As we approach the end of the first half of the year, we have yet to see the AIR app for android and the 10.1 flash player. I just got done watching the below video and I am eager to develop flash for mobile… Adobe?

Google has annouced that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you. You’ll also see how far away the stores are from you — as long as you’ve enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you’re in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the “more” link, and then select “Shopping.” Or look for the “Shopping results” section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.

Every March, thousands of entrepreneurs and digital types descend on Austin, Tex., for South by Southwest Interactive. They’re hoping to get a glimpse of some of the newest Web and mobile innovations, and perhaps to sample some tacos.

For start-up hopefuls, capturing the fancy of the attendees is almost as important as checking out the panels and parties. The high concentration of tech savants supplies a rare opportunity for companies to woo the eyes and clicks of early adopters and influential Twitter users and bloggers capable of elevating their sites and services out of obscurity.

Their efforts have sometimes paid off: in 2007, a series of giant, glossy screens installed around the convention center displaying Twitter messages helped that service gather speed. Before that, the conference helped give blogging tools like Movable Type a boost among the digerati.

This year, snagging people’s attention won’t be an easy task. There are thousands of events at this year’s conference, including a keynote talk by Twitter’s chief executive, Evan Williams.

But it certainly won’t be for lack of trying. Many start-ups are customizing and tweaking their services to make them more useful or just more fun for conference attendees. The hope is that people who use the services in Austin will go home and spread the word.

This year, some of the most talked-about services are location-based social networks — services that allow users to “check in” on their phones and broadcast their location to friends.

For example, Gowalla, a social network that doubles as an interactive scavenger hunt, allowing users to find virtual goods each time they check in, has hidden virtual items around downtown Austin that can be redeemed for their real-world counterparts, like tacos, drinks, retro film cameras and Palm cellphones.

Foursquare, another mobile social network that doubles as a city guide and competitive bar game, has unleashed a new set of South by Southwest-specific badges for players to unlock.

In addition, the company plans to hand out temporary tattoos and teach people how to play the childhood ballgame that the company is named after.

A new iPhone application called Sitby.us will show users where their Twitter friends are sitting in a particular conference room or panel for easy coordination.

TabbedOut, an application that lets users settle bar tabs with a mobile phone, has teamed up with several venues in Austin to allow conference attendees to pay for drinks that way.

Sched.org, a free, unofficial scheduling tool for conference attendees, is also unveiling a so-called augmented reality iPhone application that allows users to point the camera down a street and see which parties and events are happening nearby.

The conference itself offers tools for quick and easy networking. Badges worn by conference-goers will be equipped with unique bar codes that, when scanned with a mobile phone, save that person’s contact information. In addition, the official South by Southwest iPhone application makes use of a feature that allows people to swap contact information between mobile phones, thanks to a company called DubMeNow.

Of course, these services will suffer if the wireless networks in the area of the convention center can’t handle the crush. Last year, AT&T’s network buckled under the influx of iPhone users. This year, the company says it has been working with conference organizers to add new temporary cellular sites and shore up the city’s existing network.

We are opening registration today for f8, Facebook’s conference where developers and entrepreneurs collaborate on the future of personalized and social technologies.

We hope you will join us on April 21st, 2010, at the Concourse at San Francisco Design Center for a day of learning about the latest Facebook technologies and connecting with other developers. To get your ticket for the event, please visit the f8 Facebook Page and click the “Register” tab.

Members of the Facebook team and the developer community will explore a variety of topics across these areas:

• New Tools: Everything you need to know about our new tools
• Techniques: Best practices for building fast, scalable, and engaging products
• Industry: Engineers, VCs, and entrepreneurs share strategies for growing a business and making technologies social
• Open Technologies: Facebook’s open source projects

We expect f8 to sell out quickly, so register soon to guarantee your spot. Check back to the f8 Page regularly for the latest updates. Tickets are $325 now and will be $425 after March 21st, 2010, if tickets are still available.

You can find more information on our FAQ on the f8 Page. If you are a member of the press who covers topics related to f8, please contact us through the f8 Page.

We hope to see you there and connect with you in person.

*f8 registration is powered by Eventbrite.

With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company’s shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month – devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs – are “better than netbooks.”

On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company’s sentiments that “Flash is a CPU hog” and including support for the technology in Apple’s mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.

However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.

