“This company has deep mobile software expertise, with two of the founders of this company being from Tegic, who created the T9 texting software,” added Dederer. “Here’s a cocktail party factoid: it’s the most widely-distributed software of any kind on earth. It’s on three billion-plus handsets. So we know how to make things for phones, and now there’s an extended marketplace.”

So who is this Dederer? It’s Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for The Presidents of the United States of America. And who is he talking about? His company, Melodeo, where he’s VP of Biz Dev. And what have they released? An iPhone app featuring all the band’s music from their four albums, demos, live tracks, etc. etc. Interesting.

Amble Time / “A shortcoming of standard maps is their inability to convey a sense of temporal scale. Can I stroll to the park for lunch, or would it take me all day? Amble Time adds an element of time to a PDA-based tourist map. By using a GPS system and your average walking speed, it creates a bubble that indicates everywhere you could walk in an hour.” This could be a lot of fun.

Don’t bother clicking, the url is kaput. One quick Google finds Amble Time alive and well:

A steadily shrinking area of a city map shows where you can walk as time ticks by. The bubble shows everywhere you could go within timing constraints that you provide. Researchers used this “travel-sensitive alarm clock” to explore ways that location-based information and ad-hoc networking could support participation in interactive stories.

There’s even a nice PDF available, Time, Voice, and Joyce, that discusses the project Amble Time was built to support:

We present a design for recapitulating walks through Dublin’s City Centre by characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Our computationally supported walkers will avail themselves of a “map with a sense of time” and a system that translates their hand lettering gestures as attributes of colourful typographic forms.

Now I definitely have to see it working again. Amble Time has iPhone written all over it.