After picking up my iPhone 3GS and using it for almost a month now, I’m officially calling it: the point and shoot camera is dead. It’s kind of a bold statement but I truly believe they are fast becoming a relic of the past. Obviously high end SLRs are not going anywhere but the middle ground between SLRs and “camera phones” is really starting to disappear and become a meaningless distinction.

The age old saying of photographers is that “the best camera you have is the one you have with you.” The reality is that carrying another device on your hip is not something anyone wants to do. In addition, there are always those unexpected moments where you couldn’t have predicted ahead of time that your camera was needed. I hate to use the word “convergence” as it seems to be something that has been promised forever but I think the current generations of smartphones are starting to get us there. Although my iPhone 3GS has about the same capability of a low end point and shoot camera from five years ago, it doesn’t matter. It is perfectly good enough for my needs and well worth it given the fact that I don’t have to carry around another device.

Just look at the most popular cameras used on the photo sharing site Flickr for example. The iPhone is second but very close to being the most popular camera used to upload photos to the service. The reality is that people don’t have an interest in printing their photos like they used to do in the film days. Today, people want to immediately upload them from whatever phone their using to Facebook or their other social networks and generate conversations around them. In a world where photos are viewed online on a 15″ computer screen and very rarely printed and blown up, your phone’s camera is perfectly fine. I think it is quite comical that the average consumer who walks into an electronics store looking to buy a point and shoot is all concerned about things like megapixel count when most of their photos will never make it off their computer and only likely be viewed as low res thumbnails on social networks or via email.

I would love to hear your feedback and whether or not you still use a point and shoot camera and why. The only real reason I see a use for them is if you are on a vacation and are in “picture taking mode” for an extended period of time. Other than that, I think the camera in your smartphone will do just fine.

Photo Credit – magikid

Recently, there haven been two market developments in The Netherlands which are very interesting. The first one is that recently the Dutch social network Hyves announced the opening of their own online app store where they will offer both online and mobile apps. The app store will be supported by a payment system, so Hyves can sell paid applications as well. In many respects, they follow the great success Apple had with their iPhone App Store. And I can’t see why they would fail.

The second one is that Nu.nl, the biggest Dutch news website, unofficially (at a conference) announced the launch of their own mobile app store in their very succesful iPhone app (around 80% of Dutch iPhone users has got Nu.nl installed). It will operate as a store but in fact it will suggest iPhone apps from the App Store. The added value lies in the selection Nu.nl makes for its users. Nu.nl will obviously receive an affiliate fee on the apps being bought by users redirected from their store.

It’s easy to digest from these two developments, that the app store model is now both copied in an online model and in a mobile affiliate model. In fact, you could see Nu.nl as an Apple App Store ‘user’ that starts to suggest applications to its loyal visitors. Nu.nl knows its customers a lot better than Apple knows the App Store customers so can offer its customers a tailored offering based on this knowledge. Now it’s also easy to copy this to the situation Hyves is creating. Hyves’ users can suggest their favourite online and mobile apps to their friends. But why would everyone all the sudden start recommending apps to each other? Because Hyves will pay out an affiliate fee for every app sold through your profile page!

I firmly believe this model is a very interesting business model for both mobile media and social media.If you look at the strong growth of the mobile app market, you can already spot the need for some sort of filter. In just one year’s time the Apple App Store has become very hard to oversee, about six months ago it was still reasonably easy to choose what apps you wanted but now it’s just too much. If popular and highly used apps such as Nu.nl start suggesting apps I might like, this would be of great help. And I can’t see why popular apps such as Spotify or LinkedIn wouldn’t start suggesting apps based on its user’s data and preferences. The smart thing is that these aren’t just filters, they’re revenue streams because of the generated affiliate fees.

When it comes to Facebook, MySpace, maybe even Twitter, you could do the exact same thing. You could start suggesting certain applications to your friends in a controlled and not too intrusive way so people can slowly get used to the idea of affiliate marketing on social networks. I don’t think things will get out of hand soon, the social element of social networks will prevent people from overloading their profile with all sorts of applications. Just like in a shop, people will make sure their profile looks nice, tidy, tailored to its audience and not too obtrusive.

Posterous has been rolling out new features like crazy lately. I admit I have only used it casually but have become more and more interested in using it more given the buzz and positive reviews I have been hearing. The recent nod that Mashable gave it in their head to head battle against Tumbr as well as Steve Rubel’s declaration that he was using it exclusively as a replacement for his blog have got me really interested in implementing it in my social media workflow.

The latest cool feature they are rolling out is the ability to automatically embed the geolocation of your photographs posted to Posterous using Google Maps. Starting today, Posterous now offers a sleek little embedded Google Map below any photo you upload. Embedding the geocoordinates using Google Maps can be accomplished one of two ways:

1. You can do it manually by grabbing the map link from Google Maps and dropping it on its own line into your email or the web based post editor for the post’s picture.
2. Or, you can just let Posterous do the work by letting them look up the the geocoordinates encoded in the photo.

In both situations the Google Map is nicely placed at the bottom of the post just above the comments section. If you don’t want the Google Map embedded on your posts, you can simply turn it off on your settings page. If you already have a Posterous account, make sure to go to your settings page to turn on this feature. Existing users must give Posterous permission to automatically retrieve and post geolocation information from your photos.

I am really excited about this feature and geolocation moving into the mainstream. I can’t wait to see what the Posterous team comes up with next.

For some unknown reason, the guys at iSoft decided to take the time to see if they could get windows 95 and XP running on the iPhone. We’re quite glad they did because although there’s very little point to it, it at least gives us the opportunity to show our teenage readers what a real operating system is all about.

The hack makes use of a standard Windows 95 image and the Bochs emulator, though as you can expect, the performance is awful.

Warning: for some, this might a rather nauseating experience:

Goldman Sachs analyst James Mitchell projects that both the iPhone and Kindle stores will generate more gross revenue than YouTube this year. And Apple’s net revenue — the 30% it takes from transactions — could overtake YouTube in 2010, he predicts. (And that’s not even including the hardware sales these products generate, which is a major reason these stores — especially Apple’s — exist in the first place.)