Twitter recently announced that it has acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter  joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.

Twitter also launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.

Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

This all comes less than a week before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, where the company will try to steer developers down a path that they won’t be paving over any time soon.

Though,Twitter’s post does not mention anything about the Tweetie desktop application, which is available exclusively for the Mac. Don’t be surprised if this becomes ‘Twitter For Mac’ eventually.

iPad and Steve Jobs apparently can’t keep out of the news.With the release of the iPad, and the updated license agreement for iPhone development, new debates are brewing up. Just take a look at section 3.3.1 of the new iPhone Developer License Agreement:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and  objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Doesn’t this sound rather restrictive?Jobs does come out creative-restrictive solutions for the competition.With the launch of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler, this is a rather odd move and it certainly puts a damper on Adobe’s Flash Professional CS5 release.

Certainly, Apple has the right to control the quality and secure nature of its products, and nobody wants to see poorly written or compiled programs allowing viruses and bugs to run rampant on their handheld devices. But just how far is too far?

Microsoft notified customers this week it plans to patch a total of 25 security vulnerabilities, five of which received the highest severity rating of “critical,” in its upcoming “Patch Tuesday” release.

Altogether, the company will release 11 Security Bulletins. However, the new bug-fix drop will not be of the scale of October’s patch release, the largest to date for Microsoft.

While Microsoft alerts IT administrators to upcoming Patch Tuesday roundups, it typically does not go into advance detail surrounding the vulnerabilities it plans to address before it’s released the updates.

However, some key details are known of a handful of the problems it’s aiming to fix. Included in the vulnerabilities getting attention on Tuesday are a pair of flaws — one listed as critical — that originally surfaced as Microsoft Security Advisories, which are somewhat akin to early warnings about bugs for which Microsoft doesn’t as yet have patches.

The most dangerous of the two surfaced in early March. That bug has to do with how VBScript processes help files in Internet Explorer.

Among the other critical bugs receiving patches on Tuesday are ones that affect all supported versions of Windows, from Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) to Windows XP SP2 and SP3, to Windows Vista SP1 and SP2, and even Windows 7.

Additionally, critical patches affect Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Release 2 (R2). Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those systems are included on the list of affected systems.

Other vulnerabilities due for patching, though rated as “important” — the third highest threat level in Microsoft’s four-level vulnerability rating system — affect Microsoft Office and Exchange.

Olive Telecommunication launched its offering in the multiple sim/standby category viz., ‘Olive Wiz’- a social networking triple sim Qwerty phone (2GSM+CDMA).

Unique by virtue of its offering of dual GSM SIM (with dual standby) and a slot for CDMA RUIM, the phone is ideal for customers who are intensive voice and data users – on the go, thus giving the consumer the freedom to choose the strongest network and stay connected.

For the generation hooked on to social networking, Olive Wiz is embellished by applications that allow one click access to websites such as facebook and twitter along with fastest browsing experience through Opera Mini browser.

Olive Wiz also offers the convenience of easy Email access while offering the convenience of a Qwerty keypad that allows faster responsiveness through a built in instant messenger.

A scam Facebook page offering the site’s users a US$1,000 Ikea gift card took in nearly 40,000 victims last Friday.

In late March, a similar $1,000 Ikea gift card scam took in more than 70,000 victims, and just last week another scam Facebook page offering a $500 Whole Foods gift certificate was widely reported.

Friday’s scam page had taken in more than 37,000 users by 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time, offering them a $1,000 gift certificate in exchange for promoting Ikea to their friends. At that time, the page was gaining new fans at the rate of about 5,000 per hour. The promotion, the page said, was only available for one day.

To participate, users must become a fan of the fake Ikea page, hosted on Facebook, and then invite all their friends to become fans. They are then directed to an affiliate marketing page hosted by GiftDepotDirect.com, where they are asked personal information such as name, address, date of birth and home telephone number.

After that step, the victim is told to sign up for two online marketing offers — these ones with legitimate Web sites such as Netflix and CreditReport.com — in order to claim the gift card.

