Web 2.0 is a great place with some really cool applications. But there are 5 companies out there that I’d love to see do something with AIR:

Yelp: One of my favorite services. Why do I want an AIR app from Yelp? A few reasons. One, I’m really bad at sitting down and remembering what I ate. I’d love to have a Yelp desktop application that would let me take notes about a specific restaurant as soon as I get home. Then when I have time the notes are on my hard drive and I can finish the review and send it up when I get a chance. I’d also like notifications. When I get a message, compliment or a review for one of my favorite restaurants it would be great to get a notification. Finally, I really want a .yelp file that I can email around or download. The .yelp file would contain all of the major info about the restaurant and would be associated with the AIR application and view it online or offline. Ideally it would be XML so you could even add info to it and do a kind of desktop mashup with other services.

Dopplr: The big one for Doppler? Alerts. The weekly emails are great (and I know I can increase the frequency) but having alerts would be awesome. I would also love to have a Dopplr desktop widget that would let me easily browse other people’s trips without having to go to the Dopplr site. A quick entry feature would also be very cool. Click on the Dopplr icon in the system tray (or dock) and be entering a new trip right away. Ideally, since Dopplr would have access to the file system, you could also sync it with different calendar applications or (because I like filetypes) a .dopplr File type that you could send to friends and they’d be able to use that file to add the same trip you have. The theme of the desktop application could even change color based on where you’re going just like the logo does.

NewsGator This would be the perfect AIR application. I’m now addicted to using NewsGator in the browser when I have to and using a combination of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire on the desktop. Why not combine those code bases? Why not enhance the experience of the browser client and make it look and feel like the desktop applications? You can use the file system or the SQLite database in AIR to store your feeds and synchronize them when you get online. You have the exact same UI and code base for Mac and Windows plus you get to take that code and create a similar and great looking web interface. News reading would never look so good or be so easy. Your feeds when and where you want them with a consistent user interface.

Facebook: Yup, what can I say, I try to be a power user and I want a desktop application for Facebook. This I want just for the experience. I want an Ajaxy or Flashy interface with cool transitions that makes doing tasks like managing messages or friend requests easier. I want to synchronize my contacts automatically with my email using the file system APIs. I want uploading photos and videos to be really easy. You can still display ads for me, that’s fine, but I want a robust interface that helps me use Facebook faster and more easily.

Desktop Tower Defense Okay, maybe this one seems silly, but think about it. You could use transparent windows and the power of Flash to play Desktop Tower Defense on your desktop. You could also take the game with you wherever you go so you can play it on the airplane or wherever you need to waste time without an internet connection. You could save your games or even record them so you can show them off to your friends later. Wasting time was never as easy as it could be with DTD on AIR

I just blogged about uvLayer a really interesting blend of social networking and rich media that uses an AIR client built in Flex as the primary application. The team over at uvLayer has done a lot of things to help create a social experience out of a rich Internet application. They’ve incorporated Facebook and a real time sharing feature that makes watching videos a collaborative experience. Head on over and download the application.

It was a really great week for Flex and AIR at DEMO this week and there are some really awesome companies building on the Adobe RIA platform. BusinessWeek picked up some of the standouts from DEMO and highlighted some of the AIR applications that were shown on stage:

Another intriguing trend at this year’s DEMO is the way numerous entrants have made use of Adobe’s (ADBE) AIR technology. Unveiled at last year’s DEMO, Adobe AIR is used to create rich Internet applications that can run both while a computer is connected to the Internet and, to some degree, when it isn’t.

AIR-based entrants at this year’s DEMO include Joggle, an online service designed to organize the files you have scattered among the hard drives on multiple PCs in a single browser window. Joggle was created by Fabrik, a vendor of external hard drives that is familiar with the confusion people face when trying to remember which documents, songs, photos, and videos are stored on which computer. Other DEMO participants that utilize Adobe AIR are Acesis, which created data-management software for health-care providers, and Israel’s 2Win Solutions, which built a Web-based collaboration application called KonoLive.

Pownce opened up registrations today and also released a new version of their desktop client. Pownce was one of the very early adopters of AIR and this new client runs on Beta 3 of the AIR runtime. It includes system notifications when you get a new message as well as the ability to reply to people right from the application. That means you can do almost everything you need to in a desktop client. So far response seems to be pretty good. Have you downloaded it? What do you think?

Serge Jespers talked to the team at Boulevart, the company behind the Google Analytics AIR application and found out that they’re working with Google and that Google is going to both host the application and is supporting development on it. Serge has a video interview up including some news about the new features.

The Google Analytics AIR applications was by far one of the coolest applications we saw from the community. Nocolas Lierman created his own API for Google Analytics and wrapped a valuable desktop experience around that. It’s great to know that Google was as impressed as everyone else with the application and they’re helping out. It’s a great application for users of Google Analytics.

The Adobe evangelists are spreading out across the United States, Europe, and even Australia this month to talk to Adobe user groups about the new features in Flex 3 and Adobe AIR. If you’re interested in hearing about how Flex and AIR can help you or even just what all of the buzz is about, this is a great, informal way to do it. Here’s the full list of cities and dates:

Updated: Now with Australia/New Zealand dates

Joe Johnston has updated his working AIR iPhone application to run on Adobe AIR beta 3. He’s still using Ribbit so you can actually use the iPhone to make calls. It’s a great example of custom chrome and how a pretty simple desktop application can help convey a lot of concepts. He’s also got a lot of other AIR applications that he’s updated. It’s well worth checking out so if you don’t have it, grab Adobe AIR Beta 3 and get the .air file!

24 ways has a tutorial for getting started on your first Ajax AIR application by Jonathan Snook. It’s titled Christmas Is In the AIR and will give you everything you need to know to start building HTML/Ajax applications on the AIR runtime. It walks you through setting up the application descriptor file and also using the new HTML security model. It’s a very, very good tutorial and I hope it gets you excited about checking AIR out over the Christmas break.

Kevin Hoyt, the Ajax master on the AIR team has updated all of his Ajax samples to run on AIR Beta 3. We made a lot of changes with AIR beta 2 around Ajax and security but for the most part Beta 3 was just bug fixes with the exception of drag and drop. So if you’re just starting out on AIR or there’s something you want to see how to do on the Ajax side, subscribe to Kevin’s blog and check out the samples.

Ooyala, a company that is making a lot of use of AIR, won the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge last week. I wrote about Ooyala’s use of Adobe AIR in their Backlot application over on the Universal Desktop. Even though AIR is a desktop runtime, the web is the most important component of any rich Internet application including those on the desktop. AIR and Amazon Web Services make for a great combination and Ooyala is a perfect example of that.

[Via Andre Charland]