Visa has launched an iOS application that shows you offers based on your location. There are currently over 50 merchant offers, in areas including clothing, entertainment and dining. The app allows retailers, among which are Planet Hollywood, Holiday Inn, Hard Rock Cafe, Zales and New York & Company, to automatically deliver offers to Visa account holders based on their location. Those who own Visa Signature cards will also receive special Signature offers in addition to the standard offers that everyone else gets. The offers can be redeemed either online or at physical retail locations, and they are stored inside the app. You can also get a map and directions to ATMs in your immediate vicinity, as well as nearby retailers where you can redeem offers.
Visa also has an Android application out, but participation in the Android program is currently limited to select US Bank debit cardholders, whereas the iOS app is free and usable by all US-based Visa account holders.
Download Visa Mobile Application for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (iOS 3.0 or newer required) from the iTunes App Store
Tags: apps, finance, IOS, ipad, iphone, ipod touch, IpodTouch, offers, Visa, visa iphone app, VisaIphoneApp
Apple's iBooks has received an update today, pushing it to version 1.2. New in the app are a few features that have long been requested by iBooks fans. 
Most people rarely think about this, but your Wi-Fi hot-spot is actually broadcasting its signal on something called a channel. In North America, you can pick one of 11 channels; in most of the world you can pick one of 13. 
Adblock is already available for Chrome, and is working very well for us so far. But now Adblock Plus, of Firefox fame, may be joining making the jump to Google's browser platform. 
Third-party browser tracking -- and how to give users more control over it -- is a hot topic right now. Microsoft and the FCC have similar plans, one former Google employee recently took the wraps off his take, and now there's another Chrome extension which turns the tracking blocker knob up to eleven. 
Google's Chrome for a Cause extension promises to donate money to a charity for every new tab you open in Chrome until this Sunday, December 19. At the end of each day you can choose where the money will go, and you have five charities to pick from:
Apple has just published a press release that confirms a January 6 opening of the Mac App Store. It will be available in 90 countries, and feature free and paid apps. Mac OS X Snow Leopard (time to upgrade from 10.5!) users will need a free download via Software Update before they can use the App Store. 
Android users already have a number of capable mobile browsers to choose from: Dolphin HD and Mini, Opera Mobile, Firefox, Skyfire, and even the stock browser are all quite good. Now there's a new challenger: Maxthon. The Chinese makers of the popular-even-though-most-of-the-west-has-never-heard-of-it desktop browser has released a version for Android, and it's a very nice app. 
Tags: android, apps, browsers, china, maxthon, web browser, WebBrowser
Dropbox has been around for so long and become so indispensable for so many people, that it's tough to remember that the spry little utility has been in beta all along. Not any longer -- the Dropbox team has announced that their baby has officially left the nursery, and version 1.0.10 is available for download right now. You may actually have to go to the site to get it -- Dropbox has never been known for auto-updating. 
Flipboard, the RSS and social aggregator that recently won Apple's US iTunes iPad app of the year, has gotten a pretty solid update today featuring even more sources for quality content. First up is a pretty big one -- Flipboard now integrates with Google Reader, arguably the most popular way of organizing RSS feeds. Now you can sign in with your Google account, pull in and sync up all your feeds and reads in one smooth motion. Sharing and starring are also integrated, plus you can comment on stories like you would on the desktop, just with all your feeds presented with the Flipboard webazine style instead of the traditional inbox approach. The only thing you might miss that's currently absent is the ability to manage your feeds directly within Flipboard, so you'll have to resort to the Reader Web app for feed maintenance. 
There's really no question what the most popular, free antivirus program for Windows is here at Download Squad. You, our readers, make it pretty clear whenever we post about the topic that Microsoft Security Essentials is at the top of the heap -- and we tend to agree. With detection rates every bit as good as some competing paid products (and better than many), MSE might just be the best piece of free software Microsoft has ever released. 
Alright sci-fi fans, it's that time again -- it's been a month since we last heard from the folks behind Pioneer One, and the word then was that come mid-December, there'd be a second episode. Well, it's now officially the middle of December, so let's get campy. 
Okay, so we're not quite at the point where you're going to be playing the next Crysis sequel in your browser, but still -- the arrival of WebGL in Chrome's beta channel is kind of a big deal. Apart from being able to play around with cool demos like the ones offered up by Google in its official announcement, WebGL is another important step in bringing more desktop-like functionality to the Web. 
Mozilla Labs' F1 is a Firefox extension that enables quick sharing of links via Twitter, Facebook and Gmail. It sits right in your browser's toolbar and includes neat features like automatically inserting the shared URL into a new Gmail message and automatic link shortening for Twitter. The latest F1 update makes this add-on even more useful, with a keyboard shortcut to activate F1 -- just press the F1 button, naturally -- and the option to automatically bookmark the links you share. 
While tech pundits don't seem ready to give Google TV the thumbs up, yesterday's update certainly makes Google's home entertainment platform a bit more compelling. For starters, there's built-in Netflix support and a better movie search function -- which makes it easy to find your favorite Terry Gilliam flicks (if you're in the US, anyhow) and watch them on Netflix or Amazon Video on Demand. 
Tags: amazon video on demand, AmazonVideoOnDemand, convergence, google tv, GoogleTv, netflix, video, video on demand, VideoOnDemand, VOD, web
Mozilla doesn't support the proprietary H.264 video format in Firefox, but Microsoft does. While Mozilla has been pushing open-source WebM as the format of choice for HTML5 video tags (with Google's help), Microsoft has released a new plug-in that lets Firefox take advantage of Windows 7's native H.264 support. The plug-in looks for HTML5 video tags and passes the video to the Windows Media Player plug-in for playback. 