The promised cards in these scams never show up. In fact, the victim’s personal information could be used for identity theft, or worse, her computer could be hacked.

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has started manufacturing 3G mobile communications infrastructure at its Chennai facility. With this move, the company becomes the country’s first telecommunications infrastructure vendor to manufacture 3G products locally.

With 3G licenses underway and the country taking huge strides in telecommunications, operators require a local manufacturing partner. This is definitely the right time and place to begin 3G manufacturing for India,” said Urs Pennanen, head of the India region at NSN.

The first batch of LTE-ready 3G base stations rolled out of the Chennai facility last week. NSN will initially manufacture radio frequency modules and system modules, ramping up production for both these products by almost three-fold towards the latter half of the year. In addition, the company plans to commence production of transport modules and next-generation microwave radios from the second half of 2010, as well as increase its 3G manufacturing headcount from 75 to 210 by the third quarter 2010.

The company has set up 3G test labs in the country and has trained 3200 Indian field engineers to support 3G roll-outs. Furthermore, the company’s Global Network Solutions Centers (GNSC’s) in Noida and Chennai are fully equipped to manage 3G networks remotely. These GNSCs already serve 27 3G operators globally, maintaining, operating and optimizing their networks. The company’s R&D center in Bengaluru supports 3G-related initiatives for the domestic market, and the company has already carried out site surveys for 3G deployment.

SunGard has created a global services organization of approximately 4,500, bringing together its consulting and technology services teams. The new business is one of the leading consultancies focused primarily on the global financial services and energy industries. Mack Gill, previously president of SunGard Technology Services, has been named president of SunGard Global Services.

SunGard Global Services operates out of 25 global financial and technology centers including Bangalore, Dublin, Houston, London, New York, Paris, Pune, Shanghai, Sydney and Tunis. To help customers in Asia manage their growing infrastructure and technology needs, SunGard Global Services is also launching a new consulting services practice, based in Singapore.

Starting today Bangalore will play host to 2010 edition of Tech Ed India. Spread over three days this Microsoft event is expected to bring together over 50000 best technical minds in India, including CIOs, CTOs, IT professionals, developers, architects and decision-makers. In February this year Servion had partnered Yes Bank to deploy a banking speech recognition enabled Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

Some of India’s leading technology companies have partnered Microsoft for this event. These include Intel,  Sapient, Citrix, Infragistics, Accenture, Telerik, Micro Focus, Component One, Developer Express, Jet Brains and Sogeti.

Giving in to popular demand, this year, Microsoft has set up over 400 additional event hosting centres where audience who are not able to participate live at the event will be able to access content and participate in the sessions.

The conference will also showcase a wide range of Microsoft’s latest or soon to be launched technologies. These include Business Intelligence solutions involving beta versions of the latest Microsoft SQL2008 R2 server and the soon to be launched Microsoft Office 2010 suite. Other highlights include Windows Phone 7, Microsoft Surface Digital Table, Windows 7 and the Silverlight 4.0 Platform.

The latest release of Sybase Afaria, a mobile enterprise BI software, now supports iPad and Android devices. With this new ability to secure and manage iPad and Android, Sybase extends its ubiquitous device support to a list that includes iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry.

The new ability to manage Android devices from the Afaria console, enables IT to configure devices, control password policies, perform remote kill and more. The expanded management capabilities include the ability to perform a remote kill for iPhone and iPad and the expanded security to block unknown or non-compliant devices from accessing corporate assets for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms.

Olive Telecommunications has introduced the first ever triple SIM phone, V-Wiz GC800 in India. This is projected to catch the trend of the multi-SIM handset market in the country.

By introducing the triple SIM V-Wiz GC800 for the Indian customers, the handset maker has also recorded its name as the first handset manufacturer to bring the triple SIM phones to India.

The V-Wiz GC800 phone sports a 5.58 cm color screen and is featured with QWERTY keyword, 2 MP camera, WAP/MMS/GPRS. Bluetooth with A2DP and access to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MSN and Yahoo in IM. The handset is incorporated with opera mini for enabling a faster browsing experience to the user.

