Back in July there was an announcement that Spotify and Virgin would be joining together to offer a music services to Virgin Media customers. Today the announcement becomes a reality.
Virgin are offering Spotify Premium as part of your Virgin media broadband or mobile contract.
The package on offer is slightly different from anticipated — initially Virgin were saying the £9.99 monthly cost from Spotify would be less.
Vlingo is tagged as “your intelligent virtual assistant” — that’s quite a general statement so I will define it as a voice recognition tool for your mobile.
In recent weeks there has been a lot of blogging words committed to Siri for Apple’s iPhone 4S but Vlingo covers a greater range of platforms. A colleague gave me a heads up to the App a few days ago and since then I had a quick ‘play’ with it but not much else.
Coldplay, the UK alternative rock band, have decided to shun streaming services such as Spotify for their latest album, Mylo Xyloto.
Fans need to download the album via iTunes or other music online stores, or purchase a physical CD. Their label, EMI, said “We always work with our artists and management on a case by case basis to deliver the best outcome for each release.”
Finally, after what seemed like eons, Google allow Google Apps users to access all the Google+ services. Basically, those who have their own domain name hosted by Google can now sign up to G+.
Your domain administrator needs to sign in to GMail and “Manage this Domain”. Then Click Organization & Users, then Services. Scroll well down the list and click ‘On’ for Google+. Save the settings.
For those, like me, currently using another email address in G+ there will be a migration tool in a ‘few weeks’. Personally I decided not to wait and started again with a new G+ account in my Domain.
(You don’t need a Google email account to use Google+ but if you already have a GMail Domain account this is good news)
Enjoy
Unthink.com, the latest in a long line of Social Networking services, wants to be the Facebook killer or at least a viable alternative if you value your privacy.
Getting any hard detail on the service is actually very difficult beyond a few crazy video adverts, which I slot into the same area as an Ikea advert — a little bit of crazy!
I blogged a few days ago on the failed beta launch but I have now been able to login and use the system and what follows is my first impressions on it.
A momentous day Readers — the blog hit 10,000 views and I am delighted and humbled. I started this little blog having no idea how it would develop, or even if I would have any readers, and here we are just seven months later hitting, what I think is, an impressive milestone.
Ten thousand may not be a big number if I were a commercial blog but I am just one and I’m delighted. Hopefully you find the posts interesting?
Another week another Social Network site launches. This time it’s unthink.com, who tout themselves as the anti-facebook site. Today it opened the doors to the first round of beta testers and I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the launch.
Unthink received (US) $2.5 million funding for the project and aims to be more open and put you in complete control of your data.
The Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark has completed a of study which hopefully dispels the myth that using a mobile phone can cause brain cancer.
There have been several studies in the past coming to a similar conclusion, however this is one of the longest and most in-depth. Over a period of 18 years they looked at over 350,000 people using mobile phones and concluded there was no increased risk of mobile phone users contracting a brain tumour.
The result, published in the British Medical Journal, attracted praise for the way in which the study was conducted. The Institute do however note that not every category of user was well represented — especially the ‘corporate’ user known for heavy mobile phone use.
Interestingly the World Heath Organisation still rate the mobile phone at the same level as coffee for its carcinogenic properties.
The study is encouraging news.
Box (aka box.net) have announced a brief promotion giving iOS users a free account with 50Gb of storage rather than the normal 5Gb.
The offer is open to anyone who uses an iPhone or iPad and there seems to be no catch. Sign up for a normal free account then access it at least once from the iPad/Phone and your account is upgraded to 50Gb. You can even download the free App from the Apple store and sign up within the App. If you already have a paid account with Box you can also get the additional space.
At the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday Google announced some long awaited features for Google+, their Social Networking platform.
Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social business at Google said “By Christmas you will see the Goolge+ strategy coming together. The reality was that we had to prioritize doing some work and we didn’t anticipate such fast growth”