New great day of talks for founders raising cash

There's a great new conference being put on by General Assembly called A Founder's guide to fund-raising which should be good for any start-ups out there. You can see more on the event http://assembledcapitallondon.eventbrite.com/ and sign-up below.

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Do sign-up, it costs £200 but it's a great day of talks.

Blackberry 10 Jam

Yesterday 14th June 2012 Research in Motion held their UK Blackberry 10 Jam event in Vinapolis near London Bridge. The day was full of information about how to build native or HTML5 applications on the new Blackberry 10 operating system. RIM also gave away an Alpha dev 10 phone, which looks pretty similar to an iPhone, but without any buttons (apart form the power button). The unit also has a micro USB connector, an HDMI connector and a tray and slot for a micro SIM. After setting up the device (using your Blackberry ID), you get to the home screen, which gives you 2 apps, the camera and a browser (and of course settings which is part of the OS). Anything else you have to write yourself. In the US, the devices were given out with SIM cards and they are meant to be fully operational as phones (and allegedly there's even a dialler within RIM somewhere). It is possible to pair the device with a Bluetooth headset and then receive calls by answering through the headset. Also in the US developers were promised free upgrades to official Blackberry 10 devices when they are released. This may be the dying spasms of an organisation trying to attract developers with gifts, but Blackberry's OS 10 is actually rather good.

ICANN release applicants for new top level domains

ICANN or as it's properly known The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has released the list of applicants and the top level domains (TLDs) they've applied for [1]. Many of the names are expected, with big brands applying for their names such as car manufacturers and such like. Other large companies have also applied to register names of their services (such as Microsoft LIVE, but there's multiple applicants for that TLD). Amazon have also applied for a variety of TLDs (77 in fact) including AMAZON, APP, AUDIBLE, AUTHOR, AWS, BOOK, BOT, BOX (many of these will have multiple applicants). If there are multiple applicants for the same domain, ICANN will hold an auction and the highest bidder will get it. There are 40 applications from the UK (though there's a slight weirdness there as the ISO country code is actually GB so they're actually listed under that, why the UK chose UK over GB is a historical peculiarity) including LONDON which London and Partners applied for (the PR agency for London etc) and WALES applied for by Nominet who run the gTLD .uk Nicely ICANN have also published the corresponding applicants emails, which are (it can be assumed) now nicely being harvested by SPAM bots.

Spotify nows Plays on Android

Spotify has now released their app on to Google Play (formerly Android Marketplace). The app has been available from Spotify's site in beta for a while. The new features are

• Totally new app with full support for Android 4.0
• All-new slide-out navigation
• Crossfade/gapless playback settings
• Widget - control Spotify from the home screen
• Playlist folder support
• Even more social - check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
• Artist imagery in high resolution
• Related artist view - available for the first time on mobile
• ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320kbps listening
• Play queue
• Last.fm scrobbling
• Speed increases

In order to use the mobile version users need a Spotify Premium subscription. Spotify now gives access to over 18 million songs and is available in 15 countries including USA, UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. there are now over 10 million active users with over 3 million paying subscribers.