For the month of April, I made a 30-day promise. To make life easier, I would use a combination of virtual assistants through the services TaskRabbit and Fancy Hands.

I’ve paid TaskRabbits and Fancy Hands assistants for a wide range of activities. I’ve asked Task Rabbits to pick up lamps, booze and birth control when I couldn’t pry my hands away from my desk. I’ve asked Fancy Hands to book restaurant reservations, fact check articles and recently, even write movie reviews for our upcoming iPad magazine. The costs, in comparison to time saved, are minimal.

In July of last year, I got really excited when the San Francisco-based startup TaskRabbit launched its new iOS app and opened up its services to New York City, home to the busiest people in the whole world. (The service was already live in San Francisco, Orange County, Los Angeles and Boston at the time.) In case you don’t know what TaskRabbit is a brief description is that it’s a two-way marketplace that connects ‘TaskPosters,’ people who need help, with ‘TaskRabbits,’ a network of pre-approved and background checked individuals, who have the time and skills needed to complete the listed task.

Since then, I’ve met Leah Busque (TaskRabbit’s CEO) and Johnny Brackett (TaskRabbit’s Marketing Guru) and told them that I’m moving to London and that they really, really need to open up TaskRabbit in London soon. Why? It’s become one of those services that I completely depend upon. And it’s not just for me, but for the 7.5 million busy British folks who have yet to enjoy this fantastic, time-saving, money-making service.

This just in: Today, the startup put up a simple landing page that I’ve pasted below. It looks like TaskRabbit is preparing for its London launch, which will be its first international city! Sign up at the link below for more details. And tune in to TNW for the official announcement.

➤ Sign up to be notified of TaskRabbit‘s arrival in London.

Want to learn more about The Sharing Economy? Don’t miss our 2nd iPad Mag issue on Collaborative Consumption.

According to StatCounter’s collected browser usage data, Internet Explorer 9 is an anomaly among its franchise brethren: IE9 is more popular on weekends than on weeknights.

For some time, the rule was simple: people used Internet Explorer at work, as they had to, but at home they used Firefox and other alternatives (this was true before Chrome, if my memory serves). This lead to Internet Explorer losing market share on weekends, and regaining it on Monday.

In short, higher weekday usage wasn’t that stunning an endorsement of the browser.

However, that appears to be changing as Internet Explorer 9 is picking up more usage points on the weekend than it does during the week, begging the question ‘what the heck is going on?’ StatCounter has its own view:

“We have previously noted that Google’s Chrome peaks at the weekend at the expense of IE. This seems to suggest that many home (as opposed to business) users prefer Chrome to IE. However, having drilled down further into our data, we have released a new statistic which allows the comparison of Chrome (all versions combined) with the individual versions of other browsers. This shows that while IE6, 7 and 8 usage falls off at the weekend, IE9 spikes. This indicates that IE9 is bucking the trend of previous IE versions and is gaining home user traction.”

Essentially, StatCounter is stating that IE9 is making consumer inroads. That’s a big deal, that a version of Internet Explorer has managed to reverse its cycle of decline and derision, right? That’s actually true, but not as much so as you might think.

Here’s my take: IE9 usage is spiking on the weekend because new PCs sold that run Windows 7 have the software installed. Now, here’s where IE9 is doing better than its predecessors: it’s keeping those new users for itself; people who buy new machines aren’t downloading other browsers as often as they perhaps once did. Thus, IE9 spikes on the weekend as people use their newer machines, which have IE9.

That’s not as ringing an endorsement as saying ‘IE9 taking market share from its rivals as its quality shines through,’ but that the browser is holding its own (again, in our estimation) is quite the shift. IE9 is as massive improvement on its predecessors, and that change is showing.

As one of the web’s most loved social shopping sites, it was only a matter of time before Svpply, which has long brought the window shopping experience online, launched its first iPad application.

Today, you can download the new iPad app, sit back on your couch and enjoy its elegant interface and seemingly endless product catalog of over 1.3 million products and 80,000 stores. Open up the app and you’ll find the Svpply Shop, a constantly updated, endless scroll of the beautifully designed products, fashion items and tech selected by Svpply’s community of members and tastemakers, with over 3,000 new products added a day.

