The latest from TechCrunch
- It's Almost Here: Exclusive Video Of Lala's Upcoming iPhone App
- Netvibes Delivers A Potent Stream Reader With Wasabi (Beta Invites)
- Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0
| It's Almost Here: Exclusive Video Of Lala's Upcoming iPhone App | Top |
| Last March I wrote a preview post showing off Lala’s upcoming iPhone app, which gives users the ability to stream their entire music collection from the cloud, without having to worry about syncing their files. At the time Lala wasn’t ready to give a release date for the app, but our impression was that it was due out fairly soon. Obviously that wasn’t the case. But now we’ve gotten our hands on the latest version of Lala for the iPhone, which was just submitted to Apple for approval. And it’s safe to say that it was worth the wait. For those that haven’t used Lala before, here’s a quick overview of the service: Lala revolves around the concept of the ‘web song’ — you’re allowed to listen to any song you want totally free exactly once. If you like it, you can then pay 10 cents for the right to stream it as many times as you’d like from then on. This means that you can ‘purchase’ and entire album for around a dollar. You can also use Lala’s Music Mover tool to upload your entire library of MP3s to the cloud free of charge. This is all built on top of a very slick interface, but so far it has come with one downside: because all of the songs are streamed, users didn’t have a way to access them when they weren’t at a computer. Lala’s iPhone app changes that. The app will be familiar to anyone who has used the iPhone’s native iPod app. The big difference is that all of your songs are streamed from the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about syncing your songs. The app is also better for music discovery than the normal music app, because you don’t have to wait for songs to download — you can instantly add an album to your music library in one click. And it’s significantly cheaper. Of course, streaming has its own problems. Normally if you’re disconnected from a streaming music service, your music goes dead. Fortunately the Lala app uses caching to store hundreds of songs from your library, which it has waiting in case your connection dies. Lala wouldn’t say exactly how many songs are saved, but they say that the app uses some intelligence to determine what gets cached (e.g. it will generally save songs you’ve most recently added to your library). So what was the reason for the delay? Lala CEO Geoff Ralston says that “basically everything” had issues, from dealing with licensing from content owners to tweaking the app itself. Suffice to say, it works very well now, and is sure to be a hit among Lala users. It has good timing too: Lala just launched as one of the partners powering Google’s music search service, which is sure to drive a lot of traffic to the site. Other music streaming apps coming for the iPhone include Spotify , though that isn’t out in the US. Check out a video walkthrough of the app below. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Netvibes Delivers A Potent Stream Reader With Wasabi (Beta Invites) | Top |
| Netvibes, original widget homepage, is morphing into something much more interesting. The next version of the service, dubbed Wasabi, is a potent stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and much more in an extremely manageable interface. Wasabi will become available early next week in a private beta, but you can start signing up for it now . CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order. You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. “Any service that has a stream we can display it,” says Mini. Rather than scan across 20 boxes, Netvibes users will now have the option to mash everything together and filter simply by what’s been posted most recently. Wasabi has infinite scroll, so you can keep going down until you’ve had enough. There is also a new mosaic view, which shows each item as a visual tile. When you click on a tile, you get an expanded view that allows you to read the item, while keeping a strip of navigational tiles up top (see screenshots below). On the backend, Netvibes is speeding things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), which also launched at the Realtime CrunchUp, and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds. So Wasabi is not only a potent stream reader, it is faster too. I won’t miss the widget view one bit. Photo credit: YouTube/ FatoosVanRobin . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0 | Top |
| If you weren’t sure about switching to an Android phone in the near future, this might put you over the edge. Google Maps Navigation is an absolutely killer app. And it is only available for Android 2.0 phones. Today is Droid day , and for the most part Google is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention . But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices. Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product. First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity ( Dash is a notable exception). The application is also completely free. So all those paid navigation apps (Navigon, TomTom , CoPilot, MapQuest, GoKivo and Sygic Mobile) are at an immediate disadvantage. But even if Google charged for this app, it would still win hands down. The features include easy search (no need for address), voice search, traffic information (from data sources and crowd sourced from app), and street view close up pictures when you get near your destination. And the car dock mode gives bigger, simpler icons and auto-voice mode (see video): Search in plain English. No need to know the address. You can type a business name (e.g. "starbucks") or even a kind of a business (e.g. "thai restaurant"), just like you would on Google. Search by voice. Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”. Traffic view. An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch on the indicator toggles a traffic view that shows the traffic ahead. Search along route. Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking. Satellite view. View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery. Street View. Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination. Car dock mode. For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length. Here’s Navigation in the Droid dock, followed by an image gallery for the app: Video Demo Of Google Maps Navigation Official Google Navigation Video Screenshot Gallery Of Google Maps Navigation Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
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