One of the more frequent questions we’ve gotten about GuitarToolkit is, “can I use it on my iPod Touch?”. The answer is yes, but the Touch doesn’t have a microphone, and therefore the tuner isn’t available. A bunch of folks have written in to say that they’d like to see a version specifically for the Touch, at a reduced price. Sans tuner of course.

GuitarToolkit Lite is exactly this. You can now find it at your local App Store for $5.99 (direct App Store link), or read more at GuitarToolkitLite.com.

We’re happy to announce GuitarToolkit, an application with essential guitar utilities for your iPhone. Available with iPhone OS 2.0, GuitarToolkit has the following features:

• Chromatic Tuner Using the iPhone’s microphone, the tuner has 3 modes of operation: all notes, standard guitar tuning and alternate guitar tuning (with 40+ alternate tunings pre-defined)
• Chord Finder Over 260 chords for quick and easy reference
• Metronome Variable tempo and adjustable time signature
• Reference Tones For tuning by ear

Available at the iTunes App Store for just $9.99. You can watch the screencast and learn more at guitartoolkit.com.

DashGo is excited to announce the launch of their new service that makes it easy for “artists, labels, and content owners to syndicate content across digital music stores and social media sites from a single dashboard.” By tracking performance of content across social media sites and digital music stores, DashGo enables content owners to react rapidly to demand and quickly scale distribution while maintaining a consistent brand.

Agile has worked with the DashGo team over the last several months to iteratively develop a site with a user experience and functionality finely tuned to the needs of artists, labels, content owners, and marketers. Making use of the latest web technologies, including Ruby on Rails and the application programming interfaces (APIs) of online social networks and digital music distributors, the dashgo.com site gives content owners the tools to manage their distributed online presence from a centralized location with an ease that has never been achievable before.

For more information on the site please contact DashGo or Agile Partners. We’ve had a great time working with their team and are excited to continue to help enhance and enrich the experience available at dashgo.com.

Here’s a stitched shot of the RailsConf public bulletin board. The overal image quality is pretty poor (I tried a few different stitching options), but it’s acceptable at the detail level. Note that the full resolution version is 8+ MB (14,880 x 2,732 px).

Update: Pelle Braendgaard has posted some high-res photos of the board.

This is the fourth in a series of posts which represent my notes, impressions, and in some cases audio, for the sessions I attended at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo.

Wednesday Keynotes

• Jeff Weiner in Conversation with John Battelle (Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President, Yahoo; John Battelle, Federated Media). A bit painful, Weiner sounds like Merlin Mann when he is imitating valley-VC-speak.
• High Order Bit: The Other Local (Rich Skrenta, Co-founder and CEO, Topix). Skrenta points out how little local news is really available today; and how the trend is downwards. Topix.com has had some success in penetrating the local news market. Natural disasters (tornados in one case) spurred the initial adoption of Topix is some communities, but eventually it stuck.
• Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is It Soup Yet? (Dan Farber, ZDNet; Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra; Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise; Ross Mayfield, CEO, Social Text). CIO-speak is the kiss of death. Painful.
• High Order Bit: Joost: P2P Television (Dirk-Willem van Gulik, Joost). Since I’m on the Joost beta, nothing really new here, but worth a listen if you haven’t used Joost.
• mp3 audio

Implementing OpenID (David Recordon, Verisign; Brian Ellin, JanRain). Solid session on OpenID, including walking through some code samples. One thing they pointed out that OpenID doesn’t address is phishing: the standard implementation still relies on typing in a password, and a phishing-controlled site can send you to a fake OpenID provider and steal that password. On the other hand, solutions like Vidoop can work with OpenID. Also, MyOpenID.com supports certificate based authentication. I tried it and it works, although using a cert for login adds too many clicks they way it’s currently implemented. mp3 audio slides

The Challenge of Agile Development: Avoiding Half-Baked Design (Alex Chaffee, Pivotal Labs; Leslie Chicoine, Satisfaction). Digs into how creative resources need to adjust their mode of operation when working with a development team that is apply agile development methodologies. And also what developers can do to improve communications with creatives. mp3 audio slides

Immersive Experiences: Lessons from Game Designers (Raph Koster, Areae). A great presentation, probably the most fun I had in any session at the conference. Raph took us through about 20 funny little lessons that game designers have learned that web designers probably haven’t picked up on yet, but need to as the on-line experience becomes more immersive, more like gaming. Enjoy, this is a blast. mp3 audio slides

Reality Bites: The Future of Gaming + Virtual Worlds 2.0 (Susan Wu, Charles River Ventures; Joichi Ito, Creative Commons; Raph Koster, Areae; Lane Merrifield, Club Penguin; Craig Sherman, Gaia Online; Ginsu Yoon, Second Life). I followed Raph to his next session … also a good one, everyone on the panel was interesting this time. I have my youngest daughter on Club Penguin now, which is like Second Life for 8+ year olds, she loves it. Raph made the point that most game companies where clueless about virtual worlds; that Blizzard / World of Warcraft was really an outlier, that most new virtual / on-line games are not coming from the traditional gaming companies. mp3 audio, missing last 5 minutes or so

The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures and Podcasting, and Vlogging (Jeremiah Owyang, PodTech; Thomas Hawk, Zooomr; Chris Pirillo, LockerGnome; Robert Scoble, PodTech). Both Scoble and Pirillo are on live-streaming kicks, and the both had live streams rolling for this session. Ustream TV and others like it look like the next step in web media. mp3 audio, a little hard to hear as I had to record from back of room