Social media-fueled personalized magazine app Flipboard announced today that they've seen 1 million new users as a result of launching their iPhone app last week.
The app has long been beloved by owners of the iPad, the only device on which it was available until recently. By bringing the app to the iPhone, the Palo Alto-based startup made good on a promise they had been making for several months.
In the fast-changing digital music streaming space, it's hard to know which service is best for you. Spotify gets the most hype, but lots of people love Rdio, which has solid backing and a huge library of music. There are also beloved underdogs like MOG and Grooveshark.
When it comes to choosing which option to go for, the most you can do is take each service for a spin, run a couple searches for stuff you like and see what comes up. You can get a general feeling of which one's a better fit and go with your gut, but wouldn't some hard data be nice?
Comedian Louis C.K. was tired of seeing his fans pay marked-up prices to enjoy his work. The bloated costs of show tickets and add-on fees for myriad middlemen had become "f---ing brutal" for consumers, C.K. told Rolling Stone recently. Thankfully, we're no longer trapped in the 20th century with its top-heavy, restricted, one-way model of content distribution. So C.K. took to the Web.
His experiment, as he called it, was to see if he could self-release one of his stand-up comedy specials on the Internet without paying for others to produce, edit and distribute the material, all of which drive up the cost paid by fans. It was a somewhat bold gamble, even if the model had been tested successfully by a few big name bands and musicians. Would it work for stand-up comedy?
Personal cloud storage is all the rage these days. Dropbox continues to be one of the most buzzed-about startups and its enterprise-focused counterpart Box is making moves toward the consumer market as well. For music files, Google, Amazon and Apple all offer cloud-based storage lockers and iOS allows syncing of other types of content via iCloud.
iPhone owners not satisfied with the available options now have a new one in Microsoft's SkyDrive, which launched its first iOS app today. The four-year-old service has been available to Windows users on the desktop and Windows Phone platform for some time. Today, it starts to branch out onto other platforms.
The Twitter handle @breakingnews has approximately 3,379,339 Twitter followers. Today, it announced the launch of its very own StumbleUpon channel, a new feature available in the StumbleUpon redesign. This makes discovering @breakingnews content on StumbleUpon less serendipitous and more Twitter-like.
In its blog post, @breakingnews acknowledged that it was the only branded channel that curated stories from other sources. Other publications on StumbleUpon Channels, such as BuzzFeed, CNNMoney, ELLE and Seventeen, just to name a few, either aggregate content or produce original content. BreakingNews picks up on organizations that do break stories, sending more traffic back to them. The new StumbleUpon channel will give those publications an extra boost in traffic.
When it comes to UI design, Apple's iOS evolves pretty slowly. They rolled out one of the biggest enhancements to its mobile operating system this year with the launch of iOS 5. A radically redesigned notification system was the biggest visual overhaul and prior to that, there was the addition of folders in iOS 4.
Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS's look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple's latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.
Today, BBC.com has launched a U.S. election hub at BBC.com/USelection. It opens with an introduction to the Republican candidates along with a few topical analysis posts. It's a redirect to the BBC.co.uk topic page, so it's the same coverage that the British audience gets.
As the election gears up, the site's content will include articles, video series and interactive maps and polls. BBC.com averages 17.4 million unique visitors per month from the U.S., about a third of the site's global audience. Big news months, such as in May, when Osama bin Laden was killed, drew more than 19 million readers.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus was a four-time entrepreneur with no experience in the game industry. Yet in five short years, he has created a game industry giant with dedicated users. Zynga has doubled its revenues this year. Today it holds the top five games on Facebook DAU: CityVille (10,110,000), CastleVille (8,100,000) and FarmVille (7,200,000), Texas HoldEm Poker (6,300,000) and Words With Friends (5,700,000).
Zynga filed its updated S-1 on December 2. It will issue 100 million shares of Class A common stock at prices of $8.50 to $10 per share and will list on Nasdaq as ZNGA. The underwriters are Morgan Stanley, BofA Merill Lynch, Allen & Company LLC, Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Zynga's initial public offering would be the largest IPO from a U.S. Internet company since Google's $1.7 billion in 2004.
In a potential abuse of YouTube's system for reporting copyright infringement, Universal Music succeeded yesterday in having a pro-file-sharing song removed from the site. The kicker? Universal evidently does not have any legal claim to the rights of the song or any of its contents.
The track was commissioned by file-sharing site Megaupload as part of a campaign to generate support for the controversial service. It features several mainstream artists, including Snoop Dogg, Kanye West and P Diddy, praising the service, which happens to be one of many thorns in the sides of major music executives everywhere.
Owners of iPads, iPhones and iPods running the latest version of iOS have not yet had the option to jailbreak their devices in a way that's at all worth the trouble. For those who are dying to break free of Apple's restrictions, an untethered jailbreak appears to be on the way.
On Friday, France-based iOS hacker @pod2g uploaded a video showing that he was successful in jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 running on his iPhone 3G. This came about a month after he announced on Twitter that he had discovered a bug in iOS 5 that would make a jailbreak possible.
