Shazam’s Free iOS App Gets Unlimited Tagging

Shazam

, the very popular music ID service for iOS, made a major change to the free version of its iOS app. “Shazamers” are now getting unlimited free tagging. Shazam believes this shift will give them more opportunities for users to discover and interact with their favorite music and television shows.

Andrew Fisher, Shazam CEO said, “Shazamers already identify over 1 billion songs each year and go on to purchase over $100 million in digital music via our service. Now, with no limits, people can Shazam even more songs they don’t know – or they already know - to conveniently purchase them, see the lyrics, watch the official music video, share on Facebook, Twitter or email, get recommendations and purchase concert tickets instantly. Unlimited free access means people can use Shazam even more as part of their daily lives.”

Users of the Shazam service can of course upgrade to the paid app, called Encore, and get the benefits of ad-free usage and features like LyricPlay, which allows users to view lyrics as the tracks play.

A link to the free Shazam app can be found here.
Read more

Facebook’s iPad App And Project Spartan Likely To Launch Next Week, Possibly At Apple’s Event

Back in July TechCrunch revealed that Facebook had already developed an iPad app that was live inside the iPhone app. It seemed feature complete, which has confused many as to why Facebook has taken so long to launch it — they didn’t even launch it at last week’s f8 conference. If MG Siegler of TechCrunch is correct (which he has been for many Facebook scoops this year), it has been waiting on another of Facebook’s Project Spartan and various negotiations with Apple - as was reported this week.

Earlier today another TechCrunch writer, Alexia Tsotsis found some screenshots of Project Spartan (see above) which MG Siegler believes to be the real thing. He writes this morning that “the planets are aligning” and that the Facebook iPad app and Project Spartan (of which both have seen delays and delayed each other) will launch next week.

According to him Apple has been involved with both projects and that the two companies have been collaborating on both projects. His sources note that the two Facebook projects may launch at next week’s Apple event (Mashable also suggests this), potentially as part of a demonstration that shows off improved HTML5 support on iOS. But if that arrangement falls through Facebook will apparently reveal the two projects during a Monday event.

But make no mistake, the relationship between the two companies is tenuous at best. Both know that they’d probably be better of working together, but both also believe that they don’t actually need each other. Hence, the dancing we’ve been seeing and hearing about. The two are frenemies. But the launch of Google+ has made the common enemy very clear…

Project Spartan is an HTML5-based development and distribution platform that’s being built with Mobile Safari for iOS in mind. When MG Siegler first posted about Project Spartan in mid-June, he described the purpose of it as:

Facebook will never admit this, but those familiar with the project believe the intention is very clear: to use Apple’s own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook is certainly in the position to challenge the almighty App Store distribution mechanism. But they need to be able to do so on Apple’s devices which make up a key chunk of the market.

[Via TechCrunch]

The Daily Averaging Only 120,000 Readers A Week

The promised iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, that News Corporation created with some Apple support and launched in February this year has continued to sell poorly. Bloomberg reports from an advertising executive, John Nitti, that the newspaper is averaging just 120,000 readers a week (which includes those who are on a two-week free trial of the publication). He says the subscription numbers are less than a quarter the number that is required for the publication to make money.

When The Daily was unveiled in February, News Corporation Chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch said “We believe the Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed”. He spoke of how the publication would have the speed and versatility of new technology with the “serendipity and surprise” of newspapers - making ‘newspapers’ “viable again”.

News Corporation did reveal that more than 1 million people had downloaded the app between February and June but had declined to give out figures of actual readership. In May, News Corporation COO, Chase Carey defended the publication calling it a “work in progress”, and it being “early days”. Murdoch revealed in February that they had invested $30 million in the project, hiring over 100 staff and required a readership of 500,000 to break even.

[Bloomberg via The Guardian]

Dragon Go! Update Adds Support For Netflix, Wolfram|Alpha, Google+ And More

Back in July Nuance released a new iOS app, Dragon Go!, that we described as combining “Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said”. It will listen to a question or statement you make and then using the number of services it supports (from Yelp to Twitter to the iPod app), complete the task that you invoked.