Apart from that, there are three colour options for the back panel like yellow, silver and black which are changeable and can be customized. There is also a 4GB microSD slot to suffice the data storage requirement. Built in FM radio, Stereo headset, Speaker phone, Music Player and Video Player with Recording are some other regular features that can be seen in this triple SIM phone.

According to the company, the V-Wiz GC800 handset would be available at Rs 6000 for the Indian customers. However, there is no word about its launch date in India till now.

If you were asked what key existing browsers, Opera would you cite? Not sure. However, Opera is one of the oldest software in its category.

Published by the Norwegian company Opera Software, the browser has never failed assets: especially light in its first versions, it has mainly revealed, over time, highly innovative.

It has taken almost every speed competition with, for example, shortcuts to the mouse gestures, voice commands, support for BitTorrent, widgets … But Leaded by the mandatory posting a banner up the release of version 8.5 in 2005, the browser never managed to get a comfortable market share.

Its revival, he owes in part to additional software, Opera Mini, a version developed specifically for mobile devices and game consoles all, it’s Opera Software, which is the source of the complaint against Microsoft with European Commission and led to the establishment of “ballot screen.

This is to provide automatically through Windows Update, change the default browser. Of the twelve proposed browsers, Opera is one of five immediately visible on the screen of choice. This is a good opportunity to find out. And just icing on the cake – not necessarily coincidental – Opera just released version 10.5 of its browser. The program, speed and always foolproof innovation.

Nvidia has announced a range of Quadro professional graphics solutions, which are certified by Adobe for Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) software. As a result Adobe Premiere Pro can leverage the parallel processing architecture of Nvidia GPUs and their hundreds of cores to allow film and video professionals to work unconstrained. Users can now create compelling, multi-layer projects with a virtually limitless number of HD or higher resolution video clips, then apply sophisticated visual effects and color correction, while still being able to view the output instantly.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium, which includes Adobe Photoshop Extended, Adobe After Effects and more, and Adobe Premiere Pro with the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine that taps into the parallel processing capabilities of Nvidia GPUs, is fully supported by a range of Nvidia Quadro professional graphics solutions. Products certified by Adobe for professional use include the Quadro FX 5800, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 4800 for Mac, Quadro FX 3800 and Quadro CX.

In a bid to increase COBOL reach among the tester and developer community, Micro Focus has rolled out Visual COBOL as part of the Visual Studio 2010. Micro Focus Visual COBOL enables developers to exploit existing enterprise applications on the Microsoft platform. Organizations that continue to rely on COBOL-based applications to run their business now have a low-risk opportunity to take advantage of Visual Studio 2010 without the need for rewriting their applications.

Many skeptics presumed that COBOL or The Common Business Oriented Language was dead for the last few decades. However, Currently COBOL is being used for various applications from ATM machine to electronic cheque clearance to online shopping.

In India, several banks and financial institutions like State Bank of India (SBI) has developed its core banking solutions based on COBOL and extending their applications to its branches.

Similarly Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) that has been on multiple technologies earlier but in 2000, moved to COBOL as a customer of Micro Focus.

To help businesses protect, store and recover information with greater efficiency and reliability through a single, unified platform, Symantec has announced NetBackup 7.  This solution enables organizations to simplify information management while reducing data stores and network traffic by integrating deduplication everywhere – at the client, media server and on third party hardware appliances – thus reducing overall costs.

NetBackup also delivers complete virtual machine protection to increase backup and recovery speeds of data within virtual environments and adds new backup replication for fast, cost-effective disaster recovery.

Extreme Networks has joined the RSA Secured Partner Program to certify interoperability between its ExtremeXOS operating system and the RSA enVision security information and event management platform from RSA.

ExtremeXOS,  delivers security features, including awareness of user and device identity, authentication, encryption, integrity and protection, flexible file-based policy language, and XML across Extreme Networks complete portfolio of high performance BlackDiamond and Summit switches.

