WhoSay is another social media website making a name for itself. But you will never get to use it — not unless you can win a daytime Emmy, hit a ball out of Fenway, or write a critically-acclaimed collection of short stories.

“It’s Not Easy Being Me”

Celebrities don’t have it easy. Anonymity is a luxury they do not have. Paparazzi follow them wherever they go. Their every indiscretion (real or fabricated) ends up in the tabloids. Sure, there are the perks — the accolades, the adoration, the hedonistic lifestyles — but being famous is no free ride (well, not always).

An area where a lot of celebrities are starting to venture into is the realm of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Mobli — celebs are all over the social Web. However, many are still a little camera shy when it comes to social media. Enter WhoSay.

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The newly updated Triposo app may very well change the way you travel. Triposo has been around for about year, and we pick them as one of our top startups to keep an eye on.

The App Complex

The problem with existing websites and products going the app route is that for the sake of preserving the integrity of what their Web incarnation looked like, developers often get bogged down and do not fully allow the creative process to flow. We will not name names, but because of this, there are many app versions of websites and products that simply fall flat in their mobile form.

This is why often some of the best mobile applications come from startups who are building a product from the ground up. One such team is Triposo.

Triposo Travel App

The Trioposo app is a “self-starter,” which means that it does not wait for you to run a search before making a recommendation. The Triposo blog explains it like this:

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A total of 25 retailers, including Gap, H&M, and Sephora have teamed up with the Swedish social gifting company Wrapp to bring their services to the United States. In a world where everything has gone social, it is no surprise that gift giving has, too.

Wrapp — A New Way to Give Gifts

If you ask the average person what an app is, they will likely tell you that it is one of those little icon/programs on an iOS device. But before the iPhone and the iPad became so prominent in the social psyche, there was the Facebook app. It is quite possible that Facebook will reach a billion users this summer. And although developers are scrambling to create apps for the iOS and other smartphone platforms, a billion users is hard to deny.

Many companies and developers have tried to leverage the Facebook platform to generate revenue, but few have done it as well as the Swedish social gifting company Wrapp. In less than six months, Wrapp has given out more than 1.4 million gift cards and is growing at over 30 percent per week.

The Wrapp model works like this: You first sign up for an account on the Wrapp website, which integrates it with your Facebook account and a mobile application for the iOS and Android. (Spoiler alert — not that kind of spoiler) Now, this is where it gets a little icky. If you have any qualms about social media, then look away.

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The MyHeritage website recently released the My Heritage app for the iOS and Android. It has many similar features to the more ubiquitous Ancestry.com app as well as a surprising one, too.

My Heritage App

The My Heritage app has some nicely-laid-out features, including your Family Tree, a Research tab that has billions of records, and a place to share photos with your extended family. There are two subscription options for users.

The first is a payment option that allows you to have up to 2,500 people in your family tree and comes with 500 MB of photo and video storage (roughly 500 photos). You can locate family connections with Smart Matches, which compares your profile and family tree to the millions of profiles in the database. The cost for this service is $5 per month for a total of two years.

Paid subscriptions also offer unlimited access to billions of historical records; birth, marriage, and death records; census, military, immigration, and legal records; newspapers, yearbooks, directories, and guides; as well as family trees, photos, documents and maps.

The free plan comes with limited photo storage and can only add up to 250 people in your family tree. Of course, the no-cost option has other limitations with respect to the many resources the MyHeritage website offers, including the Family Pages where the full range of services are offered.

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You know those memes that are floating around the Internet (especially on Facebook) that have a picture and some kind of pithy phrase attached to it? The comments are sometimes thought provoking, usually funny. Well, with the meme generator app, you can start producing some ‘memic’ gems of your own.

Meme Generator App for Android

You have seen those memes. There is the one of Animal, the Muppet, looking his usual crazy self, and the meme says, “It’s not so bad being crazy. You’ll never run out of friends; even if they are imaginary.” Then there is the one with the dude with the grammatically incorrect tattoo that reads, “Your far from the usual,” although that one could be interpreted to mean, “I am ‘your far from the usual.’”

The official name of the app is Generate All the Memes, which sounds like a good title for an Depeche Mode reunion album. The app is very simple to use. You can choose from 140 different existing memes and add your own phrase to them. There are also 10,000 other memes that you can share with friends and family. You can also create your own memes by either using a photo from your photo gallery or library.

Content is updated weekly, so there is always a new selection of memes and images to choose from. The meme generator app is also linked to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Gmail, and Dropbox so that your fresh new memes can easily be shared with friends as soon as you create them.