Today Nuance has released an update to Dragon Go! that, in a sense, upgrades its intelligence that we described. It has improved it’s intelligence by adding support for a number of new services - meaning it can now understand more commands and actually do more things. It has added support for media services Netflix and Spotify, search engines Wolfram|Alpha and Ask.com as well as Google+.

It has also improved the Yelp experience from within the app by allowing users to access a map from within the Yelp tab. You can grab the update now, or if you haven’t yet tried Dragon Go! you can download it for free on the App Store.

iTunes Music Store Goes Live In 12 More EU Countries, iBookstore Coming To More Countries Soon

Following a report from yesterday that Apple was set to launch the iTunes Music Store in 10 more European Union countries, Apple has pressed the button and launched it in not 10 but 12 EU countries that did not have the service before. This now means that every single EU member nation now has the iTunes Music Store, with today’s countries that got the store being: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Apple is also about to launch the iBookstore in most EU nations including: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland.

These countries have now gone live in iTunes Connect, a back-end system where authors give Apple their content for distribution on the iTunes stores. Previously, authors could only sell their books on iBookstore in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Canada.

[Via MacRumors, The Next Web]

“Universal Save” for iOS Apps

Ted Landau at The Mac Observer covers an issue I’ve mentioned several times in the past, which Apple has partially fixed with the last releases of iOS: saving documents and moving them across apps. Specifically, Landau notes that the lack of a “universal save” option for documents that can be read by third-party apps (PDFs, text files, images) leads to an annoying and pretty much useless duplication of content. Apple has implemented an “Open In…” menu to send files to other apps, but the file that’s being sent is a copy. iOS apps can’t read and modify a source file from a single location.

Currently, iOS does not come close to matching the advantages of Mac OS X here. There is no way to have a unifying folder in iOS that contains related documents from different apps. There is no way to have a document easily opened in different apps, where any changes you make in one app are instantly accessible by all the compatible apps. You can come closer with Dropbox, but closer is not good enough here.

That’s annoying for me, too, as I constantly switch between apps to get my work done, and it’s not like I don’t enjoy trying new ones. This typically leads to some sort of geek frustration – why can’t Apple build an invisible layer that lets Elements edit a text document from Evernote and Pages access the same file?

For Ted and me, yes, being able to avoid file duplication and tedious exporting processes would be nice. But I do wonder how much does Apple care about such functionalities considering the underlying paradigms of iOS and the upcoming iCloud functionalities of iOS 5. For one, Apple really cares about application sandboxing: each app has its own controlled data environment and only a few items can be shared between multiple apps. Apple cares about sandboxing so much that they’re bringing it to the Mac App Store. Would iOS sandboxing allow for a source file to be edited and “saved” by multiple apps? Where does that file belong to, technically? Would iOS apps be able to write specific metadata to it? And what happens if, hypothetically, this “shared” file needs to be pushed back and forth with iCloud?

I’m no iOS developer, but I can see this proposed “universal save” model becoming an issue when on iOS, unlike the Mac, there’s no visible, centralized Finder location to write and read files from. In fact, Ted is right when he says that the convenience of a Mac is being able to create “a folder that will contain all the assorted files needed to put his column together”. That’s made easy by the Finder – but on iOS? Apple allows third-party developers to plug into the Music library or Camera Roll, yet there’s no Apple app to “create text file here” or “save webpage from Safari here”. Again, the lack of an iOS Finder would require “universal save” to work inside any app. iDisk could have been a centralized location for files – it could have even been Apple’s “answer to Dropbox” – but it’s not going to be supported by iCloud.

