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Mobile World Congress – Day 3 round-up

James Thornton

James Thornton

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The Mobile World Congress today moved into it’s third day, and there’s still plenty of exciting launches to talk about. After Nokia dazzled us with an array of announcements on Monday and Google got all philosophical on us yesterday, today Microsoft stepped up to the plate, announcing its new desktop/mobile hybrid operating system, Windows 8 at the MWC. But there was plenty more to see, too:

Windows 8

There is no escaping the big launch of the day at the Mobile World Congress – Windows 8. Microsoft officially announced the pre-release version of the new OS, releasing it into the wild as a free public beta download.

Besides the sexy new Metro UI, the new version of Windows includes a range of interesting new features. These include the new Windows Store, Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 5, and cloud computing support through a new log-in feature that lets you share content across devices. Check out our Windows 8 review and read the blog post for more.

Windows 8 is clearly a push to move the Microsoft OS into the tablet age. Ultimately it will allow for more seamless working across Windows devices, and will help to push hybrid devices based around the concept of a tablet that docks with a base station to become a desktop.

FourSquare

The FourSquare stood in the plush Android Developer section of the show (below) but was disappointingly devoid of anything we haven’t seen before from the location tagging app.

Fortunately we got a better insight into where FourSquare is going from CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley in his keynote speech. Crowley says the company is looking at ways of using customer’s information to automatically alert people of places and events nearby that they might be interested in.

FourSquare recently added a Radar feature to its app (above), which helps you find things near to you that you wouldn’t otherwise know about. If you add places to your to-do list in the app (visit a museum, try a particular restaurant, etc.), Radar will automatically send you a notification when you pass near to that place to remind you you wanted to go there.

The suggestion is that Crowley now wants to take this a stage further, and transform FourSquare from just a social network into a powerful recommendation engine. So instead of you telling FourSquare where you’d like to go one day, it will suggest places for you, based on locations it knows you like, popping up an alert when you pass by somewhere it thinks you’ll like.

Mozilla Marketplace

It’s not just Microsoft which is launching a new application store at the Mobile Congress. Firefox creator Mozilla is also pushing its upcoming Marketplace at the MWC.

The company has announced that Mozilla Marketplace will start accepting submissions from developers of HTML 5 apps next week. The idea behind the platform is that you’ll be able to visit the Mozilla Marketplace and choose from a wide range of web-based mobile application. This will allow developers to by-pass app stores and create applications that run the same across all mobile devices.

Having met with Mozilla we’re now getting excited about the prospect of the Marketplace and were impressed to hear that great apps such as SoundCloud and Dropbox have already committed to submitting apps to the store.

Vimeo

Video streaming service Vimeo has had to live in YouTube’s shadow for so long, but the company is really trying to up its mobile app offering in order to compete and it’s doing a great job.

We checked out the new iPad version of Vimeo, and were very impressed with the elegant design of the user interface. The application makes it very easy to edit, upload and manage videos on the device, as well as offering a gorgeous player for enjoying Vimeo video.

The new version 2.0 of Vimeo supports iPhone and iPod touch as well as iPad. It adds lots of other interesting new features, such as an easy-to-use video editor, which gives you the ability to purchase and add licensed music to your movies from the Vimeo Music Store.

Shazam

We called in on our favorite music discovery engine, Shazam to take a sneaky peak at the developer’s upcoming innovations for the app. Things to look forward to include support for Android Beam, which will allow you to share songs you tag in Shazam with a buddy just by touching your phone next to theirs, as you can see in this demo.

We were also privy to a look at the new Shazam interface, which will be applied to the application later in the year. Although we weren’t encouraged to take pictures, we managed to snap this one of the current development version of the new Shazam user interface. The design is much fresher than the current version, and it looks like it will be able to display lots of track and artist information and other content to enjoy while a song is playing.

James Thornton

James Thornton

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