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Instagram is the new, hot start-up everyone is talking about nowadays.

Today, the blogosphere is abuzz because of its exponential increase of users (maybe more than a million now) and for other reasons.

Why is everyone talking about it?

First of all, Instagram may be the first international, social mobile experience.

You might ask me about Foursquare. Well, I’ll tell you that, unfortunately, Foursquare isn’t great. I can’t understand why so many people are talking about it and can’t find what is its utility. Foursquare seems to be mainly used by Americans and not by many Europeans (I live in Paris). And I also think that there is a problem with geolocation applications in general. Anyway, a recent Pew Study everyone was talking about the other day explains that only 4% of adults are “checking-in”.

Let’s be honest; I’m on Facebook, I don’t mind about rigorous privacy and my problem with geolocation isn’t about that. I agree that geolocation might be the future but there’s a disease striking the valley. Everyone is building a geolocation service: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook and the stranger one? SCVNGR. Dude, recheck your start-up’s name. Stop this madness.

Places will be a moderate success. Facebook did not “educate” us on geolocation, their communication for this feature was disastrous and I feel like nobody’s using it—if they implement innovative features and thoroughly teach people how to use it, it may become mainstream. I’m not inducing that people are stupid nor that Facebook users are stupid. How we can measure the success of Places really depends on how Facebook defines success for Places. Must everybody who owns a smartphone use Places? However, it may be too soon to tell.

Let’s come back to Instagram.

Instagram will succeed for a few but vital reasons. I think that although Foursquare has the lead, Instagram will quickly come back.

• The first of Instagram’s advantages is that it appeals to another sense and stimulates it. I’m not going to dig deep into psychology’s role, but I think that the fact that we see actual photos of our friends is more interesting that seeing that he (or she) checked-in at the mall. It may need another social layer but my hopes are becoming reality. They are building a feature that could allow you to follow a friend, comment on photos and have a profile.

• Instagram has a very simple goal. Photo sharing. Sharing photos is way more explicit than checking-in to someplace because you might get a discount and a virtual badge. What do you do after checking-in? With Instagram, you share your enhanced (through filters) photos with your friends. Showing-off plays a huge part in this success. I understood Instagram’s goal directly. I’m still figuring out why Foursquare will ever be useful.

• Instagram is beautiful. This is undeniable. The quality of the application is incredible and the filters are just great.

• Finally Instagram has a wider range than any other application on the iPhone. Potentially everybody already took a photo with the iPhone and any Facebook user probably has shared a photo. Anyone would be up and going with Instagram in no time. People would already have photos in their Photos app and would upload a photo very easily. It’d be fun and entertaining.

But is Instagram useful? Foursquare may give you the opportunity to find deals at local businesses. But Instagram doesn’t have to be useful in the sense of productivity or matters of money. It just has to be entertaining in order to be successful. Ever heard of Zynga?

Now, how could they be successful?

In the first place, they have to open up a little. I mean they have to create profiles, allow more control over the web. Add more filters, stay beautiful.

Yet there will be a time when they will also have to find how to be profitable—but as we all know, becoming profitable means to kill the cool factor and that, ladies and gentlemen, would be a shame.

Why did they create RockMelt?

With RockMelt, we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages. Today, the browser connects to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Yes, indeed, this is a great idea. You should be able to do things you do on your browser much more efficiently. Sharing a link to Facebook and Twitter would be quicker with RockMelt. But do you really need it?

Are you really active on three different social networks? Do you tweet every two seconds and update your Facebook status every minute? If sharing a link, updating a status and upload a photo is what you do all day long, you might like RockMelt.

However, I think that RockMelt may find a path towards a mild success. The UI work is appreciable but putting too much options just blurs the simplicity of the browser. RockMelt will appeal to social media freaks but not to a regular Web surfer. And frankly, I’d rather have a minimalistic browsing experience than a rich—yet cluttered one.

Blekko has launched Sunday and people are wrongly wondering whether it is a Google killer.

Henry Blodget, from SAI thinks it is doomed. It may be but his arguments are false.

1. For the most part, search isn’t broken.

Blekko is not meant to fix it.

2. When search IS broken, the problem is usually not Demand Media content. It’s because the question you’re asking generally isn’t well-suited to being answered by algorithmic search.

Man or Ash? People ask what they feel is the most intuitive query. Yes, they adapt their questions to algorithms but anyway, this argument is wrong.

3. Normal people haven’t the faintest idea what “slashtags” are or why they would ever want to use them.

Normal people want to ask Google: where is my grandson? If change is innovative, people will adapt.