And then there’s the conceptual issue of an iOS device being the app that you’re using. When you use Pages on an iPad, the iPad is a word processor. When you browse the web with Safari, you’re holding the web in your hands. On a technical level, this app console model is represented by sandboxing and one-way “Open In” menus, and soon iCloud-based documents that allow multiple versions of the same app to access files. Would a “universal save” option somehow break the illusion that you’re holding an app, reminding us that we’re using a device with multiple layers of abstractions including a filesystem?

I don’t know. I believe I’d like this feature in theory, but I wonder if there would also be a considerable trade-off to accept.

On Amazon, Ecosystems, And “iPad Killers”

Earlier today Amazon announced a completely revamped Kindle family, which includes the standard $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle touch, and the much-anticipated $199 Kindle Fire tablet. Ad-supported options and hands-on coverage aside, I’d like to quickly touch upon a common mistake in today’s tech headlines – that the Kindle Fire will “kill” the iPad.

First off, Amazon gets it: they know an ecosystem has to scale to different devices and operating systems, so they diversified their approach to ebook reading and media consumption with three different sets of Kindle (Keyboard/$79 Kindle, Touch, Fire) all tied to a single defining feature: your Amazon.com account.

In discussing Microsoft’s approach to the concept of ecosystem when compared to Apple’s, I wrote:

In Apple’s vision, separate operating systems can live inside the same ecosystem. The single defining aspect of this vision is the Apple ID, which on iOS devices, Macs, PCs, and web browsers gives you access to:

- Songs, Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts;

- Apps;

- The Apple Online Store;

- Your iOS device’s location (still free with MobileMe);

- Email, Calendar, Contact and data sync with MobileMe;

- Your desktop operating system (with Lion’s Apple ID support).

Compare this to Amazon, which is doing the following:

  • Amazon Prime: faster shipping times and Instant Video;
  • Amazon MP3;
  • Amazon Kindle;
  • Amazon Appstore;
  • Amazon Web Services.

Amazon is building an ecosystem, and all you need to access these services is a single Amazon.com account, possibly connected to a credit card. Like Apple, it may be difficult to keep everything in one account, but it’s not like the average consumer needs all the functionalities of Web Services anyway. Furthermore, Amazon controls its platforms with the web infrastructure they’ve created, and the newly announced Silk browser is the perfect example of how Amazon should also be able to somehow control and optimize web traffic operated by its devices.

There’s more. Amazon gets it because they’re offering a limited choice of devices to use with their ecosystem. Many often cite Apple’s product line-up as an example of simplicity and “just one model” philosophy, but if you think about it, there are multiple ways to get started with iOS:

  • iPhone (two colors, different storage options, carrier variations);
  • iPod touch (different storage options);
  • iPad (two colors, different storage options, carrier variations).

and the Mac (all with multiple configuration options available):

  • MacBook Air;
  • MacBook Pro;
  • iMac;
  • Mac mini;
  • Mac Pro.

Amazon may kill off some members of the Kindle family soon (DX perhaps?), but here’s what they offer today to access the Amazon.com ecosystem:

  • Kindle;
  • Kindle Keyboard;
  • Kindle DX;
  • Kindle Touch;
  • Kindle Fire.

The similarities in the underlying concepts of “ecosystem” and “uniqueness” between Apple and Amazon are clear, but there are some key difference that many people don’t seem to properly consider when referring to the latest Kindle Fire as an “iPad killer”. Assuming that by “killer” they actually imagine a scenario where people will stop buying iPads altogether and start seeing the Fire as the only option, Amazon would still need Apple’s retail power at an international level. These people that write “iPad killer” seem to forget that the iPad is available in 64 countries today. Amazon’s Kindle Fire will ship November 15th in the US. So let’s put the “killer” argument behind us once and for all.

Amazon is about to launch a product that may end up being a feasible alternative to the iPad for some people, a product shares several similarities with Apple’s approach to the digital ecosystem. I have no doubt Amazon will sell millions of these new Kindles, and I think the Fire in particular will prove popular with families, readers, movie watchers, gamers – average consumers that may prefer a cheaper device integrated with the Amazon.com account they already have and use daily.

