Friday’s Pick and Mix #24

GLOBAL – So what’s been going on elsewhere on the World Wide Web, we wonder? Here’s our pick of stories and nuggets that aren’t from us but will be interesting to Conversations readers. We’re in your blog, readin’ your posts. And if there’s links we should have bookmarked, but missed, then let us know and we’ll check them out for next week’s post.

Adam spotted this remarkable film of an HD video camera being sent to the edges of space carried by a weather balloon. First person to do this with their Nokia N8 wins a prize, probably. There’s already some fun stuff being done with N8s and kites as part of the Push project.
The OviDailyApp blog reports on Tap2It for new Symbian devices. It’s a great web search app that combines predictive text input with Google’s Instant API to provide blazing fast results.
The folk at Nokia’s Beta Labs have announced a new version of their Gig Finder app. It’s extended its geographical reach somewhat and now covers 18 countries:  USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.
The wait is over for Nokia N8 users who were waiting for Swype. It’s now on Ovi Store: here.
Mobile video use is exploding, according to a survey conducted on the YouTube mobile site. Of the people who use the site, three-quarters said it was the main way they watched online videos. A bit of a biased survey group, of course, but a sign of the way things are going.
Newsweek on How Cellphones are Changing the World. Nice article, but we think the impact of mobile is even wider and more disruptive than they suggest.
And finally. A lot of you enjoyed the video from the Beijing test centre yesterday, showing you one of the drop tests we perform on new models, but some of you pointed out that it was hard to see exactly how the drop worked. To show another example, here’s a video we shot in 2008 at the UK test centre. Brrr…