This post is about an iPad application that’s over two months old and has already been chosen as an App Store app of the week. But I’d never heard of it, and, given that the app only has around 95 reviews, I’m guessing a lot of TechCrunch readers haven’t seen it either. And it’s just so damn cool.

It’s called The Civil War Today and was put together by A&E Television Networks (which owns the History Channel) and developed by Bottle Rocket. It isn’t a game or social networking app or anything else even remotely sexy.

It’s a daily newspaper that’s over 150 years old.

The premise is simple: you get to relive the Civil War as it unfolded. Every day, you fire up the application and are presented with a handful of news stories that actually appeared in newspapers exactly 150 years ago — along with photographs, maps, quotes, and a running tally of the casualty count so far. The application will be updated every day for the next four years.

It’s an incredible concept, but it’s also going to test your patience: while you can jump back through previous editions of the paper (there are now around two month’s worth), you can’t jump forward. Sure, you could cheat by looking up big events on Wikipedia, but that would spoil the fun.

We’ve heard a lot about how the iPad will or won’t revolutionize the newspaper industry, with tablet-only publications like The Daily and Apple’s iOS subscriptions for existing publishers. We’ll see how that goes — with the ubiquity of free news on the web, I’m still skeptical. But The Civil War Today seems like a surefire winner. This isn’t content you’re going to easily find elsewhere. And it’s perfectly suited to the tablet form-factor.

Of course, the app doesn’t have to be iPad-specific — the content could presumably be ported over to Android, RIM, or WebOS tablets as well (actually, it would probably make more sense to move the app over to HTML5). But for the time being, it’s only on the iPad. If you’re even remotely interested in history, the app is a must-have. It’ll cost you $8, but remember that that’s for four years worth of content.

Update: If you like this you’ll probably also be interested in the NYT’s Civil War blog, Disunion (Hat tip to commenter Beau Roberts.

Ok, I got a little over excited in the title. But the new version of search engine Blekko, called Zorro and launching right now, is pretty cool. There have been big improvements visually. Gone are the red links of previous the version along with most of the left sidebar clutter. In fact, that left sidebar is gone and has been replaced with small icons next to search results to tell you what site they’re from at a glance.

The company has also increased search relevance substantially by auto-including some 1,000 slash tags, up from just a handful previously. That means that for many results you are looking at hand picked sites that are known to have high quality content. Content farms just can’t get through slashtags.

Search for “pregnancy tips” and you’ll see to slash tags, for /pregnancy and /health, and quite good results compared to Google. But on Blekko you’re not done. Click on one of those slash tags to drill down into results relevant to that tag. Answer relevance goes even higher. On Google you’d have to visit the next page of results, or rephrase your query. Both are time consuming.

What’s most amazing about Blekko, though, is it’s still around. So many ambitious search startups like Cuil and SearchMe went for it and flailed. But Blekko, six months in, is growing nicely and has around 1 m unique IPs visit the site monthly. Early contextual ad testing, they say, is producing good results. When they finally turn that on for good, a real revenue stream will be flowing to Blekko. In other words, it may be time to start thinking of Blekko as a long term “we’re still here” startup. They have no appearance of fail anywhere near them yet.

One more thing Blekko is launching today is a fun tool called 3 Engine Monte. More on that in my next post.

Cloud9 IDE, a commercial development as a service (DaaS) platform, has raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and product development software company Atlassian Software.

Cloud9 IDE, which spawned from Ajax.org, is aiming to be the IDE for Javascript developers (Javascript creator Brendan Eich is an advisor to the startup). Founded in 2010, Cloud9 provides a cloud-based commercial integrated development environment that allows web and mobile developers to work together in remote teams anywhere, anytime. The platform’s NodeJS framework supports HTML5, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Cloud9 enables developers to easily start projects behind a single URL, share their code, and collaborate with co-developers all over the world without having to install anything on the client. Over 30,000 developers around the world are already using Cloud9, which only launched to the public in March of this year, to build and collaborate on software projects.

The platform runs in the browser and lives in the cloud, allowing development teams run, debug and deploy applications from anywhere, anytime. The DaaS also offers syntax support for popular programming languages; the ability to simultaneously collaborate on code and projects; the ability to run, realtime code analysis; the ability to debug and test applications; and includes GitHub, Bitbucket and Joyent integration. Cloud9 offers a free version and a premium offering which runs $15 per month.

