Songza Mobile Apps Socialize the Digital Mix Tape

Streaming music service Songza launched apps for Android and iOS on Tuesday that are designed to make it easy for music fans to find and share digital playlists for practically any occasion.

Think of Songza as curated, hand-picked Internet radio. Like Pandora, Songza is not a stream-on-demand service (meaning, you can’t request to play a certain track or album). Unlike Pandora, Songza doesn’t impose any limitations on how much music you can listen to and it doesn’t serve any audio advertisements. Additionally, Songza doesn’t focus on creating artist based radio stations — although you can do that — instead, it focuses on connecting users with curated or peer-created mix tapes.

These playlists are organized around activities (like “Cocktail Party” or “Coding”), genres (“’70s NYC Punk” or “Math Rock”), Moods and even Culture. For instance, there is a whole playlist category dedicated to Cover Songs, featuring playlists like “More Popular Than the Original” and “Covering Cash.” The playlists are designed to capture a certain mood, event or activity.

Using the free Songza mobile app for iPhone [iTunes link] and Android [Android Market link], users can search and browse through Songza’s expertly curated playlists, save their favorites to their phone and share what they are listening to with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The Songza team’s previous venture, Amie Street, was acquired by Amazon.com last fall. Songza just closed a financing round led by the same investors that were previously involved in Amie Street. The company clearly has big plans for enhancing its social offerings by allowing users to share their playlists or favorites via social networks.

As it stands, Songza sees itself as a “music concierge” and a better, smarter way of handling social music discovery.

After using the iPhone app over the last 24 hours, we agree. Without a doubt, Songza has the smartest, most well thought out collection of playlists of any of the subscription music services. What we really appreciate is that it is clear that a lot of vetting has gone into creating the officially sanctioned lists. If your friends are on Songza, you can also use the app to follow the playlists they share or like and vice versa.

The one downside to Songza and its mobile app is that right now, users can only create playlists at the Songza.com website. Moreover, Songza’s licensing restrictions prevent users from listening to the playlists they create themselves.

Your friends can listen to your custom mix of ultimate Fall in New York City tunes, but you, the creator can’t. Songza’s co-founder and CEO Elias Roman told us that the company is looking at either partnering with existing on-demand subscription services such as Spotify or working out its own on-demand licensing agreement so that users can listen to their own selections.

If Songza can nail that last loop and provide users who are willing to pay with on-demand access to their own playlists, we could easily see Songza taking off in a huge way.

Still, even with the self-playlist limitations, Songza for iPhone and Android is one of the most promising mobile music apps we’ve seen all year.

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HP TopShot – A 3D Scanner for your Home

Last year, HP unveiled a new range of web-enabled printers that had an email address so you could send print jobs from any computer or mobile phone even while you were miles away from the printer. These printers, and all-in-ones, also had apps to help you print information – like maps, coloring books, news headlines - directly from the Internet without even turning on the computer.

What next? Yes, printers can be made more energy efficient, the printing speed (pages per minute) can be increased, the print quality can be improved, the cost of printing (ink consumption) can be reduced but are these “innovations” enough to excite the home consumer who often has limited printing needs? If you only print 5-10 pages in a day, none of these factors would possibly convince you to upgrade the printer.

HP’s upcoming Laser Printer - HP TopShot – does however carry that ‘wow’ factor and you’ll be quite impressed the first time you use this product (see video).

  
  

With HP TopShot, you can scan 3D objects – say your dull-finish DSLR camera, a watch or even a shining piece of jewelry – and it turns them into 2D pictures that you can either directly print to paper or send to the cloud (like Google Docs) as a digital image.

You just need to place the 3D object on the white surface, hit the Copy button on the 3.5” LCD screen and the scan should be ready in under a minute.

The magic happens inside that adjustable handle which is fitted with cameras and lights. As you hit the scan button, the cameras simultaneously capture multiple images of the 3D object and the internal software transforms all these images into one seamless picture.

