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picplz

| FREE | picplz.com

An Easy Way to Share IPhone Photos Online - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Picplz, a low-profile photo sharing start-up from the founders of Imeem, expanded its reach Monday with the introduction of an iPhone app. Picplz is like a visual Twitter. People can post cellphone photos that are tagged with location and create a stream of photos and optional short captions. The photos appear on Picplz.com and people can also post them to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. “We’re keeping it really really stripped-down, letting the tool stay out of the way and letting people tell a story,” said Dalton Caldwell, Picplz’s co-founder and chief executive. Mr. Caldwell and Picplz’s other co-founder, Bryan Berg, started it after selling the assets of Imeem, their now-shuttered music site, to MySpace. They began with a Web site and Android app, which 50,000 people have been using, and waited to offer an iPhone app until they worked out the kinks. Of course, a lot of other companies do similar things. Flickr and Picasa are for sharing photos online, Tumblr and Twitter let people post photos with microblog entries and services like Twitpic and Yfrog are cellphone photo uploaders. Mr. Caldwell says there is room for something new that combines these elements. More people are carrying cellphones with high-quality cameras, and the app makes it easy to share those photos and tag them with location. Several tech companies, including Google, have been talking about the potential value in images posted in real-time and tagged with location. Picplz’s ultimate goal, he said, is not to be a photo uploader for other sites but to direct people to its site, where they can view photos by location or by user. Picplz hopes to build a community on the site and add more features based on how people use it, he said. Unlike photo-sharing Web sites, Picplz is built around its mobile apps. Read More

YouTube Mobile

| FREE | Google

Google Makes the iPhone YouTube App Obsolete - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

What’s the difference between the new version of YouTube’s mobile Web site and the Apple-created YouTube application that is installed on every iPhone? The Web site is a lot better. At least that’s the subtext of a video that YouTube released as it announced the overhaul of the mobile site on Wednesday. The site (in English only for now) has a number of new features that match those found on the normal YouTube site and are devised to cater to the growing number of mobile YouTube users. Andrey Doronichev, a product manager on the YouTube mobile team, wrote on the company’s blog that the mobile site, which was introduced in 2007, serves up 100 million video plays a day. But there’s more to the company’s promotional video than meets the eye. Here’s a dissection of its subliminal messages, with images from the video. 0:09 A finger reaches from below an iPhone’s screen and, instead of pressing a clearly visible icon for the preinstalled YouTube application, heads straight to the Safari Web browser for what the video’s introduction calls “the full YouTube experience.” (This iPhone owner has, of course, set Google as his home page.) 0:24 The video flashes through some images of the site’s slick design, and then pushes the point that there really isn’t a difference between the YouTube application and the Web version by showing a video shifting to horizontal mode as the phone is turned. 0:30 Hold on to your popcorn. The phone suddenly turns into a Nexus One running the Android software from Google. It’s magical. What is Google trying to say here? “We’re trying to show that our end goal is to provide consistency, no matter which device you’re using,” Mr. Doronichev said in an interview. In other words, the mobile site looks the same no matter Read More

Kindle

| FREE | AMZN Mobile LLC

Amazon Releases Kindle App for Android Phones - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

No Kindle? No problem. Amazon is quickly expanding the reach of its electronic books business by offering its Kindle application on PCs and mobile phones. On Monday the company took that approach further, announcing the release of a new Kindle reading application, called Kindle for Android, that is available as a free download for phones running Google’s Android software. As with other Kindle applications, users will be able to download books they have started reading on other devices directly to their mobile phones and save their place across other devices using Amazon’s Whispersync system. This new announcement puts Amazon farther ahead of its competitors in offering a read-everywhere experience. For those who do not want to buy a Kindle reading device or don’t want to carry it everywhere, there are Kindle applications for all versions of the Apple iPhone, the iPad, PC and Mac computers, BlackBerry cellphones and now a range of Android-powered phones. By way of comparison, books purchased from the Apple iBookstore can only be read on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. In an Amazon press release, Dorothy Nicholls, who is responsible for the Kindle business, said, “Our customers tell us they love the convenience of having their Kindle library with them everywhere and their reading synchronized across multiple devices.” Amazon also said that Android owners can expect several new features to appear in the application in the near future, including the ability to search the text within a book and to buy new Kindle books from within the app. Read More

mSpot Music

| FREE | mSpot, Inc.

Three Cloud Music Companies to Watch - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Internet observers eagerly awaiting the arrival of “music in the cloud”— services that store people’s music collections on the Web and stream their songs to any computer or mobile device — tend to focus their attention on the plans of the big guys like Apple, Google and Amazon and the brand-name subscription services like Rhapsody and Spotify. Yet as the giants make their move, a wave of innovation in digital music is coming from entrepreneurs trying to anticipate and exploit trends like cloud computing, smartphones and broadband mobile networks. Here are several new and older music companies to watch as digital music makes its way into the cloud. . A mobile media company based in Palo Alto, Calif., mSpot is rolling out a so-called “music locker” service on Monday. Users of the service can upload their music collections to the Web and stream their songs to any PC, Macintosh and soon, a variety of mobile devices (starting with Android; an iPhone app is on the way.) The first two gigabytes of storage (around 1600 songs) are free, and there’s a variety of fees for extra storage. It seems to me that mSpot is taking a legal risk here: it has not secured special cloud music licenses from music labels and publishers. Darren Tsui, mSpot’s chief executive, says the company does not have to, since consumers have a “fair use” right to make a  copy of their media collection, and mSpot is storing separate copies of everyone’s songs in their own individual online locker. Still, Mp3Tunes.com, a similar service founded by music pioneer Michael Robertson, was sued by EMI back in 2007 and that litigation is still going on. . The 12-year-old Internet music store has one of the most complex propositions in the digital music scene. Its 400,000 subscribers pay a Read More