Mobile game developer Gameloft has launched a new app store for its Android titles. It’s called Gameloft Live, and if that sounds a lot like Xbox Live, there’s good reason.

Like Xbox Live, the new Gameloft app isn’t just a store for buying and downloading games. It’s also a social hub that lets you send messages or chat with your friends, invite them to play games, or share your achievements. You can also create custom avatars for you account.

This isn’t the first time the company has taken inspiration from outside. Many of the top Gameloft games are blatant rip-offs of other titles. Order and Chaos, for instance, is a World of Warcraft clone, Eternal Legacy draws heavily from Final Fantasy, and NOVA is basically Halo for Android.

Even if you don’t care about the social aspects, Gameloft Live might be worth checking out. The company promises to offer exclusive discounts to members, and the service should make downloading and installing Gameloft titles on an Android device a little simpler. Some of the company’s many games aren’t available in the Android Market.

via EuroDroid

There’s a new beta version of the official Twitter app for BlackBerry, and it adds support for multiple Twitter accounts. Now if you have a personal account and one for work, you can login to both from your BlackBerry smartphone using Twitter 2.1 beta.

The app is available as a free download from the BlackBerry Beta Zone.

Twitter 2.1 beta supports up to 4 Twitter accounts at once. The name of your current profile will show up in the header so you won’t forget which account you’re using. You can also cross-post Tweets between accounts.

In addition to multi-account support, the new Twitter app also makes it easier to edit your Profile data thanks to an edit link on the Profile page.

Twitter’s mobile apps for Android and iOS already support multiple accounts.

It’s been about three months since Google launched the Google+ social network, and today the company is removing the beta label. Anyone can sign up for the service. Google also launched a few major updates today, including some new features that are available in a web browser and a few that are available on mobile devices.

The biggest change for mobile users is support for Hangouts. These are group video chatrooms that you could previously set up at a moment’s notice on any computer with a webcam, mic, and supported web browser. Now you can join a Hangout using the Google+ app for Android. The feature is also coming soon to the Google+ iOS app.

If you’re in the US or India you can also now post to Google+ or receive notifications using SMS instead of a mobile app. The mobile apps for Android and iOS also let you send a message directly to an individual by typing +username. And the iOS app now lets you add a +1 to a comment, not just a post. The Android app will get this feature soon.

Other mobile updates include the ability to edit your profile photo, customize notifications, and share photos using the Messenger service (previously known as Huddle). Android users can also now move the Google+ app to an SD card.

The desktop version of Google+ also gets some nifty new features including:

• Search (seriously, how was this not available before?)
• Record or “broadcast” Hangouts (10 people can chat, but there’s no limit on how many people can watch)
• Share documents, a sketchpad, or share your screen in a Hangout

You can sign up for Google+ at plus.google.com.

Flipboard, a popular social news-magazine app for iPad, is planning to add books, movies and TV content to its ‘pages.’ The company will also be launching an app for iOS devices with smaller screens son.

Currently, Flipboard offers content from various magazines like the Economist and Rolling Stone, while hosting customized news-feeds via Facebook and Twitter. How Flipboard will include books in your personalized feeds is uncertain, but it may work through a bookstore such as Amazon or iBooks.

While Flipboard is reportedly hoping to cut deals with studios and providers to carry film and TV content, the company is declining to say who will be approached or even when this project will materialize.

An app for iPhone and iPod Touch is expected to launch in the coming weeks, pushing an app that has been downloaded over 3 million times into a huge market of smartphone users. It might not be as convenient to use on the smaller 4″ screens, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

via BGR

Research in Motion has launched a new subscription-based music service called BBM Music. The good news is that at $5 per month it’s one of the cheapest music subscription services available for any mobile device, and there’s a strong social element that allows you to hear the songs your friends are listening to. The bad news is that if you don’t have many friends you can’t listen to much music.

Here’s how it works: You pay up your money and BBM Music gives you access to 50 songs that you can stream over the internet or cache on your device for offline playback. If you want to change songs, you can only change 25 per month. When you compare this to services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, or Rdio, which offer unlimited access to music it sounds like a ripoff.

But here’s the innovative feature: BBM Music is a social app. If your other BlackBerry Messenger contacts are using BBM Music you can access any of the 50 songs on their devices. This way you can discover new music and expand your library… by convincing your friends to pony up $5 per month too.

From RIM’s standpoint, BBM Music could be an excellent way to lock users into the BBM service. After all, if you have a few hundred friends and a few thousand songs, you may be a little less likely to replace your BlackBerry phone with an iPhone. From a user standpoint… yeah, I’d probably rather just use a non-social music app. But maybe that’s just me.

Popular online note-taking service Evernote has acquired popular Mac-based image editing and sharing service Skitch. Eventually Evernote plans to offer Skitch to users for free across a variety of platforms. The company is starting with Android.

A new Skitch app showed up in the Andorid Market today, allowing you to snap a photo or grab one from your phone and make some quick edits before sharing with a friend. You can use a pencil tool to write or draw on the screen, or a highlight tool to draw attention to a part of the photo. There’s an arrow which you can use to draw attention to a specific elements, and a few other very basic editing tools include a typing box for adding text.

You can adjust the color of your text, lines, and other drawings, undo actions, and even select annotations that you’ve added to your photo and move them individually.

When you’re done you can share your picture with your contacts on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, or any other app you have on your phone. If you have Evernote installed on your device a Send to Evernote button will also show up on the image editing window — but you don’t need to be an Evernote user to use the free Skitch app for Android.

Skitch for Android is the first mobile version of Skitch, but the company is working on apps for iOS and other platforms.

While Facebook, Google, and others battle it out in the social network space, LinkedIn has largely cornered the market on a specific niche: social networking for professionals. LinkedIn provides a platform for users to connect with business colleagues, former coworkers, and others to form business networks, see what their contacts are up to, look for job opportunities, or write recommendations.

This week LinkedIn launched major updates for its iPhone and Android apps, and launched a new web app aimed at modern smartphones with browsers that support HTML5. The company’s older mobile website is still active at m.linkedin.com, but it’s ugly and difficult to navigate, while the page at touch.linkedin.com offers many of the features you’d get from a native app.

All three apps are designed to let you view updates from your networks, access messages and invitations, see your profile, or browser and interact with Groups. Up until recently Groups weren’t available in the mobile apps.
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Socialcam is a mobile app for iOS and Android that makes it easy to share videos with other users. But maybe it’s a little too easy… up until recently Socialcam didn’t provide a way to mark videos shot with your camera or uploaded from your mobile device as private.

Now Socialcam 2.4 is available for iPhone and it includes a new private video option. For some reason it’s all or nothing though — you can mark all of your videos are private, but you can’t select which videos you’d like to hide.

The company has also launched Socialcam 1.3 for Android, adding some features that had previously only been available in the iOS app such as the ability to share videos on Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumbler or Dropbox, or to find Socialcam users by scanning your Facebook, Twitter, or phone contact lists.

Unfortunately the latest Android app does not include a private videos option.