All-you-can-stream music service Spotify is letting third party developers expand on its functionality using its API. It is offering the results to users in a new HTML5 app directory, CEO Daniel Ek announced today in New York.
Developers have already built apps with features like the ability to find and purchase concert tickets, the means to display a song's lyrics on-screen through TuneWiki and deeper Last.fm integration for better music recommendations.
The iPad isn't even two years old yet, and already it's making a huge impact on the consumer electronics market. The tablet has sold phenomenally well, chipping away at netbook and other PC sales in the process. Android-based tablets are slowly catching up, and will undoubtedly be fueled by the Kindle Fire, but the iPad is expected to remain dominant for at least four more years.
This is all great news for Apple and the consumers who love their products. It's less thrilling for its competition, quite obviously. But it's also a bummer for companies that manufacture RAM chips.
You're already paying a monthly fee for Internet access at home and an additional fee of equal or greater size for your smartphone's data plan. When all is said and done, you end up paying nearly $2,000 a year to access the Web from two devices, but only one of those connections is mobile and ubiquitous, unless you pay extra to take your home ISP with you on the road.
With these costs, paying an additional $15 to $50 to tether your iPhone to your laptop can seem difficult to stomach. Well, now you may not have to. For whatever reason, Apple has approved an iOS app that lets you do exactly that for a one-time fee of $15.
Google Reader may be one of the best things to happen to RSS/Atom feeds, but Feedly is definitely one of the best things to happen to Google Reader, and Feedly 8 makes it even better. With this release, Feedly adds tagging, "infinite" scrolling, and two new views.
The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.
We've been hearing a lot about the convergence of television and the Web this year. From second screen apps and Twitter chatter about TV to set-top boxes and Internet-connected HDTVs, the two worlds are colliding in a big way. Apple is even rumored to be planning to get in on the game, launching an HDTV set of its own next year and possibly making a big impact on the market.
So what does this mean for future of television advertising? That piece of the puzzle is still emerging, but marketers aren't wasting any time figuring it out. Today marks the launch of the Connected TV Marketing Association, a trade group focused on digital advertising on Internet-enabled television sets and devices.
If you think whipping out your phone, searching for a venue and then tapping the "Check In" button on Foursquare is a tiresome waste of several seconds, you're in luck. Like so many other things in life, the Foursquare check-in promises to be simplified by NFC technology, allowing us to simply wave our phones to automatically check into a venue.
Of course, mainstream adoption of NFC is at least a few years away, but owners of Symbian-powered phones can get started thanks to a new update to the Foursquare app for the platform.
One year ago today, the slow leak of over 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks began. It would be the biggest exposure of such information in recorded history, and the event would trigger both a massive wave of support for the organization and an unprecedented backlash that has included governments, financial institutions and Internet companies.
Today, WikiLeaks is struggling to survive, let alone operate as it once did. A financial blockade has crippled its finances, its founder continues to fight extradition over sexual assault charges and others have defected from the organization entirely. Some of them even launched a competing site for whistleblowers.
A few recent legal developments affecting U.S. online privacy have rightfully troubled privacy advocates and civil libertarians on American soil. In addition to the Patriot Act's relaxed regulation of law enforcement's access to private data, recent court rulings have made it clear that U.S. authorities can secretly request data from tech companies without the user ever knowing.
If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.
Some large technology companies frown upon developers hacking and reworking their products. On the far opposite side of the spectrum, lies an unexpected organization called Microsoft. After some initial hesitation, the tech giant is now actively encouraging developers to tinker with its Kinect hands-free user interface accessory for the XBox 360.
Until now, those hacks have been encouraged for non-commercial purposes only. But the company took things to the next level this week when it announced the Kinect Accelerator, a program for startups who want to build creative uses for the Kinect into their businesses.
Once upon a time, Google had a pretty nasty reputation among traditional media companies, many of whom lampooned the search giant for promoting piracy and even "stealing" content outright. Much of the criticism was overblown, but it remains true that there is copyright-infringing content on the Internet and Google is may people's gateway to the Internet.
Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.