While we know Accel is actively looking for investments in the enterprise infrastructure market; Atlassian as an investor is a bit of a surprise. This is the first investment for the company, which raised $60 million from Accel a year ago. Cloud9 will be the first investment for the Atlassian.

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian CEO and co-founder, says that Cloud9′s platform is complimentary to Atlassian’s development software. For background, Atlassian’s software development and collaboration tools help teams conceive, plan, build and launch products. Products include JIRA (issue tracker) and Confluence (content collaboration). The company’s offerings are used by over 20,000 customers around the world, including Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe.

Cloud9 will use the funds to add support for multiple languages, platforms, and cloud/mobile SDKs. The investment will also be used expand the startup’s Amsterdam development team and open a new US headquarters in San Francisco.

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a piece entitled Lessons in Longevity, From IBM. In it, author Steve Lohr looks back at the past 100 years of IBM and points out the keys to their longevity: shifting and adapting to new markets and times. He then lays how three tech powers today — Microsoft, Google, and Apple — may make similar moves to weather the inevitable storms.

At a high level, the parallels make some sense for Microsoft, and to a lesser extent, Google. They make no sense for Apple.

Microsoft and Google, as Lohr points out, are hugely successful companies right now. But their businesses have potential points of weakness because almost all of their money comes from one or two areas. In Google’s case, the one area is search advertising. In Microsoft’s, it’s Windows and Office (the Server division makes a good amount of money, as Lohr notes, but it’s peanuts compared to the two towers).

Lohr says that Microsoft up-and-coming gaming division could eventually be a key to saving them. And for Google, it could be Android. Again, this all makes sense (though is hardly anything new).

But when it comes to Apple, Lohr loses it. First of all, Lohr talks about IBM’s near-failure in the 1990s, but completely leaves out the fact that Apple too almost went under in the same time frame. In fact, they were much closer to death. Then Steve Jobs came back and — we all know the story.

The key is that Apple, as successful as they are right now, has already had to reinvent themselves. And they did it with stunning success. In fact, their reinvention has been more successful than IBM’s most recent reinvention. It’s just that Apple is not 100 years old. Nor is their metamorphosis something that any other company in the tech world (and perhaps beyond) is likely to be able to replicate anytime soon. And in fact, Apple’s metamorphosis is still ongoing.

And that leads to point two.

In remarking on the same article earlier today, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber tears into Lohr’s assertion that Apple’s hardware business could be easily “mimicked”. Specifically, he questions if Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at MIT that Lohr cites, understands Apple at all when he suggests that Apple in the future will have to shift to software and services to stay alive.

“I wonder if the professor thinks companies like, say, Rolex and BMW ought to shift to ‘software and services’ too?,” Gruber writes. He also notes that while Lohr brings up how Macs are still dwarfed in sheer unit sales by Windows PCs, Lohr completely disregards the fact that Apple is now in command in terms of profit share amongst PC-makers.

This is something which, comically, is almost always overlooked — even though it’s entirely deliberate on Apple’s part.

I also think that Lohr and Cusumano completely disregard something else important: innovation. As in, while it’s certainly possible that “Apple’s product designs, however impressive, will eventually be mimicked and come under price pressure,” as Cusumano suggests, that seems to be assuming Apple stands still and stops innovating in the areas of hardware design and manufacturing. That’s ridiculous.

I’ve been buying Apple products for just about ten years now (yes, that’s all). In that entire time, I’ve yet to see a product by a competitor that matches the build quality and aesthetic of Apple’s products in their major areas of focus (Macs, iPods, iPhones, and now iPads). Not once.

I know that sounds like just about the biggest fanboy thing to say… well, ever. But am I wrong? Even Apple haters cannot deny the quality of the products. Bitch about price, bitch about control, bitch about the fruit logo — but quality is simply never a compelling argument. Because Apple wins.

That hasn’t changed for at least a decade, and some would argue much longer. Why is it going to change all of a sudden? Because the manufacturing and designing processes will get cheaper? Sure. For shit products.

Competitors have been trying to mimic the look and feel of Apple’s products for much of this past decade. Guess what happens? They always come up short. We’re left with a ton of products that sort of, kind of look like Apple products, but never feel right. They feel like cheap knockoffs. Which is exactly what they are.