After having gone through a beta testing phase for around two weeks, Evernote 2.0 for Mac is now 'final' -- it's ready to be pushed to all users. 
The Mac App Store is coming next month, but Windows users have a similar store they can enjoy right now. AllMyApps has just launched in beta, and it's ready to help you find, install, and share loads of great free (and eventually paid) software. 
iTunes 10.1.1 is now available for download, either direct from Apple's dedicated website, or via iTunes' integrated Software Update mechanism (which may have already prompted you to download). 
Our good friends over at Engadget report that a new version of Kindle for Android is now out. Here's what's new:
Tags: amazon, android, apps, kindle, updates
So far, Google Docs has been no match for Excel's raw power. Recent additions such as macro editing and scripting bring it somewhat closer, but it's still an uphill battle for Google. So instead of playing catch-up, they're now giving Spreadsheets users something Office users don't have – multi-user revision history. 
Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley has been speculating about the future of Windows Phone 7. According to Foley, a major update is due around Jan/Feb 2011, adding copy/paste functionality and two major browsing enhancements: HTML 5 support and a Silverlight plug-in. Foley also wonders whether enterprise tweaks might be part of the game plan as well. Microsoft, of course, doesn't comment on rumors -- so we'll have to wait for someone to score some hands-on time with the WP7 update. 
Google, in association with a couple of boffins from Harvard University, has just released an awesome tool that should entertain you for at least 10 minutes, and possibly more. It lets you compare words, or phrases, from a corpus totaling 500 billion words from 5.2 million books -- in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. 
There are quite a few homescreen app launchers for Android; the best-known ones, ADW and LauncherPro, are very powerful but tend to be a tad on the chunky side. When you're in the middle of doing something and need to quickly switch to another task, you may not always like to go via your cluttered homescreen. 
While Opera 11's warm reception had a lot to do with a greatly improved browser and a very loyal fan base, the boys in Oslo had one clever trick up their sleeve which they saved for launch day. And with nearly 7 million downloads in 24 hours, you've got to hand it to Opera: they know how to tempt a geek. 
Del.icio.us has lived a long life -- having been around since 2003 -- but Yahoo! has confirmed the demise of the delectable bookmark service. It comes as no surprise after news of the company's recent layoff blitz, and the Delicious team has been on the list of expected victims for well over a year. It's not the only property getting the "sunset" treatment from Yahoo!, either; Yahoo! Picks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Alltheweb, Altavista, and MyBlogLog are all going the way of the dinosaur along with it. 
At long last, Microsoft has given plug-ins for Windows Live apps their own home. You'll now find enhancements for Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Live Writer at plugins.live.com -- rather than at gallery.live.com, where they were nestled in amongst the sidebar and sideshow gadgets. 
Email as we know it is a fairly static beast; you get text, and maybe some links and images, but that's about it. After all, allowing email to run code within your email client or browser could be mighty risky. 
Words with Friends has been a ridiculously popular asynchronous Scrabble-like game for iOS devices since it came out over a year ago, but word comes from the developers themselves that an Android version is on the way -- and that it's going to be compatible with the iOS version of the game. 
Dan Kaminsky, famous for discovering a DNS bug that almost "broke the internet," has just released a side project that has nothing to do with security. It's DanKam, an augmented reality app that lets colorblind people get a color-corrected view of the world through an iPhone or Android camera. The app has only been out for a short time, but it's already getting positive feedback from colorblind users -- especially designers -- who didn't know this kind of real-time correction was possible. 
Google has just released version 5.0 of Google Maps for Android, and it might be the most significant update in the five-year history of Google's mobile maps app. For the first time the, Google Maps mobile app features 3D maps and an offline mode, making it both cooler-looking and more useful for Android users. 
If you took a specific subsection of plants -- daisies -- and headed down to the Popular Archetypes store to exchange your zombies for pirates, you'd be about 90% of the way to making a tower defense game called Pirates Love Daisies. It's that last 10%, however -- a little flash of brilliance with a soupcon of quirkiness -- that makes the game. In this case, it's HTML5; Plants Love Daisies is one of the most accomplished HTML-CSS-and-JavaScript games to date. With a truly excellent interface, it plays like a mature, latter-generation Flash game, but it retains the svelte efficiency of HTML, with barely a blip on the CPU graph. 
In Pirates Love Daisies, not enough attention has been paid to the core aspects of a tower defense game. The upgraded towers don't look significantly different, which is crippling when you need to quickly upgrade a tower and can't tell at a glance which towers can be upgraded. There's no feedback -- you can't see the actual, numerical effects of each tower, so it's hard to work out whether it's better to build more towers, or upgrade existing ones. It would be nice if you had warnings of upcoming 'air waves,' too -- I lost quite a few daisies after not having enough musketeers to take down the seagulls! 
Over in Europe, PlayStation fans are getting a treat in the form of mobile apps for iPhone and Android. No, the app won't turn your phone into a PSP, but it does sync up with your PlayStation Network account, which allows you to check trophies and see which of your friends are online. It also loads up announcements about new PlayStation titles. Predictably, there's also social networking, so you can do some volunteer Facebook and Twitter advertising for games you like. 
Facebook, in a continuing drive to upgrade the most popular portion of its site, will roll out facial recognition auto-tagging of photos in the next few weeks -- if you live in the US, anyway. 
Less than two days ago, the first Opera 11 release candidate appeared. After a frenzy of developer activity to patch any remaining bugs -- and two more RC builds in the next 20 hours -- Opera has released version 11. 
Think you have a good vocabulary? If that's true, Knoword lets you show it off... or find out that maybe it isn't as great as you thought. Knoword is a fast dictionary game. You'll be shown a definition along with the first letter of the word and you need to figure out what the word is. Once you type the word (correctly, mind you – spelling matters), you get points and get the next word. 
