Spotify May Need To Be More ‘Asian' To Dominate Region
Asia’s fragmented music fanbase and subscription habits may stand between Spotify and its total domination of the region, or at least so its competitors hope. The music streaming service recently launched in the Asian countries of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. When we spoke to Spotify’s head of new markets in Asia-Pacific, Sriram Krishnan, he was evasive on how extensive the company’s Asian catalog was, saying that the company is working with labels here and does feature local music, but emphasized that “mainstream” (read: US-originated) music is big here, and that catalog Spotify has plenty of. But several Asian-originated competitors say that their experiences here have been quite different. Taiwan-based KKBOX was launched in the region in 2005, and is available in its home country, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, with plans for other Asian countries, said representative, Inman Lin. “The Asian market is very fragmented in terms of (each country’s) ...
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500 Startups Grad Waygo Releases New Version With More Chinese Translation Functions, Seeks Android Developer
Optical character reader (OCR) translation app Waygo, which was part of the 500 Startups accelerator batch that graduated in February, just launched a new version with more functions and social-sharing options. The handy app, which I reviewed back in January, is also currently in the process of closing its first round of investment. The new version of Waygo boosts more translation capabilities and allows users to share translations with their friends through email, Twitter and Facebook. The developers hope that this will not only increase Waygo’s profile but also help them fine tune the app’s translation algorithms (its OCR was built from scratch in-house). “We hope that our users will share both interesting translations as well as wrong translations so we can improve Waygo,” the team says. The previous version of Waygo only supported single line translations; this version can read several lines of Chinese characters at once. In addition to food menus, Waygo 2.0 can now translate ...
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Twitter Archives Now Available In 12 More Languages, Including Japanese, Portuguese, Russian And Simplified Chinese
On the occasion of its seventh birthday today, Twitter has announced that personal archives of tweets are now available for 12 more languages: In December, when Twitter rolled out the option to download a massive archive of your history, this is what they had to say about the feature: Today, we’re introducing the ability to download your Twitter archive, so you’ll get all your Tweets (including Retweets) going back to the beginning. Once you have your Twitter archive, you can view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones. Sadly, tweets in the above languages weren’t available, but they are now. Simply go to your settings page, and then click “request your archive.” You’ll then be emailed once the archival process is complete. Once you download the file, you’ll be able to open it on your desktop and review everything you’ve ...
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Kaifu Lee Tracks How Many Of His Weibo Posts Have Been Deleted
Former Google China head, Kaifu Lee, has been tracking how many times his Weibo posts on Tencent and Sina have been censored and deleted, and has helpfully made a graph of the past 8 months. The outspoken investor has had his tweets deleted most often in the recent weeks because he was discussing the story on the 13,000 dead pigs found in a Shanghai river, as well as a session in the Chinese parliament to appoint its new leadership. The government often gets the country’s two large microblogging services run by Tencent and Sina to wipe out posts that trigger its censorship keywords. His tweet accompanying the graph: My weibo deletions (click link).Lowest week was my “3-day silence”, and the highest weeks were the recent 2 weeks twitter.com/kaifulee/statu… — Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) March 18, 2013 Kaifu Lee was kicked off Sina and Tencent’s Weibo sites for three days last month for criticizing state-run search engine, Jike. He has about a million Twitter followers—tiny compared ...
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Update For Twitter’s iOS, Android Apps And Mobile Site Includes Top Tweets From The Past And Better Web Browsing
Twitter has updated its iOS and Android apps today, as well as its mobile site, to include more interesting content to keep you tapping and exploring as you perform searches. As we noted last month, Twitter has started to surface older tweets in its search results. Today, that experience will become more prevalent in Twitter’s mobile experience. In addition to tweets that might have some age to it, your search results will now include topics and user suggestions based on your query. Since Twitter is a real-time service, this is no easy task. A few video services have gotten the axe, and the app now has native support for traditional Chinese language. It’s nice to see Twitter combine some sweeping discovery updates with a maintenance release in time for SXSW. It’s a small tweak, but I’m enjoying the addition of the tweet staying visible when you tap a link, providing some context as you venture off of the network. You can make it go away by tapping the web page: Here’s the list ...
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