apps
Songkick and Spotify a match made in heaven with 100,000 new users
Earlier today, Songkick announced that over 100,000 users have signed up to its service through the Songkick Concerts App on Spotify since last year when it was launched. Users who have registered on Songkick through Spotify have been receiving millions of concert alerts. When using Spotify, users can choose to track their favorite artist and Songkick will send the user a concert alert if their selected artist is performing somewhere. This removes the need to wade through concert information online as the details of the few specific artists you want come directly into your mobile device.
The reason why the numbers seem so large is because the app caters to artists ranging from coffee shop musicians, jazz quartets right up to big name stars performing in arena shows. As Spotify’s Director of Platform, Sten Garmark says, “Spotify is not just a place to listen to all the world’s music but – thanks to apps like Songkick – it is also a great place to find out when and where you favorite artst will be playing live.” Besides proffering you information regarding your artist and their performance, the application also provides the user with the means to buy tickets from within the app itself which is proving to be good for both, fans of live music and for artists. While the idea of combining the two apps to integrate their usage, the idea needed more than that. It needed a spark and it seems like this combination sounds like a right one.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!