As a “Christmas gift” for the DriveCast user community, we are happy to announce the release of two new DriveCast Apps for iOS and Android with browse and subscribe functions.

Up to now DriveCast has been based con the idea that you browse and subscribe from the PC and listen from the device, be it a car, a smartphone or a connected tv. With the availability of tablets and large screen smartphones we assumed it’s right to bring to them the richer experience that you have using DriveCast with a pc or a mac. Withe these new apps, now DriveCast gives you the capability to modify your LiveLibrary
directly from your device, following the trend for which smartphones and tablets must provide complete functions.

Cloud and Internet are used sometimes as synonyms nowadays. In more exact terms, we should say that the Internet is build nowadays by many “clouds” that can talk more or less easily between them.

Trying to be true to the Internet spirit of openness, DriveCast is now integrating 4 different cloud storage services, with complete access and interoperability.

No matter where you store you media files on the cloud, you can now connect to them using DriveCast’s web interface, so that you will be able to play them on any device that has the DriveCast App installed: smartphones, tablets, TVs and cars.

Radio24, the first Italian talk radio with over 5 million listeners every week, is now using DriveCast to bring the radio and its 44 podcast channels to the new Internet connected devices: Android, Connected TVs, Windows Phone 7, Bada, iOS.

DriveCast will make even more convenient having the different Radio24 programs always available on any device and in any moment.

Radio24 started to broadcast on October 4th 1999, it’s now the first Italian talk radio as listeners,
reaching by FM 86,9% of the Italian population. Radio24 is owned by “Il Sole 24 Ore”, the publisher
of the fist Italian financial newspaper, that with a circulation of about 300.000 is the second financial newspaper in Europe after the Financial Times.

DriveCast confirms its relevance as the tool of choice for bringing Internet media content to the connected TVs, by being part in the first set of application released for the new Opera TV Store.

The Opera TV Store is a complete HTML5 based store solution for easy implementation into connected TVs by OEMs and easily reached content providers.
The Opera TV Store extends beyond connected TVs, making it an all-device experience. Running on the TV, set-top box or a Blu-ray player makes no difference for the Opera TV Store.

Opera TV Store with DriveCast will be shown at ShowStoppers in IFA (Sept. 1, 6:00pm to 9:00pm Messe-Berlin Fairgrounds-Building 15.2) and IBC in Amsterdam (Sept. 9-13, Booth 5.B47).

For more info on Opera TV Store please refer to the Opera press release.

DriveCast follows them!

We are happy to announce the integration of two cloud storage services, Dropbox and Box.net, as media
sources in DriveCast.
Using the DriveCast web interface you can now connect to specific folders on the cloud, add their content to
your library and define them as playlist.
This new content from the cloud will be available to all the DriveCast apps on the smartphones, tablets, and TVs.
Any time you’ll add something to your cloud storage it will also automatically come to DriveCast.

Having this new and powerful cloud support, the native file upload support will be phased out from DriveCast in Q3 2011.

With help from Federico La Greca, we can now claim that DriveCast is also available on Windows Phone 7.

It was very interesting to work with Federico on the software development tools provided by Microsoft, and with the Samsung Omnia 7 provided by Samsung Italia.

We have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the development experience, and while it’s true that the Windows Phone 7 OS still needs to evolve in order to attain the same level of function and consistency as the Apple IOs and Android, the concepts used by its “Metro” User Interface are really advanced.

They’re also a perfect fit for promoting the intuitive and user-friendly experience that DriveCast wants to achieve on all mobile devices.

The app is available for free at the following link: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=091c42ec-4a5c-e011-854c-00237de2db9e

Starting in 2011, Facebook deprecated a lot of old development tools recently replaced by modern technologies. That’s just boring developer stuff, but it gave us the opportunity to update and refresh our app FBDriveCast, which now features a brand new design and some additional functionalities.

The best news? Now you can play all your Library content, both audio and video, and we also added support for onDriveCast radios, just like we did for our mobile apps.

Last but not least: share-with-your-friends functionalities for podcasts and recordings are now more powerful than ever before.

Happy social networking with DriveCast!

It’s been a long time since the initial release of DriveCast for the Apple iPhone, and everyone here would like to thank Emanuele Fornaro, the independent developer who made it possible, for all his efforts over the past 18 months.

But as DriveCast grows and the iOS devices also continue to increase in popularity, the time has come to bring App development and maintenance to the same team of people developing the core DriveCast service.

Thanks to the latest help from Emanuele, the approval stage is complete, and we are proud to announce that the new “official” DriveCast App is now available from the iTunes Store.

Existing users will see that DriveCast is now completely free on iOS, and that the new version adds the playlist support that was missing from the previous free version.

The new app also provides the streaming of local radio station that are “onDriveCast“.

“onDriveCast” is a project aimed to help the Italian local and independent radio stations to get distributed in a simple and effective way on all the new internet connected devices.

Install DriveCast from App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drivecast/id414012011?mt=8&ls=1

No new gadget family can escape from DriveCast.

Thank to Carlo Prone who created it as an independent developer, we also have DriveCast on bada available from the Samsung Apps Store.

Carlo played with DriveCast during his internship in Inrete and after that decided to create a new app for the Bada Developer Challenge, where he qualified for the “Device phase winner award” (and grabbed the $8000 prize). Congratulation Carlo, we look forward to see the new DriveCast releases for the new Bada smartphones.

Thanks to many user’s feedback, a new release of the DriveCast app for Android is now available, with a lot of updates targeted to make DriveCast easier and more straightforward to use, as:

• an integrated audio/video player which remember the playhead time when stopped, and let you restart from it when it’s played again;
• a better download manager, with autosync option;
• an icon in the notification bar, to easily access the element playing in background;
• bug fixes.