Location-based mobile gaming startup Gbanga has launched a new quest that sees fellow Swiss tech companies become integrated into the gameplay.

Zurich-based Gbanga offers a ‘mixed-reality’ gaming platform where factors like location, the weather, time and nearby players influence gameplay.

The new Startup Quest is part of the ‘Gbanga Famiglia’ mafia-themed game. The startups aren’t just making cameos, they can offer power-ups to players based on their expertise. For example, Dacuda, which produces computer mice that double up as scanners, offers the SuperMouse, which players can use to scan and find hidden items in the game.

Players who are in Zurich can check in at each startup’s real-world location to gain the relevant power-up, while those elsewhere in the world will find them scattered randomly throughout the game world.

The first startups to feature in the game are Dacuda, scheduling firm Doodle and online notebook Memonic. In coming weeks, Poken, GetYourGuide, Sandbox Network, Shadow Government, Zurich Instruments, Connex.io, Wuala, House Trip and more will be added.

Switzerland has a lively startup scene which doesn’t get as much recognition as the higher-profile likes of London and Berlin, so to see it promoted in a virtual world is an interesting way of drawing attention to another cluster of Internet tech activity in Europe.

➤ Gbanga

We’ve seen tons of parodies and pranks involving Siri, the personal assistant that comes with Apple’s iPhone 4S. But rarely do you see one with serious production value or special effects.

Today we got sent a video called “Psycho Siri” that is so well done, it could pass for a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. The storyline involves one of the characters finding an abandoned iPhone 4S, but I won’t ruin the rest of it for you.

Try to not get creeped out when Siri says “it’s futile for you to run and hide”.

“Have you ever had the problem of finding something again you have already seen on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet?,” asked Gerald Bäck, co-founder of Archify. A few vague nods of agreement flickered around the audience as Gerald explained some of the difficulties in remembering where you’ve read a piece of content online.

This was at Startup Bootcamp’s London investor day last week, where twelve startups pitched for investment cash. Archify is a browser plugin which, once installed, saves everything that you browse online – including every update from you and your friends on your social streams. If you search for something on Google, a little overlay will appear telling you that there are also results in Archify.

Archify is like your own personal browsing archive. In addition to indexing all the content you’ve viewed, Archify also takes a screenshot of each page you visit, allowing you to not only find content, but view it exactly the way it looked on the day you visited the page.

Archify is three guys from Vienna - Gerald Bäck, Max Kossatz and Walter Palmetshofer -  who have launched startups previously but sold them last year to concentrate their efforts on Archify. It’s currently in private beta and they’re hoping to launch it publicly by the end of Q1 2012. For now, you’ll have to submit your email address and wait for an invite – or if you can’t wait, The Next Web has 100 invites to give away (see further down).

How Archify works

So…how does Archify work? Well, when you activate your account, your browser should automatically detect the correct plugin and prompt you to install it – this works with all the major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. You then set up your account, including username and password, and you can choose to register without connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts if you like. However, if you connect with your social media accounts, it will enable you to archive your browsing there too.

As it’s a browser plugin, Archify works away in the background snapping your every search. When you enter keywords in into a search engine, an overlay appears informing you that there are search items with your keywords included already in your Archify archive. It’s worth noting here, that the product was previously called egoArchive, and this branding still exists on the plugin for the moment, though it will change in the coming weeks.

You can either click on the link within the overlay, or you can visit your account at Archify.com any time to search directly within it.

The one thing I’d say is the search box within Archify seems needlessly big and dominates the page, as you can see here:

Archify also lets you filter your search results to include just your search engine browsing history, or Facebook and Twitter. It also lets you specify time-frames, including the last day, week or month.

Your search results also let you delete specific archives, share them with the social sphere and even favorite them – the latter meaning you can choose to search specific results that you have personally bookmarked as ‘important’.

 So…what exactly does Archify record?

