Internet connection while travelling overseas is a huge boon – you can find your way with Google Maps, suss out must-eats nearby you, and check the weather so you don’t get drenched in rain while hiking up a mountain.

Taiwan’s government has just made it easier for tourists by extending free Wi-Fi services for travelers island-wide. This follows after the government in 2011 launched free public Wi-Fi in Taipei.

In a press release on Tuesday, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau said the government has set up about 4,400 “iTaiwan” Wi-Fi hotspots at major tourist spots, transportation hubs, cultural establishments and government offices all over the island. On top of that, iTaiwan has established roaming agreements with four local governments for tourists to access other Wi-Fi hotspots including TPE-Free in Taipei City, New Taipei in the city of that name, iTaichung in the city of Taichung, and Tainan-WiFi in the city of Tainan.

All tourists need is a passport, and they can apply for an iTaiwan account at a Taiwan Tourism Bureau service counter or any visitor counter across the island, according to the press release. The entire service will be free of charge.

Foreign tourist arrivals hit a record-breaking 7.3 million in Taiwan last year, and that could increase to 7.7 million this year, with China and Southeast Asian countries the main sources of growth, the tourism bureau has said.

Headline image via Thinkstock

Spotify has launched its very own charts, as it looks to showcase the top 50 songs by region.

Spotify Charts constitute both the top 50 most listened to (the Spotify 50) and the top 50 most shared (the Social 50) songs on the music-streaming platform every week.

Charts can be configured by each of the 28 territories Spotify is available in, from Australia through to the US, and you can scroll back to see the previous 4 weeks’ charts too. They’re updated every Monday at noon EST.

You can also embed the charts on your own website, which is an obvious step for Spotify to take, as it looks to increase its online presence.

This mirrors the move it made last year when it launched embeddable play buttons, letting bloggers and other online publications build music directly into their site – the one obvious downside was, however, that it would only work if the end-user was signed-in to Spotify.

With the charts, however, these will show up regardless of whether the end-user is signed-in to Spotify. But to click through and listen to a track in the browser, they will be required to log-in to their account.

“What’s so powerful about the streaming charts is they let you hear what people are really listening to, right now, and not just what they’re buying,” explains Steve Savoca, Head of Content at Spotify.

Play counts for all

In related news, Spotify has also officially announced play counts for all tracks, a week after some users started seeing this feature appear in their account. So for any artist you visit, you’ll now see their total number of global plays since Spotify launched in October 2008.

This feature launches initially for the desktop client only, and if it’s not showing up yet in your account, it will do in the coming weeks.

“We want to be the best artist promotional platform in the world and showing play counts is a clear step in that direction,” adds Savoca. “Now artists can get immediate feedback from their fans on how their music is performing on Spotify.”

Spotify data was already being tapped for other charts, including the Billboard 100 in the US, but it makes sense that Spotify should have its own dedicated charts, with total number of streams visible to all.

As things stood, users could access a “Top Lists” section which surfaced the top-played tracks and albums, ranked from 1-100 by region. However, it also includes a filter for ‘everywhere’ – this is a key omission from the new Charts feature, and it would be good to have a global perspective as well as a local one.

Spotify is  now availabl.e in 28 territories, including the UK, US, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, and most of Europe. It now claims more than 24 million users, 6 million of whom are paying subscribers.

Remember when ‘freemium’ was a new concept and endless conference talks and blog posts evangelised it as the ultimate Web 2.0 business model? Flickr was very much the poster child of that age, offering a solid free product and a good reason to pay – unlimited storage and no ads. The newly relaunched Flickr has done away with that, offering instead what can only be described as ‘faux freemium’.

Seriously, there is no real need to upgrade from the free option – Flickr is now all about ad revenue. Sign out and go to the homepage – even finding details of the new plans is a challenge (hint: they’re buried in the FAQ).

Sure, there’s still a nod to its old model there. You can pay if you want to, but the paid tiers look more designed to milk money from those (few) people who really want to give money to Yahoo than any attempt at an alternative business model to ads.

$49 per year only to remove ads? I’m willing to bet that more people who paid for the old $25 Pro tier did so to get access to the unlimited storage and access to all their photos than for the removal of ads. As for the $200 per year double storage option? As our own Josh Ong noted, you could just get two free accounts and spread your photos across them.

According to a source that spoke to TechCrunch, the Pro tier never really did that well, so perhaps its time to die had come and the thousands complaining on Flickr’s support forum will just have to grin and bear it or go elsewhere. Google+, 500px and even Facebook are all solid alternatives for those feeling slighted by Yahoo today.

Still, as Flickr moves from freemium to faux-freemium, a little bit of the optimism of Web 2.0′s brave new world of a decade ago fades away in favor of good old-fashioned ads. RIP.

