After nearly a month's worth of public trials, on Tuesday, Brizzly finally announced the launch of Picnics - the newest approach to private group chat on the Web, leveraging the company's rich media roots and intelligent conversational UI found in their popular social networking client to give less public conversations a new home - even as other sites are continuing to peel back the layers of what is public and what is not. The result, a fun free-flowing environment to chat with friends, family and colleagues without fear of the content going public, and without the headaches associated with more feature-laden tools, like the much discussed Google Wave.

While Brizzly is well known for their Twitter and Facebook client for the Web and iPhone, the company is branching out from being solely beholden to those two sites. Their Brizzly Guide explains the day's hot topics, and Picnics, which require a dedicated Brizzly account, take place outside of both networks.

The concept of a Picnic is a private (or public, if you choose) chat with any number of people you invite. Updates are posted chronologically, with the oldest at the top, and you can add photos in line. Quoted tweets are displayed with a unique design, and hours can be wasted playing with the customizable Webcam feature, and its related effects.


Before you say "Hey! Web chat is nothing new!"... yes, that's somewhat right, but Picnics are surprisingly useful. You can customize the people invited to participate, you can get e-mail notifications upon new entries, and can even start 1-1 sidebars with people involved in each Picnic, much like direct messages without the overhead. Brizzly's leading Web app capability to display photos in line is also a fun addition that brings us ages beyond the world of shared text windows.

Brizzly's introduction comes at a time when Facebook and Google and others have been called on the carpet for violating privacy. They know this and said that the launch of Picnics puts "you in control of who sees what you say and where," adding "Have a picnic with your friends to post the funny YouTube videos you used to put on your wall." Meanwhile, Twitter, while it has improved, continues to strain under the pressure of one to many conversations, and lacks the potential for rich discussion in an intimate way that Picnics bring. So Picnics gets privacy right and it gets conversations right in a fun way.

I've been using Picnics to talk with friends and family for weeks, and the debut is welcome. Check them out at http://www.brizzly.com.

Mint.com is quickly turning into a single stop venue to not only capture your current financial picture, and graph how you are doing in terms of spending and savings from your financial history, but it is also helping you set marks for the future - with the launch of Goals, a new tab now available for all users, who can leverage the site's relationships with various financial institutions and intelligent calculators to see how much money they should be saving to achieve one's life targets. And even if you opt not to sign up with new banking institutions immediately, the site's basics help you stomach the tough realities and importance of socking money away even when it seems you can't afford it.

While Mint.com previewed the new Goals feature at the end of April, the tab just went live for all users, between budgets and trends. As you can expect, the site encourages you to choose from a list of preset goals, select an end date or affordable amount, and then, once saved, you can track Mint.com to see how close you are at achieving this goal.


For example, when looking to buy a home, Mint.com asks your annual income, and prefills with average mortgage rates, 20% downpayment, insurance and property tax data. The more you earn, the more you can afford. It even provides "Aggressive" and "Conservative" options should you be more fiscally responsible or prefer to live dangerously.


Speaking of dangerous, as a parent of twins, simply calculating college costs can be scary indeed. One can set estimated costs per year, the number of years the student plans to attend college, and their current age to start the calculators in motion. In fact, Mint.com says we should be saving more than a thousand dollars per month, every month, per child, to be prepared for a good school, so that is quite daunting. Luckily, they do offer a way to get a 529 plan started to help with that process.



Where I think the Goals function falls a little short is that it first, doesn't tap into your existing data on the site, as it could help you understand how much you make on average, and it also relies on you to choose how much things will cost in the future. Why not suggest prices for specific colleges, cars or geographies for instance, when buying a home? In these simple models, you say whether your child will attend a $10,000 a year university or a $30,000 one, and you decide whether you think you earn $30,000 a year, or $300,000.

Mint.com, now part of Intuit, can make quite a bit of its own revenue through referrals of its customers to financial institutions that offer the very plans that make sense to achieve these goals, so in some recursive way, these goals push Mint.com's goals further forward. I do plan on investigating if it makes sense to get serious about my kids' college plans, and yes, we may even need to plan on getting one of those super cool minivans everyone is talking about once baby #3 shows up, so I'll tap Mint.com for suggestions on saving there as well. It's a goal, right?

If you are a Mint.com user, check out Goals here: https://wwws.mint.com/goal.event

One of the major sticking points in Apple's cold war with Google is the fact that Google plays a visible role on Apple's iPhone platform, but Apple plays zero role on Google's Android platform. Google has always been the iPhone's default search engine, and Google Maps has been among the most used apps. Despite politicking from Steve Jobs and the recent inclusion of Bing as an option for iPhone's search, it is true that Apple's products are better with Google software than without. Meanwhile, Apple makes some great software - especially with their iLife suite and accompanying iTunes Store - the core of the iPhone experience and the company's entire digital media strategy. iTunes found its way to Windows. Would it ever make a leap to Android?

