This week’s news was all about the new iPhone, but our top story was about something completely different: Java, and whether or not you need it. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: The Internet of Things really is a series of tubes; augmented reality may save the planet; and we mapped the oil spill using the real-time Web . Read on for more. Sponsor Top Stories of the Week Who Needs Java? Probably Not You How to Jailbreak iOS 4.0 for iPhone 3G Jailbreaking iOS 4.0? How To Keep a Jailbreak For iPhone 3G or 3GS OpenDNS Launches FamilyShield, Free Parental Controls Service for Web New iPhone Software Arrives Today – Can You Run it? More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web How Twitter Annotations Could Bring the Real-Time and Semantic Web Together Online Language Learning Company Babbel Adds Voice Recognition Tool Mapping the Oil Spill in Real Time More Real-Time Web coverage . Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Augmented Reality Can Augmented Reality Help Save the Planet? More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Mobile Web iPhone 4: Your Burning Questions Answered Google Activates Android “Kill Switch,” Zaps Useless Apps Developers Betting on Android for Long-Term Success, Says Surveyy More Mobile Web coverage Internet of Things Google, GE & Others Prototype Wireless Mote to Connect Any Device to Smart Grid The Internet IS a Series of Tubes: Real-Time Mapping of the London Underground More Internet of Things coverage Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Is Venture Capital Broken? Posterous and Ambition: A Lesson for Startups? Delicious Founder, AOL Exec Launch Hacker Angels ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Oxygen: A Desktop Network Connected to the Cloud Architects of Amazon Web Services Launch Nimbula, Promise an OS for the Cloud Weekly Poll: Is Salesforce.com Chatter Really That Unique? Does it Matter? ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. Antivirus Product Testing is Changing, Whether Vendors Like it or Not 3 Up-and-Coming Collaboration Suites Google Apps Now Supports Multiple Domains Enjoy your weekend everyone. Subscribe to Weekly Wrap-up You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email below. RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form: Discuss

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Amazon just dropped the price of its Kindle e-reader to $189 . This move comes just a few hours after B&N announced the launch of its WiFi-only Nook for $149 and reduced the price of its 3G-enabled version of the Nook to $189. No doubt, Amazon’s price drop is a direct reaction to B&N’s attack on Amazon’s Kindle business and it will be interesting to see how B&N will react to Amazon’s new challenge. Sponsor In its press release, Amazon doesn’t address B&N’s Nook directly. Instead, Amazon takes a thinly veiled swipe at Apple’s iPad and stresses that the Kindle can be used in “bright sunlight” and that it is light enough for “one-handed reading.” In addition, Amazon stresses that even though the Kindle is a 3G device, users won’t have to pay monthly fees or sign annual contracts. For Half a Day, the Nook was the Cheapest 3G-Enabled E-Reader Now that the Kindle is $10 cheaper than the Nook 3G, Amazon’s e-reader is now the cheapest 3G-enabled standalone e-reader on the market – a claim that B&N was still able to make in its announcement this morning. The WiFi-only Nook is still $40 cheaper than the Kindle, but with its 3G connection, the Kindle offers a very significant extra feature for what is only a slightly higher price. How Will B&N React? Another Price Drop or Focus on Unique Features? It will be interesting to see how this race to the bottom will play out. Amazon has already shown that it is willing to take a loss on the Kindle business in order to gain market share. If B&N decides to undercut Amazon’s price again, chances are that Amazon will pull even within hours. If B&N decides to keep its current pricing scheme, chances are that the company will focus its marketing on the unique features of the Nook ecosystem, including the ability to lend e-book to friends for up to two weeks and B&N’s in-store reading program. In addition, the Nook’s small touchscreen at the bottom of the device gives B&N’s e-reader an additional hardware feature that the Kindle doesn’t offer yet. Discuss

