To see just how work is changing thanks to technology you have to look no further than these two companies:

1. Sococo gives you a virtual office, where you have an office space on screen. You have to get a demo of this. Video.
2. Gigwalk lets you work (or hire people to do tasks) on your smart phone. I’m using this to hire people to take pictures of vacation homes in Los Angeles, so I don’t waste money on a badly-located home. Video.

These both are a good example of why I like video. It’s hard to explain these concepts in text, but in video you’ll get a much better idea of how work is changing. Enjoy!

Gigwalk:

Sococo:

I’ve been slowing down my blogging lately. This has happened for a few reasons:

1. I was speaking at the Next Web a week ago in Amsterdam and wifi there was crappy.
2. Right before that I took a few days off to be in Yosemite with my family.
3. After I got back from Amsterdam I overscheduled myself, which means I got a ton of interviews done but had no time to upload those videos or process them or blog about them.

Anyway, this weekend I caught up and uploaded 24 videos. Which pissed some people off over on Facebook as I flooded their streams.

But, one advantage of doing and posting so many videos all at once is you start seeing patterns. So, here’s what I’m learning.

1. The iPad is encouraging some interesting new businesses to form, like Pose, which is a cash register and inventory-management company for retail stores. Video.
2. Health tracking and apps that help you keep your health up continue to pop up. Fooducate is a good example, it shows you whether the food you are picking in grocery stores is healthy or not. Video.
3. iPhone app store is too hard to use, so we’ve seen a ton of companies come out with ways to improve that. The latest I’ve seen is Zwapp, which shares apps with each other in a neat social way. Video.
4. Photo/camera apps continue to be hot. Especially true since Instagram took off and Color got $41 million. Here Pixamid has an easier-to-use and understand social camera than Color. Video. And Photogram has a new competitor for Instagram that lets you upload groups of photos to Facebook or Twitter. Video.
5. Enterprise collaboration service space continues to be hot. You know, the space occupied by Jive, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, SocialCast, SocialText, etc. Here Moxie hooked up with design firm IDEO to make the best designed and easiest to use collaboration service. Video.
6. Traveling brings about new business opportunities, especially as regular travelers realize they are being slammed with high roaming fees. Here two startups really help out. Onavo compresses your iPhone’s data, which saves about half on data roaming charges. Video. And MaxRoam gives you a SIM for unlocked phones that saves you a ton on voice calls. Video. Plus, a third company, Abukai, helps you do your expense reports when you travel by scanning the receipts with your mobile phone’s camera. Video.
7. The Web isn’t forgotten. Scrible helps you research things on the web and save and share them. Useful. Video. Silk is building a new kind of database which will be used first by the Next Web to build a startup database. Video. Shufflr.tv helps you find more and better video online. Video. Webdoc helps you build a new kind of rich, expressive, site. Think a modern Blogger or Tumblr. Video.
8. But the most interesting set of companies is being built around smartphones and here, for the first time, Apple’s iOS doesn’t have the coolest apps. For instance, Innobell lets you add social apps to a phone call. Only on Android today. Video. TekTrak gives you really great security. But mostly on Android today. Video. And WalkBase lets you track your phone’s movement through wifi and assisted GPS patterns in the room. Again, only on Android because Apple and Microsoft don’t let WalkBase talk to the radios the way Android does. Video.

Anyway, here’s all the videos embedded, so you can enjoy them. These are all on my YouTube Channel, if you like them please subscribe there.

Talking iPad apps and accessories with Sam Levin:

Android app WalkBase tracks wireless data to tell whether you’re in the same room:

VUFind lets people play and share around their visually-recognized interests:

A must-have when traveling: MaxRoam, saves money on roaming calls and data:

Mobilistar makes world clickable with mobile augmented reality:

Why you should jailbreak your iPhone:

Scrible helps you research the Web (cool tool!):

A new way to do expense reports with your mobile phone: Abukai:

Mobile wireless compression from Onavo saves TONS of money when overseas:

A “social camera” Pixamid:

A new dating service: Kismet:

Zwapp helps you find better apps for your iPhone:

Silk: a great new database powers new Next Web site:

Shufflr.tv helps you find better videos online:

Cool Ring prototype shows new way to use Tablets:

TekTrak makes your mobile phone more secure:

Must have mobile app at the grocery store: Fooducate helps you make healthy choices!

