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Alright, you may not be making a physical prototype of the next Tesla Roadster or NASA space station, but your project is just as important to you as those were to their creators. Right? Prototyping apps is not easy, though, and can often involve countless hours of labor just to make something visual for a 15 minute presentation.

JustProto.com hopes to step in to make the process much easier. This is a boon for those of us who might understand what “return function ($y) use ($x)” means, but have no idea how to create a decent graphic in Fireworks or Photoshop.

JustProto is an online app that is similar to project management applications, but aims towards making prototype mockups and current status displays rather than telling team members what to do or where to be.

Significant amounts of information can be plugged into JustProto and will come out the other end as a nicely-built representation of where you are, where you hope(d) to be, and so forth.

The app is designed for network and desktop application development. Elements and their parameters can be built online through the site (or uploaded as data files) and immediate previews can be done using the site template or graphical layout you’ve already built (or using one of their built-ins).

In fact, JustProto allows you to build the whole app right on their site. It can be done as a mockup, as a real-time current version, or as a final solution test. Mostly, however, it will likely be useful as a prototype test and mockup check.

Very large projects and teams might find JustProto useful for building the app from start-to-finish online, allowing all involved to see the progress, see how they’re elements are fitting, and make changes or suggestions more easily and interactively.

Signup and trial is free, so it’s worth finding out if this app will work for you. Prices start at $19/month for a standard account and work up to $99/month for unlimited accounts, all scaled by the size of the project itself (collaborators, disk usage). The totally-free plan allows 1 project and 1 person to use it and is meant as a trial balloon.

While Wolfram Alpha might be the revolution in search for scientific research, Socrata.com might be the revolution in search for publicly-owned data.

The site combines data sets from over 200 public sources around the nation, aggregating them into one site and usable format. While most sites that deal in public data sources are unwieldy, sometimes broken, and often impossible to navigate, Socrata is simple.

It works similar to a standard search engine using cloud computing in a way similar to many apps made for Twitter or Facebook data collection. This makes it fast and accurate.

The information is presented in such a way that it’s useful to those looking for it. Instead of the usual links to PDF or (worse) Word DOCs, the results are in clear HTML that is nicely rendered from the original source. It’s similar to Google Docs, though probably not as powerful.

On top of that, the site enables users to sign up and network with other researchers to share found data and information. Custom views of single data sets can be made with narrowing filters. So a search of the 2000 census data, for instance, might be narrowed by ZIP code or state.

Personalized views and fields of research data like this can be saved and shared with the person’s social network, if they wish, adding to the usefulness of the site overall.

Socrata, Inc. is based in Seattle, Washington and it’s CEO, Kevin Merritt, touts the site as a new phase of full disclosure and openness in government. “We are providing publicly available data in an interactive, social format that enables citizens, for the first time, to discover, read, manipulate and share publicly available data with a tool we all have – a Web browser,” he says.

The site itself is very easy to understand and moves relatively quickly during searches and when adding filters to narrow results. The information available is interesting and current and mostly comes from government, university, and other public sources.

One of the best parts is Socrata’s ability to pull pure data (numbers, mostly, and charts) from large research files so that if you’re looking just for specific numbers, you don’t have to download the entire 30mb PDF file just to find what’s contained in three paragraphs of one page of it.

Hopefully, Socrata will continue to grow and ad more sources for information and stay free for public use.

RingRevenue.com is a new service that allows advertisers, affiliate networks, and the like track purchases that are made by phone. So if your affiliate network tracks products for online sales, but a customer makes a phone call instead, the affiliate still receives credit for the sale.

They call it a “pay-per-call” platform and it makes it easy for publishers to track campaigns that are carried over over the phone. Both online and offline advertisers will definitely like this addition.

RingRevenue includes a lot of targeting and tracking as well, including demographics, geo-location, and other marketing information for the sales made. This information could potentially be extremely useful to a marketer who’s aim is to convert more phone sales or add phone sales to the mix.

Campaigns must be made to include phone calls as their tracking, or the system won’t work, of course. Promotions for specific products or affiliates will include a special phone number for tracking their sales. So a website which allows customers to call in their orders, for instance, would have to integrate dynamic scripts to display phone numbers based on the tracking cookie or other affiliate model.

