Spotify

• Price: Free
• Category: Utilities , Applications
• Version: 0.5.0
• Size: 12.4 MB
• Languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish
• Seller: Spotify
• © 2008-2010 Spotify Ltd.
• Download: Spotify

Rated 12+ for the following:

• Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
• Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
• Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later

Description

Get free access to Spotify Premium now! With Premium you'll get access to millions of tracks from thousands of albums and artists on your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad. If you haven’t tried Premium before, you can try it on your mobile for 48-hours, completely free. You don’t even have to enter credit card details. Simply download this app and log in using your Facebook account*.

If 48-hours isn’t enough, you can extend your trial by 30 days by following the details in the email we send you when you log in.

If you don't want to extend your Premium trial, or subscribe to Premium, you can still enjoy Spotify on your phone. Wirelessly sync and play mp3s from your computer, explore our music catalogue, and edit your playlists.

Praise for Spotify

- "Spotify is so good" – Mark Zuckerberg - CEO and Founder of Facebook
- "The celestial jukebox is no pipe dream; it’s here now." - Time
- "Spotify makes music fun again, just like the iPod did nearly 10 years ago." – Billboard.biz

Great features

• Instant access to millions of tracks
• Stream online
• Listen offline – no mobile connection needed
• Share music with your friends
• Star your favourite tracks
• Wirelessly sync your own MP3s to your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad
• Create and sync playlists
• Send the tracks you listen to direct to Last.fm & Facebook

Love Spotify?

Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/spotify
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spotify

* Full mobile terms of Use & 48-hour free trial terms and conditions can also be found on the Spotify website.

Download Spotify

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Google+

• Price: Free
• Category: Social Networking
• Updated: May 09, 2012
• Version: 2.0.0.5888
• Size: 18.2 MB
• Languages: English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Moldavian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
• Seller: Google Mobile
• © Google Inc. 2012
• Download: Google+

Rated 4+

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later

Description

Share and keep up with people no matter where you are with the Google+ app. Join a hangout, post a photo, or see what friends are sharing while you’re on the go. Use Messenger to get everyone on the same page with fast, simple group chat.

Features:
- Turn on Instant Upload to sync photos from your phone to a private Google+ album
- Video chat with up to 9 friends with mobile Hangouts in Messenger
- Chat with a friend or all your friends at once with Messenger
- Check out the What’s Hot stream to see trending topics
- View the Nearby stream to see what people near your location are saying

Download Google+

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Apple Buys Chomp – App Search Engine For $50 Million

TechCrunch reports that Apple has acquired Chomp - a startup that offers app search and discovery platform. Chomp also has a free iPhone app in the App Store. 

TechCrunch reports:

Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.

We first covered Chomp in November 2009 to announce their seed funding. Since then, they’ve grown their scope to include not only iPhone apps, but Android apps as well. In fact, Chomp currently has a deal with Verizon to power all of their Android-based app searches. That relationship, obviously, is going to get a bit awkward with this acquisition.

My understanding is that such deals will remain intact for now but are likely to end once the Chomp team and product fully transitions over to Apple. The same is likely true for Chomp’s stand-alone products.

As the number of apps have increased in the App Store, which is now over 550,000 apps, it has become more and more difficult to find a new app. Apple understands that it has a growing problem on its hand and seems to have bought Chomp to help address it. Chomp claims that "their proprietary algorithm learns the functions and topics of apps, so you can search based on what apps do, not just what they’re called. Try searching for “puzzle games”, “kids games”, “expense trackers”, “tip calculators” or “chat” and start finding great apps."

We just tried Chomp (iTunes link), though we liked the user interface, we were not very impressed with the search results.

Apple has confirmed to AllThingsD that it has acquired Chomp:

Apple on Thursday confirmed it has acquired San Francisco-based start-up Chomp, which operates a search engine for apps, for an undisclosed amount. Apple declined to elaborate on how it plans to integrate Chomp, other than to say it sometimes acquires technology companies and generally doesn’t discuss its plans. 

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Apple may have bought Chomp for about $50 million, which is an awesome deal for a 20-employee startup that has raised $2.5 million in two rounds of funding. The other bonus is that they all get to work for Apple.

9 to 5 Mac reports that according to their sources Chomp CEO Ben Keighran and CTO Cathy Edwards are already working at Apple.

Keighran has joined the iTunes Marketing team and Edwards is now a Senior iTunes Engineer.

We can't wait to see how Apple plans to use Chomp's technology to improve App Store search and recommendations.

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iOS 5.1 to Bring Rich Text Formatting to Notes App

Folks at iPhoneHellas have posted a screenshot of the Notes app from iOS 5.1 beta, which suggests that Apple plans to enhance the Notes app to finally include rich text formatting.

With iOS apps such as Notes coming to Macs with OS X Mountain Lion, it makes sense to allow rich text formatting in the Notes app.

Based on the screenshot, it looks like we will soon be able to include bulleted lists, add hyperlinks, change the color of the text and more.

Apple is rumored to release iOS 5.1 on or around March 9th, which is couple of days after it unveils iPad 3.