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The new GiddyUp App was released for the iOS and Android a week ago, and we predict that it will be a hit with all you social butterflies. But it’s a pretty cool app for the rest of us, too.

Giddy Up App

How many more ways can we plan an event, you ask? Facebook’s event setup is nicely set up, but what do you do for all those friends that are not on the social networking site (yes, there are still a few)? Email is okay, but it can be inefficient and, let’s face it, a little boring (you want to add a little fun and anticipation to your event, no?). Phone calls? Who still makes phone calls?

Enter the GiddyUp app. The GiddyUp app uses the contacts from your smartphone, so you can create an event and a message and alert will be sent to them via their contact info (i.e., email or phone number). The setup is pretty much the same as the Facebook events feature. You select a title for your event, a date and time, and who you want to invite.

Once you activate the event, a message is sent to all those invited. Everyone can see who is invited and what their status is. Responding is easy, too. You do not even need the app to receive text alerts. The message contains a link that directs the individual to a mobile landing page, and from there they can respond to the invitation.

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Springpad 3.0 is one of the latest productivity applications on the market for the Web, iOS, and Android. It may be getting a little hard to sift through the maze of Web and mobile applications, but every now and again one appears that offers a fresh new look on an old idea.

Productive Apps

The number of productivity apps on the market is reflected in the numerous articles we have done as of late on some cool note-taking applications and the like. Similarly, the Readability app offers an effective way to keep track of articles and sites on the net without the necessity of overloading your bookmark bar.

Now there is a new application that is upping the ante on productivity.

Springpad 3.0 for the Web, Tablet, or Phone

Springpad brings together the best elements of your average productivity apps and fuses it with the intuitiveness of Flipboard and the social-networking nature of Twitter. The basic idea behind the app is to keep track of all your favorite things ─ movies, books, websites, music, recipes, or whatever you fancy ─ but it also lets you share them with friends and other Springpad users.
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The iPhone apps PicFrame and Diptic make it a snap to combine multiple photos into a single ‘frame’. You may be a little saturated with the over exposure of photo apps these days (sorry for the photographic word play), but these two iPhone apps are worth a look.

The New Photographers

Apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic have helped create a new movement in photography. Now, the purists might decry the use of such apps (in some cases, rightfully so), but these applications are just a tool, a technology no different than the camera itself. Ultimately it’s not the medium that defines you (despite what McLuhan said); it is indeed the message.

It may be true that a photograph is only as good as the person taking the picture. But what these apps have done is made that process just a little bit easier. Instead of having to shoot a picture, upload it to a computer, and then tweak it using photo editing software, you can now do this all in one place.

All of the rules of photography, like composition and lighting, still apply. The only thing that has changed is that instead of having to figure out complicated cameras and software, the average user can point, shoot, and with a few finger taps create a lens flare that would have made László Kovács proud.

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On April 21-22 of 2012, NASA will be hosting the International Space Apps Challenge to inspire the scientific community, the aerospace industry, and the public at large to develop new software and hardware solutions “that advance space technology and better our world” ─ and yes, to develop iPhone apps.

Pigs in Space!

Yesterday we wrote a story about NASA’s partnership with Rovio on the Angry Birds Space app to help promote human space exploration and, indeed, the recapture of celestial eggs from Miss Piggy and her clan of bandits.

International Space Apps Challenge

Today we want to follow up on NASA’s other apps venture, the International Space Apps Challenge, a kind of open forum that will be held at different locations around the world on the 21 and 22 of April. Although this is a well-organized event, the people behind the challenge want to encourage the kind of serendipitous brainstorming and crowdsourcing that occurs at more traditional hackathons or codeathon-type events.

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Today marks the release of the latest installment of the hugely-successful Angry Birds series, Angry Birds Space, and with Rovio’s partnership with NASA, the duo aims to not only entertain the public but also teach people a little physics along the way. But don’t worry ─ it won’t require the use of a calculator.

Angry Birds Space ─ The New Frontier

Those little, rotund birds that millions of fans have come to love are even angrier now that they have to search for their eggs in space. Rovio showed off the Angry Birds Space app at this year’s SXSW Festival after having announced their partnership with NASA.

The game itself has all the familiar characters plus a host of new birds and superpowers, and features up 60 interstellar levels of gameplay. Rovio also introduced some new gameplay mechanics that make this latest installment even more interesting than previous versions. Planets have gravitational orbits, which can be used to launch birds in curved trajectories at pigs resting comfortably atop a planet’s pole.

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