With 120 Music Channels and City-Specific Regions, Earbits Launches Improved iPhone App

[ The Earbits website features large, gorgeous photos of the artists whose music you're streaming. ]

Earbits, commercial-free online radio in which streams are personalized and bands pay for airtime/market themselves to listeners, recently launched a revamped app for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Version 2.0 lets users choose from three "regions": Earbits Worldwide is all music on the service while Earbits LA and SF Gate Radio play only bands coming to those cities. The 120 channels include pop, hip hop and electronic. Users can also hit shuffle to play songs randomly. The original app, launched in October 2010, did not have many features, such as playing music in the background.

Los Angeles-based Earbits provides radio station recommendations to tens of thousands of users monthly based on music they have previously liked, Earbits CEO and co-founder Joey Flores tells LAUNCH via email. The startup works directly with

Click to read more ...

Why Apple Shouldn't Worry about the Amazon Appstore for Android

[ Paul Hochman, contributing writer to Fast Company, introduces the Appstore. ]

LAUNCH editors recently stumbled across the promotional video for the Amazon Appstore that boasts eight "simple" steps to download an app, whereas all iPhone users have to do is enter their credit card information to start marking purchases.

"I thought they were trying to be campy, but they're actually serious," +Thai Train, founder and CEO of Lightbox, writes on Google+.

Android users must...

Click to read more ...

Twitter's Storm Software -- Hadoop of Real-Time Processing -- Available as Open-Source

Storm, a scalable real-time computation system that Twitter got when it acquired analytics platform BackType in July, is now available on Github. 

Storm eliminates the need to manually process messages from a queue, update a database and then send messages to another queue. Bonus: it can be used with any programming language. For example, Storm makes it possible to stream Twitter trending topics into web browsers. 

Twitter engineer Nathan Marz, who has called Storm the Hadoop of real-time processing, debuted the open-source version of Storm at the Strange Loop 2011 developers conference. Nathan was previously the lead engineer at BackType.

"Its use cases are so broad that we consider it to be a fundamental new primitive for data processing, " Nathan wrote on the BackType blog in June, before Twitter acquired the startup.

We have asked both Nathan and Twitter for comment on Storm, which BackType had long planned...

Click to read more ...

Launching Soon: Hangout Academy Will Turn Google+ Hangouts into Education Platform

Hangout Academy will connect people in search of knowledge with experienced professionals and hobbyists willing to share it. Details about the product are currently under wraps, but Hangout Academy is expected to launch Oct. 9.

The promo video shows screens full of code and floats past various hangout moments. It ends with a voice whispering "create" and "share" as those words flash by.

Members of the six-person team of developers have never met each other in person, only in Hangouts.  

"Meeting random new people is nice, but can we use Hangouts to learn new skills...

Click to read more ...

White House Favorite ThinkUp Launching Google+ Plugin for Storing Social Activity

[ ThinkUp Google+ plugin. ]

ThinkUp, a free open-source web application that lets users store and organize activity from social networking sites, plans to soon launch a Google+ plugin using the newly released Google+ API.

The plugin will track and chart comments and +1 counts, list posts by most discussed and most +1-ed, and filter posts that contain questions into a separate feed.

"The API is extremely limited, but I like starting small and simple, and this was just enough to tackle in a day and a half," ThinkUp Lead Developer Gina Trapani writes on Google+. 

Gina notes the launch will be "soon" and that it might be...

Click to read more ...