Riding on “phenomenal business” in the first quarter (Jan-Feb-March) of this year, Canon India has revised its earlier target of Rs 1,100 crore and placed it a few notches higher — to Rs 1,200 crore. The company’s top line, according to Alok Bharadwaj, Senior VP, Canon India, grew by 60 percent in the first quarter which has given confidence for this revision.

To drive this, the company has created a special major accounts team that will focus on the top 300 accounts, instead of just “spreading it (document management) everywhere.” The company is also looking to replicate its success in the verticals it is already present in. Apart from that, Bharadwaj also intends to focus on healthcare and education, in particular, which has a greater ‘paper load’ than BFSI.

Canon India is also going to hold high-level discussions with the Government with regard to document management solutions. Even though the company is yet at the discussion stage with various government departments, Bharadwaj informs, “We are offering a pilot study at our cost for them to see the outcome. The Government is pushing for the public private partnership model (PPP). Many large IT companies are getting the responsibility to do the last mile service delivery.”

MindTree and more recently Maruti Suzuki are some organizations who have adopted the company’s centralized printing solutions to save on paper, energy and observe document security.

SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has released a new version of Sugar 6. The new version includes a new user interface that promises speed, simplicity, and interoperability with other web applications and mobile devices. The company also announced it has made the primary source code repository for Sugar Community Edition publicly accessible.

Sugar 6 includes the Sugar Shortcut Bar, which is a persistent toolbar throughout the application that allows users to perform common tasks from the toolbar, including creating an account, contact, sales opportunity, document, note, task or logging a meeting or call. Included in the Shortcut Bar, users will also see a context-aware Global Search field which filters search results based on the module in use (e.g., Contacts, Opportunities and Accounts) and produces results without leaving the page.

The application has also received a bit a facelift, with a new, sleek look and easier navigation. In addition to the new user interface, Sugar 6 also includes native application support for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry Smartphones and even the iPad.

SugarCRM, which faces competition from Salesforce, Zoho and other companies that develop CRM products, had a bit of a shakeup last year when CEO John Roberts abruptly resigned last May. But with over 600,000 subscribers of the company’s products, and nearly $50 million in funding, SugarCRM seems to be doing just fine.

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When Salesforce’s enterprise-friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced last Fall, we focused on the social features and connectivity it could bring to the enterprise. It was, in fact, Salesforce’s first major venture into the social networking and collaboration space, and many think Chatter’s innovation will have a lasting impact on the enterprise and cloud computing.

But Chatter, which launched in private beta earlier this year to 100 customers, is slowly growing up, adding more customers and developing its own ecosystem. Today, Salesforce is expanding the beta program and launching ChatterExchange, a marketplace for Chatter Apps.

Cloud storage and document sharing startup Box.net is announcing significant news today: the startup has just raised $15 million on Series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and U.S. Venture Partners participating. This brings Box.net’s total venture funding to $29.5 million. As part of the deal, Rory O’Driscoll, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined Box.net’s Board of Directors. The startup’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie did not disclose the valuation for the round but said the funding would be used for building out the platform further and for hiring staff in the company’s sales and engineering divisions.

It’s late Tuesday evening and the TechCrunch office is mostly deserted. I was finishing off a few things and preparing for tomorrow when Steve Gillmor, my friend, mentor and the founding editor of TechCrunchIT walks in.

“I’ve got some news and I had to talk to you in person about it.”

Damnit. I knew right then I wouldn’t like the “news.” And sure enough, he’s taken another job. Starting monday he’ll be on the senior team (senior as in high level, not as in old) at Salesforce. Founder Marc Benioff recruited him directly.

“You bastard.” (I tend to take these things personally)

Now I know why Benioff has been writing regular guest posts for us. It’s because he’s feeling guilty over stealing Steve from us, obviously.

Of course I’m also happy for Steve, and the new job is a terrific opportunity. And graciously Steve has agreed to continue writing every week or so for us, and of course you can follow him on Twitter at @stevegillmor. In some ways things will remain the same with us and Steve.

But it’s still a sad day at TechCrunch. I was listening to Steve on the Gillmor Gang long before I ever started TechCrunch. And I miss the old days when Steve, Dave Winer and I used to meet for breakfast in Burlingame most weekends.

