China :: Science & Technology

Spotify is opening up its service to developers to create free applications inside its desktop app that build off its fast-growing streaming music platform. The company, which already provides a limited application programming interface (API) to developers, is now enabling robust integration of apps inside its desktop client, allowing developers to tap into Spotifys 15 million songs and its growing user base. The goal is to create a lively ecosystem that helps draw more users into Spotifys world and helps them discover and share more music. Founder Daniel Ek said Spotify is trying to fill a void on the web, which has a lot of sites and applications dedicated to music but often have little music content. By opening up Spotify as a platform, Ek is hoping to unleash a lot of innovation that can help kick music consumption into high gear, turning music into something as ubiquitous as water. Todays integration keeps Spotify simple and beautiful but later on social and fun. One way to think...

Last night a source of mine sent me a text message about spotting Jerry Yang and David Filo (in a suit) at Palo Altos Four Seasons Hotel in company of some serious looking men, who spend a lot of time (and money) appearing to be self-important, a skill they perhaps learn in business school. His pithy message to sum it all up looks like it is all going down. The it is Yahoos very public auction of itself to the highest private equity bidder. In case you were hiding under a rock, here is a recap of rumors around Yahoos possible sale: Silver Lake Partners wants to buy a minority stake in Yahoo for about $16.60 a share (valuing Yahoo at $20.6 billion or about 6 percent higher than yesterdays closing price.) Silver Lake is working with Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz. The transaction is going to use PIPEs, private investment in public equity a type of transaction long reserved for somewhat dubious companies. Jerry Yang will stay on the board, but the investors will get three seats on t...

HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis thats pushing a big-data processing-and-delivery platform, has tuned its software to run on Amazons cloud computing platform. Interested developers can now experiment with the open source software without having to wrangle physical servers for that purpose, which brings HPCC one step closer to establishing itself as a viable alternative to the uber-popular Hadoop framework. When I last spoke with HPCC Systems CTO Armando Escalante in September, he explained that although he thinks his company will have little trouble attracting risk-averse large enterprise and government customers, it will be tougher to establish a developer ecosystem similar to what Hadoop has built. As good as HPCC might be and at least some analysts are starting to sing its praises having a vibrant community goes a long way. Hadoop has no shortage of startups, large vendors and individual developers committed to it already. That gives potential users the confidence that ...

Email is far from dead and is in fact an increasingly popular way for companies to maintain relationships with consumers. But it really hasnt been an effective way to deliver dynamic real-time ads that can serve up impressions to advertisers and bring in revenue for publishers. But LiveIntent , a New York-based startup, is poised to change all that with a real-time ad serving technology for email. The company is announcing today the release of LiveIntent for Publishers, a self-serve tool that allows companies who send out email newsletters, notifications and other communications to place ads that are served up in real-time like display ads. They can now manage their email ad inventory in much the same way they handle display advertising, deciding whether to run in-house ads for marketing purposes or third-party ads to drive revenue. The key is that LiveIntent has overcome some of the barriers of advertising in emails, which dont support iframes, Javascript, Flash and cookies consistent...

Plantronics updated its InstantMeeting app to allow iPhone (a aapl) users and enterprise users to connect to conference calls on their calendar with one click, much like Android and BlackBerry users have been able to for almost a year. The InstantMeeting app, which is pretty darn useful for those who handle a lot of conference calls, combs your calendar and shoots you a reminder when one is about to start. On a mobile phone, clicking through on the reminder allows the user to click to call or click to say youre running late with the push of a button. The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, vice president and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure that employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. Its a pretty specific use case,...

Its official: Brightcove isnt just about video distribution anymore. After years of catering to media companies and video publishers with a white-label platform for delivering video online, the company is trying to do the same with a cloud-based approach to mobile app creation. That could provide a helpful new revenue stream, just as Brightcove is preparing for an IPO. Six months after announcing its new App Cloud product , Brightcove is finally making it available to the public, as a way to simplify the creation and distribution of mobile web apps. The App Cloud platform lets developers create multi-device apps for iOS and Android mobile devices, using standard HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to do so. It provides multiple templates, as well as a cloud-based visual app creation tools, to make development a breeze even for those who arent technically proficient. It also allows developers to re-use existing code HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code libraries. That can dramatically reduce the amoun...

While America was tucking into its turkey dinners last week, I was in Milan mingling with a group of European venture capitalists and trying to understand what it is that makes the continents investors tick. The event, Kultur Convivio , drew together a range of the continents leading lights some old (such as French firm Partech, which was founded 29 years ago) and some very, very new (at least one investor hadnt officially finished pulling his first seed fund together). It was a rare opportunity to get some insight into what is, from the outside at least, a disjointed and sometimes contradictory scene. Here are some things I took away from the event: There is no single answer One of the refrains from almost everyone in attendance was that there are no silver bullets: most deals are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. This is partly because investors prefer close relationships with their companies, but its also infrastructural: there may be a single currency, but there is no single ma...