Netflix is giving its subscribers in Latin America new ways to access its library of streaming video titles, by expanding availability of its app on iOS products in that region. Starting Wednesday, Netflix subscribers in its newest international markets can download apps and stream video to the iPad, iPhone and even the Apple TV.

Users in the U.S. and Canada have long been able to stream to those devices, but availability on mobile and connected devices in newer markets should help Netflix gain traction in Latin America. After all, the service is most useful and engaging when it’s watched on a TV or tablet, as opposed to a desktop or laptop PC.

In addition, Netflix issued an update to its iPad app in all regions, giving users the ability to better navigate content. In a blog post on the update, mobile product manager Zal Bilimoria wrote that the new app is “much more immersive and provides greater focus on our growing catalogue by displaying twice as many titles than the previous interface.” The update is available with a free download from the Apple App Store.

Finally, Netflix is making its Just for Kids user interface available on Apple TV, which should improve discoverability and interactivity for the streaming company’s youngest users. With easy, character-driven navigation, Just for Kids aims to help children find the content they would most like to watch without having to search through non-relevant titles.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

One week ago Microsoft officially launched Windows Phone 7.5 in India, bringing three devices – the HTC Radar, Samsung Omnia W, and Acer Allegro to the market by the end of November. Together with the launch, Microsoft also announced the expansion of the Windows Phone Marketplace to India. According to the official blog post:

We’re pleased to announce that as of today Windows Phone customers in India are now able to purchase your apps and games via Windows Phone Marketplace!

At the same time, Microsoft also announced that developers in China can now also register via App Hub and begin submitting apps to the Windows Phone Marketplace. However, curiously the Windows Phone Marketplace is not yet available to customers in China, given that Windows Phone has not yet officially launched in the country. It is expected that Nokia will be bringing a TD-SCDMA (China’s 3G network standard) version of their Windows Phone to China Mobile sometime in the near future.

In addition, Microsoft also announced two other changes to the way apps can be published to the Windows Phone Marketplace. Firstly, Microsoft has made the change such that developers can now maintain their Windows Phone 7.0 apps and the 7.5 “Mango” apps at the same time. According to the blog post:

Effective today, developers who have updated their Windows Phone 7.0 applications to Windows Phone 7.5 (OS 7.1, aka Mango) have new options for how they manage updates for both apps. The 7.0 and 7.5 versions of an application share the same catalog details, pricing (including trial and geographic distribution options), ratings & reviews and hidden/live property if in a published state. However, each version of the application can now be updated, unpublished and re-published independently. You can view both versions of the application on the lifecycle tab in App Hub.

It is important to note that there can only be one in-progress update at any time across both versions of an app. The update in progress must be published to Marketplace before another version of the app can be updated. Also, catalog details and pricing changes made as part of a 7.0 app update will affect the 7.5 version of the app and vice versa. Finally, be aware that if you publish a new 7.5 app there is no way to later add a 7.0 version.

Further, there is also a slight change in the way Windows Phone Marketplace handles search keywords. From today, the search functionality across Marketplace will now use only the first five keywords, and all subsequent keywords entered by the developer will be ignored. Developers with existing apps published are encouraged to review the keywords for their apps to ensure that it is still relevant.

It is great to see Microsoft tapping into the mass markets such as China and India. However, with a majority of their online services – such as Zune, Xbox LIVE, and many parts of Bing – not made available in these markets, will Windows Phone succeed even with the Nokia brand around them? Interestingly enough, Microsoft is actually tapping into WPXAP.com, an unofficial Chinese Windows Phone forum, to obtain feedback directly from users on how to improve the localisation of Windows Phone in the Chinese market. Let’s hope something good comes out of this!

(Thanks Picturepan2 from LiveSino.net for the heads up!)

LiveSide.net

Google Translate for Android  conversation mode, which allows two people to speak in different languages and have their words translated in near real time, is now expanding beyond English and Spanish and is available in 14 languages. The new languages are: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

Google Translate conversation mode, which debuted in January, is still in alpha and is in the process of getting better as it gets fed more speech data. It allows a user to speak their language into the Google Translate app and have their words spoken out loud in another language. Users can trade turns speaking into the app and have translated word spoken and rendered in text. With the addition of a dozen new languages, it should greatly expand the number of people who use the tool. Conversation mode is one of those tools that really show off the power of the cloud on mobile devices.

The service is also getting some additional features that help facilitate conversations. Users will now be able to see if the app has incorrectly recognized spoken words and correct them before they’re translated. They can add unrecognized words to their own personal dictionary. And users can also pinch to zoom or tap on a magnifying glass to view translations in full screen mode. This is helpful if you just want to show someone translated text instead of using conversation mode. The Translate App can handle text translations of 63 languages.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

New technologies will give businesses a universal platform for data management, access and collaboration.
Microsoft PressPass, Information for Journalists – Press Releases

BitTorrent Inc. has quietly been testing its upcoming live streaming platform, and now the company is ready to take the next step with a new round of scalability tests that could include the live streaming of indie concerts.

A new BitTorrent Live website built with these kinds of tests in mind launched a few days ago, but a company spokesperson cautioned that “a broad beta is still a couple of months away.”

BitTorrent has been testing its live streaming platform with a limited number of users at a no-frills website that hasn’t been publicized, but has nonetheless been publicly accessible for some time at live.bittorrent.com. At the end of last week, the site suddenly received a significant face lift, complete with installation instructions for the BitTorrent Live software and a brief explanation that reads:

“BitTorrent Live is a whole new P2P protocol to distribute live streamed data across the internet without the need for infrastructure, and with a minimum of latency.”

