Don’t you hate it when you’re with a group of friends who are debating politics and business, and you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about?  You just smile and nod (or frown and nod, depending on the subject matter), waiting for the right moment to jump in and change the subject to something with a little less Condi and a little more Snooki.  Well, you’ll never have to be left out of those conversations again because Boxee’s full of newsy goodness.

Boxee’s arsenal of news apps features free on-demand videos from top-tier sources like The Washington Post, CNN, The Associated Press, and The Onion, ensuring you’re up to date on the latest news (even if it’s fake).  The Washington Post gives you your fill of national politics, while the Associated Press shows you top stories from across the globe.  You can also tune into CNN to watch their whole lineup of on-demand web videos.  If, after all that, the real world’s getting you down, then tune into The Onion for a nice, hearty chuckle.  In fact, The Daily Show and Colbert Report in Boxee’s TV Show Library will also do the trick.

Today, we’re introducing Livestation to the bunch. Livestation delivers live news from BBC, Al-Jazeera, France 24, and Frontline, among other international news channels.  The best part of Livestation is that there’s something for everyone, no matter where you are on the globe; just click a channel and watch without fear of being geolocked out. Honestly, I’m thrilled to finally be able to watch BBC Persian over the web instead of with my previous set-up, which was anything but ideal (let’s just say it involved a Pringles can, a taped up composite cable wayyyy past its prime, a screechy satellite dish passed on from a cousin’s cousin’s friend of a friend, and my darling grandmother yelling at the newscasters).  The Livestation app and its free channels are available on all versions of Boxee, but its premium channels are only open to Mac and Linux users for now (don’t worry, Windows, we’re opening up Livestation’s premium content to you soon). Search for “live tv news” in the App Library to find the Livestation app on Boxee.

The news on Boxee means watching the stories you choose from the sources you want, the same way you watch everything else on Boxee: free, web-sourced, and kinda sexy.  To start educating yourself on world happenings, tune into the news on Boxee today.  After five minutes of watching, you’ll be the one driving those fancypants political and scientifical conversations (and before you know it, you’ll be making up words).

I’m a music-lover. For three years I put together a music podcast to highlight my favorite music across many genres. I explored high and low for new songs on Pandora, Slacker, We are Hunted, HypeMachine, Lala, The Sixty One, Beatport, 7 Digital, NPR, and Last.Fm.  I searched for killer mixes on Hybridized.org (Jody Wisternoff from Way Out West is my favorite here), Mixcloud, and the essential mixes & friday night bangers from the BBC (thanks Pete Tong & Annie Mac!).  But while all these services do a great job of helping you discover new bands and mixes, none have created an experience around live music concerts like Wolfgang’s Vault.

Think of Wolfgang’s Vault like that amazing local record store run by the friendly man that knows more about music than you ever could because he’s lived it.  He’s done the concerts, the VIP rooms, the backstage parties, the hotel parties, and the chance encounters.  In my home town of Dallas, the man is Bill Wisener who has run Bill’s Records (and tapes, and CDs, and posters) for as long as I can remember.  On the Internet that man is Wolfgang, and you now have access via Boxee to his collection of rare and vintage concerts as well as from bands on tour now.

Wolfgang’s Vault on Boxee propels you into a world of 60’s psychadelic rock, amazing vintage jazz, “tear the roof off this mother” funk, current Indie rock idols, and amazing concerts from the 80s.  Wolfgang has generously picked out some of his favorites in the featured section.  Wolfgang’s Vault aficionados can search for their favorite concerts or play directly from their personal playlists on the site.  For those who hate making choices, you can just turn on Wolfgang’s Vault radio and let the music wash over you – including sessions from famed DayTrotter Studios in Rock Island, IL.  Oh, and did we mention all of this is free?

Sign up for an account with Wolfgang’s Vault and relive all those musical moments you might have missed.

And lo, from every field and foundry they came.  They – heroes of their own time – answered a clarion call of competition and sallied forth onto the pitch to win honor, glory and some sweet, sweet hardware.  Writing poetry in code and bending the boundaries of what was once thought possible, the proud corps of engineers who committed their sweat and their blood in the Boxee + Twilio Developer Contest asserted to the world that method and medium need no longer be segregated by the ancient shackles of traditional telecommunication.  They proved that TV and telephone did, at long last, belong together, and in so doing became more than competitors.

They became legends of these fine Internets.

As strong as this competitive field was, sadly we are forced to select a first and second place.  It was not at all easy, but after great deliberation by our rockstar panel of judges including Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, Boxee Platform Chief Idan Cohen and Twilio Head of Marketing Danielle Morrill, a winner has emerged.

Earning first place, a netbook from Twilio and a Boxee Box *before* it is available in stores is:

Bring the Popcorn
Drew Baumann and Brett Hazen

Bring the Popcorn is a fun app to quickly organize a movie party directly from Boxee.  Using a simple interface and leveraging the Twilio API, users can add their friends, sort out who brings what, and SMS those friends to see when they are coming over.  The app was developed by a team of Luther College CS Majors Drew Baumann and Brett Hazen who flew out for the hack day event at Twilio HQ this past weekend.

