Mixcloud
Billing itself as the “YouTube of radio,” Mixcloud is an on-demand radio app, using a rather loose definition of “on-demand.” It essentially aggregates a number of Internet radio streams, podcasts, and DJ mixes. It also lets users upload their own custom mixes, called “Cloudcasts.” These stations are organized by genre, with the most popular added to a “What’s Hot” section. Users can also save favorite stations, and there’s both a history and search function as well. The app is live, but still in beta, and as such is free until the company decides how it wants to charge.
Viddy
A video sharing app that takes advantages of the phone’s videocamera. Users capture their video form the phone, and the app provides editing features and stylized effects to produce into a short clip, which users then share on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Artists are already on board. Panic at the Disco, Snoop Dogg, Pete Wentz and other celebrities are using Viddy to have their fans crowdsource music videos, fan messages and so on. The app already has some 500,000 downloads in the six weeks it’s been available.
Mobile Roadie
Mobile Roadie makes the list this week not for introducing a new app, but rather for eliminating an old one. The do-it-yourself app platform said it would no longer support the Blackberry app platform. It only launched support for the BlackBerry platform back in December to compliment its exiting iPhone and Android platforms. Here’s why:
“Our Blackberry team spent more time than expected on creating new features and getting the product up to our standards. This made Blackberry features fall perpetually behind our other products, resulting in fragmentation for our customers, and some features working on iPhone/Android, but not Blackberry.
We also had a hard look at engagement of Blackberry users. We were surprised to find that while, on average, over 50% of our iPhone/Android users logged in via Facebook or Twitter and interacted with the app, less than 2% of Blackberry users bothered to log in. In other words, Blackberry users’ engagement with the apps was about 1/20th of iPhone/Android.”