When you browse a website that uses the secure https protocol, Archify doesn’t record the pages – after all, most people don’t want their online banking pages saved for posterity. And if your Twitter’s Always use https is enabled, it won’t record your Twitter browsing either, though if you’re accessing Facebook, Twitter or any site using http they’ll be archived. It’s worth noting here that Archify won’t record your browsing if you’re in private ‘incognito’ mode.

However, when you choose to actively ‘connect’ Archify with Facebook and Twitter, Archify automatically archives all updates from your friends on Facebook and all the tweets from the people you follow on Twitter, as well as your own tweets and updates. This happens in the background, regardless of whether you actually visit Twitter or Facebook.

Interestingly, all your browsing is stored to your Archify account, meaning that no matter what browser you’re using on what computer, your online activity will be archived in a centralized repository in the cloud. Assuming you have the plug-in installed on each browser, of course.

Plugin updates will be rolled out prior to the full public launch, and we’re told that new versions due out imminently will also archive a user’s geo-position and display it in their search results as a marker. This means that in the future, you will be able to search for what pages you viewed on a given day in a specific location.

In terms of money, basic Archify accounts will always be free to use. In the coming months, more features will be added, including social-graph technologies, additional filters and labels, some of which will be available as part of a premium service offering. However, for the duration of the alpha and public beta, all features will be available to all users.

The verdict…and the invites

Archify is certainly an interesting project, and it does what it professes to do. Of course, it’s still in development so there are a few bugs – for example, some versions of Firefox don’t yet have the overlay feature built into the browser, though this is being fixed. And there are a few other niggles here and there which will be ironed out as the tool is developed.

It’s probably worth mentioning the performance too – there’s a danger with such plugins that they will adversely affect your computer’s processing power. I installed Archify and forgot it was there until I decided to check out exactly what it had been recording.

Meanwhile, The Next Web has 100 invites to giveaway – first come, first served. Simply visit this link, and the special invite key should already be filled in – it’s tnw01. Just complete the rest of your details and you should be good to go. But you’ll need to be quick…if you miss one of the 100 invites, you can submit your email address and join the waiting list.

➤ Archify

It’s not often you would see a rugby app featured on The Next Web but with the RBS 6 Nations rugby tournament commencing today, Europeans will be finding that comfy spot on their sofa to take in the best that England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and Ireland have to offer.

To accompany today’s matches, a new official has been commissioned to help armchair rugby fans enjoy the spectacle, fusing sport with a little bit of social to deliver RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge, an informative and fun game app for iOS and Android.

RBS says it is rugby’s first ever interactive in-game companion app, from what we have seen, it could be right. The Challenge app compliments the company’s existing fixtures application, delivering scores, stats, gameplay in the form of an in-game quiz and a social scoring system to pit people against their friends via Facebook Connect.

The app is best used when matches are in progress, with RBS pushing trivia questions to smartphone and tablet owners as events occur on the pitch. Think Toby Flood will make that conversion for England following a try? Back him and be rewarded with a points win should he score. Each answer will be compared to other gamers, and your friends if they are connected to the app from their devices.

All of your results can be automatically shared to your Facebook wall, motivating others to join you and show you their rugby knowledge.

The app will activate 40 minutes before each live match and enable fans to test their rugby knowledge with a few pre-match questions. It doesn’t matter which app you use or on what device, RBS will make sure that scores are updated in real-time, enabling you to face-off against your friends and family from either your tablet or smartphone.

The app also saves your data so you can add to your score throughout the Championship, tracking where you stand on the leader board based on your selected supported nation, matches, or friends playing.

RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge is available to download now; if you fancy yourself as a bit of a rugby pundit and want to take on your mates, make sure you grab it today before the France vs Italy match kicks off at 2:30pm GMT.

➤ RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge – iOS | Android

Once every few weeks a new app hits Apple’s app store that has a very hidden, yet very sought after feature, tethering.

We reported on one just a few weeks ago, called QuasiDisk, which has since been taken down by Apple. Another app called “PayUpSucker” also saw a similar fate.