Now, what does doomed mean? Doomed like Cuil?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo

Yes, if it is easy to learn. How does it work?

The screen is divided into four quadrants with an X. You begin at the center. Moving into each quadrant selects one of eight characters. A clockwise or counterclockwise movement cuts that character list in half. Then, one, two, three, or four “clicks” through each sector selects the first, second, third, or fourth character. In practice, each gesture amounts to a partial circle.

Gadget Lab.

Gizmodo thinks (and rightfully so) that the new MacBook Air is the death of the MacBook Pro.

No, I’m not trying to attract visitors by saying this (it’s not my headline) but I think that in the future, there will be a clear separation between portable Macs. We will have portable workstations and light notebooks. The 13-inch MacBook Pro will be radically changed and the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros will become the aforementioned workstations.

Marco Arment has another vision.

And if you want to know everything about these notebooks, just follow AppleInsider’s exhaustive review.

Attention to detail is essential. I am deeply sorry, but I have to make the connection with Apple. It seems that Apple has no problem in designing things; what they produce is widely as being at the edge of industrial design. And what they produce is bought by millions. Although Apple is growing, day after day, this attention to detail continues to be one of the brand’s signature.

Samsung does not know how to design stuff. Let’s not talk about how they name their products—before the Galaxy S, they named the Player: SGH-F480—and talk about the way they design their products.

This is the Samsung Player. It was released in June 2008. One year after the iPhone. Why am I talking about this?

Let’s it rotate it and place the iPhone 3G next to it.

Ok. Now, let’s view their invitation to their November event.

What’s with the stocks? This is such a flawed invitation I can’t even talk about it.

Finally. Great looking phone, great looking OS. It only needs developers. So please guys, develop for Web OS.

Their hardware vision of the future is the MacBook Air they made. Flash storage, (lighter, safer) high-resolution display, important graphics processor and so forth. My first impression is that it is great, but I don’t like the MacBook Air. They aren’t powerful. Steve, we didn’t ask for an iPad with an actual keyboard, we asked for a multitasking-capable machine. We’ll see. I don’t think that the next MacBook Pros are going to go through the flash memory treatment, but it’s just an early opinion.

Their software vision of the future is iOS. iOS meets OS X. Multi-touch gestures, on the trackpad and the Mouse—which has finally become useful. As you probably think, the Mac App Store is a broken promise. It’s not because Steve said that there won’t be a Mac App Store that only allows approved apps. So, the Mac App Store (MAS) will probably be a great experience and more certainly a place where you can buy quality software for relatively low prices.

The real thing is the trackpad. The future is there. Both hardware and software use it and this is where everything will happen.

And the whole OS UI is more than probably Lion.

This is funny. The Economist has published an interesting chart showing iPad’s retail price throughout the world. Just like the Big Mac index. With Apples.

Mac OS 10.7 and what else? A lion, of course people.

Three days ago, Motorola unveiled the Droid Pro. And why is this important?

Finally, Android surpassed Apple in the U.S.

I strongly believe that we can foresee what will happen between the iPhone and Android. Android will definitely surpass the iPhone and the iPhone will become the Mac of smartphones but it will still have its intrinsic shininess—with advantages related to this position.

Now, Motorola takes the first step in the right, new direction, attack RIM. And apparently, they did well.

Instapaper does one thing in such a great manner, it is quite incredible.

You place a Read Later bookmark in your bookmarks bar on your browser and when you’re on a web page, say, a long article, you click Read Later and it saves it in your bookmarks directory on Instapaper’s website.

Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages for reading later.

Now, Marco will dedicate his time to updating, maintaining and enhancing Instapaper and this could be a bad idea. Sometimes, things are useful the way they are and success makes you think that change will make things even better.

You may say I’m not open-minded but I truly cannot see what could Marco do to make it better. No, I’m lying. I can. He can make an Android app—even though it seems like he does not want to craft one but instead make an HTML5 web-app compatible for all Android phones, which, of course, with the screen resolution proper to each phone, is the best idea. He can update the app to speed things up, on my iPhone, the app is quite slow. But these things are not impossible to make along with a job, say, leading Tumblr’s development.

The blogosphere is all warmed up today because of the latest Nielsen research results. Android is the most popular operating system in the US among recent smartphone buyers.

Though RIM and iPhone OS are close, Android is on the rise.

Now, the very serious Bits blog from the New York Times posted an article stating that the iPhone has a real fight on its hands?

We must ask ourselves, is that true?

