Twitter launches official iPad app

Twitter has just announced the service’s official iPad app.

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitteraccounts.
Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blogthat the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”
The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” writes Rechis.
Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.
Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.\

Amazon has been robbed

You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues, but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years. But that’s very much the case today as for the past couple of hours the service has been switching back and forth between being totally down and being up, but showing no products.

Obviously, Twitter is abuzz about this — though there’s no word from Amazon on Twitter yet about the downtime. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, all seem to be a go, according to their dashboard. The mobile apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices are sort of working, but it doesn’t a

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ppear you can go to actual product pages.

Echofon pro for iPad preview

Echofon is one of the biggest apps for Twitter and Facebook, they just released a preview for there iPad pro and here are some of the pictures they posted.

The picture above is in landscape view and helps you see peoples tweets easier and easy to pop up and retweet.

This brings in the Hovercard feature of Twitter and adds in some things like add to list and Direct message.

This is a preview of the ability to Retweet Favorite and Delete a Tweet.

This shows what a tweet will look up close up plus when you add a picture threw Twitpic (and we thing yfrog and tweetphoto to though we aren't sure) looks like.

This photo is to show off how you can look at a picture without leaving your Twitter feed page.

This picture is a simple preview of the timeline on this certain iPad Pro app.

and this lastly is a preview of the settings page on the app.

The option to save tweets and post them later has not been added to this app yet but developers say it should be on there soon. The app cost 4.99$ which is a little bit hight but it might be worth it.

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Starbucks will soon give you free wifi in ALL its stores

Starting July 1, Starbucks will offer free Wi-Fi nationwide, with no registration or account required. Even better, Wi-Fi will not be time limited.

Starbucks joins an increasing list of brands and chains to offer free Wi-Fi in its stores. For example, last December, McDonald’s rolled out free Wi-Fi to nearly all of its restaurants across the country. Panera Bread also offers a similar program.

McDonald’s and Starbucks both have partnerships with AT&T, which, while often criticized for the quality of its wireless data network, is one of the largest Wi-Fi hotspot providers in the United States.

Starbucks was one of the first chains to offer Wi-Fi access to its patrons, first via an agreement with T-Mobile and then with AT&T. Starbucks visitors have been able to enjoy up to two hours of free Wi-Fi from their favorite coffee house, provided they are either an AT&T customer or they use a Starbucks Card to login. The new program will do away with any sort of registration, which will make those of us who always forget either our AT&T account information or can’t find our Starbucks cards extremely happy.

In addition to the new free Wi-Fi program, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told Wired’s Chris Anderson that the company is also planning on rolling out a new Starbucks Digital Network in partnership with Yahoo later this fall. This network, which will only be accessible in U.S. company-operated stores, will offers customers free and unrestricted access to paid sites and services like WSJ.com and other content providers on their phones, tablets or laptops.

Bringing the Starbucks Experience Online
We spoke with Stephen Gillett, CIO, EVP and GM of Digital Ventures at Starbucks about the new plan for free Wi-Fi and the Starbucks Digital Network. According to Gillett, the goal is to bring the overall Starbucks in-store experience online.

The first step is in providing an overall better online experience. This is where one-click logon comes into play, as well as the ability to connect with your device, be it a laptop or phone or iPad. The second part is the branded Starbucks online experience.

Rather than just trying to create an aggregated portal of sources, Starbucks will be bringing quality content that is usually behind a pay wall to customers to access for free while in Starbucks stores. Different categories, like business news, lifestyle, music, entertainment, etc. will provide access to different content. This means that you can visit the Wall Street Journal uninhibited, as well as Zagat and also get local content from services like Foursquare pulled into your default Starbucks page.

Furthermore, stuff like the Starbucks “Pick of the Week” iTunes promotion can now be integrated online, meaning that you can download the free weekly track from your iPhone or iPad or laptop, instead of having to use the cards with the redeem codes. The physical cards will still be available but for connected visitors, this is an easier way to access free content.

The opportunity for premium service providers is that by offering free content to users while they are at Starbucks, they are potentially gaining new customers. A user might find they really enjoy some of the pay Wall Street Journal content and look at subscribing at home, for example. More and more providers will be announced as the launch date gets closer and Starbucks is committed to finding the best pay wall content it can bring to its audience.

What do you think of Starbucks new free Wi-Fi plan and the content deals? Let us know!

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Wall Street Journal

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iTunes

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the iPad has 10,000 apps. Have you downloaded any of them?

During his keynote address at WWDC on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs rattled off some key statistics. Among them was that there are 8,500 native iPad apps. Actually, at the time, Apple had over 9,000, but we’ll let that slide. How do I know how many app there were? Because unlike other stores Apple oversees, they actually posts the number of apps available for the iPad. And that number just hit 10,000.

If you go to the App Store app on the iPad and click on the “Release Date” area, you can see the total for yourself. Along the top of that area, it will read “1 – 12 of xxxx” — “xxxx” being the current number of apps that are built to run on the iPad.

Back at the end of April, it was reported that Apple was approaching 5,000 iPad apps (actually, they were past that number at the time). That means that in about six weeks, the iPad App Store has doubled in size. Given the iPad’s stellar sales, this is hardly a surprise.