Even though Apple has seeded three beta versions of iOS 5.1 (beta 1, beta 2, beta 3) so far, it hasn't revealed too many new features other than the slider button for the Camera app in the lock screen and support for Japanese coming to Siri.

[iPhoneHellas source iMore]

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Apple Launches ’25 Billion App Countdown’ Promotion; Winner To Get $10,000 App Store Gift Card

When Apple launched the App Store on July 10th, 2008, even they would not have thought in their wildest imaginations that it would end up becoming such a huge success.

The success of the App Store was clear when one billion apps were downloaded in just 9 months. Fast forward to today and the App Store is about to hit the magical 25 billion app download mark.

Apple has launched a 25 Billion App Countdown promotion to celebrate the milestone. The user who downloads the 25 billionth app from the App Store will get a $10,000 App Store gift card.

As of today, nearly 25 billion apps have been downloaded worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves. So we want to say thanks. Download the 25 billionth app, and you could win a US$10,000 App Store Gift Card.

Users can enter the promotion up to 25 times every day by either downloading an app from the App Store or by simply filling an alternate entry form – for free.

Apple ran a similar promotion for 10 billion app downloads almost a year back.

You can checkout this webpage for the contest details. The counter was at 24,296,320,429 at the time of writing this post and it's moving very fast. Keep an eye on the counter and don't miss out on the opportunity to win the $10,000 iTunes gift card. Good luck!

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Process Killer: App That Allowed Users to Close All Apps Running in The Background Was Briefly Available in The App Store

While there are jailbreak tweaks available to kill processes running in the background to free up memory, did you know that there was an app briefly available in the App Store that allowed users to kill processes running in the background or at least that is what it claimed to do. 

Apple seems to have removed Process Killer app developed by Aeonika from the App Store recently. We found out about the Process Killer app when we came across this article by Digital Inspiration's Agarwal, which talks about "How to close all apps in the background".

Though the app still shows up in the search results on Google, clicking on the link (which is an App Store link) gives you the following error message: "The item you've requested is not currently available in the App Store".

Here're some interesting details about the Process killer app:

• As you can see from the screenshot above, the app received quite a lot of favorable reviews in the App Store from users.
• This was the description of the app in the App Store (courtesy Appolicious):

Application shows you background processes and memory consumption.The app "kills" with it's simplicity!

• You can checkout the screenshot and demo video of the app below:

• It looks like the app was available in the App Store since October 2011 and was available for $0.99. According to the Digital Inspiration's article published on 6th January 2012, it was a free app.

We're not sure how the app sneaked into the App Store, as we're quite sure that the app used unpublished API's that officially break Apple's iOS Developer agreement. The other issue is that when you click on the URL for developer's website, you're taken to an under construction page.

If you've seen this video by iOS developer - Fraser Speirs, which gives a demo of how iOS multitasking works then it is also possible that Apple removed the app from the App Store for misleading users.

Whatever the reason, we were quite surprised to find out that there was an app available to kill background processes in the App Store so we thought of sharing it with you.

Have a nice weekend!

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Apple Sends ‘Take Down’ Notices to AppTrackr – Major Source of Pirated iOS Apps

AppTrackr - which is a website that allows users to illegally download and install pirated iOS apps has announced (via Installous) that they have started receiving take down notices from Apple.

AppTrackr claims that Apple has been scrapping their links and sending them take down notices for a lot of their content, which has forced them to implement CAPTCHA checks to all outbound links.

ApplTrackr has also revealed that they've moved their servers and will be placing an ad on the CAPTCHA page to help them support their servers.

It is good to see Apple taking steps to prevent piracy of iOS apps, which has been an issue ever since Apple launched the App Store and should come as good news to developers. It remains to be seen if Apple can prevent piracy of iOS apps completely as it would also help in getting rid of the stigma of piracy that is unfortunately associated with jailbreaking.

Sometimes we wonder whether Apple would have taken a different stance if jailbreaking was not used for illegal activities such as piracy of apps.

[iJailbreak source 9 to 5 Mac]

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NFL To Stream Super Bowl XLVI To iPhone And iPad

We have some good news for NFL fans (with some caveats).

NFL and NBC has announced that it will stream the Super Bowl and the Pro Bowl live on its website for the first time.

NFL will also stream the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl live to Verizon's NFL Mobile app for iPhone and iPad (App Store link). Unfortunately, this means that it will be available only to Verizon Wireless customers.

According to Fierce Online video, users will be able to watch the game online in HD, access DVR-style controls and select additional camera angles. They'll also get access to in-game highlights, live statistics and other interactive elements.

It won't be the first time NFL has streamed live online, it has streamed Sunday Night Football games since 2008 with SNF Extra previously

Rick Cordella, vice president and general manager for NBC Sports Digital Media had this to say:

"We don't want to limit ourselves to people not in front of the TV."

The Super Bowl is the biggest attraction of the year on television, with last season's Packers-Steelers matchup drawing 111 million viewers, which was a record U.S. audience for any show.

It would have been great if NFL would have streamed the Super Bowl to all mobile users rather than restricting it to only Verizon Wireless customers. We're hoping that yesterday's announcement is a step in that direction.

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