HP TopShot, also known as HP LaserJet Pro M275,  is expected to become available in US and Canada later this year while the launch in India and other Asian countries is expected to happen sometime early next year. HP executives didn’t reveal the price but, as per the official website, this 3D scanner can be yours for around $400 (see tech specs).

Technically, what HP TopShot does is equivalent to capturing an image of a 3D object with your regular digital camera and then using Photoshop to remove the background. If you have an online store, say on eBay, TopShot could actually save you a lot of time.

HP also unveiled a new range of premium printers – HP Envy – for people who use Apple products the style-conscious consumer. These are wireless AirPrint enabled printers (you can print directly from and iPad or iPhone) and, unlike the other all-in-ones, the Envy series printers are compact and the white elegant body looks really good. HP says that the Envy range is most popular among Apple users.

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Google+ Hangouts Are Now More Sign-Language Friendly [VIDEO]

Google+ Hangouts were already popular with users who communicate with sign language, but thanks to improvements in video stability and a new “Take the Floor” feature, Google’s group video chat capability just got a lot more accessible for everyone.

Switching between speakers in Hangouts is automatic using voice activation, where whomever is talking the most (or the loudest) is shown in the main video area, and all others are seen in smaller video thumbnails. Sounds great, and that automatic switching is one of the coolest features of Google+ Hangouts.

But that wasn’t working as well for hearing-impaired users in chat areas where all users were signing — the main screen was usually occupied by whichever user’s microphone was picking up the most background noise. As a result, most users were often trying to read the sign language of people who were shown on tiny thumbnail screens.

Google’s fixed that with its new “Take the Floor” feature. In a Google+ post, Google engineering director Chee Chew explained how it works:

1) Have everyone mute their audio.
2) When you want to sign something, hit Shift+s.
3) When you see yourself as the main video, that’s your cue. You’ve got the floor… everyone’s main video has switched to you. Sign away.

Chew added, “We’ve noticed over the past few weeks that the stability and quality of the video in Hangouts has improved as well, which also makes it easier for the hearing impaired to see and understand sign language.”

Great idea, Google.

[via WebProNews]

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Best Buy Sales Suffer Without iPhone Launch

Best Buy, a bellwether for consumer electronics sales, posted weak second-quarter results as sales of TVs slowed and the lack of a high-profile smartphone launch weighed on revenues.

The retailer’s fiscal second-quarter income fell 30% to $177 million compared to the same period last year. The company’s revenues of $11.3 billion for the quarter were less than the $11.5 billion analysts projected and were flat with last year’s second quarter results.

The news sent Best Buy’s stock down about 8% to its lowest level since 2008 in Tuesday’s morning trading. “We’re still facing an uncertain macro-environment with volatile consumer shopping behavior, and this was evident in our results for the second quarter,” president and CEO Brian Dunn told analysts during a conference call Tuesday.

The company also blamed the lack of highly anticipated smartphone launches. Apple has released a new iPhone model every summer since 2007, but this year, the iPhone 5 launch is expected to launch in October.

Image courtesy of Flickr, osed8info

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The Best Mind Mapping App for iOS is now Free

If you have an iPhone or an iPad, here’s a mind-mapping app that you should not miss.

Mindjet is a neat iOS app that you may use to create mind maps, capture notes or to brainstorm ideas on your iPhone or iPad. The app was earlier selling in the iTunes store for $8.99 but, with the upcoming launch of Mind Manager 2012, the mobile app is now available as a free download.

Getting started with Mindjet is easy. Tap and hold a topic to create a child or a sub-topic. Double-tap to change the formatting or the shape of a node. You may also include images, hyperlinks and additional text in the various nodes.

You can connect the Mindjet app to your Dropbox account and the mind map files created on the iOS device will automatically synchronize with your PC or Mac folder. Since the app uses the native .mmap format, mind maps created on the iOS device can also be edited using Mind Manager software on the desktop and vice-versa.

