The more, the better. That's the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days.

The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).

Earlier last week, as the day was coming to an end and I was speaking with my 5 year old at bedtime we shared the highlights of our day. I started by telling him the company that created the iPhone is about to come out with . . . I paused—how do I describe it?—well, a “big iPhone” I said. About this big, I gestured holding my hands about 10 inches apart. “Wow, Amazing!” was his instant reaction as his eyes lit up. Even my 5-year-old knows that bigger is better, especially when it comes to tactile interfaces. In fact, the advantages are probably more obvious to his generation than it is to ours.

For this first generation born into a world of the iPhone, Wii and soon the Xbox’s Project Natal, the distance between the metaphor created by these devices and the reality of their interaction is constantly shrinking. My wife is currently doing her PhD research on the merits of tangible interfaces for young children in education and the data is telling. There is no doubt that there is great potential to enhance learning with tactile computing. Through that lens the “Bigger iPhone” is akin to a bigger yard to play in or a bigger room. This insight is telling. For these kids the iPhone’s primary function is by no means a phone. It is first and formost a gaming device, followed by a networked camera, followed by everything else. Through this lens one can see the importance of the iPad in the historical trajectory of our human-computer interaction. What’s lost in all the complaints about what the iPad is lacking (multitasking, camera, etc.) is that people need to view the iPad on more than its merits as a first-generation product. Rather, they need to understand it in context of the evolutionary arc of computing.

Don’t think about the iPad as just a computer. Its true potential lies in its potential as a communications device. Already, it functions as an electronic reader, helping to bring the world of books to computers. But there is video and audio too, with the potential for VoIP apps and even one day a camera for video messaging. The artificial walls that separate our notion of communications and computing are being broken. It is time for the dawning of communications apps. Think about it. It makes absolutely no sense that we have these parallel universes on our devices that are relics of technologies past. The notion of voice as one stack of technologies and the rest must perish. Communications, both audio and video, will be weaved into the fabric of the app space. For example, an API should allow developers to integrate Skype-like P2P communications into their apps opening a new world of utility.

Only a company like Apple can have this kind of leverage over the telcos and only in the very near future will they be able to bring about this change. This goes for the iPhone as well as the iPad. The two are joined at the hip through 140,000 shared apps. In their dash to fortify their lead against the hordes dressed in Google colors, Apple must use its window of opportunity to push the envelope on what one can do with a touchscreen computer, but not yet with an Android-powered device. They must learn from their OS wars with Microsoft. Google will continue to copy their every move as did Microsoft before it. Fueled by their advertising money printing presses, Google gives away what Apple attempts to sell. This means Apple must drill deeper into the telco stack. Think of visual voicemail as a simple prelude. But they will have to go much deeper, making the communication experience itself evolve. Video calling will be made a reality with iChat for iPhone OS, and not just one-to-one calling but conference calling. Many claim that video calling is just a gimick and that it has never really caught on despite being available decades in one form or another. To them I would argued that it has never been attempted by a company with product-design excellence like Apple and furthermore it has never been integrated into a vibrant app ecology with tens of thousands of developers applying their creativity.

By opening up the communications stack via the API in a holistic way and introducing video and P2P realtime data transport, Apple will open a new world of communications apps that will further blur the lines between computers and communications devices. Imagine Xbox Live-type experiences where a group of teenagers fire away while being on a group audio chat, calling Hertz to reserve a car while seeing the agent and using swipe gestures to choose your car, even playing REAL strip poker (see illustration).

Utilitarian business communications, social interaction and gaming will all evolve and co-mingle on the platform. The iPad doesn’t need anything other than a data connection to function as a phone as well as everything else.

Whether they like it or not, the telcos will be relegated to running efficient data pipes competing on price and service. The iPad will further blur the lines between device categories and contribute to the coming confusion. As I wrote in a prior post this will significantly impact the media world as well.

Here’s another prediction: the coming iPad and next iPhone will have a front-facing camera and rest assured it will be put to good use. The lines between a device you put up to your face (a phone) and a next-gen communication device you speak at will continue to collapse. The fact you put it in your pocket or carry it around will also not define it as a “phone” anymore. In many ways the legacy technologies are coming full circle. You can be sure that when the inventors of the Internet sat down and brainstormed the topology of the network they used the metaphor of a phone number to explain the notion of it being a phone number of a computer. Now the phone number is the IP address of a person. It follows you in a nomadic form that is true to the human condition.

