Mashable!

Slowly but surely, iPhone versions of popular web applications are coming in; I don’t doubt that in a year’s time you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have its iPhone counterpart.

The latest app to adorn your iPhone screen is Google Earth, the virtual 3D world atlas we’ve learned to love on our desktops. Like all other iPhone applications, it’s available through the applications store; it started rolling in on Sunday and is now available for almost everyone, depending on your time zone.

The interesting question about this application is, of course, how did Google take advantage of iPhone’s capabilities when they created the interface for the app, and the answer is: beautifully. Besides the standard panning and multitouch zooming, you can tilt your iPhone to change the viewing angle or switch it to horizontal view to see a wider picture. Furthermore, both Wikipedia and Panoramio layers of bookmarks are included (you can turn them on and off in the settings), and offline mode also works; if you continue using the application without being connected to a network, it’ll use cached imagery you’ve previously viewed. Finally, there’s the standard search, available through an icon in the upper left corner, which works pretty much like in the desktop version.

Take a look at the video presentation of Google Earth for iPhone in the video below.

[image credit: CNET]

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Unhappy with the quality of satellite imagery on Google Maps and Google Earth? You’re in for a treat: Google has signed a deal with GeoEye Inc and will be receiving imagery from their new high resolution satellite called GeoEye-1. GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender claims that the new satellite will provide the highest resolution commercial imagery available, at .41 meters in black and white and 1.65 meters in color. Yes, that means: stay locked inside your house if you want privacy, cause it’ll all be out there in high-res on Google Maps and Google Earth for everyone to see.

According to Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz, Google will start receiving new imagery in 45-60 days. However, this doesn’t mean Google will shun everyone else; they plan to continue using imagery from other providers, including GeoEye’s rival Digital Globe, whose high-res satellite WorldView-1 offers half-meter resolution in black and white only.

Still, it’s good news for GeoEye, whose shares, workforce, revenues and profit are all going up.

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This was posted by OgleEarth.com. There’s new stuff in the default layers: New Zealand gets road data, the World Wildlife Fund gets to georeference its many conservation projects, and the mountaintop-removal coal mines in Appalachia get before-and-after overlays.

In the existing layers, National Geographic expands its series of georeferenced articles and photographs to include new regions, including both Antarctica and the Arctic region.

Most other existing default layers get updated content. All the details are in this post at Google Earth Community.