All posts tagged StreamStore

Taptu goes Australia

New Australian StreamStore

Today, we have released the new version of Taptu for Android phones and tablets; the biggest thing there, is a tailored StreamStore for our friends in Australia.

Our featured streams include a wide selection of topics relevant for Aussies, from Sports to Politics to Fashion and Tech. So if you live “Down Under” check it out.

We hope you find those relevant, but in any case, you can contact us on Twitter @Taptu, or our Facebook page, or via email [email protected].

Thanks a lot,
Konstantinos

Australian flag courtesy of wikipedia

This week, our line-up of featured streams from our StreamStore starts with our specially mixed Tour de France stream. By adding this stream you’ll be able to follow all of the ups and downs of this year’s tour, which runs from Saturday July 2nd to Sunday July 24th 2011.

We’ve also curated a search stream for you on the on-going Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga, the former IMF chief accused of attacking a hotel maid. The news broke earlier that the case was on the verge of collapse after US prosecutors found too many holes in the housekeeper’s story to them. Strauss-Kahn, once seen as a presidential hopeful in France, was forced to resign from his top post at the IMF following his subsequent arrest.

What else have we got? We’re highlighting The Awl, the current events and culture web site that the New York Times once described as “all over the road” but that’s meant in a good, eclectic way! We’ve also got The Daily Beast, who’s tagline is “a fresh take on the news from around the world with sharp opinion,” and that old stalwart National Geographic. It’s stunning photos look great on the iPad and tablet.

For our UK fans, we’ve chosen NME, the music magazine as well as two smaller blogs, The Style Scout, and Bitch Buzz. The Style Scout is a street style fashion blog highlighting the quirky, stylish and cool in London, while Bitch Buzz is not your ordinary women’s magazine. It calls itself the “Honest Women’s Magazine” and you will certainly not be reading about how to shed those 10 last stubborn pounds or how to get your mascara not to run. But you probably knew that from its name.

Finally, we come to our Guest DJ of the Week, Jimmy Ebersole. Jimmy is an event planner, fundraiser, student, community-relations specialist and major foodie from Atlanta, Georgia. In his spare time, Jimmy curates the best food news and recipes from Taptu and shares them to his Twitter followers @Global_Food.

He’s kindly agreed to mix up a stream of his favorite global food sites, which include eclectic picks such as the cheese magazine, Culture, New Asian Cuisine, a must for anyone who loves Asian food, and Souvlaki for the Soul, “a Sydney food blog featuring Greek and Mediterranean recipes, travel stories, beautiful food photography and food styling.” Jimmy’s Global Foods stream is a great one if you’d like to explore cooking from across the world and need fresh ideas on what to cook. I was thinking of making a summer pudding from a recipe I found in Jimmy’s stream, but I’m now leaning toward the Matcha Mochi Cake (Green Tea Mochi Cake). Thanks Jimmy!

If you think you’ve got a great mix on your hands, why not share it with the Taptu community? You can reach us at @taptu on Twitter, our Facebook page, or on our community support pages. Thanks again for using Taptu.

Taptu fans, we’re kicking off a weekly update where we throw the spotlight on a selection of some of the 12,000 sources (and counting!) you can find in our StreamStore.

We’re featuring a mix of your old favorites, great blogs both big and small, our own curated streams, and mixes from our Guest DJs. And, to our UK fans, don’t think we’re just giving you the American stuff (love it as you do). We’ve combed the StreamStore UK and picked out the very best for you as well.

This week, just in time for two of the summer’s biggest sporting events, we’ve got streams for golf’s US Open and Wimbledon. Though Wimbledon doesn’t officially start until 20 June, there’s still plenty of gossip and run-up news to be read. Plus, if that’s not enough, we’ve got curated streams on Tennis and Golf.

We’d also like to share two awesome Guest DJ streams that two of your fellow Taptu fans have created:

If you’re into Hip Hop, you’ll want to add the MoBetter Hip Hop stream, mixed up by @Mobetter, radio hip-hop programmer extraordinaire at Hot 107.1 in Memphis, Tennessee.

If you want to discover what your iPhone’s camera is capable of, and some of the interesting and beautiful photos others are snapping, you’ll want to check out iquanyin’s Essential iPhone Photography Stream. Iquanyin, a photographer from Honolulu, Hawaii has curated the definitive list of iPhoneography sites that will teach and inspire you to do more with your iPhone camera.

And, we’ve picked out a few blogs:

Cool Hunting: A favorite of those seeking inspiration beyond the mundane and looking for innovations in design, technology, art and culture. And, now that we’re showing full photos in the article cards, you can see Cool Hunting posts in all their glory.

Brain Pickings: The perfect way to spend time on your tablet or iPad. Brain Pickings is a selection of carefully chosen “pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology,” or, as Maria Popova, the sites founder and editor calls it, “a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion.”

NYMag’s Vulture: The popular entertainment blog from New York Magazine covering all things from television, movies, books and music.

In the UK, we’ve curated the best of the British political magazines and put them all in one stream. That’s right, you’ll see Spectator stories sitting next to articles from Prospect and Private Eye. Should be an interesting mix! Look out for the UK Political Magazines stream to add it.

For some UK-specific blogs, we’ve also got:

Pop Justice: What more can you say? The blog that’s dedicated to celebrating pop music has an annual Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize, which rewards the creator of the best British pop single of the previous twelve months with £20 cash.

The Offside: Footy season may be over, but transfers are now underway! Get the latest gossip, rumours and news from the Offside, the “serious” football blog (according to the Observer) that also manages to be funny and irreverent. Its promise: “If there is a sex scandal in England, we’ll be stuck in the middle of it. If a player is traded for a thousand pounds of beef in Romania, we’ll cook the steak. If something interesting happens in MLS, we’ll be just as surprised as you.”

