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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PicPlz, Fashism & 29 Others Implement New Aviary Photo Editing Tool for Mobile

Aviary, a four-year-old startup that offers a set of free photo, design and audio tools, is launching a new plugin for developers that easily puts photo editing and effects in any iPhone or Android app.

PicPlz, Fashism and 29 other companies have already agreed to use it.

Developers can choose features from a basket of Aviary tools — basic editing tools like crop, flip, rotate, sharpen, blur and red eye removal, as well as fun features like drawing, text, stickers, and photo filters — and customize the user interface to fit within their design.

This is the second Aviary release this year that powers other startups’ products behind the scenes rather than through an embeddable widget or standalone tool. The first was an Effects API that allows any website or mobile app to easily tweak or add effects to its photos.

While Aviary had a Twilio-style monetization plan in mind for that API, in which it would charge frequent users for its service, Alex Taub, lead partnerships and third party integrations, says the startup will likely add premium features for brands to its new plug-in.

Here are how several startups have already implemented the free tool:

Image courtesy of Flickr, bareform

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Writing for Mobile Blog Readers

This guest post is by Brian Milne of the BlogHyped Blog Promotion Community.

As far as you know, your blog is mobile friendly.

You’ve optimized the design for mobile devices using plugins such as WPtouch. You’ve started serving Google mobile ads. Heck, you even have your own mobile app.

Copyright Aaron Amat - Fotolia.com

But are you turning away mobile readers with your content? Are your 2,000-word posts, bogged down with 200-DPI images and run-on sentences, negating all your other efforts?

Possibly. But with mobile users making up between 5% (global) and 8.2% (U.S.) of overall traffic, you’re probably wondering if it’s worth tailoring content for mobile users.

Well, like any form of writing, you can’t satisfy every audience, but here are some reasons to consider mobile when producing content for your blog:

The iPhone/iTouch combo was the fastest-growing consumer electronics line of all time (before the addition of the iPad and the dozens of ensuing anti-Apple tablets).The line between entertainment and the web has blurred thanks to today’s multi-use devices (desktops, laptops, phones, readers, iPods, TVs, kiosks, gaming consoles).And most importantly, many mobile writing tips will improve your content on the traditional Web as well.

A wise old newspaper editor once gave me some great advice, even though I didn’t want to hear it as a reporter: “When you’re done with your story, cut out 100 words before you file it. Then it’s done.”

Hacking 100 words from a blog post is pretty extreme, but it can’t hurt to trim 25 to 50 words. Cut out content that’s irrelevant, or acts as a speed bump in your post. Your content should flow from beginning to end, without any bumps or potholes that’ll bounce your readers off the site.

Cutting down content also carries over to the images and media that complement your post. Whether they’re reading on a desktop or a tablet, users bail when page-load time becomes a problem. The W3C recommends pages be no more than 10KB, and total page weight shouldn’t exceed 20KB (images included). Using a mobile theme or skin will help shed that weight, but using a content delivery network (CDN) and making sure your images and other assets are “web ready” will speed things up across all devices and platforms.

Along with tightening up your writing and getting to the point early in posts (getting a keyword phrase in the first couple sentences is a best practice across the board), it’s always a good idea to break up the main body text with subtitles and bullets.

Subtitles not only break up your post into digestible pieces, but they’re an ideal place to inject keyword phrases as H2 tags, further improving your SEO efforts.

Bulleted lists such as Top 10s are another popular approach, not only because they’re interesting and generate traffic in a hurry, but because they’re easier to read on both the traditional and mobile web.

If you’re writing about a subject readers on the move could benefit from (restaurant reviews, event information, etc.), give your mobile readers the details they’re searching for.

As with the traditional Web, a large portion of mobile users stumble upon blogs via search (Google reported mobile searches quadrupled in 2010, with one in seven searches coming from a mobile device), so don’t hesitate to include mobile-critical details such as phone numbers, addresses, websites and directions. Keeping your traditional Web readers in mind, you can avoid bogging down your body copy by offsetting those additional “mobile” details in parentheses, taglines, captions or callouts.

