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Modea, a digital advertising agency focused on design and technology, claims not only to help its clients build their brands (and advertise) but also to “make and design things they would use themselves”. While this is always a good litmus for a new product or business, you’ll have to excuse my cynicism, but coming from an advertising agency, statements like these are questionable. But, that being said, it’s great to see that Modea is an agency that builds products and apps, tinkering right alongside the companies whose brands they help to hawk. What’s more, they’ve built something today, called InstaEarth, that Instagrammers may very well find usable themselves.

Instagram is fairly popular these days; the app hit 5 million users back in June and have been adding 625,000 users every month since launch. They seem to be doing with four people what Color couldn’t do with $41 million by focusing on providing a killer visual experience for their users. As my colleague MG Siegler made mention of, part of the reason they’ve been able to do this with such a small team is that they’ve focused on the mobile app and API, allowing developers to fill in the holes and help create the rest of the user’s experience.

So, if Instagram is an app that allows “users to tell the story of their lives in a visual way”, InstaEarth is an app that visualizes the story of Instagram users worldwide — in map form. And it’s trying to be more than just another Google maps mashup. I’ll let you decide whether they’ve succeeded in this endeavor, but so far, I’m impressed.

But, how in the sam heck does it work? InstaEarth allows you to navigate and explore Instagram photos on a global map layout, showing photos on the map in the location they were taken. (Though, of course, you have to connect the app to your Instagram account for it to have real useful application.) Users can organize the visual experience based on the popularity of the photos, the proximity to their current location, their own photos, photos of friends, etc.

Users can zoom into any location on the map and view photos nearby taken by any other Instagram user, or enjoy the voyeurism inherent to clicking on any Instagram user and then viewing every location in which they’ve taken a photo. Slightly creepy? Maybe. Kinda cool? Yes. Of course, Instagram users have the option in the app’s settings to decide whether or not to share publicly at scale, so if you’re not the sharing type, not to worry.

InstaEarth creators and Modea creative developers Chris Allnutt and Nathan Dicken have been Instagram users since they beginning, they say, and had long wanted to see a feature that allowed a more exploratory dimension to seeing the world through other Instagram users’ eyes. They’re off to a pretty good start, though there are some tweaks needed in the web interface. But so does TechCrunch. The founders said that they have plans to add UI enhancements soon, as well as a slide show view, “official” iPad mobile web support, realtime updates, search, and deeper integration with Google Places API.

Alnutt said that his young son will get up every morning, eager to follow the travels and photography of users around the map. While this may not be the motivation you’re looking for, it is fun to play with, if not to wake up to.

Check it out here and let us know what you think.

Hey, look at that! Just a month after Sprint and Motorola announced the beastly, dual-core, Android-powered Photon with the uber-vague launch window of “sometime in Q3″, they’re back at the well with proper launch details.

If all goes as planned, the Motorola Photon (fancy kickstand an all) will be hitting Sprint’s stores on July 31st for the totally reasonable price of $200 on a 2-year contract.

The Motorola Photon Specs:

• 1 Ghz, Dual-core Tegra 2 CPU
• 4.3″ qHD (960×540) display
• Comes with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) out of the box
• 3G and 4G (WiMax) friendly
• Sprint’s first “Global” WiMax phone — it runs on Sprint’s (CDMA) 3G and WiMax here in the states, but works on GSM internationally
• Compatible with Motorola’s accessory docking system, a la the AT&T Atrix. It’s not clear yet if it plays friendly with the Laptop Dock system, though, as Sprint/Motorola only mention the TV Multimedia Dock and the Car Dock. That’s okay, though, because the Laptop Dock is hella stupid.
• Dual cameras: 8 megapixels on the back, with a VGA resolution (sneaky way of saying 0.3 megapixel) front facing camera
• 16GB of on board memory, with support for microSD cards up to 32 gigs
• Bluetooth 2.1
• 802.11b/g/n WiFi
• Plus, it has that super sweet kickstand, which usually isn’t Motorola’s thing

Ad.ly is an advertising platform that pairs advertisers with celebrities. For $1,000 to $200,000, an advertiser can get one of a thousand celebrities to publish a sponsored message, usually on Twitter. The company has raised $5.5 million, has sixteen employees, and has sold 26,000 paid endorsements in the last year and a half.

The company occasionally pops up in the news. They were banned from Facebook, for example, and they were right in the middle of the whole Charlie Sheen is now on Twitter thing.

But for the most part, Ad.ly has been quietly operating out of their Beverly Hills headquarters without a ton of notice in the tech press circles. But suddenly there’s a lot of interest in them. And multiple sources have told us that a handful of companies are looking to buy Ad.ly.