As you would expect of such a beautifully designed ecommerce site, the Svpply iPad app is equally aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Use the app to search for accessories, art, shoes, tech, media, home stuff and sort items by category, gender and price. Connect your social accounts to visit your friends’ favorite products or thumb through the collections of their favorite stores. It’s like Stumbleupon meets Tumblr but for hipster shopping.

“We set out to build the best window shopping destination on the planet.” says Allan Yu, Svpply’s lead designer. “Svpply has the best products from the best stores, and now you can get lost in them with a few taps of your finger.”

To date, the New York-based Svpply (pronounced “supply”) has raised $550,000 from Spark Capital and other investors. The site is similar to the London-based Lyst, which has raised $1.5 million and lets you follow your favorite designers, stores and stylists and the New York-based Fancy, which has raised $18 million in funding and focuses on meta-tagging to create the Web’s best database of “things”.

➤ Svpply (Free)

T-Mobile USA has announced a partnership with electronics payments provider Vesta, as it officially rolls out the T-Mobile Refill Android app, which lets pay-as-you-go customers top-up their credit directly through their Android device.

Launched on Google Play quietly a few weeks ago, T-Mobile Refill allows consumers to initiate a one-time refill, or alternatively sign-up for ‘Auto Refill’ by customizing the payment amount, frequency and start date.

T-Mobile USA is the US wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG. By the end of the fourth quarter last year, around 129 million customers were served by the various mobile communication segments of the Deutsche Telekom group — 33.2 million by T-Mobile USA.

“With the number of smartphones on prepaid plans increasing dramatically, prepaid customers want a fast and easy way to refill their service so they can stay connected,” says Mike Katz, vice president, prepaid marketing, T-Mobile USA. “The T-Mobile Refill application offers a convenient way for customers to quickly refill their monthly or pay as you go service, ensuring they have consistent access to data and our 4G network.”

In addition to one-time refills and auto refill enrollment, the T-Mobile Refill app also supports gifting to other T-Mobile prepaid customers. Gift recipient names and numbers can be saved within the app to enable repeat purchases.

Vesta has established long-term partnerships with a number of telecommunications and financial companies since it was founded in 1995, including AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cricket Communications, Digicel, O2 (Telefonica), Sprint, T-Mobile USA, Telcel, Verizon, Vodafone, Bank of China, Bank of Ireland, Chase Paymentech, Green Dot, and NetSpend.

➤ T-Mobile Refill

With more than 20 million members, devantART‘s massive community of artists is worth noting in and of itself. Still, the site has been expanding beyond showcasing talent with its HTML5 drawing app “Muro.”

Now, that app is receiving a major update that brings the ability to record and replay digital drawing sessions. Muro Redraw lets users draw, record and watch art as it is created.

With this major update, artists and observers alike now have the ability to speed up and slow down each digital brush stroke, allowing users to take a deeper glimpse into the artistic process of other creators. It’s an interesting tool for sharing techniques and educating newcomers, as revealing each and every step should help to inspire inexperienced illustrators while making the entire community a little more intimate. Click here to see the app in action.

Redraw offers people a way to view the stylistic process from beginning to end – speeding up or slowing down digital brush strokes – to observe each step as a piece of art is created. Amateur artists, DIY craftsmen and highly skilled professionals all benefit from deviantART muro Redraw by tracking artists’ movements as they unfold providing both education and entertainment for the viewer

deviantART Co-founder and CEO Angelo Sotira:

Our in-house development team is dedicated to driving real innovation in the arts, extending education for both amateur and professional artists alike, and Redraw is another example of that commitment. The masters of traditional art have given us paintings to admire, but the methodologies of their practice will never be fully unearthed. Now with the new and improved deviantART muro featuring Redraw, the creative process of our current masters can be preserved to inspire and enrich future generations to come.

The HTML5 app is notably compatible with iOS, all modern browsers and Wacom drawing tablets. Overall, it’s a major release for anyone that’s involved in or curious about the online art and illustration community. The fact that the app is entirely free makes things even better, showing just how much deviantART cares about its long-time users.