According to InformationWeek, a new one called “iRandomizer Numbers” has found its way onto the store and might be able to stay there the entire weekend, since Apple’s reviewers don’t tend to work weekend shifts.

When you download the app, which is $4.99, simply enter “1984″ in as the minimum number and “31337″ as the maximum number. Tap generate, and boom you’re able to tether any machine to your iPhone and use its 3G connection.

The CEO of the company behind the app, Nick Kramer, told InformationWeek that this feature was originally meant for friends and family:

Reluctantly, I will admit that my application ‘iRandomizer Numbers’ does have a hidden tethering feature. I say reluctantly because I didn’t plan on the feature being released. I designed the tethering functionality for my family and close friends not thinking it would be disseminated outside that circle.

If you don’t want to pay your carrier for tethering, grab the app now before Apple figures it out and takes it down. Pay at your own risk!

➤ iRandomizer Numbers

Discovering music has become easier thanks to services like Pandora and Spotify. It seems that everywhere you turn on Facebook, you’re shown a new track someone is listening to currently or a new music video on YouTube.

While all of these services provide instant and on the go music recommendations, sometimes you just want to get dirty and dig through information about musicians to find out their history and who they’ve influenced or have been influenced by. When you use Pandora, you know that a station has music that is related, but they don’t spell it out for you to learn why the music is similar.

I found a site today that is perfect for music junkies, and it’s called Music Bloodline. For someone who isn’t just a casual music listener, this site is a goldmine of information and artist discovery. By showing you how artists are influenced and who they’ve in turn influenced, you’ll spend hours digging through these links to find musicians that you’ve never even heard of.

This visualization uses the popular Rovi API that powers many entertainment apps, and was created during Music Hack Day Boston 2011.

Bob Dylan has influenced everyone

When you first load the site, you’re shown popular artists on the left hand side and those are the musicians that are the most influential. You’re shown a popular artist in the middle, and to the right of that the artists that they have in turn influenced.

If you like, you can search in the box up top to find one of your favorite artists and start from there, however I found that it’s fun to just click through what you’re shown to see the lineage between how these musicians have influenced each other over the years.

When you click on an artist, it will move to the center spot and give you a quick bio about them as well as links to tracks and albums on Spotify. It’s a really handy launching point to listen to some new music or to add tracks to existing playlists on the service.

If you’re not in the mood to listen to automatically created music that’s similar and would rather do some reading and historical digging into the relationship between artists, then I suggest giving Music Bloodline a try. Once you start clicking around you’ll probably end up blowing a few hours of your time, but you’ll be adding more music to your playlists, so it’s worth it.

Music Bloodline

Audible.com (a.k.a. Amazon) recently unveiled its subscription based audiobook library, putting Amazon and Apple in yet another head-to-head competition. For those of us who listen to audiobooks, Audible is triple the cost of a library’s late fee – but it’s a modernized step in the right direction.

Audible’s flagship “Gold” account runs about $14.95 (per month) and provides users with one book (per month) in addition to a free daily audio-edition of The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Unlike, say, Netflix – Audible subscribers actually own their audiobooks rather than renting them, but the subscription isn’t unlimited. If users want more than one book per month they receive a 30% discount towards their next purchase.

Unfortunately, as a “subsidiary” of Amazon, there is no love for Amazon Prime members but there are some perks to having an annual membership. But when you compare that to an iTunes audiobook edition of something like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” ($17.95), it’s a pretty decent deal.

But what about Spotify?

At $9.99 a month for a premium subscription and mobile access, Spotify is one of the greatest things to happen to man-kind. With an enormous international library and user friendly interface, Spotify has single-handedly supplanted the need for musical piracy and its share-oriented social integration is slowly chipping away at the expensive musical prison of its #1 competitor: iTunes.