Extending this metaphor one can recognize another potential gap in the strengths of the forces aligning themselves against Apple. Namely, Facebook monopolizing the social graph. We carry with us on our “phones” our most intimate of social networks. Your contact list coupled with the frequency of communication you have with those people on your device makes for the most useful social graph of all. Without users needing to do anything they don’t do already, that social graph could be made extremely useful. Not a network of hundreds of people you didn’t want to say “No” to and friended despite your better judgement, but rather an intimate network of your real friends and family with a simple proximity threshold based on communication frequencies. Having someone’s nomadic IP (phone number) is an indication of a real relationship. Apple is in a position to capture that and control this namespace and add value to it. They already own Me.com and can build out that core MobileMe service to become the equivalent of a DNS service for telephone numbers by resolving them to peoples names. Think of it, a phone number is unique and is mapped to a person. It’s not so useless after all. With number portability people are holding on to these numbers with the same vigilance that some IT folks hold on to our static IPs.

What Apple should do is move Me.com to a freemium model ASAP and start amassing a high value social graph that will have increasing returns for the future of its platform. There is no reason for them to give up the addressable space of users to Facebook and Google when they own the point of origination and the best way to access consumers, their nomadic IPs. So there you have it: the path for Apple to combat the two other majors, who are all inching onto each others turf in more ways then one.

The winners, like with all such competitions (as long as no one wins), will be us. Welcome, iPad. Me and the kids are waiting.

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, which he sold to AOL in 2006 (after it was renamed Relegence). Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom. iPad image via Flickr/Scott Chang, REAL strip poker illustration by Edo Segal.

A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.

While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.

If a story hits 10, it will then get tweeted out automatically to its specific Twitter account with a link to the original story as well as the story’s page on Topicfire. This method of curation ensures that followers won’t get overwhelmed by stories that perhaps aren’t that important.

You can see the full list of the 24 Topicfire accounts here. As you can see, they range from Apple news, to design news, to skiing news, to surfing news (though ski and surf don’t have a ton of news items).

Microsoft posted strong earnings for the final three months of 2009, but some parts of its business have been having a harder time, executives acknowledged during an analyst conference call this afternoon. The company’s good news was driven by strong sales of Windows 7, while business sales are lagging.

There’s a clear contrast in tthe revenue numbers Microsoft posted today. During the last three months of 2008, business revenue outpaced Windows and Windows Live revenue, $4.9 billion to $4.1 billion. A year later, Windows leaped past to $6.9 billion, while business revenue fell slightly to $4.7 billion.

“While we have yet to see a return on business spending growth, the consumer segment continues to perform better than expected,” said Bill Koefoed, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations.

The question-and-answer session at the end of the call seemed pretty brief, but Microsoft found time for a few answers about the enterprise sales. Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said that it’s taking longer and longer to close those sales, and there’s sometimes a gap between the expiration of old deals and the start of new agreements — but in most cases, Microsoft isn’t losing those customers.

One analyst asked whether Microsoft expects things to remain sluggish in the coming months.

“The thing that I can say is that we have the great product pipeline,” Klein said. “We don’t have visibility into exactly what business spend will be, so we’re just going to have to work through that in the next couple quarters.”

During the just-ended quarter, Microsoft also continued its cuts with another 800 layoffs. The company’s scheduled releases this year include Windows Mobile 7 (which Microsoft is expected to demo at the Mobile World Congress in February) and Office 2010.

Here’s our photos from Apple’s event today.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs opened the conference with a funny quote about Moses’ tablets.

Steve Jobs mingled with the crowd inside the demo area after the event.

An accessory stand turns the tablet into a cool photo frame.

ESPN’s X Games Snocross is one of the 3-D games that will be available on the iPad.

Gameloft’s Nova first-person shooter game, which is available on the iPhone, was shown on stage. The game was rejiggered to look better on a big screen. It was probably the best-looking app shown off today.

Steve Jobs was very animated as he walked through the demos, using words such as “amazing,” “wonderful,” “beautiful” and “revolutionary” frequently.

This slide shows how you can create Keynote presentation slide shows with the iPad. The slider on the left, which you control with your finger, lets you scroll up and down the slides quickly. These iWork apps are only $10 each.

This is where Steve Jobs showed you can open an Adobe PDF and read a document in its original format.

This artsy canvas hung above the demo room.

Did we say the iPad is just a half-inch thick?

Back up folks. Don’t trample the demo dude.

The iBook bookshelf, which shows the electronic books you’ve bought, looks just like a bookshelf.

Typing is a breeze on the virtual keyboard, which has big letters that are hard to miss.

The New York Times page looks great on the iPad. The newspaper spent three weeks optimizing it for the iPad. You can zoom in on pictures or play embedded videos.

Here’s how the VentureBeat page looks on the iPad!

Folks milled about after the event.

Walt Mossberg and Katie Boehret of the Wall Street Journal snapped a picture of the crowd.

The media horde before the event.

