By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I am sure when the founders of HotPads came up with their website business, the idea was to tap into the red-hot housing market. Sadly, things have changed and now the word “hot” has a whole new meaning.

Hotpads is a free service that lets you compare rentals and homes for sale in many top US cities. Even more interesting is the site’s heatmap feature. As shown here, foreclosures in the San Francisco Bay Area are indeed heating up.

We Say: Why not throw in a gasoline price tracker heat map and we an all just drown ourselves right now.

Alice Adds: If you truly want to depress yourself, check out Gas Buddy. San Francisco has hit $4.11 a gallon. sigh…

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Following up on the success of the iPhone Dev Team at finding a way to jailbreak the iPhone 1.1.1 system, the iPhoneSIMfree developers (who released the first software unlocking solution for sale “way back” in early September) have released a new version which not only unlocks iPhones with the 1.1.1 software update, it restores ones that were bricked by the update. This includes phones unlocked by the AnySIM open source method, as well as previous iPhoneSIMfree releases.

We Say: The battle rages on. Who wants to bet on if the next Apple iPhone software update will close this hole as well? No takers? Too obvious, eh?

If you want to give it a try, you can buy iPhoneSIMfree here.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I’ve always aspired to have a video wall, until the thought of all those talking heads and ceaselessly moving images remind me to steer clear of the TV aisle for now. But thanks to video search engine Blinx, I can now have one virtually. You can customize your own video wall (6 screen or 16, you decide), or search the Blinx library. It’s not YouTube, but the video viewer is interesting. And the price is right.

Hint: Mouse over the screens for more info.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

This is silly yet interesting. First some facts about Google Maps: “Each marker and even the speech bubbles with further information cast a shadow on the maps and satellite images. While zooming in on the map, the pixel size of the markers on the screen always stay at the same size. But if their size is seen in relation to their environment they shrink when the user zooms in.”

Basically that knowledge got guy named Aram Bartholl all worked up, and he decided to re-create the map markers in real life. To scale. “The size of the rebuilt red Marker in reality corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in max zoom factor of the map.”

See Adam’s Map Project Here
Source: datenform.de
View the Video on YouTube

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Shouldn’t we be over “Web 2.0″ by now? The use of big fonts and colors and tags and all the other zoomy things that dressed up Web pages and made us feel better about the crash? That’s what I thought until I have to say I was taken by silly-sounding Zirr.us.

You basically create a mini ecosystem of tags based on how important the task is, and Zirr.us generates a tag cloud - visually reminding you that your 5:00POM deadline is far more important than that aspirational “Start a Band” to-do.

We Say: Silly and not very serious, Zirr.us is nice try, and I now have using it on my own to-do list.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Online apps keep on getting better. Our own David Johnston has been a big fan of Open Office as a competitor to the traditional suite of Microsoft Office apps you load on your own system. But here’s a suite of similar apps (spreadsheet, word processor, presentation, drawing, etc.) from Ajax13 that load in your browser (meaning no download necessary), work on any OS, and works with Microsoft Office and Open Office files in seconds. Pretty slick. And most of the apps are under 400K, so they load in seconds too.

We Think: With more of us online all the time, the days of the $499 office suite are looking a little pricey. Office 2007 has a very nice new UI that may keep us corporate users down on the farm another year or so, but for many college student and people on the go - give this a try.

Try Ajax13 Here

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Mash-ups are getting old, but this one from Geogreeting.com is a fun new idea at least. It takes the shapes of buildings seen from Google Maps and spells out a custom message using the buildings as letters. You can even mouse over each word and find the origin of each letter. In our example, the “R” in RealTechNews is a building from Gary Indiana.

Best Feature: You can create your message and then send a URL to pals so they can view your mapped message online.

Try GeoGreeting Here

By Chief Gizmateer
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet), a new download service looking to provide subscribers with legitimate television downloads with purchases and Bittorent feeds, is accepting email addresses for sending out invitation to use the service.

Here’s an excerpt about their service:

We currently index 1,600+ TV shows - 90,000+ episodes - and we are matching everything up with content sources like iTunes, AOL and Amazon Unbox - with more to come.

Our beta feature set allows you to do exactly what it says on the tin and do it in style. With integrated message boards, groups, personalised badges and an extensive API, we have lots more great stuff coming soon too.

So we’re slightly curious as to why they used the obsolete word “Tape”…