The key to a successful blog or online community is user engagement, no matter the device at the reader’s fingertips.

The easiest way to encourage interaction is through comments. But on a mobile device, with fat fingers and tiny keyboards, commenting can be a challenge. Unless, of course, your blog integrates smoothly with quick-hit services such as Twitter and Facebook—communities that thrive in the mobile realm because they’re easy to use on the fly.

Even if mobile users aren’t commenting on your blog in a traditional sense, give them plenty of other options to talk about your site, and, more importantly, link to you from the social mediasphere.

Unless you have a website geared specifically toward mobile readers, it would be foolish to abandon traditional blogging and web writing best practices for mobile-only content. Even the most popular blogs out there—problogger.net, for example—see an average of only 5-8% of overall traffic coming from mobile devices.

Rather than focusing exclusively on that small slice of readers, consider the entire audience with your content development efforts—all while keeping in mind the smartphone market is projected to grow by 49.2% this year, according to the IDC.

Take advantage of this opportunity to not only better your content overall, but prepare for the mobile takeover. Absorb valuable online resources like ProBlogger, and consider offline resources like community college writing courses and those dusty old journalism books filled with priceless tips about writing for busy newspaper readers.

It might sound funny, but those age-old writing techniques carry right over to today’s hurried mobile readers. (Think of bus or subway commuters who replaced their morning newspaper with smartphones and tablets.) Now is the time to work those suggestions into your blog. Get the nutgraph (keyword phrase) of your story in your lead (first 140 characters). Write short paragraphs, and use bullets (lists) and subheads (H2 tags) to improve readability.

You’ll be surprised at how well those old-school, JOURN-101 tips can tighten up your content and enhance the user experience for your blog readers—whether they’re surfing via the traditional web or their mobile devices.

Follow those tips and it’s only a matter of time before your blog is truly mobile friendly.

What tips do you have for improving content for both mobile and traditional web audiences? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A former senior writer and editor for McClatchy Newspapers, Brian Milne founded the BlogHyped.com and BallHyped.com social voting communities, where bloggers can share their posts, get followed links and additional blogging resources. Connect and share your blogging tips with Brian via Twitter @BMilneSLO.

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Apple tops the mobile PC Market, passes HP with 13.5m units shipped

The latest findings from DisplayResearch show that Apple has passed HP in mobile PC shipments during the second quarter. Thanks chiefly to the success of the iPad 2, Apple managed to ship a reported 13.5m units, representing a rise of 136 percent from the year-ago quarter. Not a bad to start the day for the Cupertino gang.

According to DisplayResearch, the 13.5m units Apple shipped in the second quarter represent 21 percent of the mobile PC market. This information along with other manufacturers’ data is contained in the company’s “Quarterly Mobile PC shipment and Forecast Report” which it release today.

Obviously the key to Apple’s success, at least according to report, is that DisplayResearch include tablets in its definition of mobile PC. With 80 percent (10.7m) of Apple’s mobile PC shipments coming from iPad sales, the magic lie in the slate.

via Cnet

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Three unveils Huawei E586 MiFi: the UK’s first HSPA+ mobile hotspot

Ah, the power of speed. Today, Three announced the Huawei E586 MiFi. As the first mobile Wi-Fi device in the UK to support HSPA+ mobile broadband technology, the E586 MiFi will be able to ride Three’s upgraded 21.1Mbps network later this year. Upload speeds are set at 5.76 Mbps (HSUPA) and this bad boy even has a microSD card slot which supports up to 32GB cards.

Beyond the blistering fast speeds and storage options, the Huawei E586 MiFi has a horde of other features. Firstly, there’s an OLED display on the front of the unit which displays key information like the amount of data used, speed of the current connection, length of browsing time and dashboard for viewing SMS and changing settings. Compared to other MiFi units, the display alone is enough to win our hearts.

Further, the most important selling point to the E586 MiFi is the network. Three commands the UK’s biggest 3G mobile broadband network. Without a steady stream of bits and bytes, this MiFi will be of little use and the device’s 4.5 hours of battery life will be of no consolation.

The Huawei E586 will be available in store and online from September.

Coming September | Three | TBD

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