“Imagine, you come back to your car from dinner and find a ticket on your windshield and you were positive you had parked legally. Now, without even leaving the scene, you can use your iPhone and begin to fight your ticket. You react instantly to a ticket using your iPhone,” explains Glen Bolofsky, President of parkingticket.com.

The process begins by navigating the iPhone’s Safari browser to the parkingticket.com website where you’ll find a straightforward means to fight a parking ticket; whether the ticket was issued in New York City, San Francisco, Boston,Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. Simply register for a free account and choose the city in which the ticket was issued. Enter your ticket and vehicle details then answer a few quick questions. The detailed process takes about ten minutes, from A-Z. To allow easy entry of your ticket, a look-a-like parking ticket is displayed – for your specific city – with interactive functionality.

Thanks to iPhone’s camera, parkingticket.com suggests the recipient snap lots of photos including: the actual sign, a full perspective of the entire street showing all the signs and the actual street address of where the ticket was issued. “Multiple photos’ can help you win the case,” says parkingticket.com.

To have parkingticket.com prepare a guaranteed dismissal request letter customers post 50 percent of the fine amount at the onset of the process. If parkingticket.com is successful in assisting you in getting the ticket dismissed, then the upfront deposit is retained by parkingticket.com. If, after a hearing, the parking ticket fine is reduced, rather then dismissed, parkingticket.com retains half of the amount you saved and refunds the balance. After the hearings take place, if parkingticket.com is unsuccessful in getting the ticket dismissed or reduced they will not only refund the posted payment, but also pay you an additional $10.00 just for trying! So, now, iPhone users will get paid to fight their tickets if they are not dismissed or reduced.

The software is made for an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch and works over any available network connection. Transactions can be processed at places such as conventions, street fairs, antique shows, and by business owners performing mobile detailing, on-site consultation or construction. The list is endless on who could benefit by offering the convenience of accepting credit cards on the spot and the confidence of getting immediate authorization for a credit card payment.

The software performs captures, authorizations, voids and credits. It utilizes multiple database tables for recording transactions and repeating sale information, such as order, shipping, and customer info. There is also an option to add a gratuity to the final charge.

“Since the announcement of ProcessAway last month, there has been a tremendous amount of interest for versions that operate with other gateways,” states Randy Palermo, Member of Rapadev, LLC, the developer of the software. “We are currently expanding the line to accommodate these requests.” The current version of ProcessAway works only with the Authorize.net gateway. “We realize there is a large number of gateways and resellers that can benefit by offering iPhone credit card processing. We hope ProcessAway can fulfill this need, and welcome contact from interested parties wanting to adapt the software for specific gateways.” Currently under development are versions for NMI, PayLeap, and Chase Paymentech, along with privately branded version for specific resellers.

ProcessAway for Authorize.net is available in Apple AppStore for $19.99. Additional information, video, screenshots, and FAQ’s can be found at http://www.processaway.net.

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network.

Offline applications can’t of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, it stores e-mail in a local database on the phone, even when online.

“You’ll note that it’s very, very fast because it’s using that local database,” Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his inbox.

It’s significant for several reasons that Google is eyeing a new version of its Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone. For one thing, the company wants to bring to the iPhone all of Gmail’s features — search, labels, and conversations, for example — and Apple’s built-in mail application lacks those abilities.

But more broadly, the move is significant because it shows how Web-based applications can bypass the control particular companies such as Apple or Microsoft have over a computing technology.

Apple has achieved tremendous success with its App Store, which lets people download and buy software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it controls that conduit, and it only can deliver software written specifically for those devices.

Web applications run in a Web browser, and all smart phones have browsers — though of course hardware and network constraints typically mean they’re anemic compared to desktop versions.

In case this point about the power of Web applications was lost on observers, Gundotra showed the same Gmail software running on the HTC Magic, a new phone using Google’s Android operating system.

“You now have an ability to build an app that spans devices as long as that device implements the latest specifications of these modern HTML 5 Web browsers,” Gundotra said.

The mobile phone version of the Gmail software uses a somewhat different approach to enable offline access.

Where the desktop version uses a Google-developed open-source browser plug-in called Gears to enable offline support, the iPhone version uses the offline data storage standard of HTML 5, the gradually emerging overhaul of the language used to describe Web pages. That technology can cache the state of an application as well as data such as messages.

Of course, getting a modern, full-featured browser on a PC with plenty of memory is hard enough, and mobile browsers generally lag PC versions.

However, it should be noted that Safari on the iPhone, like the browser in Android, is based on the WebKit open-source project, and WebKit has been building in offline support. So at least on some higher-end phones, a Web-based version of offline Gmail could be an option sooner rather than later.