Two years ago customer support startup Get Satisfaction turned its ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands. Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Tapping into the conversations taking place Twitter and other social media sites is now integral to brands and customer support, as we’ve recently seen with Southwest Airlines. Get Satisfaction is extending its social media coverage today by rolling out the ability to add a support tab to Facebook Fan pages.

As companies turn to Facebook Fan Pages to connect with customers, consumers are increasingly voicing their issues with a particular product or brand on the brand’s Facebook page. But often these complaints or opinions can get lost in the stream. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes in. The startup now allows brands to create a tab on their fan pages, which can be a portal for consumers to express their opinions, complaints or issues with the brand or product.

The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday.

“The competition I’m really afraid of are social networking sites,” Jon Klein said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit here. “That’s an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us.

“The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information,” Klein said. “You click on links they send to you and you trust them.

“Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news,” he said. “We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you.

“That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge,” Klein said.

“So I’m far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox,” the News Corp-owned station which is CNN’s major competitor in the cable news arena, Klein said.

The CNN executive said his network’s “mission” is to drive social network and other Web users to “link back to something on CNN.”

Besides expanding its footprint on the Internet with news and video, CNN is looking at mobile devices, Klein said.

“Online is a big growth area for us, mobile has enormous growth potential and domestic US cable is actually a growth area,” he said. “There’s a lot of room to grow.

“We’re in a lot of places and I think that’s the model that can be very successful for us,” Klein said. “Everyone in the media business is actively loooking for multiple revenue streams, that’s no secret.”

Klein, a longtime producer at broadcast network CBS who took over as head of CNN’s US operations in 2004, also said that with the explosion of news outlets and the Internet just being at the scene of a news event was no longer enough.

“Simply getting there used to be a big achievement,” he said. “Nowadays, you’ve got to provide more than just being there.

“Offering the depth and analysis is harder,” he said. “It takes more brainpower, it takes more work, it takes more thought, it takes more creativity.

“People are pretty up to speed on what happened today,” he said. “You’ve got to give them more insight about what’s going on. That is where we are going to try to continue to make a difference.”

Yesterday, MySpace announced a revamped games homepage, available at www.myspace.com/games, which helps users discover and share games virally. The new Games section also improves application engagement and analytics tools for game developers. In addition, MySpace introduced the “MySpace Neon iPhone” application that gives users access to their MySpace games on the iPhone.

According to MySpace, “nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site”. The site is attempting to focus on games as its primary source of entertainment, just as they have for music in the past. Reading the blog post announcing the new upgrade, we can see that in addition to the release, there are nine social games were released as well. The games are not developed by MySpace, but seem to be highlighted to identify that developers are still creating unique experiences on the platform. Although it hasn’t been stated as such, with the recent shakeup of management at MySpace, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are now dedicating a significant portion of resources to developing the games section of the site. I wonder (complete speculation) if they may consider making games themselves.

Hi5, a social network that changed its focus to gaming relatively recently, announced Tuesday that it’s built some code so that Facebook application developers can transport their creations to Hi5’s platform with minimal effort. It’s specifically targeting game developers, so that some of the smash-hit games built on Facebook can now wind up on Hi5.

This may sound familiar: Bebo, the social network eventually acquired by AOL, announced a similar plan to accept Facebook apps late in 2007, but it’s unclear as to the extent it was actually executed.

“As a leading game distribution platform, it’s our job to make the process of getting games live on Hi5 as easy and seamless as possible for our partners,” Hi5 president Alex St. John said in a company release. “Now, developers who have designed and developed a social game for Facebook can easily get their game up and running on Hi5 with minimal development effort.”

When building apps for a social-networking platform became all the rage after Facebook’s developer platform debuted almost three years ago, there arose an industry-wide concern that there would be too many platforms, too many apps, and a profoundly messy environment as a result. Google launched an initiative called OpenSocial, which aimed to make these apps cross-platform, and pretty much every social-networking site signed on to the initiative–except Facebook. And ultimately, Facebook’s platform was the far-and-away winner.

Hi5’s developer platform is still based on the OpenSocial framework. The site used to be a fairly standard social network, gaining primary traction among youth markets in Latin America, before its executives chose to change the focus of the site to align it with the fast-growing social-gaming craze. Currently, it’s working on broadening its global reach, and getting popular Facebook games on board is one step that the company’s taking.