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The Guggenheim Museum is teaming up with YouTube in partnership with HP to discover the art of YouTube videos. Tasked with uncovering the “most creative video in the world,” the companies have launched an international search by way of YouTube Play, a specially branded YouTube channel that will feature the entries in this new competition. Sponsor About YouTube Play Anyone is invited to submit a video to YouTube Play , even video creators themselves, and the submission deadline is July 31st. The videos may consist of animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and even “entirely new art forms” that challenge the perception of what’s possible to do with video, explains the YouTube blog post about this unique collaboration project. Afterwards, 200 of the leading videos will be selected for further attention by an international jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film and video. Twenty of those initial 200 videos will then be presented at the Guggenheim. Yes, that’s right – at the Guggenheim itself. The YouTube videos will actually appear in the Guggenheim network of museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin on October 21st and will be made available for the world to see on the youtube.com/play channel. This isn’t a contest per se, as the winning videos don’t receive a cash prize or other sort of physical reward. But having a video dubbed “art” and being showcased internationally in one of the world’s most famous art museums, is a reward in and of itself, most would agree. This isn’t the first time YouTube has proven itself the medium of choice for artists worldwide. Last year, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra , an online experiment in music, sought out musicians to participate in the world’s first collaborative online orchestra where the endgame was a performance at Carnegie Hall . YouTube: Internet Leads to Instant Success? What’s most interesting about this current art competition as well as the Online Orchestra is the way that it is able to surface undiscovered talents and allow them to achieve fame without all the requisite toiling and tolling for years in “starving artist” mode, as was once par for the course for those wanting to break into the art world. Instead, with YouTube, a handful of videos can lead to a lifetime of success. Just ask Justin Bieber. Or Soulja Boy . Or Esmee Denters . Or Journey’s new singer Arenl Pineda , discovered a few years ago. Or FRED , the annoyingly overactive boy whose high-pitched voice befuddles parents but whose videos and associated kid-friendly merchandise have made the teen rich beyond belief. But while the above are certainly high-profiled examples, let’s be clear about one thing: when it comes to art and music, YouTube hasn’t yet surfaced the next Leonardo or Monet, the next Beatles or Stones, the next Janis Joplin or Jimmy Hendrix. To date, the folks who have made their way up through YouTube are not necessarily, forgive me Bieber fans, going to make their mark in the annals of history as being among “the best of the best.” In some cases they may be great…but are they the greatest? Really? However, with this contest, that may change. For next-gen video artists, there’s surely no better place than YouTube to flex your artistic muscles. It should be interesting to see what video creation wins this latest attempt to elevate YouTube to art form. The end result will likely be just that: art. Discuss

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Within two years, the number of hours people spend viewing online video will easily surpass the time they spend watching television. There’s no doubt that online video has enjoyed stratospheric growth of late, but despite that success, the technical underpinning by which video is delivered into your browser hasn’t really developed much since the 1990s. Back then, watching a video on the Web meant squinting at a postage stamp-sized low-res player with very jerky video. Sponsor Nick Wilson is CTO at Break Media , an entertainment community for men. He’s spent the last two decades building products that leverage digital content and is a recognized innovator in the digital entertainment field. He’s excited about Break.com being one of the first HTML5-enabled video sites. Fast forward ahead to 2004, when YouTube and casual gaming sites burst onto the scene and we finally had killer applications that meant one thing: To experience the new wonders of the Web, one had no choice but to download Adobe’s Flash browser plugin. After all, the two most popular browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (collectively with 80% market share), still have no native way to play a video or animation without installing Flash. So the massive demand for video on the Web was enabled by a few de-facto standards that converged at just the right time, and was led by Adobe Flash, which is now installed on over 98% of all desktops and laptops. The trouble is that we engineers always viewed Flash as a transitionary technology: a platform that enabled a browser to do things that couldn’t be done using the archaic Internet standards of HTML and JavaScript alone. Every transitionary technology reaches a peak (98% adoption is a pretty good peak!) and eventually declines as newer developer-friendly technologies with better standards compliance take hold. Of course, with Flash being so ubiquitous on desktops and laptops it will be years before developers ditch it all together. But the desktop isn’t where the next battle for video will be fought – rather it will be the new breed of platform and mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes – all of which have limited processing power and little to no ability for a user to download and install plugins like Flash. With the newest crop of browsers, principally Apple Safari and Google Chrome (soon to be joined by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9), come a new set of capabilities based upon existing standards: HTML, JavaScript, and H.264 video playback. Using this trinity of technologies, it’s possible to engineer a completely immersive video playback experience that’s indistinguishable from a Flash-based player to the user, but is far faster and easier to develop and is supported out of the box within the browser. The arrival of the iPad unquestionably puts the fate of online video – and the means by which it is distributed – center-stage. It’s unsurprising that Apple’s newest baby, the iPad, would follow in the footsteps of its older sibling, the iPhone, by relying on the browser to handle video rather than allowing a Flash plugin. But there’s one critical difference: The iPad allows an embedded video playback experience, so the video can appear within a normal Web page without having to go full-screen as with the iPhone. This seemingly minor difference, coupled with Safari’s mature HTML5 implementation, means that a website can be modified to work on the iPad and can retain all of the functionality of a Flash-based player but with a developer-friendly HTML and JavaScript implementation. Provided that your videos are already encoded in H.264, modifying a video playback page to be iPad-compatible should not take more than a day or so (see the iPad screenshot above). Adding some iPad-specific features such as pinch-to-zoom with auto page rearrangement (impossible to do in Flash) take longer, but are still very straightforward to implement. And what about the online video economy, with its Flash-based pre-roll videos and overlay advertising units? Well, with some clever coding they can work just fine on the iPad, too. Transcoding video ads into H.264 is a straightforward process, and ad units such as a “video bug” (those pop-up messages that show at the bottom of a video) can easily be reprogrammed to work in HTML5. When we combine the in-video units like preroll and video bug along with non-Flash IAB-standard ad units, there are plenty of opportunities to monetize a video view impression. So the iPad without Flash, rather than presenting a problem for online video, presents a great opportunity to modernize the video playback experience, supporting the unique and immersive user experience that the iPhone started and the iPad will continue and enhance. Discuss