Specific campaigns made for telephone are where RingRevenue really works best, though. In this case, the affiliate advertiser would just list their specific campaign phone number in their ad. The call is then tracked by the network when a customer calls in and the affiliate’s cut of the sale is automatically attributed when the operator finishes the sale.

Sales and information are reported real-time on the RingRevenue website when clients log in to view them. A full demo on the website will give you a better idea, in more detail, of how the process works.

Earlier in June, RingRevenue managed to pull $3.5 million in Series A funding from GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, and Great Pacific Capital. The idea behind RingRevenue is to tap into the $300 billion in yearly sales that take place offline.

One of the world’s largest affiliate platforms, Commission Junction, has signed on to offer the RingRevenue platform for their clients. RingRevenue is based in Santa Barbara, California and was co-founded by Jason Spievak, Robert Duva, and Colin Kelley.

The much-buzzed Sirius XM iPhone app received a critical bitch slap from geek-chic basement bloggers and high-tech webzines when it was made available to the public last week.

The complaints included the fact that much of the premium branded content, like Howard Stern and NFL Play-by-Play, isn’t available for streaming through the app. Additionally, there are already a bunch of music apps that let you listen to a D.I.Y playlist sans fees. (While the app itself is free, Sirius XM charges $12.95 a month for its basic services, plus another $3 a month to stream online.)

My counter argument to refute both of these reactionary criticisms – clearly penned by writers who don’t listen to Sirius XM – is that you still get the best stations with the app.

Let’s start with the Virus, which is branded as an extreme talk radio channel and includes shock jock stalwarts Opie & Anthony, as well as the underappreciated Ron & Fez. While Stern prefers to talk about how he’s revolutionized the medium and how his listeners can never bed the D-list skanks he brings on the show, O&A combine hilarious obscenity-littered rants with cutting insights. Possibly even more entertaining is their regular practice of mocking the traditional FM morning zoo format. No personalities make the huge entertainment rift between terrestrial and satellite radio as clear as these Long Island wiseacres.

Meanwhile, Ron & Fez boasts a loyal army of odd listeners and callers that nicely complements the O&A train wreck. Former stand-up comic and professional cokehead Ron Bennington is the best interviewer I’ve ever heard on any medium, and Fez Whately is a neurotic puppy dog who likes to wear women’s clothing.

And that’s the Virus channel alone. Guilty please music channels include Lithium’s eclectic ‘90s playlist, a unique movie score station in Cinemagic, and you can also get the sports scores you’re looking at with ESPN and Fox Sports channels. Stations are up in playing in about three seconds, and the signal quality is better than expected.

The Sirius XM iPhone app may not perform its primary duty: Attract new listeners/iPhone users to the satellite radio platform. But it will perform an important function in any recession: Retention marketing. If I can listen to Opie and Anthony’s third-chair comedian Jim Norton wax philosophically on tranny love and golden showers secretly from the workplace, then I’ve got one more reason to keep paying my monthly fees.

Tweeting on the go is the new thing. Nothing shows you’re hip and with it like an iPhone imbued with the ability to send tweets about anything and everything you’re doing. Of course, some people actually need to do this, so there are legitimate reasons for a Twitter-enabled mobile device too.

Whatever your reasons for doing it, it’s not likely you’re going to be happy just using the Twitter Mobile website from your iPhone or Blackberry. Unless you only follow four or five people, you probably won’t want to use the SMS (text) feature either.

You’ll need an app. But which one?

For this look at mobile Twitter apps, we’re separating them by device type and then looking at the most popular for each.

Blackberry
The real Twitter mobile war is between Blackberry and iPhone users. Crackberry enthusiasts have two popular clients: TwitterBerry and Tiny Twitter. You can see the latter below in the Java Handsets section, but TwitterBerry is a Blackberry-only app. It’s fairly basic for something made for such an advanced mobile platform. In fact, it’s pretty limited with no profile viewing or URL shortening. Funny, since it does support TwitPic. If you’re not a real twitaholic, this might be OK for you.

iPhone
Apple users will have 6 real choices for iPhone use (six if you check the Java Handsets section below): Tweetie, TweetDeck, Nambu, Twitterific, Twitellator, and TwitterFon. All three are available at iTunes.  Picking a favorite is not easy, but the most popular (by a slim margin) appears to be Tweetie.