After starting in its infancy as SoundJam MP way back in 1999 (I actually bought my own copy through Digital River in 2000), Apple launched iTunes in 2001 after SoundJam's acquisition, ushering in their digital media era. (I was in the audience at MWSF that year as well, my only time for a Stevenote)

iTunes, and its sibling iLife suite, including iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD, were first available only for Macintosh, and were seen as a compelling reason to choose the Mac over Windows. But in 2003, Apple released iTunes for Windows, calling it, unabashedly, "The best Windows app ever". Of course, many Microsoft fans consider iTunes bloated and are not big fans, but the product does play a key role, at the very least, in backing up all those iPhones from Windows users out there, and enabling them to make purchases from the popular iTunes store.

If the iPhone is a trojan horse for those who are otherwise not Apple customers, then iTunes could be the wheels that enable the horse to be pushed into Redmond's kingdom. Similarly, after Apple introduced Safari, its Web browser, in 2003, a Windows version of the application was rolled out in 2007, now supporting Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. So Apple absolutely has a history of supporting Microsoft where it makes sense - even though they have no history of supporting Linux for these products.

As an Android user now, having turned in my iPhone, I do lack the local music storage application which iTunes represented. As my life is increasingly cloud-based, this is not much of a problem, as I can tap into Sirius XM Radio or Last.fm for personalized music streams, and Spotify will no doubt come soon, as will the long-rumored Music offering from Google. But again, Apple's library of TV Shows and Videos are unavailable to Android users - many of whom may be politically opposed to Apple's products, even as others wouldn't mind firing up iTunes on Android, if it existed.

Steve Jobs was famously reported to have said, angrily, during an internal meeting, that Google went after Apple in the phone business, while Apple stayed out of the search business. The company routinely displays charts that show Android as having significantly lower market share than the iPhone, even if all reports show the mobile OS catching up. Apple clearly is not a fan of Android today, and Google is said to be enemy number one.

In addition to the animosity, veiled or open, between Cupertino and Mountain View, reports show that the overwhelming majority of Apple's revenue continues to be in hardware, not software. The company's Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPads are pushing money into Apple, while revenue from the App Store on iTunes is small. So unless the company wanted to display, again, that its software products are fantastic, even on Android, they probably won't go there. It's also highly unlike Apple could trojan horse any iAds into Android screens of any flavors.

We Mac fans of old used to debate heatedly whether the iPod/iPhone halo effect was real, and there were many people who swore up and down that Apple should never offer the iPod or iTunes on the Windows platform, that it was giving too much respect to Microsoft, and giving away the crown jewels from Cupertino. Now, we see one platform, run by Cupertino, that is populated by enemy software, and the opposite is not true. Apple is probably going to play stubborn and avoid the Android platform unless the market demands it.

If you purchase all your Web video from iTunes, having those shows and films available to your Apple TV and iPhones is pretty simple. But video from other sources, be it through camera and smartphone recordings, or even BitTorrent downloads, can sometimes be a challenge to get into the iTunes ecosystem. A simple piece of Mac software, called iVI (short for iTunes Video Importer) can bring all those videos from all those places and bring them back to iTunes, complete with cool extras, including season and episode data for TV shows, and standard or high definition content into one file.

Despite Apple's success in the video downloads market, the reality is that many people still tap into peer to peer networks to get individual episodes of TV shows, or even full-length feature films. Often, even after these files are downloaded, it can be difficult to find a way to even play the files. iVI converts many different file types, from the standard .mp4, mpg and .mov files to other less Mac-friendly options, including .3gp and .avi and makes them iTunes ready.


Getting files to iVI is billed as being as simple as drag and drop. It recognizes if files are movies or TV episodes. Later, if instructed, it can scan for new video files in regular directories, and will go so far as to suggest TV show episode and season information if not automatically applied.


Many people are turning away from the TV set and their DVRs to the computer for videos. For some, the solution is Hulu or other sanctioned outlets, while for others, BitTorrent and other networks continue to reign supreme. iVI looks like it does the hard work to make the data meaningful and get it on all those Apple devices built to play video.

I've already tapped iVI to pull the 3GP files from my HTC EVO into iTunes so I could build a new iMovie project for posting to YouTube. (See Matthew Walk to the Store With Me) iVI simply works, so check it out from South Pole Software.