Tag: mashup
Spotify launching API
This is the big news that followers of Spotify have been waiting for for a little while. The revolutionary music service is launching an API “sometime this week”. It’ll give developers access to the raw workings behind the software, including its streaming facilities.
I don’t need to tell you that this is *fantastic* news. Freeing up the vast catalogue that Spotify has built up will energize developers and you’re going to suddenly see the service appearing everywhere – from phones to set-top-boxes and games consoles, but also on the web. The mobile aspect will be most interesting – anyone will be able to build their own mobile client for the service for any platform – BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone, Android – whatever.
Also revealed by Spotify – 40,000 new users sign up each day, and users are spending on average 70 minutes listening to the service every day! That’s three lots of ads served to every user every day. Not bad!
When the API is out, we’ll scan the nascent developers scene and bring you the best of the user-built applications.
(via Guardian)
OPINION: Here's what I want from Google Latitude
I don’t really care about privacy. I recognise the fact that other people do, but I don’t have anything to hide. Add that to the fact that I’m not especially interesting, and that I’ve been on the internet so long, and have such a unique name, that there’s a lot of me out there already.
That’s why I’m not bothered by commenters saying that Latitude is a massive privacy invasion. For me, the social proprioception offered by Latitude far outweighs the downsides of having my location available to my friends.
Lightbulb/speaker mashups suddenly all over the web
Okay, ‘all over the web’ is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but just the other day, we spotted the Soundbulb over at Yanko Design. Today, I spotted this concept Bulb-Sound-Speaker over at Crunchgear. Two lamp-speakers in a week? I’m calling that a trend. Before the end of the month, we’ll be swimming in the things.
Silliness aside, it’s quite a cool concept, and could prove useful in public places – restaurants, elevators, etc. Of the two, only the Soundbulb works as a light as well, but they both rely on Bluetooth to ferry the music around the place wirelessly. Would I use one of these? No. Do I think they’d sell? Most definitely.
(via Yanko Design and Crunchgear)
Related posts: Lightbulbs to replace Wi-Fi? | Greenpeace launches range of dimmable energy-efficient lightbulbs
O'Malley's Mashup: Synchronise your browsers
As you’re reading a tech blog, I’d say that the chances are that you use more than one computer regularly – perhaps you have a desktop and a laptop. Or if you’re me, a desktop, two laptops and access to yet more computers all over the place.
As you probably know, this can be a frustrating experience – if you bookmark something on one computer and you need it on another, do you really want to spend all of the time Googling for it again, or logging into your e-mails on each machine every time? How about having to update all of your saved passwords when you change them? Well the good news is, as luck would have it, there’s a few solutions to these irritating problems, and that’s what I’m going to be talking about in today’s mash-up: how to make your browsers sickeningly consistent.
O'Malley's Mashup: Enhance your Twitter feed
Twitter‘s great. It’s like a secret club where people in the tech sector go to talk about the inanities of their lives… and it’s horrendously addictive. It may surprise you to learn though that Twitter can also be used for some genuinely useful things.
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Okay, that was obviously a lie. But there are many things you can do that will enhance your Twitter feed, and give it the virtual 140-character equivalent of bells and whistles. For this week’s mash-up, I’m going to go through some services that you can hook into Twitter.
O'Malley's Mashup: Save time by syncing calendars
Hello, this is my new column about one of the most important aspects of our increasingly digital lives: making our tech talk to our other tech. In the past, both applications on the web and your desktop and tangible consumer gadgets were all rather solitary and lonely beasts, doing their own thing and not really talking to each other – but thankfully, times are changing. Thanks to the magic of Web 2.0, people are creating things that talk to other things – and this can make our lives infinitely more efficient. For this week’s example, I’m going to be looking at calendars…
