BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.

Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Forget a bigger screen or LTE. Ask anybody who has ever dropped their iPhone in a sink, puddle or toilet what they want from the iPhone 5 and waterproofing is number one on the list.

The good news is that there are now a number of companies who are bringing to market superhydrophobic technologies that will help make the soggy iPhone or iPad a thing of the past. Don’t expect a waterproof iPad 3, but an iPhone 5 by the end of the year isn’t just possible, it’s probable.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — SuperTooth, the company behind the excellent, beat-pumping SuperTooth Disco, are ready to boost their product lineup like their speaker boosts your music’s bass. First will be the imaginitively-named SuperTooth 2, followed by the dinky SuperTooth Mini, and some SuperTooth Bluetooth headphones.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Our new podcast has been on iTunes for barely more than 24 hours, but The CultCast has already skyrocketed up the charts and is now the #1 Technology Podcast on iTunes. We’re blown away with how successful the podcast has been and we owe it all to our incredible fans who have been downloading it like crazy. Being on the same page as shows like TWiT, 5by5, NPR and Lifehacker is very flattering, and to be at the top of that list is ridiculously exciting. Thanks a bunch, guys!

We’ll be coming out with an new episode every Thursday, but if you haven’t checked out our first 30 minute episode of The CultCast you can subscribe to it right here. Give it a listen. Tell us what you think. And if you have time to give us a rating on iTunes as well, that’d be awesome.

Apple announced this week the acquisition of Chomp, an app-search startup.

Chomp CEO Ben Keighran is reportedly working already in Apple’s marketing department, and CTO Cathy Edwards is already employed as a senior iTunes engineer.

Chomp crawls the data associated with all the apps in an app store and uses a sophisticated algorithm-based search function to enable people to search and actually find the apps they really want. Less appreciated by the public (but not Apple) is what appear to be incredible analytics tools, enabling a deep understanding of what people are searching for, how successful they are at finding it and detecting meaningful trends in app demand.

Sound familiar? Search algorithms and analytics are Google’s core competency.

Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.

We’re starting a new series called Wallpaper Weekends. We’ll be bringing you a fresh new wallpaper for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Here’s what we’ve got this week.

Have you ever wished you could use Siri to control Spotify instead of Apple’s Music app on your iPhone? How about using Siri to get directions with your favorite GPS app?

A really cool jailbreak tweak called AssistantLove was released today in Cydia that lets you do those things and more.

We’re huge fans of the simplistic to-do app called Clear here at Cult of Mac. We’ve been captivated by its entrancing gestures and sexy design ever since we saw it at Macworld last month.

Following the highly-anticpated release of Clear in the App Store, Realmac Software has confirmed that the app has moved a staggering 350,000 copies since its launch on February 14th. Nice!

Let’s face it, RIM has been suffering from a serious personality conflict. The company is trying to cling to its enterprise business while also making its brand more attractive as a consumer alternative to iOS and Android.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the company’s PlayBook tablet. RIM initially pitched the PlayBook as being all about consuming content like movies and other media. At the same time, RIM was also trying to sell it as a business device when paired with a BlackBerry even though it lacked core enterprise apps (including email) that could run on the device when it wasn’t tethered to a BlackBerry – a fact that led to RIM hyping the PlayBook’s email app (introduced this week in PlayBook OS 2) as an exciting new feature.

RIM may be caught in this consumer/business identity struggle, but Netflix made it clear today that it doesn’t see RIM as a consumer company – or at least not as a viable one.

Are you still emailing contact cards and photos to your friends? Did you know that you can transfer them instantly with a fist bump using the free Bump app? The best thing about Bump is it’s not just available on iOS, so you can use it to send contacts and images to friends on Android devices and other smartphones, too.

Here’s how to get started.

So you’ve got your mobile app idea and you’ve learned Objective C / Java and are ready to start coding. Now all that’s left to do is to create an elegant and inviting user interface so that people will actually use your app.

And now you’ve hit that roadblock.

Today we’re introducing you to design guru Jen Gordon as part of our newest Cult of Mac Deals offer that will help you become a mobile design rockstar – and at a savings of 61% off the normal price!

There’s a certain kind of computing nostalgia that holds that the art of typing has been steadily wussified since the late 1980s, when the venerable IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard went out of favor.

