It was recently announced that Apple, Inc. is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. I wonder what people say twenty years ago if you told them that this would happen, most likely they would have laughed in your face.
Regardless, Apple is definitely doing something right. In honor of their great achievement here is our infographic, The History of Apple, Inc. See the whole Infographic…
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Google has today launched a new site geared towards helping Google Music users discover new music. The site, called Magnifier,will feature music, videos, live performances, interviews and free songs that users of Google Music beta can add to their collection.
The site is launching today featuring My Morning Jacket and Google is giving away two tracks to Music Beta users. To get the tracks you’ll need a Music Beta membership. Magnifier will be featuring a free song of the day, much in the way that Apple does via iTunes.
The Song of the Day section features a bit of details about the artist featured including a brief review snippet and alvum cover art. You can, of course, ‘Plus one’ the song, sharing it in your Google+ stream. Ironically, this remains one of the only ways to get songs into your Google Music account outside of downloading the Google Music Manager as Google does not currently have an online store.
The process seems pretty seamless though and once you click on a track it is instantly available in your Google Music account, with no downloading time whatsoever. Hopefully this is a look at what purchasing music from Google Music will look like.
Gogle is also featuring an ‘Artist of the Week’ in the Antenna section. The artists featured here are handpicked by Google Music experts and have a series of songs available for free addition to your Google Music library. Once you’ve clicked the ‘Add Free Music’ button, it turns into a shortcut that allows you to jump to your Google Music library to listen to the tracks now.
The site also provides links to Google’s free song archive as well as a tips and tricks section. So far Magnifier is a fairly basic discovery site that provides a good way to get a couple of free music tracks a day. More interestingly, it offers a preview of how quick and simple purchasing Google Music will be in the future.
Earlier this week, Fox made good on its promise to limit Web access to its television content until eight days after a show has been aired.
The network’s new system enables Dish Network and Hulu Plus subscribers to watch new episodes online shortly after they air, but requires everybody else to wait. Subscribers can watch brand new episodes on Fox.com by authenticating with their Hulu or Dish Network account credentials.
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When this plan was first announced, our own Dan Rowinski wondered if the move would have the result of throttling Hulu and potentially costing the service some of its users. We may be about to find out.
As Fox backs away from the free, quickly-available Web TV content model, ABC has indicated it’s ready to do the same, according to a post on AllThingsD.
“We’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.” Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger said in an earnings call recently, citing a desire to preserve the company’s existing relationships with traditional content distributors.
That means that, come Fall, people may need to wait several days before watching the most recent episode of shows like Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.
These moves come as little surprise as content providers have sought to maximize the profits made from television content, something that hasn’t proven simple to do as viewers increasingly shift to the Web to watch shows.
Hulu, which became profitable in 2009, is expected to earn as much as $500 million in revenue this year. Even so, the revenue seen by content providers from Internet streaming services like Hulu doesn’t come close to what they’ve made from their more traditional content distribution relationships.
The challenges experienced by television networks are somewhat akin to those faced by newspapers and magazines in recent years. While it provides a more timely and interactive mode of distributing content, the Web is slower to offer a business model that compares to these businesses’ traditional models, which tend to erode more quickly than the new ones can take shape.
One million. That’s the number of registered Twitter apps, as Twitter announced last month. With such a huge number, it’s to be expected that some are Latin American. Yet, it’s not always easy to find the best ones. Here’s our selection of Mexican and Brazilian Twitter tools you should try out.
Twitea.me
Twitea.me is a Mexican platform that lets users tweet via SMS. It was created in 2008 by Mexican entrepreneur and podcaster Arturo Garrido (see our previous story). At the moment, the service is only available in Mexico, but this will soon change. According to Arturo, an agreement with telco giant Telefonica means that it will start expanding to other Latin American countries. The option to tweet via SMS is particularly relevant in a region where mobile phones with Internet access are still in the minority. Besides tweeting for the cost of a normal text message, Twitea.me’s users can receive their Direct Messages and Mentions directly on their phones at no charge. Thanks to a recently added feature, users can also update their Facebook status via SMS.
Shout A Tweet
Shout A Tweet was born at Startup Weekend San Jose a few months ago. The original idea came from Arturo Garrido, Twitea.me’s founder and a mentor at the event. The concept is simple; Shout A Tweet lets users coordinate a ‘mass tweet.’ In practical terms, it means users sign up to send a certain message, which will then be automatically tweeted at a specific time or once a minimum number of users have agreed to do the same. This makes it much easier for a tweet to gain attention and possibly make it to the Trending Topics. Who could this appeal to? Justin Bieber’s, and other teen celebs’ fans for sure, but also anyone trying to get their message across, from protesters to brands to ad agencies.
Migre.me
Migre.me (“Migrate me”) is a Brazilian URL shortening platform. The site has been around since 2009 and is very popular in Brazil. According to its website, it has already shortened over 68m URLs. However, if all you need is a simple URL shortening tool, I’d recommend the also Brazilian Moourl.com and its cute, uncluttered interface. Migre.me, on the other hand, incorporates data analytics, and its busy landing page does more than shrink addresses. By listing the most retweeted links in real time, Migre.me enables us to find out what’s popular among Brazilian Twitter users.
Muuter
Muuter is Mexican and was created by Andres Bianciotto from Tres Monos Lab. Its name says it all; it’s a simple tool to temporarily “mute” noisy Twitter users. Think of that annoying friend that won’t stop live-tweeting football games; just send Muuter a DM or use the site to make them disappear from your timeline during the period you set. Muuter can also mute people that use a certain keyword. The way Muuter works is simple – maybe too simple in some cases. The site actually unfollows people before automatically re-following them. This might not go unnoticed, so be careful if you don’t want to hurt any feelings. Muuter is honest about it; if you don’t want to unfollow your friends, you’d better use another tool, such as Tweetdeck‘s column filters.
TwittePaga
TwittePaga is a Twitter-based promotion tool; advertisers write a message and state how they want to pay for the campaign. TwittePaga then shares a percentage of this amount with users who share this message. For TwittePaga’s registered users, it’s a way to make money from their Twitter account; the more influential they are, the more they get paid. It was created by the young Brazilian developer Bruno Bertolini, from Florianopolis, in southern Brazil.
TwitteLembra and Vai Chover
Bruno Bertolini also created two other Twitter apps, TwitteLembra and Vai Chover. TwitteLembra (“Tweet Remind”) is a reminder tool. Using the service’s interface (in Portuguese), you can write messages that will be sent at a later time. The tweets can be private reminders (replies or DMs) or they can also be sent publicly from your Twitter account. As for Vai Chover?, it translates to “Is it going to rain?” Send the name of your city to @vai_chover, a Twitter bot, and you’ll receive a short personalized weather bulletin within seconds, in Portuguese. Don’t expect a full forecast though; you’ll only know whether it’s raining or not, and the current temperature.
Sorteie.me
Sorteie.me is a Twitter-based prize draw tool (“sorteio” means “prize draw” in Portuguese). It was developed by Kingo Labs, the Brazilian startup founded by Maria Carolina Cintra (recently listed in our article Latin American Startups: 10 Women to Watch). This tool for contest organizers helps them randomly pick a winner, either among their followers or among those who retweeted a specific link. Sorteie.me has also been available for Facebook since April.
Do you know other cool Twitter apps from Latin America? Let us know in the comments.Image Credit