Rdio is the ground-breaking digital music service that is reinventing the way people discover, listen to, and share music. With on-demand access to over 12 million songs, Rdio connects people with music and makes it easy to search for and instantly play any song, album, artist or playlist without ever hearing a single ad. Discover what friends, people with similar tastes, recording artists and more are listening to in real-time and share across Twitter and Facebook. Build a digital music collection that’s available everywhere – on the web, in-home or in-car, on an iPad or smartphone, and even offline.
Launched in August 2010, Rdio is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded by Janus Friis, one of the creators of Skype. Currently available in the US, Canada and Brazil, Rdio is funded by Atomico, Janus Friis through his investment entities, Skype and Mangrove Capital Partners.
via Rdio | CrunchBase Profile.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rdio/id335060889?mt=8
As much fun as Instagram can be, it’s still missing something: actual prints. Instaprint ($400) aims to fix this problem by hooking up to your Wi-Fi network and printing out any image it comes across containing a specific location or hashtag. This means your friends can get in on the action as well, turning the Instaprint into a focal point of your next party, gathering, or beer bash. [via] Source: Instaprint
What can’t smartphones do? Mark laser tag off the list. The AppTag Laser Blaster ($35) promises to turn your phone (or iPod touch, we suppose) into a laser tag gun/shooter that works via IR and high frequency sound to let app developers create nearly any kind of multiplayer shooting game you can imagine, all without needing to block the headphone port or eat away battery via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Six buttons — including a pressure sensitive trigger and a oversized reload switch — enable plenty of real-world interaction, and compatibility with most Nerf and Buzzbee toy guns serves as icing on the geek-flavored cake. Source:AppTag Laser Blaster
Finally a app to take control of your images from your ipad. Photoshop Touch ($10).
Whether you write novels, take notes, or make grocery lists, the modern writer needs an app that just gets out of the way and makes writing less painful and more fun. After getting tired of the numbing options available, one Uncrate editor decided to just build the thing himself. Scribe ($3), a universal app for the iPad and iPhone, gives you a clutter-free writing environment, with an awesome monospaced font, and super-easy HTML support to brainlessly markup your prose for web stuff. Oh, and it syncs with Dropbox and iCloud too. It’s what we use to write Uncrate when we go iPad-only on the road. Plus, there’s at least a 93% chance you’re getting an iPad on Sunday. So Scribe will be right here, waiting on you.
Stop repeating yourself!
How many times have you sent off an email to a customer, co-worker, contractor or vendor with crystal clear instructions, only to find out later that your recipient completely misunderstood what you were saying.
So you explain it again. And again. And again.
How much time are you wasting with these “email roundtrips”?
But what if you could create clearer communications the FIRST time? What if you could eliminate email roundtrips completely? How much time would that save you each day? Each week? Each year?
Imagine how much more productive you could be in your business if you only had to explain things once.
The best way to clarify what you are saying is to use pictures. But most screen capture applications only let you work with one picture at a time. It. is. like. only. allowing. you. to. say. one. word. at. a. time.
Clarify lets you use pictures to talk in complete sentences. And that completely changes the way you communicate. Here is what one reviewer from the Mac Apps Store said:
December 11th, 2011
David
the march towards a sadly wallet-less future continues with Square Card Case (Free). This iOS/Android app ties in with Square’s already-excellent mobile payment service, letting you use your name to pay at local spots using the company’s system, and letting you create tabs at the establishments, which automatically open upon your arrival so the workers will know who you are and even what you usually order, giving you instant “regular” status. Oh, and did we mention you never even have to take your phone out of your pocket? Yeah. “Just put it on Uncrate.”
November 16th, 2011
David
New York city drivers (and visitors to the Big Apple) flustered with the elaborate maze of parking regulations, shifting street-sweeping schedules, and frivolous no-parking hours can rejoice. A new app for iPhone and iPad untangles Gotham’s parking knot by illuminating the city’s rules and regulations with a tap of a finger. Building on previous parking apps, ParkPal ($FREE, Apple) delivers an easy-to-operate and accurate—the information comes from the New York City Department of Transportation database—interface with parking ordinances from all five boroughs. But they also have a website www.parkpalnyc.com
Presented on a Google map, streets are painted red, green, or yellow to signify parking availability in real time. When users tap on a street, a complete day-by-day, hour-by-hour breakdown pops onto the screen. The app even details regulations that change within the same block and drops a pin on the map to mark the parking location.
Drivers in other major American metropolises can look forward to forthcoming additions as ParkPal’s reach grows. Because as anyone who’s spent time driving endlessly around the convoluted streets of the West Village or strained their eyes squinting at signs in Midtown will tell you, a good spot is hard to find.
Nate Storey is a research assistant at Travel + Leisure.
