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Just last week, a couple of much-trusted birdies popped into the MobileCrunch office, claiming to have some details on SkyFire (a Flash-friendly mobile browser already available on a number of smartphone platforms) and its impending iPhone release. “They’ve entered the very final round of testing!” they said. “It’s going to get submitted to Apple early next week!”

We’re one day past what we’d personally consider “early next week”, but sure enough: SkyFire has just announced that they’ve submitted the browser for Apple’s oh-so-important stamp of approval. Start the timers, folks.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

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Perhaps you’ve heard: Apple is having an event tomorrow. Normally, this means that a sea of tech bloggers descends upon the Bay Area to cover it live for those sitting by their computers at home. But this time things are a bit different: Apple is actually streaming the event live — something they haven’t done in a very, very long time. Cue Double Rainbow: what does this mean?

It’s been so long since an Apple event has been live streamed that no one can seem to agree when the last one actually was. The consensus seems to be that it was a Macworld keynote (which IDG and not Apple produced) back in the 2003 or 2004 timeframe. But what’s interesting is why Apple streamed one of these last ones: as some recall, it was at least in part to show off their then-new streaming technology — QuickTime Streaming Server. Might that be a hint about the intentions for tomorrow’s event?

Specifically, I’m wondering if Apple is streaming this event because streaming media will be a key part of the event. iTunes-in-the-Cloud is the big streaming service everyone is waiting for — but all indications are that this is still not ready to go just yet. What does seem ready to go are things like Netflix for the new iTV device. Guess how that would work? Yep, streaming.

What’s not yet clear is if Netflix has built an app for this new device just as they have for the iPhone and iPad, or if Apple worked with them to build it into the system. If it’s the latter, it’s certainly possible it will be using the “industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming” Apple is touting in their live stream press release. Interestingly enough, HTTP Live Streaming is also a part of Quicktime Streaming Solutions alongside the aforementioned Quicktime Streaming Server.

The other streaming wildcard here are the rumored new $0.99 television show rentals. It’s certainly possible that these will be downloadable content like current iTunes movie rentals — but perhaps Apple is intending to test out new streaming capabilities with them as well. After all, this new iTV is thought to only have something like 16 GB of storage space on board — that’s enough for only a handful of television shows in HD. You’d really have to rent them and them watch them right away if they are downloadable.

So while it’s entirely possible that Apple just randomly decided to flip the switch to start streaming their events live after all these years — it seems just as likely that it’s a calculated move by Apple to tie everything they’re doing with streaming together around this event. If that’s the case, you can bet CEO Steve Jobs will mention it on stage — something like “it’s the same technology we’re using to stream this to all those people on Apple devices watching this live around the world right now!”

They just better hope the stream holds up. If not, us lowly bloggers will still be there as backup.

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Just in time for our eleventh birthday, we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July, Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that’s fully integrated with Blogger; you don’t need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog’s dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin!

Feature Highlights

Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog’s traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement; meanwhile, here are some quick highlights for you.

• Real-time tracking. Each time your blog is viewed, you can see the change on your stats almost immediately
• Insights about your audience. Top search keywords, countries, browsers, and more
• Great user interface. Beautiful, easy-to-read graphs and charts

Updates

After our initial launch to Blogger in Draft, we had some very helpful feedback and suggestions from you. Based on them, we’ve made improvements including the following:

• Self-view exclusion. Some of you wanted Blogger Stats to exclude your own pageviews, and now there’s an option for that: On Stats | Overview, click on the “Don’t track your own pageviews” link (it’s on the right side, under the pageview summary) and select the “Don’t track my pageviews” option. We’re also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin pages and post Preview, providing more accurate pageview data.
• More effective bot traffic filtering. We’ve made several improvements to detect “bots” (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers) including extending our list of known “bots” to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors.
• Internationalization. Blogger Stats is now available in more than 40 languages.

We hope you like  Blogger Stats. By the way, there must be something good about August—not only is it our birth month, we’ve gone from four Admin Dashboard tabs to six, just this month alone! (The other new tab we’ve added this month was the Comments tab, which was another highly requested feature.) We still have some more ground to cover, but just wanted to say we’re working really hard to deliver the features you’ve wanted to see on Blogger. Looking forward to seeing you all at the upcoming Meetup!

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