When Loopt released its iPhone app alongside the App Store launch in 2008, it seemed to have everything going for it. Founder Sam Altman was given time on stage at WWDC to show off the app. It was featured prominently in the App Store for a while. And it was really one of the first hot location-based services. But then it cooled off, partially because the app needed to be open to update your location. And since the iPhone didn’t allow for third-party applications to run in the background, it was severely hamstrung. Meanwhile, a series of check-in based location apps that didn’t need to be open all the time came along and stole the location buzz. More importantly, they brought to light new business opportunities for local venues with the idea of location-based deals. Loopt’s new goal is to make a strong push for that.

As you can see in the deck we’ve obtained below, Loopt is working on yet another new product that is all about location-based deals. This deck is apparently making the rounds with a bunch of agencies and advertisers, as Loopt hopes to get them on board when they launch they app in a few months. The new app is called LooptCard. Clearly, from the deck it will run on the iPhone, but it should also work across all the major mobile platforms, we’re told. And these advertisers are being told that Loopt already has several retailers and venues on board with deals for when they launch.

So why is it any different than what Foursquare, Gowalla, and most recently, Yelp, are doing with location-based deals? It would seem that Loopt is trying to convince venues to use their system by offering the most customizable deals to give away. For example, certain deals are only unlocked if you do certain tasks, such as check-in at a certain time of day. This could be enticing to venues because while something like a coffee shop may be busy in the morning, it may be dead in the afternoon, and may want a way to pull in more traffic at only that time. There are also incentives for users to check-in with friends, which obviously benefits the venues since it means more people in the store. There are also options to give customers real goods or virtual goods. Users will also have an easy way to see what specials they are close to unlocking.

Perhaps most significantly though, LooptCard will be built entirely on top of Facebook’s social graph, we hear. This means there is a low barrier to entry to gain new users who may be wary of signing up for yet another social network. This also means that it will be tightly integrated with Facebook Connect so that all of these deals and check-ins will pour back into users’ Facebook streams, upping the viral potential of both the app and the deal.

Loopt has tried to rebuild itself before. They’ve spun off their Loopt Mix feature into its own app and made Loopt itself more predicated around check-ins. But they’re still fighting an uphill battle since those other players either got to the check-in game first — or they happen to be Yelp, with millions of users. Loopt has also crossed into Yelp’s more immediate territory recently with a local review site.

The new application is apparently an offshoot of Loopt’s recent acquisition of the Y Combinator startup, GraffitiGEO.

South Korea has just released beautiful schematics and visualizations for a natural preserve — to be housed in a series of state-of-the-art, glassed in domes totaling 33,000 square meters. Including an indoor wetland and botanical gardens, in addition to an education center and environmental think tank.

The landmark technology behind the project, dubbed the “Ecorium,” is the architecture devised by Korean firm SAMOO. To be constructed out of low-iron and low-e double glazed metal panels, wood and plexiglass, the structure is designed to respond to external conditions by adjusting internal temperatures and humidities to support the life taking root inside.

The idea is to give South Korean citizens, especially young people, the incentive to learn more about the natural world, the delicate balance of ecosystems and the responsibility to conserve and protect the environment. The center’s creator, the National Ecological Institute of South Korea, hopes to do this by breaking ground on a big, flashy project that could undoubtedly become a national treasure.

The Ecorium is very similar to Britain’s Eden Project, another series of geodesic domes that actually exist in Cornwall, including the world’s largest greenhouse. The preserve is a vast collection of plant species from around the planet, each dome simulating a particular type of climate. It will be interesting to see if South Korea’s efforts inspire the U.S. to do something similar. America is home to Biosphere 2, an indoor ecosystem in Arizona, but it fell short of expectation and hasn’t attracted a popular audience.

The Ecological Institute has yet to specify a construction timeline for the ecological domes in South Korea. Here are some more pictures of the plans:

BEIJING : China on Monday denied any state involvement in cyber attacks on Google and defended Internet censorship as necessary, as a row with Washington over the US firm's threat to leave the country rumbled on.

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Apple tablet roundup: Who’s going to use the thing? — Apple’s tablet has provided no shortage of rumors. Everything from design specs to pricing have flooded the internet from various media outlets and sources. To gain a better perspective on the scope of rumors, we put together a snapshot below of the most recent speculations.

Three ways the Apple tablet will save the Earth — Yes, the headline is a bit facetious. But even if Apple’s tablet doesn’t save the planet, its users will be cutting carbon in three major industries.

Want new apps for your Android or iPhone? Here are the best directories — The best way to find new apps is to use one of the 20 or so directories out there that try to make sense of the thousands of apps. Writer Jacob Lyssy tried out a number of directories over the course of the week and recommends his favorites.

Will The New York Times meter kill traffic from social media? — Following the newspaper’s announcement that it will start charging visitors a flat fee for full access to its site, we looked at data from Hitwise to see how the move might affect traffic.