➤  Muro Redraw (free)

Nokia has today announced the beta launch of its City Lens augmented reality browser app for its Lumia range of Windows Phone devices.

The app, already available for the company’s Symbian devices, emphasizes urban discovery, displaying nearby points of interest – like reatuarants, museums or theaters – as an augmented reality view via your phone’s camera, in a list or on a map depending on the device’s current orientation. It offers easy access to professional reviews and contact details for places listed, and lets you share them with friends via SMS, email or social networks.

This is far from the only app that’s taken this kind of approach to discovering information about nearby places. Many an augmented reality app has been built around the idea. However, it looks undeniably slick, following the standard Windows Phone design cues.

While the app is currently part of Nokia’s Beta Labs program and still a little buggy, it’s listed as likely to graduate to a commercial product. If you’ve got a Lumia phone and would like to give it a go, you can register for Beta Labs and download it via the link below.

➤ Nokia City Lens for Windows Phone Lumia devices (Beta)

One of the most common complaints when it comes to Firefox is that the browser is, self admittedly, quite the memory hog, and using leaky add-ons only makes it all that much worse. An announcement by Mozilla programmer, Nicholas Nethercote, points to improvements which have resulted in a majority of add-ons using up to four times less memory than they did in the past.

Testing some of the more notorious add-ons, including McAfee SiteAdvisor, Firebug, YouTube Ratings Preview and Link Resolve 0.7, using Kyle Huey’s recent Chrome-to-Content patch, it worked flawlessly, preventing all add-on zombie compartments.

So what does that mean in plain English? Mozilla point to a comment left on Kyle’s own blog:

I seem to be seeing really significant improvements from this. Normally Fx would start at 170MB and by the end of the day that would often be creeping up to 800 or 900 MB. Today using latest nightly I again started at 170, but now at the end of the day I’m only at 230MB!

Dropping memory consumption from 900mb to 230mb with this patch means that Firefox will be a far more suitable option for anyone who’s browsing on an older or low-end machine without too much RAM to speak of. That will translate into a much faster browsing experience than before.

Even if you’ve got a machine loaded with a ton of RAM, the patch will still make a significant difference in the long run, maintaining your browser performance over longer periods of time.

Unfortunately, the patch still doesn’t seem to do the trick with all add-ons, as a new issue has surfaced. Now add-ons built using older versions of the Add-On SDK are seeing a significant memory leak, for reasons which Kyle explains here.

The good news is that if developers update add-ons using a version prior to the Add-On SDK 1.6.1, it should resolve the issue.

Firefox users will have to wait until August 28th to get their hands on the latest updates, coinciding with the scheduled release of Firefox 15, whereas Nightly testers should already be able to sense the difference.

There are certain image-heavy services that are just made for the iPad experience. Browsing sites like 500px, StumbleUpon and Tumblr are a joy, so it’s surprising that Tumblr still doesn’t have its own native iPad app.

Luckily there’s always a talented developer or two willing to jump in and fill the void, as is the case with $1.99 app TumbleOn. The iPad app makes it easy not only to keep up with posts and images from people that you follow, but also gives you an easy way to check out content from a curated selection of interesting blogs.

How the app works

After you’ve logged in with your Tumblr account, the first thing you’ll want to do is head over to the Bookmarks tab, where you can access photos from blogs you follow, under ‘My Dashboard’.

Don’t be fooled by the use of the word Dashboard though – it isn’t anything like Tumblr’s dashboard but that’s part of the reason we love it. Rather than pull in all of the posts from blogs that you follow, TumbleOn displays only photo posts. You can simply scroll through an endless grid of beautifully presented photos.

When you open up individual posts, you can swipe through them, to view the next image. This is where we see TumbleOn become more than just an image viewer. While, granted, you can’t post new content to your Tumblr itself, you can reblog content adding your own caption to the post, as well as like posts, leave comments, save images to your iPad and share the photos via email.

TumbleOn’s Explore tab is where you can keep up with a curated list of blogs worth following, and more. You can add blogs to your bookmarks, view the list of blogs you’re following on Tumblr, check out who’s following you, and more.

