For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there's really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you're an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge your local music collection with the service's cloud-based selection of music. Awesome.
For artists, it's another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.
After an enterprising hacker discovered a privacy problem in beloved new social app Path yesterday, its creators have issued an update and an apology. "We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you our users, first," CEO Dave Morin writes.
Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon that the Consumer Preview phase of Windows 8 testing is slated to begin on Wednesday, February 29, with a gala rollout event in Barcelona. That's to coincide - for the first time - with Mobile World Congress, which has not generally been known as the kind of affair where a PC operating system is the headliner.
The venue may definitely steal some of the thunder from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's keynote, which remains set for the day before.
Amazon's on-demand streaming video offering just got a whole lot more attractive. The company announced today that they signed a deal with Viacom, allowing them to offer thousands of new videos from sources like MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon, among others.
In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.
Other than Spotify, there could hardly have been a more buzz-worthy music startup this summer than Turntable.fm. The group listening and virtual DJing app seemed to come out of nowhere and take the Web by storm, grabbing funding and users in huge quantities. The company, which rose from the pivot-generated ashes of mobile scannable sticker startup StickyBits, first went live in May of last year and became all the rage among the kids.
Turntable.fm was such a craze that it gave rise to a number of copycat services pretty quickly. Group listening in general became one of the biggest trends in online music last year. But many have wondered if this particular trend has long-term staying power, or if the whole thing was just a fad.
Well, it's official. Netflix has entered the original programming game and is no longer just a distributor of other companies' content. "Lilyhammer," a dramatic comedy starring "Sopranos" actor Steven Van Zandt, went live on Sunday. For the first time, the following words have appeared on the opening credits to a television-style show: "A Netflix original series."
Rather than being broadcast on HBO, a standard cable channel or even network TV, "Lilyhammer" is going straight to audiences via the Web. Netflix hopes that by making some content available exclusively through its service, it will attract new users and potentially even gain some additional leverage with other content providers.
Wolfram Alpha isn't the "Google killer" that many hyped it up to be prior to its 2009 launch. Instead, the self-described computational knowledge engine takes a completely different approach to letting users find and analyze information. Rather than scouring the Web and ranking everybody's pages in the order it thinks we'd find them useful, it uses its own data sets and computational power to return detailed reports and analysis about whatever topics users query it for.
Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.
Path is a lovely app. It pushes all the right buttons. It's mobile, it's tactile, it's personal, it's full of people we love and moments that matter to us. It makes us feel good. It's got all the greatest hits a post-Facebook social app should have. It's also free.
"Facebook will always be free," it tells us, so free is now the standard. Free apps are expensive, though; we pay with our data. Whenever Facebook or Google messes with our privacy, this is the cost of doing business for free. Path is no different. It's already using our personal data in ways we didn't expect. Arun Thampi discovered today that it uploads the entire iPhone address book to its servers. Surprised? Don't be.
It's an attention economy, and the good people at Jones-Dilworth have built a tool that will help you get some. Totem launches today, a free app that helps anyone build a great press page. Whether you're a giant company, a start-up, or even a solo act, you shouldn't have to think too hard about a press page. For that matter, neither should I.
A press page is a place for you to put all the info a reporter needs about you, your company, your product and your news. It's not the whole story; it's just the colorful details. But you'd be amazed at how hard it is to find that stuff sometimes. Jones-Dilworth has a wealth of experience, it has worked with reporters, and Totem reflects all the right priorities. If you want to make a good impression on the press, this is the way to go.
Weather Underground's interactive WunderMap now enables users to go back and forth in time. WunderMap overlays a Google map with all kinds of weather information, including temperatures, radar, webcams, ski reports, dedicated services for fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and more.
The map now displays a clock icon that lets users scroll through the past and future to view historical and forecast data. Most data go back to around 2000. It can also display forecasts for several days ahead. It's amazing to go back to historic storms and watch them happen all over again.