Other alternatives to the Mindjet app include MindMeister, iThoughts HD and MindNode.

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Tools that Detect Changes on your Favorite Web Pages

Last month, my story about Facebook hitting a trillion page-views received an unexpected amount of interest around the web. I obviously don’t have inside sources nor did anyone contact me with those numbers – so how did I get the news about the trillion milestone before anyone else on the web?

The answer is simple. I use a web monitoring software that tracks a list of web pages (URLs) at set intervals and alerts me whenever content is added or deleted from these pages. In the above case, the monitoring utility was watching a page on google.com and the moment Google uploaded the new numbers, I got an alert on my desktop.

The utility that I have on my Windows machine is called Website Watcher from Aegnis.com – a single-user license for the basic edition of Website Watcher is about €30 and it supports all types of web addresses including secure http and ftp based URLs.

A web monitoring tool, in simple English, works something like this. You specify the address (URL) of a web page that you would like to track and how frequently the tool should ping the given page to determine if the content has changed.

In the case of Website Watcher, you can also visually specify the portions of a page that should be ignored for tracking (like the sidebar or the footer). Later, if the tool detects that a page has changed, you can compare the before and after versions of the page side-by-side and, like any other diff tool, the changed text is highlighted for quick comparison.

Website Watcher works well but if you are looking for a free alternative, check out NotiPage. This is again a Windows-only utility for monitoring web pages with basic monitoring features except for one limitation - NotiPage only highlights the new content that has been added to a page but you won’t be able figure out what has been removed from a page.

If you are monitoring a page that follows a regular pattern – like a Google Search results page where all the different results are rendered as a pattern using a similar set of HTML tags – you may also use Google Docs as a page monitor. You essentially scrap the page content into Google Docs with the help of ImportXML function and then track changes through RSS. This does however require some knowledge of XPath and CSS.

Versionista is another awesome web-based tool for tracking web pages. It lets you compare the two versions of a page side-by-side and thus you can know what has been added, or removed, from a page since you last viewed it. Versionista also lets you apply regular expression based filters to help you specify what kind of page edits should be ignored by the tool during the comparison.

Also see: Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

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Virgin America Unveils Plans for Next Gen In-Flight Entertainment

Virgin America, the first carrier to offer fleetwide WiFi in May 2009, will continue its commitment to in-flight digital innovation with the next iteration of its Red entertainment platform.

The new Red system, slated for a late 2012 consumer release, includes larger, high-definition touchscreen seatback monitors, full Wi-Fi connectivity and four times more entertainment content. It will also allow passengers to connect their own electronic devices to the system pre-flight, in-flight and post-flight.

“Red is still the most advanced entertainment system in the domestic skies,” says Abby Lunardini, VP of corporate communications for Virgin America. “Other airlines are not making an investment in in-seat entertainment; they’re just doing WiFi. Fleet WiFi will always be a focus for us, but our built-in entertainment system is still important, and we think we can offer the best of both worlds.”

Red usage has increased by 20% each year since 2008. Passengers tend to multitask in-flight, using both the entertainment system and WiFi on their personals devices, Lunardini says.

When the upgraded monitors and the new Red entertainment platform reach consumers in 2012 — the system is currently in development — the most noticeable change, apart from the larger screen size, will be the addition of full WiFi connectivity, providing passengers access to the unfettered web via the seatbacks in front of them. Although still being fleshed out, the new Red, as Lunardini envisions it, will also include applications for easy Facebook, Twitter and other social network access.

“This is a significant investment for us,” Lunardini says of the company’s commitment to reworking Red. “We want to stay ahead of the path … a lot of people fly with us because it. We’re an entertainment-driven brand … and we did not want to stand idle.”

The next iteration of Red is being announced Tuesday at the 2011 Airline Passenger Experience Association Expo in Seattle with Lufthansa Systems, Virgin America’s technology partner. Back-end testing of the system will start on #nerdbird, Virgin America’s Twitter hashtag-inspired Airbus A320.

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