Opening up individual photos from blogs that you don’t follow gives you several options, among them the option to follow the blog on Tumblr or to simply bookmark it in the TumbleOn app.

Our Verdict

TumbleOn is a slick and easy-to-use app, but most important of all, it’s beautiful.

Tumblr has become an incredible repository of stunning images and those photos really come to life on the iPad screen, particularly in the app’s full screen slideshow mode. And we’re happy to admit that we’re big fans of anything that makes it easier for us to browse big and beautiful photos!

If there is one feature that TumbleOn is desperately in need of, and frankly we were a bit surprised it was left out, is a basic search function, to search for keywords or blogs. There are a lot of great recommendations in TumbleOn’s picks, but given how it’s more convenient than ever to kick back on the sofa and find new content using your iPad, a basic search function is definitely at the top of our feature request list.

Even without the search function, the app is pretty impressive, and if you’ve been looking for a way to browse Tumblr’s photos, look no further than TumbleOn.

➤ TumbleOn

On April 16th, I wrote an article about how popular video sharing app Viddy had hit 6.5M users. Less than a month later, the company tells me that it’s starting to consistently sign up over 500K new users a day, and currently boasts a userbase of 26M.

That’s pretty impressive growth in less than a month, isn’t it? Mark Zuckerberg joined Viddy to see what all of the hype was about, and investors are quite happy with its growth.

How has Viddy done it? Unlike Socialcam, which has taken a not-so-organic approach to grabbing users and seems to be irritating some people with its Facebook practices, Viddy has enjoyed a gradual climb that can keep an audience, spurred by its list of celebrity users and investors; Shakira, Jay-Z, Will Smith, and some guy named Biz Stone.

With its investors and celebrity users come huge built-in audiences that are not only trying out the app, but sticking with it. For example, Snoop Dogg is an avid Viddy user and his fans are eating his 15-second clips up.

From day one, Viddy wanted to build a product that was interesting to everyone, no matter what their interests were.

On Viddy you’ll find everyone from Bill Cosby to award-winning surfers. Instead of becoming a niche product just for rappers like T-Pain, which the company partnered up with for a production pack, the app is drawing in fans from every corner of the entertainment genre by teaming up with all types of people.

The company also tells me that its name is starting to slip into popular vernacular, with people talking about “posting a Viddy” instead of saying “posting a video on Viddy”. We know how that works out for companies (ahem, Google), so it’s definitely a sign of mainstream popularity and adoption.

While it might be a “Viddy vs. Socialcam” argument for now, whichever app ends up providing the most amount of entertaining, and unique, content, is the one that’s going to not only grab a bunch of users, but keep them for the long run like Instagram has.

Sometimes you get an idea for a really great post to share on Google+ and it’s the middle of the night. There’s nobody up that you know of, but not writing the post isn’t an option. Twitter has a draft functionality and there are services that let you schedule tweets for later.

Thanks to a new Chrome extension, you can now save your Google+ posts as drafts as well as schedule them to post at the day and time of your choosing.

The extension is called Do Share and it’s extremely straight forward. The only catch is that you have to have Chrome open and logged into Google+ for scheduled posts to head into the wild. This is because Google+ doesn’t have a full-on API as of yet, which is unfortunate.

Until the API arrives, Do Share is a perfect tool for those of you who simply want to share things at specific times and create a queue of awesome ideas to put on Google+. The extension was created by Tzafrir Rehan and designed by Joel Califa.

Once you install the extension and open it up in Chrome, you’re presented with the same type of share box as you’d find Google+ itself. You can add a subject line and body to your post, as well as add the specific people or circles that you’d like to share it with:

You can save as many drafts as you like or schedule as many posts as you like and you’ll find that it works pretty seamlessly. Even though you must have Chrome open and logged into Google+, your browser won’t miss a beat and Do Share works entirely in the background:

If you’re looking to schedule posts or just write a massive thesis that requires you to go back and forth between tabs or leave entirely for a day or two, Do Share is a great way to do it on Google+.

➤ Do Share