To add any of our featured sites:

1. On Android devices, tap on the + sign to pull up the StreamStore.
2. Click the + sign on the icon of the stream you’d like to add. Scroll down to find more sources.
3. When you’re done, click the back button on your phone to return to the Taptu main screen.

1. On Apple devices, tap on the + Add sign to bring up the StreamStore.
2. Click the + sign on the icon of the stream you’d like to add. Swipe left to find more sources.
3. When you’re done, click the “Close” button to return to the Taptu main screen.

Happy reading!

Tips: Adding Streams to My Taptu

My Taptu has three different ways to find and add streams to it: through our StreamStore, which has more than 13,000 streams and counting, through Google Reader, and by searching. We’ve broken down here the best ways to use these three resources:

1) StreamStore: The StreamStore is where you will find the most popular feeds from blogs and publishers and mixed streams we’ve curated. These are organized as Featured and by Topics. In the Featured section you can add streams from the most popular blogs and publishers. The Topics section is organized as a directory, letting you browse and add streams by subject.

2) Searching for Streams: You can also search for a stream by typing its name in the search box located in the StreamStore. If we have it in the StreamStore, it will be pulled up in the search results. If we do not, My Taptu gives you the option of using Bing RSS search to pull up the feed.

Please note that when you pull up feeds from Bing RSS, you may not see the images associated with the stories immediately, especially if no one else has added the stream. It takes a short period of time for My Taptu to crawl and return the images.

3) Google Reader: You can add up to 30 of your favorite streams from Google Reader, located just under the search box in StreamStore. Google Reader synch is very handy for those feeds you know are less popular and may not be pulled up in our Bing RSS search results or in the StreamStore search. Google Reader is especially useful for adding non-English language feeds to My Taptu.

In conclusion, StreamStore Featured and Topics sections are best for the most popular streams from blogs and mainstream publishers. Searching is great when you know exactly what you want, or if you can’t find it under Featured or Topics. Bings RSS search is great for feeds not found in the StreamStore. Lastly, Google Reader is most useful for feeds not found in the StreamStore or Bing RSS, and also for non-English language feeds.

If you have any problems adding streams, please give us a shout and we’ll try to help you out. You can reach us on @taptu on Twitter, on our Facebook page, and on our communities help page. Thanks again for using My Taptu!

After weeks of hard work, we’re excited today to unveil the latest update to My Taptu, which now lets you mix your own streams, curating them exactly as you want them.

That’s right, with My Taptu 1.3′s new self-curation feature, you can now build your very own stream from scratch, choosing and combining feeds that you find from the My Taptu StreamStore (13,000 and counting!), through a search with Bing RSS, or from your Google Reader account. Or, you can edit the topic streams we’ve mixed up ourselves by removing and adding sources. Once the stream has been created, you can watch stories flow in from your favorite sources all in one stream.

The obvious streams to create are based on topics, such as the VC blogs stream DFJ Esprit VC Scott Sage has mixed up (search for “VC Blogs” in the StreamStore), the “Parenting Essentials” stream from Britain’s best-selling “yummy mummy” author Liz Fraser (search for Liz Fraser), and the DIY Inspiration & Tips from San Francisco-based interior designer Beryn Hamill (search for “DIY Inspiration”).

Then there are the not so obvious curated streams, random mixes of favorite blogs and sites, that mashed together, provide a serendipitous and thought-provoking line-up of stories. We first tuned into this type of stream when Jed Hallam, a London, UK-based social media strategist mixed up a bunch of feeds from business news to small creative blogs, to blogs from those working in his industry, with a few fashion and design ones thrown in and called it Jed Hallam’s “Synapse Starter.”

It’s been one of my favorite streams to follow—especially since it’s where I discovered the smart and often very funny musings of Dave Trott, a London marketing man (and learned, incidentally, how to say “stingy s**t” in the southern Chinese dialect Teochew). Another example of such a stream is the one Monica Durden has curated, namely “London femme’s escort into fashion and arts” with coverage from both the arts and the fashion world, an essential stream for whoever wants to stay up to date with the catwalk news as well the art world.

The point is, with literally thousands of sources accessible on My Taptu, any number of these streams can be created. Want to keep up on work news? Create a stream for it! Want to keep up on your passions? Mix up a stream! Or do like Jed and mash it all up. We’d love to see what streams you are coming up with—or as we say here, “How do you Taptu?” so let us know by pinging us on Twitter (@taptu), in the comments, or on our Facebook page. And yes, we are working on letting you share your streams with one another as fast as we can!

Now, just a few more cool features we’ve heard you asking for:

On the social side, you can now do more inside the app with Twitter and Facebook:

Twitter Stream: You can now reply and retweet inside your Twitter stream without having to leave My Taptu.
Facebook Links Only Stream: You can now add your Facebook links stream that will only show the updates when your Facebook friends share a link. The link will open as a preview in the article card, along with the update. You can also Like or Comment right in the card.

We’ve also made discovering new content streams and RSS feeds even easier:

StreamStore Streamlined: Every time you visit the StreamStore, My Taptu remembers which streams you’ve added. The next time you visit, the StreamStore replenishes itself and displays new streams for you to choose from.
Google Reader Front and Center: Google Reader is now front and center in the StreamStore to let you import the RSS news feeds you already follow.

Thanks again for using My Taptu! If you need help, please go to our community support or ping us on Twitter @Taptu. As always, let us know what other features you’d like to see. Our full press release is here. Happy mixing! –Konstantinos