That’s part of the reason why I think Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is silly. Is Samsung trying to mimic Apple’s products? Of course they are. Basically everyone is. But I’ve used a handful of the products Apple names in the lawsuit. And, well, a quote comes to mind.

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

If Apple fired their design teams and kicked Jonathan Ive to the curb, then sure, maybe in a decade competitors would be able to mimic Apple’s current designs and build-quality at a lower price that would threaten Apple. But that’s not going to happen. At least not anytime soon. And to not even bring up that fact is a slap in the face of what Apple has done in terms of manufacturing innovation and industrial design. Believe it or not, these things are an extremely important part of what makes Apple, Apple.

And none of that speaks to the astounding success Apple has had managing their supply chains. Again, there are good reasons that competitors aren’t able to copy Apple so easily. Under COO Tim Cook, Apple today is perhaps the most well-oiled machine the tech industry has never seen.

And there’s more.

In his WWDC keynote a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs said the following. “You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul.”

Obviously, he said this because WWDC this year was entirely about software with the unveilings of OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. But he also said for a much more important reason: Apple actually believes this.

Even though they make the vast majority of their money from selling hardware, without software, their great-looking machines would be absolutely worthless. Sure, you could jerry-rig them to run Windows, but then they would just be really expensive PCs. Apple doesn’t sell only hardware or only software — they sell the entire package. They sell the experience.

This is what the vast majority of their competitors do not understand. By outsourcing their “souls”, as it were, to Microsoft for PCs or to Google for phones, they can never do what Apple does.

One big exception may be HP. Despite their denials that they’re in the process of transforming their own business to be more like Apple’s, they are well, transforming their business to be more like Apple’s. With webOS now in place, they control the software (at least outside of PCs for now — but soon those too) and the hardware (not Apple-level yet, but you can be sure they’re working on it). Will that transformation work? Maybe. Maybe not. But give them credit for trying. At the very least, they seem to get it.

So when Lohr and Cusumano suggest that Apple may one day survive as a company that relies on software like iCloud to milk money-making opportunities out of things like advertising and marketing, you have to laugh. If anything, more companies are going to attempt to alter their models to be more like Apple’s, instead of the other way around.

Apple will remain in a position of power for the foreseeable future because they have nailed that model. And it is not nearly as easily assailable as the NYT piece suggests.

At the same time, Apple will continue to innovate, and yes, transform themselves. Most of their revenues now come from phones. Ten years ago, that was unthinkable. In another ten years, most of their revenue could come from tablet computers. Or maybe something else no one is thinking about right now.

Apple certainly won’t be becoming a “software and services” company anytime soon. They follow the “SaaS” model — that is, “Software as a Soul”. As in, the software cannot be decoupled from the hardware. They tried that once before. It was a disaster. It led to the near-collapse and subsequently, the complete reinvention that we’re seeing now.

They won’t have to “pull an IBM” because they’re already doing it one better.

[photo: flickr/confidentjohn]

Onswipe, the publishing platform that allows any content site to create an app like experience on the iPad and other tablets, is coming out of beta this week and will be available to the public tomorrow at 3:00pm EST. With the launch Onswipe will also be adding former CNN president John Klein as an advisor.

Launching with partners like Hearst’s Marie Claire, Slate, Ziff Davis’ Geek.com and Extreme Tech, Thomson Reuter’s PE Hub, Forbes, Hollywood.com, StockTwits and advertisers American Express and Sprint, Onswipe promises clients touch device optimization in three minutes. All publishers and advertisers need to do to achieve a native app feel is pick and customize a layout, import content and then embed a piece of javascript into their site.

With tomorrow’s launch, Onswipe will be unveiling its three pronged approach to tablet content viewing 1) Its publishing platform that lets publishers provide a fluid tablet-like experience to users. 2) An interactive ad platform that lets clients make money off of tablet-specific advertising and the Onswipe ad network. 3) A social platform that allows users to share and save content for later.

Says co-founder Jason Baptiste on the motivation behind the startup’s tablet-centric approach this early on, “The tablet is the TV of this generation, and we’re letting publishers make their content look great on there, but also make money off of it. And lastly we’re saying, ‘Hey, if we have this new network of sites, how can we leverage that?’

Onswipe’s platform will allow publishers and advertisers to not only to add and customize content from article, but also from social media sources like Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Instagram, and Tumblr. In addition the launch will feature the addition of myOnswipe, an Instapaper-like offline reading service for sites in the Onswipe network.