These keyboards, it is held, were the last of a breed of keyboards for men. Like a vintage Underwood typewriter, these mechanical marvels were made for those who meant for their words not just to be heard, but to be felt: the hefty chunk of each key smashing into the mechanical switch underneath shouldn’t just make a letter light up on a screen; it should land with such authority it shakes your teeth loose.

For the last month, I’ve been trying to become one of these burly typist he-men. I put my Apple Wireless Keyboard — as pale, thin and pretty as the world’s most anemic twink — and have instead replaced it with the Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac. Now when I type, it sounds like ten tiny John Henrys working away under my fingers, pounding spikes through the invisible gold-plated key switches beneath each key.

It’s not really for me. Not most of the time.

Although Apple just announced OS X Mountain Lion last Thursday, Mac apps are already getting updated for compatibility with the next-gen OS. Mountain Lion is only available as a developer preview, but that hasn’t kept Smile from updating its popular PDF editor for the Mac, PDFpen, with Gatekeeper compatibility.

Smile makes great productivity apps for the Mac, like TextExpander. With this latest update to PDFpen, a Gatekeeper-friendly Developer ID has been added to help future Mountain Lion users install the app in a secure environment.

In her work as a marriage and family therapist, Sharon Gilchrest O’Neill often finds her patients bring in some common baggage: their smartphones.

Hey, iPhone users with death wish: We have just the thing to tantalize your suicidal tendencies. It’s called the Xappr, and it’s an augmented reality gun for your beloved iPhone 4. Simply pre order the Xappr for $30, hop on the plane to any decent-sized U.S city and wait for the cops to see you and mow you down in a glorious rain of lead.

Are you a fan of Instagram? Of course you are. And are you also a fan of those frustrating memory games where you have to flip over cards and match the pictures? I thought not. But if you are — you freak, you — then InstaMatch might be right up your alley.

Last month, OnLive launched its free cloud-based Windows desktop app for the iPad. OnLive Desktop provides iPad users with a cloud-based Windows 7 desktop that comes complete with the standard Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and 2GB of storage. This week, the cloud-gaming company expanded the features and storage available to OnLive Desktop users via new subscription plans – one of the most notable being that OnLive Desktop can now play Flash videos and content.

The company will also be adding a more full featured “Pro” plan that will let users install additional Windows applications and an enterprise service that would allow companies to configure and manage virtual Windows desktops on the iPad’s of employees.

Working in a Chinese factory doesn’t pay that well. When you can’t afford to buy an iPhone, even though you make 5,000 of them a day, the next best thing is to buy a fake iPhone. And when you can’t pay for a fake iPhone, people in China just pay for a cheap service that makes their friends think they have an iPhone by adding a “Sent From My iPhone” signature at the end of their texts.

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

The fantastic Letters of Note blog has posted an amazing letter that a 30-year old Bill Gates sent to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassée back in June of 1985.

In the letter, Gates argues that Apple should license their hardware and operating system out to other companies, making Macintosh a “standard.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it should: after being ignored by Apple for six months, Microsoft took the idea and ran with it, bringing Windows to the world.

The rumors are true. Cult of Mac has been working hard on a podcast and it’s finally here for your listening pleasure. Episode one of Cult of Mac’s frosty new podcast, The CultCast, is ready for your listening pleasure. And if you subscribe right now, we’ll throw in our “Welcome to The CultCast!” episode absolutely FREE!

But wait, what is this CultCast, you ask? Why, it’s the best 30 minute conversation about Apple you’re going to hear all week long. Join Leander Kahney, Buster Heine, and me, Erfon Elijah, as we banter about all our favorite Apple news, gossip, products, and Cult of Mac stories. Get caught up on all the best things from the world of Apple in just 30 fun-filled minutes.

Sound good? Well, alright! We’ll be premiering new 30minute episodes every Thursday night. You can subscribe to The CultCast in iTunes and listen to our first full-length episode right now. After you’ve given it a listen we’d love to hear your thoughts. What did you like? What could we do better? Let us hear about it in the comments.

Denso is a little bit like Flipboard, but just for video content. Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of curated and branded channels that you can subscribe to on your iPhone or iPad.

CineSquid Suction Mount from Cinetics on Vimeo.

Remember the Cineskates? They were a Kickstarter sensation, a bendy Gorillapod married to three roller skate wheels and useful for anything from smooth dolly shots to crazy bullet-time-like movies. Now Cinetics, the folks behind the Kickstarter project behind the Cineskates have come up with the Cinesquid, a tripod with suction cups for feet.