Webdoc brings you rich expression on the web:

Moxie competes in enterprises with Yammer and Salesforce Chatter with a better design:

Exclusive first look: Photogram, new kind of photosharing app for mobile:

Small-business cash register comes to iPad in Pose:

Loqly: ask questions about local businesses:

Add social apps to phone calls with Innobell:

This is reprinted, with permission, from Rackspace’s Building43.

Adobe helped spark the desktop publishing revolution in the mid 1980s with its PostScript page description language used in Apple LaserWriter printers. Today, publishing is vastly different than it was 25 years ago, as consumers are accessing content in more ways than ever, and Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS5 team is hard at work creating the tools that allow developers to work in this new environment.

Some of the coolest things about Dreamweaver 5.5 are…that we’ve just put support for HTML5 CSS3 right into the app. “You kind of have to be under a really big rock to have not noticed the change in devices people are using to access the Internet today,” explains Scott Fegette, Senior Product Manager at Adobe. “It’s not just desktop browsers on two platforms anymore. It’s a variety of devices from tablets to smart phones to connected set-top boxes on HDTVs, including the desktop browsers that we all became used to. So, this presents a number of issues for developers.”

A developer must be aware of several factors starting with how the user is going to interact with the app, whether it’s with a trackpad, a keyboard, joystick or trackball. The wide variations in screen sizes present additional challenges. Simple links on a desktop may not work so well on a phone. On an HDTV, you’re typically sitting away from the device, so you can’t fill a small space with a lot of text, and buttons on the screen have to be large enough for you to see and access. Much the opposite holds true for a tablet or phone.

Dreamweaver CS5.5 has added features that help developers deliver content to this wide array of devices. “CS5.5 is going to be a big step forward starting first with just existing content,” says Fegette. “Any publisher that really wants to become relevant immediately needs to start thinking about how they can make the interface to their site, their application, relevant on a number of different form factors. First up, CSS3 media query is a great way of managing this. We’ve got this feature in CS5.5 called Multiscreen Preview panel and media query management where you can very quickly set up a number of default resolutions for a phone, a tablet and just a desktop browser and then custom define them as well. It’s really mostly keyed around the dimensions of the screen right now, but the gist of it is, you can quickly target a CSS file to a specific resolution class—say max 400 pixels—and then go from 401 pixels to maybe 800 or 900 for a tablet and then anything above that deliver a specific style sheet just for the desktop. But the efficiency you get there is that you can really quickly build out these very targeted interfaces on top of the same HTML source, which lets you immediately repurpose your existing site.”

The latest version of Dreamweaver also makes it easier for developers to work with HTML5. “Some of the coolest things about Dreamweaver 5.5,” explains Fegette, “[are] quite frankly that we’ve just put support for HTML5 CSS3 right into the app in ways that just feel natural. We wanted to make sure that the HTML5 revolution wasn’t this big slap in the face to people, but it was something they could progress into really naturally and holistically. You’ll see things like CSS3 support in the CSS panel. You can do things like add border radius and opacity using RGBA colors to really take away some of the dependency of jumping back and forth to an image editor like Photoshop, baking these into an image and placing it into your file. Again, that’s another real power of HTML5 is that cuts down these round trips and these dependencies that a real standards-based developer would have.”

More change is sure to come, which makes familiarity with all of the hardware options even more important. “The modern content publisher really needs to understand these devices,” says Fegette, “what they’re capable of and how to become effective with them quickly, because it’s certainly not slowing down.”

More info:

Adobe Dreamweaver web site.
Adobe CS 5.5.

Just released today, Scrible (spelled weird), caught my eye at yesterday’s Founder Conference in Mountain View, so I pulled CEO Victor Karkar aside into a noisy cafe to see more.