Tweetie has a lot of filters/searches, is intuitive to use, seems to run fast, and supports multiple accounts as well as access to Trends. This is a nicely done app for the iPhone, though it can run a little slow at times.

TweetDeck (aka TweetStack) for the iPhone just came out with a new rendition. So far, while the new upgrades are nice, the app is having some real hangups. Running as, basically, the desktop version of TweetDeck for the iPhone, this app has a lot of power and functionality, but is very slow too.  Once it is working as it should, this will ultimately become the only app I can see myself using.  It supports multiple accounts, great alerts, and is free.  My only few hangups so far are the fact that it keeps booting me off, and that if I receive a direct message I have to send it back as a direct message, and if I fail to click send dm it sends it to everyone.

Twitellator Pro is relatively new to the scene, winning the Editor’s Choice at Mac:Life in May.  It handles multiple accounts and does most everything you expect a powerful Twitter client to do.  Because it’s so new, there aren’t a lot of users to draw feedback from, but it’s a robust app.  It does seem to run faster than TweetDeck for the iPhone, for sure.

TwitterFon is popular, I think, purely because it’s free. If all you need are basic Twitter functions, a fast app, and something simple and easy, then this is the iPhone app of choice for twits. If you need a little more power and function from your Twitter experience, though, then cough up the $3 and buy one of the other two apps on our iPhone list.

Java Handsets
Tiny Twitter is by far the most popular Java-enabled client for tweeting. In fact, if you’re using one of the other phones on our list, it’s likely Java-enabled and can use this instead. This app includes a lot of options for personalization to enhance how you interact with Twitter on your mobile. This is a great app that does all basic Twitter functions as well as a few extras.

Symbian
The Nokia smart phone OS of choice, Symbian generally has just a few apps and only one real Twitter app of any note. Twibble Mobile has the very basic Twitter functions and that’s about it. No user icons (just names), but it has a cool location-mapping plugin that allows your friends who’re including location pings with their tweets to show up on a map on your phone. Otherwise, Twibble isn’t much better than just going to twitter.com.

Windows Mobile
ceTwit is one of the few and proud WinMobile apps for Twitter that’s enjoying any success at all. Avatars, auto-refresh, and more are all built-in and the app almost makes Windows Mobile look pretty. Almost. Most basic Twitter functions are supported and it even color-codes tweets.

That’s our wrap-up of Twitter mobile clients. Nearly every one of these is a big step up from just getting text messages or using the Twitter Mobile site. Some are better than others and some mobile devices have more ability than others too.  Best app appears to be TweetDeck so far if they can get their act together.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rev2 and @lapp and have fun!

Remember the print-your-own biz card kits at Office Max that used MS Word templates to make business cards you could print on your printer? Then came VistaPrint with their online business card designer software. Now there’s Business Card Star, which mixes the two ideas together.

To nutshell it, Business Card Star is a Web-based biz card designer similar to VistaPrint, but instead of being stuck with their system and having to use them as your exclusive printer for your card designs, you can download the finished product as a PDF to your system and print them yourself.

For true professionals, of course, printing your own isn’t really an option. Unless, of course, looking cheap is part of your whole persona. They might work in a pinch, though, when your cards haven’t come back from the printers yet.

They’re also useful for a lot of other stuff. Business cards are a great, cheap, and quick way to advertise events, invite people to parties, and even join the new wave of soccer moms who’re making “play dates” with biz cards.

Of course, if you do want professional cards, Business Card Star can do that too. They offer professional card printing through their site for reasonable prices. Not as cheap as VistaPrint, but these are generally better quality. 500 glossies will run $29.95 with silk lamination an option too. 2-sided cards are only about $5 more.

The card designer itself is pretty slick and easy to understand. It’s a nicely-done WYSIWYG editor based on a basic design template for the card. It’s similar to the systems used by other online card designers.

Creating an account and building cards is free and you can save your card projects so you can download them again, order prints, modify them, etc.

Business Card Star is a nice site and a good step up from VistaPrint. The designs are generally more modern and aimed at the tech and creative sectors with less emphasis on the stock photography and flat designs and more on simple, graphic looks.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rev2 and @lapp and have fun!