(flickr.com/adrian8_8)

For those of you who love Uber but can't always shell out the dough for rides in swanky black sedans, your lives may soon get a lot easier. ABC News reports that the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission is accepting proposals from smartphone mobile apps that will enable riders to order cabs via their cell phones.

According to ABC:

The Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) is accepting proposals from mobile application companies that would allow taxi riders to book, track and pay for a cab using their smartphones.

Software development companies with established mobile taxi applications already in use in cities around the U.S. and abroad are vying to be considered to be the face of digital hailing in Manhattan.

ABC reports that Taxi Magic and Hailo are both current competitors for the proposal. GetTaxi, an app that has seen tremendous growth abroad, just raised $20 million for its New York rollout.

We're pretty unconcerned with who scores the proposal, as long as the app works on rainy days during rush hour.

In an effort to revamp the way consumers navigate its massively successful but increasingly confusing and overpopulated App Store, Apple has acquired Chomp, "the search engine that finds the apps you want." MG Siegler, writing for Techcrunch, reports Apple has fully committed to Chomp, and with good reason:

This is not a cheap "acqui-hire", Apple has bought the Chomp team and technology and plans to use both to completely revamp App Store search and recommendations, I hear.

Chomp was a "stealth start up" in 2009 when it took less than 2 weeks to raise around a half-million dollars in seed funding from notable angels. Founder Ben Keighran said at the time that Chomp was in to win, terming itself a "BIG mobile play."

Looks like that play paid off; Bloomberg BusinessWeek says Apple paid a tasty $50 million for the deal. Apple confirmed the deal but spokeswoman Amy Bessette told Bloomberg Apple doesn't typically comment on "purposes or plans" for such purchases.

The OSHA Heat Safety App

The infamous $640 toilet seat which the Pentagon purchased back in the 1980's now has a crappy, excuse the pun, modern day equivalent: a government-made mobile app with a price tag of $200,000.

Rich Jones of Gun.io, a job board for hackers, downloaded and installed the Heat Safety app from OSHA. It's a straightforward service that finds your current location, measures the heat and humidity and serves up a warning with notes if the temperature is dangerous.

One might call it the kind of app that could have been created for less money by simply telling people to stick their head out the window before work. But this level of precaution is OSHA's mandate and it's good, in theory, to see government trying to leverage new technology.

Mr. Jones, an Android developer himself, took a much darker view. "Pardon my French, but I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn't actually capable of the function it is supposed to do. When I first tried the application, it told me that it was currently 140F in Boston. It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way. If I had to reproduce it, I'd say that it would take be about 6 hours at the maximum. At my hourly rate of $100, that's $600."

He decided to file a Freedom of Information Act and learned, a few weeks later, that OSHA had paid $106,000 for this Android app and $96,000 for the iPhone and Blackberry versions. The work had been done by Eastern Research Group, and environmental and energy consulting firm which itself contracted out the work to a group called Pixelbit creative, a digital design firm that apparently cannot finish their own web site. After reviewing the source code, numerous developers concurred with Mr. Jones that the project could have been completed in a day or two of work.

Sadly, government doesn't operate like a startup. They are being billed not just for the time that went into making the app, but, as the FOIA makes clear, for the process of conceptualizing the app, figuring out the requirements, getting clearance from higher-ups, testing to ensure accessibility to all citizens, and a slew of other things that would never happen when creating a for-profit app in the private market. It's the way government has always worked, from the $640 toilet seat, to the $200,000 mobile app, and it's not likely to change any time soon.

Who knows what fun we'll have!

The marketplace for mobile apps that let you log-in your location and broadcast this information to friends is getting pretty crowded. There is our local favorite, foursquare, which pioneered the act of "checking in". And then there are giants like Facebook and Twitter, which let you record your location when you send a status update or tweet.