As Oracle-Sun deal gains approval, Oracle exec’s affair splashed on billboards — Just as the European Union finally gave its blessing to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystem’s, Oracle’s co-president found details of his 8.5-year extramarital affair splashed on billboards around the United States.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Seesmic goes after mainstream consumers, tablets with Look — The typical Twitter client, which is used to read tweets, might resemble rocket science to grandma. With that in mind, Seesmic, which is behind several mobile, desktop and web-based social media clients for keeping track of tweets and Facebook updates, is going after regular consumers with a new product called Seesmic Look.

Google: Our focused approach paid off, ‘We like the Chinese people’ — While crowing about Google’s strong fourth quarter earnings, the search giant’s executives looked back on 2009 as a whole. Google seemed to elbow its way into many new markets over the course of the year, but Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg said it also benefited by deciding to “double down” on its core products like search.

AdMob: Apple may break its tie with Nokia for world domination — Apple, with its iPhone OS, is the dominant force in North America, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania, while Nokia, running the Symbian OS, still leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, according to December 2009 survey data published by mobile advertising network AdMob. But data shows that Apple may finally be making inroads on a global level.

Facebook shows off latest versions of its game and app dashboards — Facebook showed off a new version of its dashboards that are meant to give more attention to games and other apps on its social network. It gave developers access to the new design so that they can start creating apps that are well-integrated with the dashboards.

BumpTop launches for Mac, turns your desktop into your desk (+100 accounts) — BumpTop thinks it can bridge the gap between your computer desktop and your physical desk. An application that launched initially in April of 2009, BumpTop launched a Mac version this week.

I’ve added the term “Eco-Bling” to my vocabulary. According to the U.K. Guardian, Eco-Bling refers to any green technology or product that — while seemingly slick and cool — doesn’t actually do anything to help the environment. One prime example: That Prius in your neighbor’s diveway. It certainly looks good, but when it comes down to it, it doesn’t save energy or slash their carbon footprint. Here are three more Eco-Bling offenses to keep an eye out for:

Home wind turbines: A standard utility-scale turbine generates 1.5 megawatts at its peak, but operates at 20 to 40 percent capacity on average. A typical home turbine produces 2 kilowatts when the wind is traveling at 20 miles per hour. Below 5 miles per hour produces nothing. To make residential wind power practical, you would need two big turbines and a reliable storage device — unless you live somewhere freakishly windy. If you fall for urban wind turbine offers, you could find yourself spending $2,000 on hardware and installation for something that could occasionally power your TV at night.

Easy-install rooftop solar panels: Last year, the Lowe’s home improvement chain very proudly announced that it would be selling DIY solar panels for regular consumers. These models would pay for themselves (before tax) after three years of direct sunlight, assuming no maintenance — not exactly realistic. In reality, it would take more than 15 years for a rooftop solar panel to pay for itself, as is. That’s not counting counting the carbon savings. But bang for the buck, you can do better by your wallet and the planet.

Lawns for carbon capture: Green spaces may have mental health benefits, and they certainly are green, but a study from UC Irvine shows that the average lawn or urban green space — assuming regular maintenance — produces four times the emissions it takes in for photosynthesis. There’s also water demands to consider. Towns like Las Vegas and Los Angeles are siphoning water from rivers up to 200 miles away, losing a lot of it in the process and devastating watershed ecosystems. The solution? Xeriscape your yards and lobby for public spaces to do the same.

Solar panels and wind turbines may be the hallmarks of the clean energy revolution, but it turns out there are some less flashy things you can do to make an even bigger difference. Here are a few ideas that can really work:

Insulate your home: A surprising number of houses were built without insulation. Look at the Pacific Northwest — after the Grand Coulee dam was built, electricity was dirty cheap and houses and contractors didn’t want to shell out for insulation. Now we know better. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 50 to 70 percent of home power in this country is used for heating and cooling. When you add insulation, these costs have been known to drop as much as 30 percent. In my house, this add ups to savings of more than $80 a month on our utility bill. Considering that half the U.S. power mix comes from coal-fired plants, insulation could go a long way toward cutting down on carbon emissions as well. This sounds like common sense, but it’s still hard to make insulation sexy.

Think efficiency: If you haven’t done it already, replace every incandescent light bulb in your house with a compact fluorescent. CFLs use about 20 percent less power for the same output of light. And lighting accounts for 12 percent of home energy consumption. Improper installation of heating and cooling systems can also reduce efficiency by 30 percent. Rectifying these problems, and converting to CFLs, could easily save you 25 percent on your monthly energy bills.

Change basic habits: Set your thermostat lower or turn it off; wear more clothes around the house. Draw your curtains to cool a sunlit room rather than cranking up the AC. Turn the lights off when you aren’t in a room. If weather permits, you can even hang wet clothes on a line instead of running a power-hungry dryer.