Users can download BitTorrent live clients for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The client simply works in the background to facilitate data transfer and doesn’t allow any configuration. Video streams display in the browser via Flash, and a Facebook plugin allows users to chat with each other while watching a stream. An additional tab offers access to the audio and video bitrate and other debug data.

BitTorrent has been using prerecorded video to test its live streaming, but it plans to expand to live events for further tests.

Speaking of video: BitTorrent’s spokesperson told me that the tests have so far been restricted to “simple pre-recorded content loops to test latency and audio/visual sync.” I was able at one time to tap into a prerecorded stream of a winter sports event, but at other times simply didn’t get to see anything.

However, those P2P live streaming tests could get a lot more exciting soon: “One of the ideas is to invite a few of our favorite indie artists into our office to broadcast content and help us kick the tires with their fans,” said BitTorrent’s spokesperson. Still, don’t expect BitTorrent to stream Coachella any time soon. “The redesign isn’t intended to suggest we’re out of the R&D stage of designing, building and testing the product,” I was told.

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen has worked on the live streaming platform for close to three years, and he told me at NewTeeVee Live last year that his efforts included writing a complete new P2P protocol from scratch. The BitTorrent protocol itself, he said, simply introduced too much latency to be a viable live streaming solution. Check out the entire interview below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• Flash analysis: Collaborative consumption – a first look at the new web-sharing economy
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Microsoft has announced that the Zune online subsciption service is coming to Canada. In addition, Microsoft will also drop the price of a Zune Pass to $ 9.99/month in the US. Read more…

Neowin.net

Verizon Wireless continues to expand its LTE-based 4G network to more and more locations in the US. Last week the company officially turned on the LTE wireless switch in 19 new US cities. Today Verizon announced that July 21 will see another set of new cities and metro areas gaining…

Neowin.net

T-Mobile is expanding its 4G HSPA + based wireless network yet again. The wireless phone and data providers announced this week that 41 more US cities and metro areas now have access to its faster network. Last May the wireless carrier flipped the switch on its 4G service in 55…

Neowin.net

LawPivot, a Google Ventures-funded legal Q&A startup targeting small companies, is broadening its reach by becoming part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program. BizSpark aims to connect startups with technology, investors and other resources to help get their businesses off the ground. Last month, LawPivot expanded beyond its Silicon Valley roots into major metropolitan areas across the country.

As LawPivot — which is similar in design to crowdsourcing services such as Quora or LinkedIn Answers but focused on legal advice — continues to grow, it could help lead a movement toward true Knowledge as a Service.

Cloud computing helped introduce us to the concept of everything — infrastructure, platforms, software, etc. — as a service, and I argued several months ago that human Labor as a Service, obtained via web tools, might well fall under the cloud umbrella, too. The idea is that things that once required capital investment and, perhaps, long-term commitments are now available over the web on an ad hoc basis. But whereas LaaS focuses on fairly commodity tasks such as proofreading or bug-testing and the human workers resemble nodes in a computing cloud, a service like LawPivot focuses on providing knowledge, rather than just labor, as a service.

Continuing the computing analogy, services like LawPivot might be compared with specialty or enterprise clouds targeting users with specific needs around security, compliance or performance. When companies seek advice from the lawyers that comprise LawPivot’s knowledge pool, they’re asking specific questions in specific practice areas, often relating to the specific laws of the state where the companies are based. Beyond the bar licenses required to give legal advice in the first place, the subject-matter expertise requires years of experience in any given field. To have this type of knowledge available via a web-based service is very valuable.

Further, LawPivot represents a change in the economics of the legal field similar to how cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2 helped free companies from burdensome IT contracts and provisioning processes. In the Information Age, where even legal information is readily available and usable on the web and via certain non-legal specialists, such as CPAs or real estate agents, the hefty retainer fees and hourly billing that have come to embody legal services will no longer cut it, especially for small, cash-strapped businesses. LawPivot, through which lawyers demonstrate their worth first before hopefully establishing a long-term relationship, is part of this larger trend.

The cloud computing connection doesn’t stop with the delivery of knowledge as a service, though. As we’ll be discussing later this month at Structure 2011, the cloud, as a new delivery model, brings about its own set of legal concerns ranging from availability to data privacy. Certainly, more than a few startups should have questions about what avenues of liability cloud computing might open them up to.

As part of the BizSpark partnership, LawPivot is also utilizing the data it has collected about clients to help point new clients in the right direction. As Co-Founder Nitin Gupta explained to me via e-mail:

Through our search algorithm, LawPivot learns about the companies and lawyers on our system over time.  We then use past and present data on users and trends to provide a company the best lawyers on LawPivot to answer its question based on the company’s specific needs, and also provide companies the best questions to ask and legal issues they should look out for.  We will be providing data such as the types of companies using LawPivot, the types of legal questions/issues they have and might have, and the types of lawyers that certain types of companies are working with.

The advent of Everything as a Service is a fascinating trend to watch. First it was IT resources and processes, then it was human labor, and now it’s moving into specific areas of knowledge. All are still very new and no doubt will evolve greatly in the years to come, possibly fundamentally altering the ways we think about obtaining everything from servers to employees to lawyers.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
• Why Humans are the Biggest Threat to Cloud Adoption
• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

There have been a string of voluntary battery recalls affecting HP laptops purchased between July 2007 to May 2008, with models added to the list each year since May 2009. The first recall began with 70,000 affected batteries and was then expanded last year in May to cover an additional…

Neowin.net