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In April, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake wrote a provocatively titled blog post : “Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.” Her arguments were on my mind when I met Jay Rodrigues in early May. The 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania junior had just secured Series A funding for his startup DormNoise . And while that conversation was primarily about the college-calendaring system he has developed, he promised me a follow-up conversation about life as a CEO and college student – once finals were done. Sponsor And although he’s now in the midst of summer school, we had a chance to speak again today. The Importance of a College Education Contrary to Fake’s contention , Rodrigues believes “You need an education.” Rodrigues admits that entrepreneurs should gain experience “in the trenches,” but thinks that the education he’s receiving at Wharton School gives him particular strengths and understandings that serve him well in those very trenches. A finance major, Rodrigues feels he can speak knowledgeably in business dealing with investors and clients thanks to some of his coursework. He admits, however, that certain classes, including marketing and management, are frustrating, in part because his own practical experiences on the subject seem to outstrip the textbook case studies. Rodrigues points to the learning that happens outside the college classroom as well. College helps you meet people, learn to work with people, and, Rodrigues adds, “learn about yourself.” Time Management: Juggling Work, College, and Social Life But balancing being a full-time college student with being a CEO is grueling. There’s no escaping from the cellphone or email, Rodrigues notes, detailing a schedule that, on a typical day, alternates between dealing with school and work, from first thing in the morning til the wee hours of the next morning: email, phone, class, email, phone, class, email, phone, dinner, gym, homework. Rodrigues works about sixteen hours a day, adding jokingly “You can sleep when you die.” He does give his company a warning when it’s exam time, asking to be disturbed only in case of emergencies. Rodrigues insists that despite this hectic schedule, he carves out time for a good social life, including involvement in his fraternity. Age: Help or Hindrance? Rodrigues says he has benefited from good support, not just from his family, but from DormNoise’s Advisory Board and now Board of Directors. He also says he’s got a strong team with him at DormNoise. But he admits that despite having good business mentors, the missing piece might be a community of other college student entrepreneurs, colleagues who understand the unique demands of being 21 and of having both a college education and a corporation’s success riding on your shoulders. Rodrigues describes himself as “kid with an idea that doesn’t like to hear ‘No’,” but admits that it’s often difficult – as an entrepreneur in general, but as a 21-year-old one to boot – to be taken seriously. He feels he’s had to work even harder to earn respect from potential investors and clients. But Rodrigues also points to the benefits of being a college student, namely “energy, passion, fresh viewpoints.” And as DormNoise targets the college market, he undoubtedly brings particular insights to bear on the development, implementation, and marketing of his product. Jay’s Advice to College Student Entrepreneurs: Stay in School When I asked Jay what advice he’d give to other aspiring college student entrepreneurs, he praised the optimism, energy, and even naivete of youth, encouraging others his age to make the most of that. But be ready to work hard every single day. “Be 150 million percent sure this is what you want,” says Rodrigues. “You’ll need passion and confidence.” And don’t drop out of school, he adds, because for every Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs who drop out and go nowhere. At least if you stay in school, you’ll have an education. You don’t have to be a Zuckerberg or a Gates, says Rosenberg. You just have to be good at what you do. “You don’t have to try to be the next Microsoft or Facebook,” advises Rodrigues to other college student entrepreneurs, “but I hope you are.” Photo Credit: University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Library by Flickr user Nathan Mathias Discuss

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