Walkbase Releases Tweagle, A Twitter Client Built On Location
Walkbase, has released Tweagle, a new product taking advantage of the company's advanced indoor positioning API. Essentially Tweagle is an Android Twitter client that integrates with Foursquare, but with a lot more useful positioning features for the Twitter world. The app looks polished, and makes it possible to hear what people are saying at a certain bar, club, or festival, for example.
Spotify Pushing Their API To Motivate Independent Developers
An OSX developer from Spotify's labs came out with a new third party desktop client for Spotify to show off the power of the libspotify and CocoaLibSpotify API features. The client, called Viva, is only runnable on Mac OSX Lion systems and with those with a Premium Spotify account. It can be downloaded from here, or you can view and build it from source on Github. With it, you get a quick and buggy version of Spotify, but with some notably missing features from the standard version such as a visualizer. To be honest, Viva really didn't work for me at all. It told me that every normal track wasn't playable in my area, but as a concept it does point to an early 2000's Winamp era of customization of features for Spotify.
Spotify To Integrate Apps Within Its Application? (Updated)
Later this evening European time, Spotify is holding a Global Press Conference in NYC to announce "a new direction for the company". If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Spotify will announce a new push for third party apps to integrate with Spotify, starting with an "app finder" integrated into the service starting tomorrow. Right now we'll speculate away, but will also keep this post updated as more is announced.
(See updates below the fold):
46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
Tradeshift Opens Up Its Arms, Brings Its Apps To Developers
Tradeshift, the Danish firm that has been in reports quite often here at ArcticStartup is making itself more useful with the announcement of bringing their applications to developers. To put it out more clearly, this would enable developers to build applications within the Tradeshift ecosystem.
Rdio Looking To Avoid Apple's 30% Cut With APIs
Rdio, the online music straming company founded by the former Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has announced that they will be releasing a set of APIs to developers, according to ReadWriteWeb. This comes as an attempt to try and go around Apple's counter announcement of them charging 30% of new subscribers that will come through their iPhone apps, a move which has been widely criticized for "killing the online music business". Margins are very low and online streaming services such as Rdio (and Spotify for that matter) are scrambling to find new ways to keep the business model afloat.