Baptiste tells me that Onswipe doesn’t charge companies for its publishing platform, and instead monetizes by taking a share of revenue from its ad platform, “We’ve already let publishers make more on the tablet than they have before.  It’s a significant amount,” says Baptiste.

Onswipe currently has $6 million in funding from Spark Capital, Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Betaworks, Morado Ventures. ENIAC Ventures, Thrive Capital and assorted angels.

Come inside, take off your coat
I’ll make you feel at home
Now let’s pour a glass of wine
‘Cause now we’re all alone.

The opening lines of Color Me Badd’s seminal “I Wanna Sex You Up” sort of perfectly encapsulates Color — the company/photo-sharing app, not the band. After one of the most-hyped launches in recent memory, it was supposed to be the app that changed proximity-based sharing. Instead, it was an app used to share a lot of drinks, often with yourself or one other person.

Unfortunately, also like the song, it was all foreplay. No sex. And now even Color is admitting that.

In an interview with The New York Times over the weekend, Color founder Bill Nguyen essentially admits defeat — at least with regard to their eponymous first app. This follows our story from last week that co-founder Peter Pham had left the company. While we had heard conflicting stories about the exit, Nguyen doesn’t beat around the bush, telling NYT that Pham was fired.

Whether Pham was a fall guy or not doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Color has to figure out what the hell they’re doing now. NYT suggests they know:

Mr. Nguyen outlined an ambitious plan to compete with Apple, Google and Facebook by tying together group messaging, recommendations and local search, all while making money through advertising.

If you thought the initial Color idea was crazy, this must sound absolutely insane. Talk about setting a high bar! Color will apparently release such an app later this summer. The original photo-sharing idea? That has likely been totally scrapped.

But the truth is that I’m not sure that a lot of people thought the original Color idea was all that crazy — they just ran head-first into a poor initial experience. And that was compounded by the almost comically absurd $41 million pre-launch funding round.

Fundamentally, there’s still an interesting concept there. Using the location element baked into all of our smartphones to automatically create implicit networks is something that we’re going to keep seeing startups working on. Others, like Yobongo, are already working in this space as well.

I’m still not convinced that if Color had simply launched a couple weeks earlier, at SXSW, it wouldn’t have been a hit (for that week, at least). Certainly, it would have been the perfect environment to showcase the impressive technology being utilized behind the scenes. Instead, the app ran into the problem where early-adopters were often trying it out with no one around them.

It often looked like ghost town. And because of that, that’s exactly what it became.

Imagine for a second if Foursquare hadn’t launched at SXSW a few years ago. The early-adopters would have booted it up for the first time and not seen any friends checking in around them and would have wondered what the hell the app was good for? Foursquare has since expanded the product to add a lot more value. But remember that at first, there weren’t deals or recommendations — there was just the check-in (and yes, the badges and game element related to it).

Further, while this isn’t a popular sentiment, I actually quite like Color app itself. I completely agree that the initial version had some major UI/UX issues, but the more refined version is actually pretty slick. It’s well-made. It’s fast. It’s not like these guys are a bunch of jackasses who took $41 million and built nothing. So part of me is sad that it’s already time to die.

At the same time, there’s no denying that the $41 million was jaw-dropping. But I also thought the company was being unfairly pre-judged because of that. As Nguyen tells the NYT, they took that much money because they could. He’s had success in the past when he’s had a lot of capital to work with. Had the company raised the $14 million they originally intended to, people would have buzzed, but we would not have seen the same level of backlash.

I’m just not sure how you can hold that against the entrepreneurs. An insane amount of pre-launch funding is on the investors. For whatever reason, Sequoia wanted to put in $25 million by themselves. Maybe Color shouldn’t have accepted all of it, but again, Nguyen has had success doing just that in the past. Kids don’t turn down candy. It just doesn’t happen.

So now we move into the really interesting time for Color. They’re essentially working with a gun against their head. Working on an app, mind you, that’s going to be a Facebook/Apple/Google-killer. Or something.

The mulligans are over. They’ve still (hopefully) got $35 million+ in the bank, but that won’t save them if they flop in a similar manner.

They really need to sex us up this time.

