I’m a huge fan of music. I’ve got several versions of the iPod for a variety of occasions, I’ve got streaming music players all over my computer, I’ve got sites bookmarked that stream audio from overseas; for me, there’s just nothing better than paying music for inspiration, clarity, and nostalgia. To increase my music listening abilities I’ve used plugins such as FoxyTunes to give me access to my music straight from my browser, but what if I’m not home or on my laptop. There’s a good chance I’ve got my mobile on me and I can stream from there, but for those of us always changing computers, or using public computers, there’s now an interesting option that we can participate with.
Stereo8 is a new stream audio web app that streams straight from your browser. No downloading, no installing, no problems. Just about any browser should work (I tested on Safari, Firefox, IE6 and IE7, Opera, and Chrome). Simply select a genre of music you want to listen to, and let the music play. You can interact with the music by voting on what you like, and those votes determine what’s played. Stereo8 calls it self a true internet radio with a twist. That twist is that listeners can vote and share music with one another making it a social community of sorts.
As I write this article I’ve picked the video game category and have listened to some of the biggest games from my present and past. In some of the other categories I was listening to songs that perhaps I was not a fan of myself, and some more obscure songs that I never even knew existed, which is not always a good thing. But if you’re looking to be introduced to something new and unique, far from the beaten path you’re used to traveling, then perhaps Stereo8 is for you. A few stations I found really solid, and just now they started playing the Terran theme from Starcraft, so that’s just an idea of the kind of music you’ll be listening to (at least on the game channel).
Opera Mini has just released some great new features which will improve the best browser for Blackberry, Nokia, HTC and other Java enabled mobile phones.
Opera yesterday announced a new version of their Opera Mini which includes tabs so you can open multiple web pages in the same browser simultaneously. The new tab feature is optimised for touch screen phones.
Opera Mini adds a new “Open in Mini” option to your BlackBerry email client so you open hyperlinks in email messages in either Opera Mini or the default BlackBerry browser. In my limited testing, this feature works only with plain text emails.
Other new features in Opera Mini 5 that lot of you may find useful are copy-paste and a built-in password manager so you don’t have to type your logins and passwords over and over again. The passwords are saved on your phone itself.
Opera Mini 5 is still in beta but the good part is that you can install it alongside your existing installation of Opera Mini 4. To download Opera Mini 5, visit m.opera.com/next from your mobile phone browser and download the Opera Mini 5 installer specific to your phone.
Opera has just released a release candidate for the next major version of its web browser, Opera 10. The list of new features isn’t all that different from those in the last iteration, Opera 10 beta. Plus according to Opera themselves they will be releasing their final version in the coming days.
Of course, Opera wouldn’t mention a date for the final version if they weren’t quite sure that the version they currently have is polished enough for mass consumption. Here’s a quick rundown of the new features:
- fresh look and feel
- enhanced speed and performance, especially when it comes to resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook
- Opera Turbo, bandwidth booster for folks with slow internet connections
- an improved Opera Mail
- resizable, thumbnail tabs
- inline spelling checker
- auto updating
- a new, personalized Speed Dial
Opera 10 Beta 2 was released earlier today by the Opera development team.The changelog lists many changes for this release especially for the Opera user interface, mail, chat and news, display and scripting, security and network. The Windows changelog alone lists more than 100 items that have been added, changed or fixed in Opera 10 Beta 2.
Many users in the Opera forum are reporting problems with the new beta release. The developers are actually warning users stating that it “may have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations”. That’s not very encouraging and it is therefor suggested to try the web browser in a test environment and not in a productive environment to ensure that it is working without problems.
Opera 10 Beta 2 can be downloaded directly from the Opera homepage for all supported operating systems. The changelogs are available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
With updates to Flock, Firefox, Opera, and even IE, browsers are becoming key factors in how we choose to integrate our online experiences with our daily lives. Each of the above mentioned browsers have key factors that stand out and make them useful to someone, all depending on our tastes. What if you could find a search engine that learned, adapted, and showed you extra content that you would not have found otherwise?
Worio is the social search that has somehow found a way to intelligently learn from your search habits and adapt itself to your likes and dislikes. Worio creator Ali Davar focuses on the search as a form of discovery. He comments that Worio will show you things that you perhaps never even thought of, but are related to your initial search.
The idea of discovery is key to Worio, and information is collected and saved on your habits. The mechanism can be turned off and it will simply function like any other search engine, but the uniqueness also comes in being able to share your favorite links and sites right from the search, without having to rely on social bookmarketing efforts or emailing people. Anyone within your network can see your habits and you can see theirs. Taking this concept a step further, Worio now supports Facebook connect. Now you can directly share your passion, your searches with friends in Facebook and open people up to a whole new world of discovery.
The search looks very promising and has a bright future, we’d love to hear what you think.
AOL quietly launched a new local site last month called When.com. When.com is a local portal which lets you know what is happening in your area with relation to tickets, performers, events, restaurants, venues and more.
When.com has some great listings and it is really great to see a site that is completely dedicated to providing information simply about your area. The first initial downside is that the ads don’t at all match the site and locations. If they came up with a text version of advertising and then locally based it also, then that would really take off, maybe this will come with time and traffic.
When.com works best when trying to find out which band in playing in your local area in the coming months and trying to plan a really good night out. Plus with the restuarant listings it makes it a very nice rounded package.
MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.
The plugin also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin. Therefore, theme designers can create specific iPhone themes or generic themes.
MobilePress also features Mobile SEO which detects Google and Yahoo mobile search bots. These mobile search bots will see the mobile version of you blog which allows your blog to optimized and indexed on Google and Yahoo mobile search.
Opera has just released a 