Recently though, a number of developers have noted a long-than-usual wait time for app approvals. One is Reeder, an awesome iPad feed reading app (which was just approved after waiting for a couple weeks). One reason for the delay is likely that Apple is trying to get iOS 4-compatible apps approved in time for the launch of that OS (and the new iPhone 4) in a couple of weeks.

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Photobucket goes mobile

In the world of online photo storage and sharing, there’s really no name quite as big as Photobucket. Long before the names Flickr and Picasa made their marks, Photobucket was already racking up users worldwide. Presently, over 100 million people choose Photobucket to store and share their photos, and the company has a new focus on mobile that is being done right.

As of today, Photobucket has released a new BlackBerry application that is showing off that mobile focus. Since merging with Ontela back in December, Photobucket has gotten some new funding and this new application is one of the products of that.

Blackberry users can now easily upload and download from the site, browse the “Find Stuff” content categories and search Photobuckets over seven billion public images and photos.

Photobucket is very quick to point out that the mobile applications mean much more than just what’s on the surface. As I said, Photobucket has a new focus on mobile.

I had a chance to speak with Rob Newton, from Photobucket, and he had this to add:

“Mobile is truly a vehicle to bring more users and usage of our site, and also is showing people that Photobucket is much more than a warehouse for image storage; it is a cross-platform multi use social networking utility that allows people to do more than ever before with their images, and from anywhere they have cell coverage.”
Ready to get in on it? Head over to your BlackBerry App World and search up Photobucket. Though the BlackBerry application is the newest, there are also versions for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

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Pandora is going to explode with the new iPhone

Remember when Pandora was on its deathbed? Yeah, those days are long gone. The service has just raised yet another round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The round was led GGV Capital and participated in by Allen & Company, They’re not disclosing the amount raised, but you can bet it’s fairly substantial considering that they’re last round in July of last year was $35 million. Up until now, Pandora has raised just about $57 million in total.

The new money will be used to further fuel growth and invest in new resources, the company says. Back in April, the company passed the 50 million user mark (up from 40 million the previous December) just as they launched their new iPad app. Mobile growth has been a key for the company, and it’s likely to explode even further with the launch of the iPhone 4.0 OS which will allow Pandora to run in the background for the first time. Despite the restraint, Pandora has been one of the top downloaded apps of all time in the App Store.

But the new iPhone ability may bring with it some issues as well. Since it’s undoubtedly going to be used a lot more, Pandora is going to be streaming a lot more music for free (currently, music is served for free until you hit 40 hours in a month, then you’re asked to pay $1 to get unlimited access). The more music Pandora streams, the more it has to pay to the labels and artists. Of course, more music also means the more ads it can serve up (most of Pandora’s money comes from advertising).

Pandora has also been signing deals left and right with other device makers, and even car companies to extend the service’s reach.

Pandora’s last round of funding came right after it was officially saved following a comprise reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels on Internet streaming music rates. Thanks to that deal, its new freemium model, and the improving ad market, Pandora was able to go from a near-death experience to profitability in the course of just a few months.

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Pandora had hired Steve Cakebread to be its new CFO. Cakebread was the CFO at Salesforce.com when it went public, so that was seen as a possibility the company was looking at. But with this new money, that seems to be off the table, for now at least.

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Continuing to fire

As some of you know the last few weeks in the microblog world have been very competitive. Well Shoutitout got involved in the war today. They released an iPad app about and hour ago and now they've announced that they have partnered up with Twitterfeed to allow blog feeds to post to Shoutitout. We aren't sure what the agreements are but we know that Twitterfeed has special accesses to Shoutitouts API.

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Shoutitout: Right back at you!

Less than half a day after Twitter buys Tweetie and reports it will be changed to Twitter for iPhone. A few days after Twitter launches a black berry app a week after Plurk launches a iPhone app and just a few hours after Jaiku re launches there SMS Shoutitout has launched an iPad app to be the first on the board of microblogs with iPad apps.

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Twitter for iPhone

Twitter has just announced that it has acquired Atebits, the company behind the popular Tweetie iPhone app and Mac desktop application.

Tweetie’s creator, Loren Brichter, will be joining the Twitter team as well. The app will be renamed “Twitter for iPhone” and be made free in the next few weeks. Twitter CEO Evan Williams explained the move in a blog post:

“We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world.”

Twitter also specifically mentions that an official Twitter iPad app is indeed coming: “Developers, services, and publishers will be able to leverage the Twitter iPhone and iPad applications to create additional innovative tools and integrations for users,” Williams said in today’s announcement.

The move comes less than a week after a controversial blog post from Twitter investor Fred Wilson, Principal of Union Square Ventures. In it, Wilson explained that he is looking for Twitter apps to not fill holes in the Twitter platform (e.g. photo sharing, mobile apps) and instead focus on innovative products and “killer apps.” The post caught the attention of developers, who feared that Twitter itself would begin competing with their applications.

It’s uncertain what the acquisition of Tweetie means for unofficial Twitter mobile apps such as Echofon, TweetDeck, or Seesmic.

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Seesmic

TweetDeck

Echofon

Atebits

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iPad VS a Rock

Just a picture on the iPad VS Rock battle of technologies!