Toluu : Last.fm – the Blog

Last.fm – the Blog

Music and Web Geekery from East London

Back in July we launched Last.fm on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was the end result of months of hard work and we were pretty happy with how it turned out. We received tons of positive feedback and although we weren’t able to launch in every country, we were able to provide an excellent streaming solution in more markets than any of the other iPhone players.

Fast forward 3 months… Apple released the iPhone 2.1 firmware which was unfortunately incompatible with the bleeding edge coding techniques cooked into our app. Fortunately, we have been feverishly working on the next generation app that also happens to be 2.1 firmware friendly. Team iPhone have once again outdone themselves to produce what quite frankly, is a work of art (check out the tagging interface if you doubt).

There’s been some awesomely high profile internet leakage of beta test footage, but below you can see the version that’s available right now from the iTunes App Store:

Here’s the feature breakdown:

VASTLY improved user interface all around (tap to zoom album art included)
Ability to tag songs
Personal tag radio
Calendar based events view
Common artists when viewing a user profile
Many other usability and back-end f

VLC Starts ScrobblingSeptember 16

The bagel was delicious. Lightly smeared with all-American cream cheese. I was so enamored with this treat that I almost missed Sam’s parting words as he wandered off to the iPhone expert lab. Sam is our iPhone developer, and this was July. We were attending the Apple Wordwide Developer Conference, just before the launch of iPhone 3G.

That was all very exciting. The iPhone stuff. But I had more important things to attend to. The Last.fm Scrobbler wasn’t working great with OS X 10.3. I made my way over to the compatibility lab, licking the breadcrumbs from my fingertips.

Sadly, the lab was less useful than I had hoped. As I turned to leave, the gangly technician mentioned that two French chaps had just been there before me with the same problem.

“They were the VLC guys”

“Oh neat,” I said, trying not to look too excited, “did you see where they went?”

He hadn’t. But I decided I had to find them and meet them and get pictures taken with them. My geek-cred really needed the boost. However there were five thousand delegates at WWDC that year, and I didn’t have time to go round them all listening for French accents. And anyway, I had a session on Core Animation in 40 minutes. As usual, in such seemingly hopeless situations, IRC came to

There are plenty of great groups on Last.fm. However, some of them can be a bit hard to find. We thought one way to make it easier to find groups would be to make it easier to find similar groups. What do you think?

Here are some of my personal favourites and their similar groups:

Bossa Nova: they have a great group radio, if you are into that kind of music
Addicted to Last.fm: the title says it all
Converse: this special sponsored group has a really cool feature you won’t find elsewhere on the site
The Special Interest Tag Radio Collective: some of the best tag radio stations I know of are listed there
People with no social lives that listen to more music than is healthy who …: a wonderful example of how a long group name totally makes sense

Hadoop User Group UKAugust 28

At Last.fm we’re fond of elephants. A few months ago Martin and I went to a gathering of elephant enthusiasts and liked what we saw. In fact, we liked it so much that we decided to host a similar event in London. Some 50-60 herders turned up to enjoy the presentations as well as the free beer and food kindly supplied by Yahoo! and Skills Matter.

If you are wondering what on earth I’m talking about, the event was focused on Hadoop – “a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.” We use Hadoop extensively at Last.fm and, judging by the number of people who came to the event, we’re not alone.

To make sure you don’t miss the next event you can subscribe to the Hadoop User Group UK mailing list by sending an e-mail to huguk-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then replying to the confirmation e-mail. You can also simulate the experience by getting a beer from your local shop and watching the videos and presentations below. Sadly you will have to talk to yourself after you�

Rockband 2 RadioAugust 22

Today we are pleased to announce a cool partner integration with Gamespot for their Rockband 2 launch center. Gamespot has setup Last.fm radio with the ability to play songs from the game (so you can start getting warmed up :). They will be updating their station with new songs that show up in weekly download section of Rockband 2.

This is a great example of the type of partner integration that we’ve been working to deliver. You should start to see more Last.fm players across the web (they’ll scrobble if you’re logged in). If you’re a website that’s interested in using a Last.fm radio, please email box@last.fm.