Finishing in a close second and netting themselves a netbook from Twilio and an Acer Revo from Boxee is none other than:

Find My Phone
Fuzz the Destroyer

Prolific Boxee developer Fuzz the Destroyer adds to his extensive portfolio of Boxee apps with a dead simple and crazy useful entry called “Find My Phone.”  The appropriately titled app uses the Twilio API to find where you put your phone with a clean interface and a wry sense of humor.  Helpful for every Boxee install, this app even helped me find my own handset stuck behind a seat in the airport terminal in which this announcement was written.

All competitors who submitted an app will get our undying respect for joining our growing family… and a Boxee T-shirt.  The entries in this contest were inspiring to all of us at Boxee and Twilio, and indicative of the radical change the living room is going to see in the next few years – a change our developer community is turning into reality every day.

Crackle is coming to Boxee with 49 Diff’rent TV show minisodes and 37 original web shows.

Crackle has long been a portal for great original web content, old TV shows, and movies backed by one of the industry’s largest entertainment companies (who also happens to make the PS3). We’re excited to say that now you can watch dozens of “minisodes” (5 min episodes) from TV shows like Voltron, Who’s the Boss, Bewitched, Rescue Me, Diff’rent Strokes and Married with Children. If ever there was a collection that spanned demographics, age groups, and genders, this is it.

Along with the TV shows, Crackle’s original web content brings shows able to highlight creativity and freedom rarely seen on a broadcast network. After watching episodes of “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Minister Walk Into a Bar” and “dating Brad Garrett,” I was left wanting to explore more from celebrities like Adam Carolla, Brad Garrett, Jon Heder, and Charlie Murphy.

Enjoy Crackle on Boxee and recommend me your favorites (I’m academik on Boxee).

– Andrew

Set in modern-day Nome, Alaska, The Fourth Kind (in theaters this Friday) is a thriller that integrates never-before-seen archival footage into the film to tell the story of psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich). While conducting a sleep disorder study, Dr. Tyler began videotaping sessions with traumatized patients and unwittingly discovered some of the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented.  Just watching the trailer freaks me out (click on the movie poster to see it).

To get people excited for the movie, Boxee’s in-house App Guru Shawn built The Fourth Kind Application, which includes TV spots, and other videos related to the film, as well as a collection of real-world video and photographic documentation of the four kinds of alien encounters: sightings, evidence, contact, and abduction.

This app provides an example of how companies can use Boxee to bring the creativity of the web to the TV screen.  Rather than being limited to a 30 or 60 second spot, Boxee’s platform lets content owners build a rich experience where audiences can use a remote control to interact with a variety of media related to a film, TV show, celebrity, band, artist, or brand.

So do you believe in alien abduction? Experience The Fourth Kind in theaters this Friday, November 6.

If you’re an anime fan, you’ve probably already heard of Crunchyroll.  If not, then let us introduce you to the web’s largest host for free, fully licensed Anime and Asian Entertainment.  The site has 5 million registered users, and great Anime including newer shows like Naruto Shippuden & Gintama and ones from the past like MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 00 and Fist of the Northstar.

The team at Crunchyroll has worked hard over the past few months to build a Boxee App, and we are happy to announce they are ready to roll it out to Crunchyroll and Boxee users today.

The App organizes videos into Featured Content, Anime, and Dramas. You can filter by popularity, season, or genre in the Anime section, and the Drama section is broken down into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean content.  In Drama, there’s forty four Korean shows alone including Coffee Prince, Prince Hours, 90 Days Time To Love, Soulmate, and One Fine Day (thankfully there are subtitles for people like me who learned Korean from Arrested Development).

The Crunchyroll App will also let you search their catalog and access your Crunchyroll account.  Crunchyroll members get the added benefits of 480p and 720p HD streams + being able to watch popular shows as they air in Asia.

There’s free Anime & Drama a-plenty so add the App and try it out.

For Boxee users who want to keep up with the news, 1cast’s new application provides a simple real-time solution.  1Cast is a content aggregator of news & entertainment sources around the globe like BBC, Reuters, Agence France Press, Al Jazeera and CBC.  At 1Cast.com they package news from all of these sources into different categories and let users search for specific topics, creating personalized newscasts that are updated as new stories come in.

With 1cast’s new Boxee application you can quickly peruse the day’s most popular headlines and watch suggested stories from a variety of different sites.  You can also browse by network, watching the latest stories from organizations like Bloomberg, MarketWatch or CNBC one after another.

We’re happy to see more news content in Boxee, and encouraged by 1Cast’s approach of tailoring news to its users.  Here’s a look at the application.

With over 150 applications on Boxee we’ve seen a lot of creative apps, both visually and functionally, but today’s addition of Cliqset to Boxee has me in awe of how people are using Boxee’s platform.   Cliqset is a new startup focused on letting you share, discuss, and discover your life online.  It ties together 70 different services into an activity stream you can quickly share with friends and to social networks. Here’s a look at my activity stream through Cliqset, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Yelp.

One of Cliqset’s main goals is to enable real-time communication across these networks and around specific events in your activity stream.  They’ve taken this focus and applied it to their new Boxee app allowing friends to have a conversation around a specific video.  Rob Spectre has ingeniously built this app to tap into Boxee’s “Now Playing” description so anytime you want to comment or chat about a certain video, just load the  Cliqset app while the video is playing and it will automatically link you to comments from other people who are watching the video, or who have watched it in the past.  Here’s a look at what Cliqset’s real-time video chat looks like on Boxee.

I sense many a long-distance date night taking place using this app : )

Cliqset just launched their Beta so sign up at Cliqset.com, and then install the app from the Boxee repository.