You can read all of Steve’s posts on TechCrunchIT over the years here. He’s been a technology journalist for something like 30 years, back almost to the beginning of, well, tech reporting. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that Steve has forgotten more things than I’ll ever learn.

Steve doesn’t bother much with details, he goes right at the big trends. And he’s usually right. Way before most other people are. Controversial? Yes. Long winded? Yep. Occasionally non linear in his thinking? Understatement. But he’s also brilliant, and he’s always guided me towards rightness.

We recorded a short exit interview video for posterity. Good luck, Steve. I hope to see you around the office regularly.

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At the moment of a major disruption, it’s tempting to view the shift in power as coming from one company or individual. So we act like giggling schoolgirls when we spot Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt having a coffee, measuring the body language and the very fact of the public encounter in terms of war, two generals meeting on horses in the center of the engagement field, etc.

And given the time it takes to make chess moves even in this realtime world, we can guess they’re not talking about today but rather about tomorrow. The time between today and tomorrow has compressed, but the cycles it takes to produce hardware and ramp carrier buildout mandate iterative development as the only way to move forward rapidly. One thing building on the last, anticipating the next, maintaining and extending core advantages while opening up newer ones.

The iPad/Android/Silverlight agendas share many elements and surprisingly few differences. Since Ray Ozzie’s Disruption Memo 5 years ago this month, Microsoft has moved from a landlocked desktop company to one poised to launch its most profitable application suite in the Cloud. Silverlight is now the application development environment for most of Microsoft platforms including mobile, TV, and Web.

If you think 5 years is not a very long time, how about 3 years since Apple announced the iPhone. With the release of the iPad, Apple has in effect done something very similar to Silverlight in moving a considerable part of its development architecture to the new iPhone/iPad OS. The arguments about Flash that so captivated us a few weeks ago seem so irrelevant now that site after site caves to H.264. Google’s odd recommitting to Flash in Chrome the browser may be sold as a pragmatic acknowledgment of the existing Flash base, but it’s got more similarity to the Office team swallowing its pride as Silverlight marches forward across the OS Formerly Known as Windows.

Scratch the surface of the weekend’s I Hate the iPad, And So Must You meme and you’re really looking at the remnants of a view of the computing universe that positions open versus closed instead of two approaches busy nurturing each other along. It’s way beyond strange bedfellows, with Microsoft way out front in guarding online privacy and Apple continuing to leverage their investments in Web Kit and other open source technologies (read OS/10), while Google supports Adobe and its proprietary hairball at the very moment media properties are running away from it.

In fact, it’s a lot like the argument over the iPad (Flash, USB, multitasking): right, I’ll take two. Open technologies are used to advance the ball, then intermingled with closed technologies (the entire Google back end) to produce massive wealth and leverage. If you haven’t been listening to Steve Ballmer recently (he doesn’t get headlines for having Starbucks these days) you may not have heard that Microsoft is all in on the Cloud. Office is soon to ship for the Cloud, just as Ozzie insisted would have to happen 5 years ago. Will they destroy Google Apps? Hell, no. But will Windows Phone get share? Just ask Nokia or Palm what they think.

The polemicists insist the iPad is a consumption platform. Sure it is, but does that mean it’s not a creative one? Hell, no. First get out of the way of the stampede of app developers and then make that case. No camera; I got stinking cameras on my iPad Nano as Scoble likes to call it, on my Nexus One, on several Flip cams, on the MacBook Air, on and on. Can I do realtime video conferencing on any phone right now? No, so why is that a limitation of the iPad? It’s coming, as is multitasking and universal bus adapters and everything except Flash which we don’t need.

In fact, every site that supports no Flash is one more advertisement and network effect multiplier for the new platform, a little reward each day or few hours that says: yes, you made the right decision, and no, you’re not going to regret it. Each app download confirms more of the same thing, that how we interact with these machines is in play, and that the only thing worse than the new OS is having to go back to everything we’re already sick of.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the MacBook Air as I sit here typing, but sure as sure can be I’ll be migrating to the keyboard dock the next time I take a trip to Starbucks. Bluetooth will become the virtual hub for creatives, with the corresponding battery drain distributed in a handy accessory. At some point, I’ll start leaving the Air home. It’s easier to invest in the new architecture; it’s a Clunkers for iPads program. iPadCare. I’m all in.

