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Now available at app stores around the Web and now available in the Apple App Store is a new iPhone application that allows you to send emails to multiple addresses and use groups to organize for sending.

The app is called Send To All and is made by Grip’d, based in Boca Raton, Florida.  If you use Gmail and are familiar with and make use of its Groups feature, then you’ll love the idea of being able to do this on your iPhone while mobile – and even import those Gmail Groups to your phone’s Mail.

SendToAll is a native iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch app.  It allows you to not only send multiple emails at once (rather than typing emails endlessly into the CC or BCC fields), but it lets you organize the email addresses in your contacts list to make them easier to find and use.

The company behind this new app is Grip’d, which I co-founded with wizard developer Raphael Caixeta.  It joins others we’ve created such as BePut and QR Scanner.

Using SendToAll is easy and intuitive.  You simply organize (or create on the fly) email groups for mass sending.  So you might have a group created for, say, developers on a project, members of your kid’s little league team, your friends who work downtown, etc.  This way, if you have a quick message to send to everyone after a meeting, to announce practice times, or to mention that you’re in town if anyone wants to grab a bite; it’s all organized and ready.

The app makes this easy and makes staying in sync easy.

The latest in the quickly growing market of low cost, easily reproduced computer devices is the Raspberry Pi. Competing against the OLPC, one of the most famous devices in the group, the Raspberry Pi takes a slightly different approach to the creation of easily computing devices that are easy to reproduce. While the OLPC had a reasonably high price point and an impressive screen, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny device- and pretty much as barebones as it could possibly be.

The plan is to sell the device for $25- it consists of a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128 MB of RAM with video ports, a removable media slot and a USB 2.0 slot. The computer is about the size of a normal USB stick. All you need to make the computer work is some external storage, which is very cheaply available, a USB hub with a keyboard and mouse and any monitor that connects to component or HDMI out. As long as the software is compatible with ARM processors, it’ll run it- and those specs for $25 aren’t really to be sniffed at, compared with PCs about 5-10 years ago.

It currently runs Ubuntu 9, but there’s lots of options. The idea of getting one of these for every child is remarkable, to say the least, but this mass-production device seems to be a great way of getting the groundwork done, meaning that all that needs to be supplied are the additional components. If this catches on, it could provide the third world with an exceptional level of computer literacy- something that is sorely missing at the moment.

Reports have been indicating that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in talks with the board of Skype to initialise a purchase of the Internet phone company. Skype as a platform is responsible for 13% of the world’s telephone calls and is available on a vast number of operating systems, including iOS platforms and Android phones/tablets. It was bought by eBay for $2 billion and then sold a few years later, valued at $2.7 billion, although eBay did retain a stake in the company. Since then, signs indicate the company has indeed grown in value. Facebook seems to value the company at somewhere between $3 and $4 billion now.

However, Google have also been reported, according to Reuters, to be interested in purchasing the company. Were Google to purchase Skype, it would surely bolster their Google Talk and Google Video services- and a global rebrand of Skype to fit Google services would be another arrow in the vast quiver of the Internet giant. Facebook are interested in purchasing the company, but it seems Skype are more interested in the idea of a joint venture, something that Google are supposedly interested in.

While Skype refuses to comment on rumour and speculation, it stands potentially as evidence that the latest iteration of Skype, 5.0, offers significant Facebook interaction, with the ability to call anybody from your friend list. So will we see a bidding war for the company in the coming weeks? Any platform as globally recognised and genuinely useful to both the private and public sectors is inevitably going to be a target for acquisition- and Google has a track record for making timely acquisitions.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Canada and Arizona State University have collaborated to create a fully-functioning E-Ink smartphone they’re calling a “paper computer.”  It’s a thin sheet of plastic that has an electronic ink display and that responds to  bending gestures on the plastic.  You can even write on it using a pen (the ink wipes off).

The Paperphone is, a spokesman says, the future.  “Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.”

The computer is almost literally an interactive sheet of plastic paper.  When reading books, for instances, you can “bend” the corner as if turning a page and it will do so.  When sending messages, you can write on it with a pen to write the messages.  When you want to make a call, you bend it into a concave shape and it loads up the phone interface.

The device is about 3.74 inches of display space (E-Ink) which has a flexible printed circuit underneath that includes resistive bend sensors to react to the bending gestures.  Best of all, when it’s not being used, the phone literally uses no power (thanks to the E-Ink).

The team created a similar device they call the Snaplet which can be worn as a large watch and then when its shape is changed, it changes function to a phone, a PDA, etc.

Very cool stuff!  Here’s video:

Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released last week amongst a lot of Linux community fanfare.  Statements from those involved in its build and distribution make 11.04 out to be a huge leap forward for the popular niche operating system.

The biggest change is in the adoption of the Unity interface, giving this latest rendition of Ubuntu a user-oriented GWI similar to that found on many netbook computers from Microsoft and Mac.

This has met with a lot of heavy criticism from hardcore Linux users in the community.  The dumbed-down interface is, they believe, less intuitive and useful than the previous renditions of Ubuntu.  Even more, the new 11.04 release is based on the Ubuntu Classic (which is still an option to install when the OS is downloaded), which many found buggy and unreliable.

So what’s the verdict?

Users should treat the Natty Narwhal release with the words of Abraham Lincoln in mind: “You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.”

Try before you buy.  Since the release is free (as are all Linux OS distributions, for the most part), you are only out the download and a little time to test it.  Like nearly every Linux distro, this one allows you to install it into a CD and boot from there to try it out without installing as a partition on your hard drive.  This means you can take it for a test drive first.

Do that.  You’ll be glad you did.  Some will like it, others will love it, some will hate it.  Decide for yourself and go with it.  It’s not like there aren’t any other Linux distributions available out there..