The value of Ad.ly isn’t really in the paid endorsement revenue. What buyers are looking at are the company’s deep ties with a ton of celebrities. And the fact that a lot of celebrities looking to get involved on Twitter start by calling the company and asking for advice.

Those relationships are hugely valuable. To companies like Twitter, who owe much of their success to celebrities embracing the product. And to companies like Google, who are looking for celebrities to jump start growth at Google+.

Although neither are confirmed potential buyers, our guess is they and others are among those taking a look. And don’t be surprised if one of them, or someone else, acquires the company sometime soon.

You know what’s really annoying? Calls from numbers you don’t have stored in your contacts. If you don’t answer, you could end up missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or getting some much-needed good news. If you get brave and answer, you could end smack-dab in the middle of a conversation that you never wanted to have in the first place.

Landlines have long been spoiled with Caller ID, and now T-Mobile customers will be equally privileged, as the carrier has introduced “Name ID.”

It’ll be available for free for the first ten days, and after that cost $3.99 per month. As of right now, the service is only available on the Samsung Exhibit 4G and the forthcoming myTouch 4G Slide.

[via TmoNews]

Uh oh. Now you’ve done it. You’ve lost your audience. The crowd that was once hanging on your every word and gasping for breath between laughs is now sending back nothing but vacant stares. A few people just snuck out the back door, and you’re pretty sure that dude in the back row is snoring. Where, oh where, did things go so wrong?

A new app called Ovation is trying to help productions of all sorts (both live and online) figure out exactly where things start to suck, with a tool much like that used to gauge audience responses to TV pilots. It requires no downloads, and no sign-ups on the user’s part. Oh, and it’s totally free right now.

The idea is simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s easily described in two pictures.

First, you create a URL for your event. You give your audience that URL, which they load up on their smartphone. This is what they see (here’s an interactive demo):

Members of your audience then use the on-screen slider to provide feedback. If they’re loving a certain section, they slide the bar up. If they hate it? They slide it down. Simple. There’s no signup process, and, as it’s a web app, it works across a ton of smartphones and mobile devices without any sort of installation.

As the event unfolds, users see a real-time time line of their feedback thus far, with a second line showing the averaged response of everyone participating. After the event wraps up, you can peruse all of the feedback data in an interactive, second-by-second plot graph (demo here) like the one below:

The whole thing is executed well, and the idea itself is great… if they can get people to use it. Though the horribly impolite patrons of my local theater tend to forget it, there’s quite a stigma around busting out your phone during events (mainly because that bright screen is like a little tiny flashbang grenade when used in a dark theater). Even if the folks behind the production request that people provide live feedback, I’d imagine some folks would innately hesitate to do so.

Another bit they might consider tweaking: it might be nice for the second line — the one that shows the average opinion of all participants — to be optional as set by the event coordinator. If user A loves something but sees that everyone else hates it (or vice versa), they might taper their response a bit for sake of going with the grain.

The whole service is entirely free during this initial beta phase, but it’s also currently limited to 10 simultaneous responders per event. Need a bigger sample group? The team says they’re willing to help out.

Not much of a live performer? Prefer to sit in front of your webcam with your bed sheet pinned to the wall and rant about why Ryan totally should have been kicked off of So You Think You Can Dance? Ovation also has an online video version of their tool, which applies the same gauging tools to videos posted on Youtube, Vimeo, or through their standalone player.

So, the big question: would you use it?

The fabled Amazon tablet: Oh how you tease us so. You come from the maker of the world’s most beloved ereader and are said to run the versatile Android OS. (hopefully skinned, though) But there’s just so much we don’t know about you. When are you coming? How much are you going to cost. What’s your name? Are you even real?

The Wall Street Journal thinks it’s real. In fact they just named October as the release month and state new Kindle models are coming soon, too. Details are understandably on the light side, but there are some interesting specs concerning the tablet: 9-inch screen, no camera, and running an unnamed Android release. Doesn’t sound like an iPad killer to me.

Chances are it won’t be positioned as an iPad killer but more as a Nook Color competitor with a major focus on the Amazon marketplace. Amazon has made a big push over the last year to bolster and better position its streaming video content. A tablet would be a great outlet for that service.

The same WSJ report states that Amazon is prepping two new Kindle models. This is less of a surprise giving that the current Kindle is nearing its first birthday. Reportedly, two Kindle versions are on tap: a low-cost retooling of the current version and then a high-cost touchscreen model. (sigh)

Still, you may want to keep your current Kindle 3G away from ebay for the time being. As likely as this report is, it’s still a rumor until Bezos does his best Steve Jobs impression and unveils the Amazon tablet to the world.