It seems that nobody noticed Apple’s policy change. It’s not called iPhone OS anymore, people, it’s called iOS and Apple doesn’t care anymore about iPhone-centric statistics. Apple is surely losing momentum. But they know things happen very fast and they know the iPhone cannot be king forever. Just like for the Mac. So they launch new products.

Please do not forget: Android is available on more than twenty (20) phones. Apple is aware of this fact.

For them, the iPad is the most important device. With billions of dollars in the tablet industry, the iPhone is starting to lose its luster. But it’s OK for Apple.

So, yes, Android is a threat to the iPhone, but right now, Apple has the innovation momentum and not the product momentum. Which is way more important.

After almost a year of on-again-off-again development, I’m really excited to announce When It Drops! Now you can easily find what new movies, music, DVDs, games, and books are coming out each week. Ryan Sims came up with the original concept and did a smashing job on the design. Special thanks to Noah Stokes who has not only been doing a great job as our one and only user, but also for getting the ball rolling on this. Finally, you can also follow us on Tumblr if that’s more your thing!

I think they ought to open-source their code and share it internationally rather quickly, in order to meet a tremendous success.

The website is really well-designed. Check it out now.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHCeUfoAnw

Lennon, known to me as the second best song-writer of the 20th century would have been 70 today if M. Chapman controlled his emotions.

The nice thing is that Google put a YouTube video instead of its logo, on the front page, featuring an animation with Imagine as a soundtrack.

At first, when you buy your Mac, you want it to be amazingly fast so you think it is. And as time goes by, you think your Mac is getting slower but it isn’t—it’s just the fact that since it’s getting older, you think that it will slow things.

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree. The experience with your Mac isn’t psychic. When you feel it it slow, it unfortunately means that it is slow. Test it, you’ll see. Let’s not fall into psychologic answers for very pragmatic and mechanic questions.

Now, many questions remain unanswered. Who created it? Why?

Fortunately, certain events brought light to the situation. We know that Iran and China were attacked.

PhysOrg reports:

The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.

Governments fear cyberwarfare. The thing is that they do not possess all the necessary defense infrastructure to deal with it. That is why Stuxnet is not making headlines—not because it is harmless.

“The Stuxnet worm is a wake-up call to governments around the world,” Derek Reveron, a cyber expert at the US Naval War School, was quoted as saying Thursday by the South China Morning Post.

Still, it is important to note something. Stuxnet is not fated to destroy systems. It is fated to prepare them to further attacks. We may be in a state of pure speculation, right now, but to weaken industry computers is to “brace for carnage”—if you play Halo: Reach.

Now, who could have possibly created it? Some say it’s Israel, some say it’s the United States (Western nations were also mentioned).

The IDF has shifted focus to cyberwarfare, earlier this week. Are they using the old technique: saying one thing so big and making something even bigger to make it look like they’re innocent? What I mean is since they have shifted focus to cyberwarfare, could they be behind Stuxnet? Wouldn’t it be too big? They’re probably happy watching a worm spreading chaos in Iran, but did they design it?

The US? Again, it would be way too big. China and Iran. I know they’re not subtle but come on.

But who, then? I suggest to read War in Context for further information and development regarding this story. I’ll also be closely watching it.

Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

The fundamental problem with Qwiki as an informatioin tool is that it is focused on a snazzy production, re-hashing and re-purposing tons of existing web content, to create an “experience” of the content rather than facilitating the most efficient comprehension and utilization of the content.

— Brianstorms.com

It’s not.

He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.

—Kevin Compton, on when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.

Read the New York Times story.

read more on mapping stereotypes.

I wanted to have a story for the Middle East, showing the world that there is interest in entrepreneurship and technology there. People perceive the Middle East as a land of wars, we just want to show the other side, the passion of the youth.—Elie El-Khoury, founder of Woopra on YallaStartup weekend.

Read more.

TotalFinder brings tabs to your native Finder and more!

HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more.

The apps are free, for now at least.

Obviously not even the finest Swiss timepiece can boast the accuracy required to detect such minute shifts. So physicists have come up with “atomic” clocks that rely on some fundamental physical properties of electrons in an atom. Normally, these reside on specific energy levels but when electromagnetic waves of a particular frequency are shone on them, they absorb energy and jump to a higher level. As they re-emit the energy, they drop back down. By creating a feedback loop which has electrons continuously hopping between two levels, physicists are able to construct an ultrafast and extremely consistent subatomic pendulum. The clocks currently used to set the international time standard rely on microwaves with a frequency of 9.2 billion cycles per second being shone on cesium atoms.