The Internet carries nearly 160 times more traffic than voice networks in North America, yet many of the regulations and inter-carrier traffic fees are based on the quickly receding era when voice networks ruled. Google calls this the “Tail Wagging The Dog” in a letter to the FCC (embedded below) urging them not to impose antiquated per-minute voice traffic fees on IP networks. This is becoming an issue as IP voice traffic approaches that of traditional circuit-switched voice traffic. Google’s lawyers write in their letter:

Standalone voice traffic already is decreasing markedly relative to other forms of communications traffic; in fact, as depicted in the attached, the majority of voice traffic will be IP-based in just a few years. Accordingly, the FCC should not allow what amounts to the very small tail of legacy voice wireline services to wag the very large dog of all communications traffic exchange. In particular, per-minute voice traffic origination and termination charges are a persistent but unwelcome relic from the circuit-switched telephony era, and not best-suited for modern IP traffic and networks.

Google illustrates the changing nature of the network in a series of dramatic slides. Back in 1997, U.S. Internet traffic was only 3,300 terabytes per month, compared to 54,000 terabytes per month for the voice network. Three years later in 2000, voice traffic peaked at 66,000 terabytes per month, while Internet traffic had grown more than eightfold to 28,000 terabytes oer month.

By 2005, consumer IP traffic had reached 669,000 terabytes per month (with 2 terabytes of that being IP voice traffic), while voice traffic had shrunk to 48,000 terabytes per month.

In 2010, consumer IP traffic in North America completely dwarfed voice traffic with 5.7 terabytes per month versus 36,000 for the aging voice network. What’s more, IP voice traffic (Skype, Google Voice, etc.) accounted for 21,000 terabytes per month, or nearly 60 percent of what was going over the old switched network.

All of these networks, both data and voice, are going to IP networks. By 2015, Google estimates that consumer IP traffic in North America will more than triple again to 19.4 million terabytes per month, whereas the voice network will shrink further to 26,000 terabytes per month. And IP voice traffic will be almost as big at 21,000 terabytes per month (See top slide). The entire letter with all the slides is embedded below.

In October 2010, Skype debuted new Windows software with deep Facebook integration, adding the ability to use the client to monitor your Facebook news feed and post, like or comment on status updates straight from your desktop.

This morning, the company (which has been acquired by Microsoft in the meantime) released Skype for Windows 5.5 Beta, which now also lets you have instant messaging conversations with Facebook friends directly from the desktop client.

Aside from support for Facebook Chat, the client also comes with a dedicated contacts tab that filters your Skype contact list down to just your Facebook friends.

Other enhancements include a new ‘Call Control’ toolbar, improvements to the saving of a phone number in the “Call Phones” section and a number of UI changes.

Skype says the final version of the client will be released ‘soon’.

iControl Networks, a provider of broadband home management software solutions, this morning announced that it has raised over $50 million in Series D funding, bringing total investment in the company to more than $100 million.

The round was led by energy and clean tech investors, with notable backers like Cisco, Comcast Ventures, Intel Capital, Charles River Ventures, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers iFund, Rogers Communications and Tyco International also participating.

The ICANN board has voted to approve the new gTLD program, which was first announced three years ago. The new program will significantly expand Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to allow companies, organizations and even cities to turn their own brands into domain name extensions. Think .ADIDAS, .HOTEL, .BRUSSELS, .FACEBOOK and the likes.

Applications for new gTLDs will be accepted from 12 January 2012 to 12 April 2012.

The first ones should be operational by late 2013 according to the current roadmap.

ICANN board members voted 13 for, 1 opposed, 2 abstain on the first day of its international pow-wow in Singapore. Earlier this year, the organization’s board entered into a contract with ICM Registry to operate a .XXX top level domain name for adult websites and whatnot.

Currently, there are 22 generic top-level domains, including .com, .org and .net.

According to ICANN, newly introduced gTLDs may change the way people find information on the Internet and how businesses plan and structure their online presence.

“Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organizations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways,” ICANN said in a statement.

However, it’s important to note that only “established public or private organizations” will be able to apply, and the price tag for a new domain name extension is steep – unless you consider $185,000 a bargain. Nevertheless, expect lots of interest even at that price.

Applications will have to show a legitimate claim to the name they are buying – ICANN is reportedly taking on hundreds of consultants to whom it will outsource the job of evaluating such claims. In addition, gTLD owners will be expected to maintain operational sites, in an effort to minimize the risk of massive .CYBERSQUATTING.

Also read: ICANN Moves Ahead With Non-Latin Web Addresses (Video)

(Image above via the ICANN website)