So, where are the audiobooks, podcasts, and audio-edition newspapers? Here is Spotify’s answer:

“This is an interesting idea but at the moment we need to focus on building a music service with the biggest music-library out there…”

If this sounds like a business oriented sidestep, it is. The red-tape and pitfalls involved in transforming the audiobook industry are different than those of the audio industry. While authors and musicians share many of the same financial plights, the pro’s and con’s of the streaming revolution affect both parties very differently. In addition, not everyone is a big fan of Spotify’s artist payout percentages so it may be a while before we see Spotify in audiobook competition with Amazon and iTunes.

Fortunately for those of us who use Spotify (and skimmed or Cliff Note’d our way through English classes) there a few audiobooks available thanks to Public Domain.

• William Shakespeare Plays and Sonnets  (provided by Gnarld.com)
• A Tale of Two Cities –by Charles Dickens
• Billy Budd –by Herman Melville
• 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea –by Jules Verne
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court –by Mark Twain
• The Call of the Wild -by Jack London
• Frankenstein –by Mary Shelly
• Crime & Punishment  -by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde –by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Far from the Madding Crowd  -by Thomas Hardy

Perhaps now some of us can actually catch up on the books we say we’ve “read.”

The excellent document handling apps of Readdle have launched a new addition to their family with the new Remarks for iPad. It’s an app specifically designed for marking up PDF documents or images and sending them along in a nicely packaged format for others to review.

We’re fans of the Readdle family of apps here at TNW and we still use its PDF Converter for a lot of our document sharing needs. Like many other apps produced by the company, Remarks doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead it concisely takes care of the issues around marking up PDF documents that you’re reviewing, likely to be returned to the sender for perusal.

The app allows you to open up a PDF document, quickly add your hand scribbled or text-written notes and export it to another application, print it or email it in PDF format. There are also options that allow for text input as well as highlighting and strikethrough if you’re working with a primarily text-formatted document.

We’ve also seen the use for it as a photographer or copyrighters assistant. You can import images directly from your photo library and mark them up with your various notes. These can then be packaged in the sharing-friendly PDF format and sent to an artist to follow the instructions you’ve given.

There’s even a nice magnified view that allows for fine tuned annotation and placement of text. This should help if you’re marking up some fine print.

As with most of Readdle’s apps, Remarks features a minimal and visually pleasing interface that allows your documents to stay center stage. What controls are there are all regularly used, with little in the way of feature bloat. This is great for an app specifically designed for ‘quick notations’. You want to get in and out of a doc quickly and the app fits the bill well.

Multi-page PDFs are displayed with a tap of the grid button and you can jump around even a big document easily. This makes it easy to scan through a legal document and pop in initials and signatures wherever they’re required, another great use of Remarks.

The standout feature for me, however, is the hand written notation features. The finger tracking of the app is second to none, absolutely some of the quickest and most accurate I’ve seen. Even tiny scribbles and super-quick jots are captured accurately and the feature just gets better with a stylus. It’s only a segment of the overall capabilities of the app, but there is just no substitute at times for a quickly scrawled circle, arrow and note to get your point across.

Remarks is an easy add to the toolbox for anyone who has to make notes on PDF documents and ship them back out with any frequency. It’s got a solid, but not overly expansive, feature set and it’s blazingly quick. The handwriting speed and accuracy is especially exemplary among these kinds of apps.

Readdle has told us that future updates will include much-requested features like cloud syncing and an even faster rendering engine.

➤Remarks

If you’ve used Instagram even once or twice, you more than likely saw at least one picture of someone’s pet. The service is for sharing photos of anything you want to share, so it’s no shock that man’s best friend is often seen on the most popular pics. I’m guilty of it, as I kind of think my dogs are cute as any puppy parent would.

With any popular platform, it’s bound to spawn off some copycats, or in this case, copydogs. Dogsly is a photo sharing app made specifically for sharing pics of the dogs in your life. Even if you don’t have a dog but really like them, the service is fun to use.

The iOS app lets you share pics, see a stream of the entire community and share them with your friends on Twitter.