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One of the more surprising things that came out of our all-star panel of consumer software VCs was an admission that Marc Andreessen is starting to invest in a new wave of enterprise software companies. He said he’d just closed one deal he couldn’t disclose, and was expecting to do more.

I talked with Andreessen briefly afterwards about his comment, asking if he meant software-as-a-service specifically and whether he meant niche products or core software for running big businesses. His answer was ‘all of the above’, if it’s the right company — he thinks it’s time for an industry reset. Oracle’s – and to a far lesser degree SAP’s – shopping sprees of the past few years have cleaned out most of the late 1990s enterprise software brush and most big businesses rely on one or both of the big vendors, with no best-of-breed competitors mixed in and very little in the way of new products and real innovation.

We’ve written about Roambi’s nifty iPhone apps and web platform that allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on the iPhone in customizable charts and graphs. Today, Roambi’s developer, MeLLmo, is bringing its mobile application to the iPad, that helps transform business reports and data into interactive dashboards.

With Roambi’s new app, companies can turn their business data – from Excel spreadsheets, Google Docs, and premium reporting services like SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce CRM – into interactive dashboards on their iPad, allowing users to transform complex analytics into easy to understand graphs, charts and images. Ater the data is downloaded, you can select a pre-designed template to deliver the data (i.e. pie chart, graphs etc.). Once published, the data transforms into interactive visualizations for the iPad.

With the iPad app, Roambi Trends will allow users to identify and visualize trends in their data. The Trends View offers data comparisons across whatever period a user chooses – years, months, even minutes; users can easily focus on specific time periods by sliding the dateline at the bottom of the graph. CataList view organizes data into hierarchical, categorized lists with the ability to drill down to into detailed summaries, as well as simultaneously compare or analyze different sets of data.

For enterprise users, Roambi offers both a Pro version, which is a secure, hosted service that connects mobile; and Roambi ES , a secure, on-premise server solution. As we’ve written in the past, the view of the data within Roambi’s app is impressive and is even more compelling on the iPad. Data-filled spreadsheets are automatically turned into interactive graphs and charts which allow you to easily understand the information that’s being delivered. Within graphs, you can also delve deeper into certain data points by simply touching the screen. And the app itself intuitively stores various charts according to subject matter and category, making it easy to access various visualizations quickly and efficiently. For any enterprise user of an iPad, this app is a winner.

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During his keynote at SXSW last month, Twitter CEO Evan Wiliams announced an upcoming new platform called @anywhere, which would allow third party sites to integrate Twitter features (he also showed off some of the partners who would be featuring the platform, which you can see in the image at right). Twitter didn’t give a launch date for when sites would start integrating the new platform, but it looks like we’ve just come across the first site to feature @anywhere. Meet Eggboiling.com.

The site, which will almost certainly be pulled down soon after this post is published, is clearly a testing environment for @anywhere, but it’s currently open to the public. It features the following (all shown in the screenshots below): various variable states; a button to ‘Connect With Twitter’; buttons to follow twitter users @jack, @biz, and @ev; a test hovercard that allows me to see @wendyverse’s latest tweets and follow counts at a glance, and a test box that lets me tweet. It isn’t particularly easy on the eyes, but it works well enough.

With the apparent lack of Flash on the iPad, video hosting platforms like Brightcove, Ooyala and Kyte are throwing their support for HTML5 playback on the device. Encoding.com, , a SaaS video encoding platform, is also announcing its support for HTTP streaming, to enable streaming of its video on iPhone and iPad devices.

HTTP streaming allows publishers to continuously adapt the video stream in real-time to match the user’s available bandwidth. Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, MySpace and the CarDomain Network, which is currently using Encoding.com’s HTTP live streaming support.

Encoding recently raised $1.25 million in Series A funding, led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan.

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