It’s hard to form a complete thought on Amazon’s new strategy because they’re just getting started. The unification process of Amazon’s ecosystem and diversification of unique devices begins today, and the Kindle Fire will ship in less than two months. It’s hard to imagine whether Amazon’s long-term plan is “trying to be like Apple” with international releases, rich App Store, deals with music labels, partnerships with carriers, and so forth. It’s also worth considering that Amazon isn’t completely independent from others yet, as the Kindle Fire runs on a modified version of Android 2.x with possible legal implications in patent fees. And more importantly, it doesn’t even make sense to “judge” the Kindle Fire right now as a winner or PlayBook when we even haven’t tried one. But two months from now, right ahead of the holiday season, let’s picture the following situation: assuming an average consumer interested in reading, listening to music, playing games, watching movies and browsing the web has $500 to spend, will he pick an iPad or a Kindle Fire? And is there a reason to pick both?

That’s where ecosystems prove their strengths.

Control Multiple Macs with Teleport

I don’t always use two Macs simultaneously, but when I do, either there’s an Apple keynote or I’m trying new apps.

That’s how I stumbled upon Teleport, a free OS X utility, last year when I needed to switch back and forth between MacBooks during an Apple keynote, and why I decided to take the app for a spin again now that’s been updated for Lion. Teleport isn’t new to Mac users – in fact, it’s been around since Tiger and it’s probably the most popular app to control two Macs on the same local network. Now that version 1.1 is out with support for Lion and multi-touch gestures, I thought a fresh mention would be appropriate.

Teleport is extremely simple in what it does, although it uses some advanced technology to accomplish it: once installed in System Preferences, Teleport allows you to move your cursor (and keyboard) between multiple Macs. Teleport recognizes Macs “shared” on the same network, and through a system similar to Apple’s “hot corners” and based on Bonjour, it lets you “teleport” the mouse across screens.

Shared Macs that have Teleport activated in the settings will show up with their respective desktops in the app’s panel; you can arrange Macs placing them next to a main computer’s screen so you’ll remember how to switch displays, and configure options in a dedicated sub-menu. These options include handy things like “switch only if key is pressed” or “share pasteboard”. In this latest version of Teleport you can assign a keyboard shortcut to switch to another Mac, and Lion’s gestures are fully supported so you’ll be able to perform three-finger swipes and other Mission Control trickery on a Mac running Lion.

When controlling my iMac through my MacBook Air’s trackpad and keyboard, I was able to drag & drop files using Teleport, and have the contents of the pasteboard from my MacBook Air automatically synced on my iMac. There are several utilities to control how the pasteboard is shared and synced across local Macs, but Teleport manages to make the whole process “invisible” in a package that also happens to do much more.

For instance, Teleport supports encryption for file transfers, and you can read more about it on Abyssoft’s website and the ReadMe file included in the download. Long story short: you can generate your own certificate to activate encryption and it’s even easier if you already have a .Mac account. Also in Teleport’s settings, you can enable a menubar item, bezel, and sound notifications. The sound effect is particularly neat when you switch between Macs, as it really gives you the sense of something “travelling” between two spaces (Teleport also displays a quick animation at the side of your screen). Control requests are also handled well between shared Macs, with options to “ask me if host can be trusted”, “reject if host not already trusted” and “automatically accept”. If you leave Teleport always running, when a shared Mac comes back online a red indicator will flash on the previously configured side of the screen.

Version 1.1 includes a few more features like:

  • Host specific options: you can define the switching and sharing options per host, to have different settings.
  • Propagated options: the options you set for a host also apply when coming back from it.
  • Full multi-screens support: all screens of shared Macs are now visible, so pairing a secondary screen is much easier than before.

Teleport isn’t new, but it’s nice to see the app working well on Lion with gestures and multiple displays. If you happen to control multiple Macs every once in a while, give Teleport a try. It’s a free download (and make sure to donate if you really like it).