Why didn’t they call it Doggygram?

I found this app when a friend of mine tweeted a picture of his pup. I clicked the link and saw the site and instantly said out loud “what the heck took them so long?”. It’s a brilliant idea that caters directly to dog lovers and if the app can build a sizable following, it could actually make some money too by providing deals that focus on my pet.

Ironically enough, the link I clicked belonged to the same person who introduced me to Instagram, Andrew Mager:

Upon downloading the app, I immediately felt at home, as most of the design is very similar to Instagram and other photo sharing apps. Share a pic, comment on others, favorite a pic (which they call “love”) and share them. One smart feature that Instagram doesn’t have is that there’s a retweet button with every pic, which allows you to share other photos on the service. That’s a nice addition.

You can take a photo or grab one from your camera roll, and the app has brilliantly leveraged photo editing service Aviary to give you tools to alter your puppy pics. With the built in Aviary tools, you can add effects, crop, or even draw on the picture.

If you’re a dog owner, this app is an absolute must have. Even though I tend to get a lot of likes and comments on Instagram when I post a picture of one of my pets, it’s different to be in an app among others that are just like you. And by just like you, I mean silly enough to download and use an app that’s full of people taking pictures of their dogs.

➤ Dogsly

While there have been rumours that an official Instagram app may hit Windows Phone before Android, any efforts by third party developers appear to be completely unwelcome by the California-based startup.

According to WP Central, Windows developer Bil Simser was working on an Instagram client for the Windows Phone, but hit a significant roadblock that has him stopping development on the app for now.

Simser’s app, along with similar Android alternatives such an Instaroid, can never be fully fledged Instagram clients for two significant reasons. Instagram’s public API does not include upload or sign-up access. In other words, users have to have access to the iOS app to sign up, and while mobile clients, like their web counterparts give users access to user-generated content on Instagram, there is no real opportunity to contribute.

In his blog post Simser writes:

I’ve taken a stance that I want to provide the full user experience on the Windows Phone 7 for existing and new users of Instagram. After all, what’s an API for if you can’t offer an alternative to “official” apps. Unfortunately Instagram has taken the position to not provide upload capabilities in their API at this time. The reason they cite on the developer site (http://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/media/) is they want to “fight spam & low quality photos”. While I don’t agree that not providing an upload API has anything to do with fighting spam and surely iPhone users take crappy pictures too, it is their playground and their rules.

Simser contacted CEO Kevin Systrom himself via email in an attempt to gain access to a more open API, but was told in no uncertain terms that Instagram has no plans to change its stance.

Instagram had a rocky start with third party app developers, with one of the very first to open its doors to users, blocked almost instantaneously. At the time, Systrom explained the move, since Followgram was scraping its content through Instagram’s undocumented and private API endpoints, since a public API had not yet been made available.

While Simser is aware of workarounds to upload photos to Instagram, he’s not willing to go down that path:

I want adoption of this application to be fair. Previous attempts to do an end-round on the Instagram folks just resulted in that application being blocked. If upload and user registration comes to Photogram (or any Windows Phone app for that matter) I want it to be on the up and up through official API access, not some backdoor sneak.

Instagram’s stance of fighting spam or low quality photos simply doesn’t seem to fully address the issue of why a fully-open API has not been made available.

Android users have been waiting for an Android version of the app, and so far have only received hints that it will eventually become a reality. The most significant confirmation came from Systrom in December, when he announced that there is currently a two-man team working on the Android app.

In the case of other similar situations, third party Twitter clients have done nothing but make it easier for users to find the perfect app that suits their personal needs based on their platform.

Instagram is an app that is built entirely around the concept of community – and that is its main strength, which sets it apart from any other competitors. If the experience provided by other developers is up to Instagram’s standards, should they be allowed to allow other mobile users the chance to join the community?

Is Instagram’s stance justified or should it afford developers the same freedoms that Twitter has? Let us know what you think in the comments.