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Spotify links up with BandPage to allow musicians to sell merchandise and exclusives directly to fans

Aug13
by on August 13, 2014 at 1:38 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Product Updates

Band

Streaming music service Spotify has today announced a deal with BandPage that will allow artists to sell their music directly to listeners via the platform. Announced today, the move may well be designed to help alleviate criticisms over the royalty rates musicians are paid when someone listens to their music on Spotify. Indeed, the company says that the new option will offer musicians additional “meaningful revenue opportunities” by allowing them to sell directly through BandPage. In addition to allowing artists to sell standard merchandise like t-shirts, they can also now offer tickets to secret shows or other exclusive content to their…

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Amazon launches Live App Testing, a developer tool for distributing Android and Fire apps to select testers

Aug13
by on August 13, 2014 at 1:30 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Google, Insider, Mobile

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Amazon today launched a new mobile developer tool called Live App Testing. In short, it allows you to distribute your apps in the Amazon Appstore to a pre-defined set of testers for the purpose of gathering feedback, improving quality, increasing stability and generally optimizing the experience before you push your app live for everyone to download. Live App Testing creates a version of your app that is only distributed to select testers, which are invited by manually adding email addresses. Testers receive an invite via email with instructions to download the test app and begin testing against Amazon’s production environment…

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Younity’s personal cloud service adds Instagram support for easier #TBT sharing

Aug13
by on August 13, 2014 at 1:00 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Product Updates

Screen Shot 2014-08-12 at 4.52.06 PM

While the focus of Instagram is — well, instant — the app does allow you to reach back into your photo archives to post older pictures to its service, as long as those photos reside on your phone. If the photo you want to post is somewhere else, say on your laptop hard drive or an external hard drive attached to your desktop computer, it takes a multi-step song and dance to get it posted on Instagram. But Throwback Thursday just got easier with Entangled Media’s Younity, a free personal cloud service that now lets you publish photos stored on your hard drive directly to…

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ZTE eyes Southeast Asia, seeking to build its brand with launch of three Android KitKat smartphones

Aug13
by on August 13, 2014 at 10:50 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Asia, Gadgets, Product Launches

zte

A market research firm recently pinned Chinese handset maker ZTE as the fourth-largest in the US according to shipment volumes. This came as a bit of a surprise, given that the company hasn’t really built up a reputation among consumers as a smartphone brand holding its own against the likes of Samsung and Apple. ZTE is, however, out to change that perception, and one of the regions it’s targeting is Southeast Asia. Today in Singapore, the company launched three new Android smartphones running KitKat — Blade VEC 4G, Blade L2 and KIS 3 — which will go on sale on…

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WeChat climbs to 438 million monthly active users, closing in on WhatsApp’s 500 million

Aug13
by on August 13, 2014 at 10:16 am
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Asia, messaging apps, Product Updates, wechat

Tencent published its earnings today for the second quarter of 2014, revealing a new milestone for its WeChat messaging app: it has risen to 438 million monthly active users, up from 396 million the previous quarter. The new figure, which covers both WeChat and Weixin – the version Tencent offers in China — means that it is closing in on rival WhatsApp’s 500 million active users. However, it can also be seen that WeChat’s growth is flattening quarter-on-quarter, which means it may struggle to catch up to its Facebook-owned competitor. WeChat is also facing difficulties in China, where its largest userbase is. Recently, the Chinese government…

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