Join us for a regular (i.e. monthly) startup happy hour (5-8PM) and then come upstairs to our offices for the Mobile Monday event.

The Dallas Startup Happy Hour is the talk of the startup community in Dallas. Check out the coverage in the Dallas Morning News: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://tinyurl.com/sshhdfw”>http://tinyurl.com/sshhdfw</a> As a result of the events, several startups have found a) employees, b) co-founders, c) angel investors and d) had a few free drinks.

Are you interested in connecting with the local startup community? We are working to build a vibrant startup community here in Dallas every bit as interesting and dynamic as San Francisco, Boulder, Boston or Austin. The first step is engagement.

Sponsored by SpringStage – you are invited to attend. Please <a href=”http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/3081373/”>RSVP</a>.

Looks like Mike Arrington at Techcrunch is frustrated with Apple and has decided to give up on his iPhone.

Per his recent updates he’s decdied to join the Android community – opting to use the T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G.

There have been a few rumors this week about Motorola developing an Android phone for Verizon.  This is all 2nd or 3rd hand gossip at this point but according to Endgadget’s russian translation it’s got the following specs:

“Sholes” is a 3.7-inch (480 x 854) touchscreen device that will make its debut in the U.S. in October, featuring: 512MB storage, 256MB RAM, support for microSD / microSDHC up to 16 GB (an 8GB microSD ships with the phone), a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, GPS, and the expected connectivity (USB, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi), audio, and video formats. And if the translation wasn’t hopelessly garbled, the source is also saying that this bad boy will support both CDMA and EVDO Rev A.

If any of this is true it’s going to be good news to all of our fans who use Verizon.  Fingers crossed!

We get emails every week asking us when ShopSavvy is coming to the Palm Pre.  The Pre was released last month but all 3rd party application development has been on-hold because developers have not had the access to the SDK required to build apps.  We finally got the word this week that the SDK was ready for prime time.

From the email we received it sounded like they were making sure that everything was going to be rock solid for the developers.  Here’s part of the email we received from Palm:

I want to thank you for your patience while we allowed a few developers to kick the tires on our APIs, tools and docs before we released them to the rest of the world. We’re working hard to ensure that Palm webOS becomes a world-class platform for application development, but we need to do so in a measured and focused way so we can be sure we’re providing a great development experience and attentive developer support.

Palm may be playing catch-up but making it easy for developers to create is always a good thing.  I know that our team is ready to get their hands on this.

NBC showed up at our offices today with a camera crew to film yet another story on ShopSavvy.  Thanks for the coverage guys!  Watch it on the late news tonight.

It’s amazing how a photo can get around these days. If you do an image search using your favorite browser you will probably find this scanning image in several locations.  Forbes used it in their article on 10 Ways to Shop on your Cellphone.  PC World used it for their article on 15 Killer Android Apps. The Canadian Broadcasting Company even used it in their article on Cell Phone Trends. I’ve even seen it posted on several blogs.

This image is all over the net! Whenever ShopSavvy is mentioned it seems like this photo is used.  It’s not surprising since the photo shows you exactly what ShopSavvy does, but the interesting thing it’s an internal photo.  We didn’t bring in a photo team and model to use.  Alex snapped this photo one day in the office and it actually features our lead designer Rylan Barnes’ hand.  And in the typical fashion of the day we emailed the photo to someone, they posted it somewhere and then someone hotlinked to it.   The next thing you know it’s showing up in articles and blogs.

Of course we don’t mind that this photos is all over the place.   In fact this is the kind of thing we love to see.  It’s just another example of how the internet is making our world smaller and smaller.  And besides, we think that Rylan always wanted to be a hand model!

According to a research report issued by RBC Capital, Amazon controls over 33% of the e-commerce market in the United States.  They are clearly on the top of their game, but are losing their heart?  Recent actions by the monolithic e-commerce Juggernaut that is Amazon are causing more and more users to question the company’s competitive practices.

For example, Joshua Odmark learned the hardway that Amazon has stopped paying affilliates their commission when the affiliate uses a URL shortener like tinyurl or bitly.  Last week Amazon cut off four different affiliate partners that supplied ShopSavvy with product data.  The reason?  Amazon doesn’t have the resources to support mobile applications.  Nobody including people like John Gruber can understand why Amazon would seek to limit the distribution of their data and ultimately their ability to sell their goods.  Finally, earlier today Wil Shipley, internet rockstar, had to remove his uber-popular application Delicious Library today after receiving notice from Amazon he would be cut off.  Ouch.  Dan Moren from Macworld responded, “this blanket ban on mobile apps is bizarre and, to put it bluntly, stupid.”

We love Amazon.  What they have done for online commerce has been truly remarkable.  In many ways, they set the stage for apps like ShopSavvy.

Unfortunately, we have had difficulty incorporating Amazon products among the more than 20,000 retailers and 2 million products that are part of ShopSavvy.   It’s not a technical issue; with access to Amazon’s product API, we could include all Amazon products in the ShopSavvy database immediately.  But for reasons that are unclear to us, Amazon has not yet given us this access.

For a while, we have been able to work around this problem, because a number of our partners had access to Amazon’s API, and we were able to display Amazon results through them.   But now Amazon has essentially cut this option off, meaning that only a small percentage of Amazon products now display in ShopSavvy results.

We’re not sure why Amazon is reluctant to be part of ShopSavvy, but we know that our 1+ million users would benefit from having access to Amazon’s prices as they comparison shop for books, movies, music, games, electronics and many other types of products.

We intend to plead our case directly to Amazon again soon — and we will need your help.  Let Amazon know that you want their product results to be part of ShopSavvy.  Tell Amazon they should join Best Buy, Wal-Mart and the 20,000 other retailers who allow their products to be accessed by ShopSavvy users.

If you had asked me which major manufacturer of mobile phones would NEVER build an Android phone I would have said, “Nokia”.  Turns out I would have been wrong.  The owner of Symbian, the most prolific mobile phone operating system, is building an Android based phone.  Wow.  Read more here.

UPDATE: Nokia, evidently, wasn’t ready for the proverbial cat to get out of the bag.  Nokia said today, “Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever [to the rumor].”