TechCrunch

• Shazam Launches Major Updates To iPhone app, Now On 20m Users - Music identification app Shazam has announced big feature updates to its iPhone and iPod touch music discovery apps. There are now customised settings for ‘tagging on start-up’ make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn't own its name on Twitter then.
• comScore: Time Spent Watching Live Web Video Up 650 Percent - comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally—U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web. While live online video sites don't have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average online video view.
• Former UK PM Joins Web Foundation – But He Really Should Join Twitter - Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ousted in this year's election, is forming the Gordon and Sarah Brown Foundation, and has accepted three pro-bono appointments all with some connection to the Web. He's joining Queen Rania of Jordan’s Global Campaign for Education. Queen Rania has 1,337,872 followers on Twitter and last year spoke at Le Web. Brown is also working on a new programme to bring the internet to Africa and joining the board of Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. If you recall, just prior to the election in May, Brown launched a policy initiative to put £30m into an "Institute of Web Science" which would have been headed up by Berners-Lee. That centre has been cut dead by the new government, so perhaps Brown joining BL's Web Foundation is a sort of thank you?
• Android’s Mobile Web Consumption Share In The US Is Surging, iOS Share Dropping - Media measurement and Web analytics company Quantcast has some interesting numbers on mobile browsing in the United States, and it's preparing to release some of those statistics, across vendors. Earlier today, the company put up a teaser blog post, showing two graphs, one of them representing the share of mobile Web consumption in the US per mobile OS. As you can tell, Quantcast concludes Android is storming ahead, now taking up a 25 percent share of total mobile Web consumption in the US. Apple's iOS, meanwhile, is seeing its share decline, from approximately 67 percent in May 2009 to 56 percent in August 2010.
• Plex Inks A Deal With LG, Could Be The Start Of Something Huge For Both Companies - Plex is about to get big. The offshoot of the XBMC project just announced that LG will be using its media platform in upcoming Netcast HDTVs and Blu-ray players, in turn, making these devices about the best media streamers imaginable -- even better than the upcoming Boxee Box or just-refreshed Apple TV. After all, Plex already works with Netflix, Hulu, BBC's iPlayer, and supports playback of just about every media format ever created via the best interface in the business. There's even an iOS remote viewing app coming soon. Forget about having an extra box sitting on your TV stand just to stream random content, it's going to be built into your HDTV. Welcome to the future, ladies and gentleman.
• The Samsung Galaxy Tab Can Set Its Own Price, No Need To Directly Compete With The iPad’s $500 Price - The Samsung Galaxy Tab is going to sell well. It won't be a blockbuster like the iPad, but it should still do alright mainly because it's the first consumer-worthy Android tablet. Samsung can even price the tablet well north of the iPad's $500 starting price. It will not matter. People will buy it even if it's, I don't know, $800. You might not, but there are enough Android fanboys that will. Rumors have popped up over the last 24 hours about the Tab's price. Some European retailer's pricing has leaked out although Samsung is saying it's all speculative because the official pricing hasn't been announced just yet. But still, it makes you think. The pricing ranges from €699 ($890) to €799 ($1,020) for the 16GB and 32GB respectively. Remember, the Galaxy Tab comes with a 3G modem and there likely will not be a WiFi-only model because Google requires cellular capability for the Android Market. But for a quick minute, forget that the iPad offers a bigger screen and twice the storage for the same price. It doesn't matter.
• A Merger Made In High Heaven: US Cannabis To Buy WeedMaps - Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson fame may be too chicken to invest in WeedMaps (think Yelp for pot), but that isn't stopping other companies from sniffing around the startup, looking to score. In fact, a company called LC LUXURIES LIMITED, or rather its most recently established subsidiary, US Cannabis, is very close to buying WeedMaps. According to this press release, the Nevada corporation has entered into formal negotiations with the startup to acquire the domain name "weedmaps.com" as well as the current operating website.
• Google Hopeful Of 2010 Launch For iTunes Rival Despite Lack Of Signed Label Deals - We all know Google Music is coming, it's just a question of when - and what it'll look like, of course. According to Reuters, Google hopes to launch the service as early as December 2010. Citing unnamed 'people familiar with the matter', Reuters says Google's VP of Engineering Andy Rubin (which we likened to a Steve Jobs-caliber product fanatic in the past) is spearheading talks with music labels on plans for a digital music download store and cloud-based song locker service, which he hopes will see the light of day before year's end. Only thing that could get in the way of a pre-Christmas debut: the company has yet to sign a single licensing deal with the music labels, those same sources told Reuters.
• Project Dance Party: Facebook’s Secret Twitter-Like Follow Feature - Yesterday, news broke about a new feature Facebook is testing out called "Subscribe." For a second, I thought it might be the equivalent of Twitter's "follow" ability -- that is, a feature which would let you follow the updates of someone that you're not technically "friends" with on Facebook. Sadly, that's not the case. Instead, this is simply a way for you to more closely follow someone you are already friends with (or fan pages), by getting alerts when they update. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't working on the follow idea. In fact, last year, they definitely were. Facebook had a secret project last year that involved testing how best to implement a Twitter-like follow feature on Facebook, multiple sources have confirmed to us. The name of the project? Project Dance Party.
• YC-Funded Cloudant Launches Its NoSQL Cloud Database Platform - YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache’s open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work. Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so "You don't have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like." Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibilty, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device services, in essence "small companies with big data."