Streaming Music with Spotify
July 17, 2011 | No Comments
Spotify announced this week that it’s finally coming to the US. The streaming music service has been hugely popular in Europe since it started in late 2008, but presumably the record label deals have kept it from reaching the US… until now! Spotify offers three plans: Free, Unlimited, and Premium. The service is currently invite-only in the US for the Free plan, but if you are willing to pay $5/month for Unlimited (or $10 for Premium), you can sign up now on the Spotify website. On Thursday morning I received an invite for the free version but quickly upgraded to the Premium plan in order to give the service a fair trial. The Premium version offers mobile streaming, offline support, 320 Kbps high quality audio, and manages your local files in iTunes. So far, I have been extremely impressed with the service!





Over the past few months I have been carefully following the news and reviews about Blackberry’s new tablet, the Playbook. I’m not exactly sure why, but something about Blackberry has sparked my interest lately. (Basically, I think their future is looking disastrous… but that’s a topic for another day.) I’ve been surprised by the significant amount of advertising that Blackberry has been rolling out for the Playbook. I’ve seen tons of internet ads, and A LOT of Playbook ads during the NHL Playoffs as well. Blackberry has been running a few different ads, and each seems to have a slightly different marketing message. Is this for college kids? Gamers? Business Exectives? Email junkies?
Wow, I haven’t written a blog post in weeks! The weather has been getting really nice here in Raleigh, NC and I’ve been trying to spend as much time outside as possible. Although I might not have been inspired to write about tech lately, I’ve definitely been keeping up with it. One of the most exciting things going on right now is obviously the iPad. I reserved mine on March 16th for in-store pickup. I decided to go this approach, rather than pre-ordering, for a couple reasons. I hate waiting around for the FedEx/UPS guy to come so that I don’t miss a package. Also, I wasn’t entirely convinced I would buy one at the time of reserving. I decided this would give me another few weeks to think about it. Not surprisingly, the blogs have been buzzing about iPad related goodness lately and I’ve decided that I will be headed to the Apple Store on launch day.
I was originally planning to do a post about Google Buzz this weekend, but then something reminded me about Google Wave. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard anything about Wave in weeks. It occurred to me that one of the most hyped products of 2009 might have fallen completely on it’s face. Ever since Wave was announced at Google I/O last May, there was non-stop hype surrounding the product on Twitter and tech blogs. The hype continued up to the end of September when Google opened up Wave to over 100,000 people, and then for another few weeks while people begged for invites on Twitter and other sites. By the end of October, I had over 25 contacts on Wave and managed to get the bulk of my web-savvy friends using the service. By the middle of November, it seemed like everyone who was remotely interested in Wave had received an invite. Google Wave finally dropped off the trending topics on Twitter and it seemed like the invite hype was effectively dead. It’s been over 2 months since the last activity in my Wave inbox and I can’t help but wonder, what happened?