What does this do? Well, it lets you markup the web. But you really need to see this one. When I first heard Victor describe it I almost wrote it off. I’m glad I didn’t.

See, we often have times when we need Scrible. Here’s some:

1. Looking for a new home, or place to rent. You’ll collect 50 to 200 different places that you want to talk with your friends and family about and compare. Scrible lets you collect all those web pages into one place.
2. Going on vacation? We have just planned out a vacation to Los Angeles in June. My wife, Maryam, looked through hundreds of different rental properties and apartments. She collected them all in email, but that’s a lame place to really do this kind of collection. Scrible is a LOT better.
3. Student research. Looking through the web and online books for information to use in a paper like my son often does for his high school classes? Well, he can pull out quotes and other information, mark them up, and save them into Scrible. After his research is done he can export all these quotes to a document.

But there’s more, and it’s the kind of tool that a simple read of a blog won’t really do it justice. Sorry for the noisy atmosphere in the cafe, but take a look.

Feedly (an RSS reader built on top of Google Reader) has waned on my screens in the past year as Twitter has become more and more dominant. That’s why Steve Gillmor and others have stated that we think RSS is dead. Dead meaning “not interesting” NOT “dead like Osama.”

But for the past 18 months the Feedly team rewrote their system from scratch especially for tablets.

Why tablets? Well, duh. The world on tablets is exploding and this is where many people are doing their entertainment and news reading. Every night I sit on the couch flipping through apps like Flipboard and Zite, along with Twitter and apps from publishers like Time, New York Times, NPR, BBC, and Wall Street Journal.

So, do we need yet another news reader on our iPads? Well, the new Feedly shows me that yes we do. Watch Edwin Khodabakchian, CEO, show us why on this video first look. Yes, it’s long, but it’s worth it.

How about on Android tablets? Well, Feedly is one of a new kind of apps built mostly around HTML 5 with a little bit of native code to add features that only iOS or only Android can offer.

Within minutes, you’ll see lots of reviews, watch Techmeme for a list, but don’t miss out and get Feedly on your iPad. Get it on iTunes.

More coverage of Feedly’s new app:
1. on The Next Web.
2. on RWW.

Yesterday was Marcel LeBrun’s first day working for Salesforce. His company, Radian6, was just acquired for $340 million (Techcrunch reported it was $326, but LeBrun told me that was wrong and that $340 was the correct number).

By a fun coincidence last night I was hanging out with Empire Avenue and Seagate execs at the Ritz firepits — you can see a Photosynth I made last night with my iPhone of that area here — when I got a phone call from JP Rangaswami, Salesforce’s Chief Scientist. He said “look up” and I saw him standing in a window. That led to meeting Marcel for this interview where he gave me insights as to what Marc Benioff is up to with a group of acquisitions (JP just hired Kevin Marks) and JP told me they are planning other big hires.

We discussed several things in this 19-minute interview:

1. Where Radian6 will be used inside Salesforce Chatter (at Rackspace we’ve decided to use Chatter as our main “at work” social feed, so I’m interested as a customer). He says that Radian6 will let employees bring outside feedback right into their social feed. For instance, an employee at a car company could say “I want to see any Tweet that talks about buying one of our products” and those tweets would show up on their social feed inside Chatter.
2. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to follow Marcel and build a company that is valued at $340 million and what the impulse was for him to start Radian6.
3. Just how much the market has changed (the company started in 2006, back when they thought that blogs were going to be the important things companies would want to listen to — Twitter wasn’t yet known outside of SF geek circles and Facebook was still for college kids only).
4. How big the market potentially is for customer service. He notes that when Radian6 started very few companies were trying to use social media, now nearly every company is and he thinks we are still very early as companies try to find new ways to delight their customers.
5. Will compensation change inside companies due to how well we use social systems like Chatter? (Dups Wijayawardhana, CEO of Empire Avenue, a system that studies the value we put into these things, was standing nearby during this interview).
6. What to do with employees who build their own brand separately from the company.

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation and gives you some insights into what one of the leaders in the social world is thinking. Hope you enjoy.