The folks at IAC have come up with a fairly brilliant end-run around all this. Their new app, Crowded Room, let's people log a "might go", the tantalizing precursor to the check-in. Not only do you not have to be at the actual location, but you "might go" to dozens of spots in one night without ever leaving your couch!

The notion behind the app, reports GigaOm's Ryan Kim, is to help users connect with new people. You can scope out all the other folks who might be headed where you are tonight, and after drilling down into their profile and seeing something you like, you can use the Shortlist feature to let them know you "might" be interested in meeting up at one of those places you "might go" tonight. Oh, the anticipation!

The promo video IAC cooked up for this app is terrifying. Really attractive people shout lists of eccentric interests at you. "Japanese hair straightening. Hot yoga! Book making!" Is this what IAC thinks it's like meeting people IRL? With Crowded Room, one really good looking woman talks to you in soothing tones about finding people like yourself at hip places full of like minded hotties.

In a way this app is a lot like Sonar, which tries to connect users with people they should meet when they check-in to venues. But Crowded Room seems to be more interested in building a profile and then encouraging you to go to certain places and meet certain people, almost like a very laid back dating app. It builds the profile using your Facebook, which is a smart way to seed the app with personal data.

What this app needs to succeed is a core group of really hip users in key cities. Otherwise it will just be another location based app consumers "might" use among a crowded field of much larger competitors. But on the business side, there is a clear path here. I let a venue know I might be interested in swinging by. They cross reference that with my Klout score and boom, I'm getting an offer for 50 percent off bottle service if I decide to pull the trigger on this check-in.

Last night Betabeat stumbled on Bromance, sort of a Grindr for straights, that goes by the tagline, "Live, Laugh, Fist Bump."

This morning we got our beta invite. "Starting a poker night? Looking for a game of hoops? Bromance supports virtually any type of event and takes the guess-work out of creating, interacting and sharing with friends both old and new."

As usual, becoming a beta tester requires participation in a pyramid scheme, with users asked to invite three friends via Facebook, Twitter or email before getting one of the coveted early adopter slots.

Finally, the droves of lonesome bros wandering the streets with nothing but a sad face and sweet smartphone will be able to geo-locate their way to an all night sausage fest where the good times never stop. How do we invest?

Starting today, Davidson is the new senior associate at the venture arm of kbs+p, which launched an effort to fund startups back in February. There has been a lot of growth in corporate venture over the past year, although less in the world of advertising. Davidson will be focusing on ad-tech, mobile and design, looking to find young companies that can sync with work going on at the agency.

Along with a history in private equity and venture, Davidson created a series of financial models under the heading Unstructured Ventures which more than 6,000 startups downloaded.

"I think its clear that the incumbents are not innovating in the mobile space, that the carriers have been disrupted, and forced to work with companies like Apple and Google" says Davidson. Along with the hire, kbs+p announced an investment in PlaceIQ, a Boulder based company that helps advertisers understand the context around location based data. Co-investors include NY Angel and big data lover Roger Ehrenberg.

"There is this wealth of information now from check ins on services like Foursquare and Yelp," says Davidson. "What we need is to find intelligent ways to shape all that data, so we can gives users and advertisers more context about who and what they are near."

"Right now, the only way to get distribution for your application is to pay out the nose on an existing ad network, get “TechCrunched,” or to call in a favor at Apple (presuming you know someone there) and get featured on the iTunes homepage," wrote NY Tech Meetup's Nate Westheimer.

To combat this, Westheimer has launched a new project, Allify, in partnership with betaworks and Prehype, two digital studios that help incubate local startups.

Allify is essentially an advertising cartel in which members promote each other's products. Developers earn credits based on how many ads they show and can redeem those credits for ads featuring their product on the Allify network.

At first this seems a bit like the blind leading the blind, but if a few apps turn into home runs the network might start to attract enough members that it becomes a real promotional asset. Of course, showing these ads will cut into whatever small revenue stream developers might see, but most will probably appreciate the trade off in terms of exposure.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

A Short Introduction to Allify