See also: Hands on with the new Flickr: Massive free storage, beautiful design, but few new features

Image credits: AFP/Getty Images: 1, 2

It’s less than 24 hours until we find out what Microsoft’s next video game console is, but that doesn’t mean the Xbox 360 has been relegated to the scrap-heap. On-demand music streaming service Deezer announced its first app for the system today, giving users a new way to discover and listen to music.

The interface will feel familiar to anyone that has used the current iteration of the Xbox Music or Last.fm app. The main interface uses a large menu bar along the top of the screen, denoting the usual key sections such as Search, My Music and Radio.

A mini-player sits at the very bottom, displaying the artist and track name, running time and cover art, alongside four colored buttons that convey the functionality of the traditional Xbox 360 controller.

The center of the screen uses a large grid to show the various options and selections available to the listener. Deezer has done this as part of a conscious effort to support Kinect, the peripheral from Microsoft that enables motion controls and voice-commands, because it makes it easier to selecting various options with the hand. It’s a novel way of navigating the various menus and is clearly geared towards social settings, such as a house party or family gathering.

The large targets are therefore welcome, and are bolstered by the usual array of colorful album artwork. As with Last.fm, Deezer is pushing its curated radio stations in a big way. Users can simply select a particular music genre, and the app will quickly create an endless playlist of suitable artists and tracks.

Expanding the audio player shows a list of tracks down the right-hand side of the screen, contrasted with the cover art and playback controls on the left. It’s not particularly innovative, or visual compared to Last.fm’s latest update, but the interface looks clean and intuitive.

The Xbox 360 app also supports up to three Deezer accounts. Only one Xbox 360 account needs to be signed in from the dashboard, but the Connection tab along the top of the screen offers a quick means of switching between users. The functionality should give listeners easier access to personal playlists and preferences, without having to exit the app or tinker with the Xbox 360’s settings.

Deezer is available to European Xbox 360 owners right now, although listeners will need a Premium+ subscription, priced at £9.99 per month, to gain access to unlimited streaming. It’s the same strategy deployed by Microsoft with its Xbox Music service, whereby users are encouraged to pay for wider device access and functionality.

For Deezer, launching an app on the Xbox 360 should improve its brand awareness and also show that it’s serious about catering for a wide range of hardware. It follows a Windows 8 app launched last month which again competes with Microsoft’s own Xbox Music service, as well as the likes of Nokia Music+.

Deezer has 26 million users and 3 million subscribers. Today’s launch follows a ‘recharged’ Android app released in beta earlier this year, as well as a new music streaming service released by Google at its I/O developer conference last week – Google Play Music All Access.

It’s been over three years since I first got to know Yoni Bloch, a musician and something of a celebrity in Israel, and got acquainted with his interactive video technology startup Interlude.

Interlude’s technology basically enables video creators and publishers to let viewers experience a multi-branch tree-structured video.

Think of it as ‘choose your own adventure’ technology for online videos, where users can – to a degree, at least – determine what happens next in music videos, commercials, branded webisodes and other sorts of clips.

Here’s an example, to give you an idea of the possibilities:

In early 2011, Interlude was funded by Sequoia Capital and a number of angel investors. Yesterday, Israeli business daily Calcalist reported that the startup had secured another round of funding, to the tune of $15 million.

The publication offered a detailed breakdown of which investor put in how much for the round (you can find it in English here), but we’ve been in touch with Bloch following the reports and can confirm that not all of the details are accurate.

Bloch said that Interlude had indeed closed another round of funding, but the amount raised was in fact $16 million. The investors were Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, the Eric Schmidt-backed Innovation Endeavors fund and Marker Capital.

On a sidenote, Intel banked on Interlude’s technology for the commercials used in its international Ultrabook campaign last year.

The musician / entrepreneur declined to comment on the specific breakdown for the financing round, but said the details as reported by Calcalist were not entirely correct.

Interlude has now raised just south of $20 million in total.

Image credit: Thinkstock

SK Telecom will soon start offering mobile and online services in Indonesia in a joint venture worth $18 million, as it seeks to make inroads into the Southeast Asian nation’s growing population of connected users, according to Global Post, which cited a Yonhap news agency report on Tuesday.

SK Planet, a unit of South Korea’s telecommunications company SK Telecom, has agreed to set up a joint venture with Indonesian mobile operator XL Axiata to offer mobile and online services, the report cited industry sources as saying. The two firms will each invest $9.15 million in the venture.

It isn’t yet clear what services the joint venture will offer, but sources in the report said it would likely push out navigation, as well as online shopping and auction services.

This wouldn’t be SK Planet’s first venture into Indonesia. The South Korean firm had in 2011 set up a joint venture in Indonesia called MelOn Indonesia to provide music and video streaming services.

SK Telecom has been pushing expansion plans to move out of the saturated domestic market in South Korea, and Indonesia, with a population of 240 million out of which more people are becoming increasingly tech-savvy, has been one of its targets.

Image credit: Choi Jae-Ku for AFP/Getty Images

Private business information service Duedil (short for ‘due diligence’) today announced that it is making data on companies in 20 new countries available to businesses and developers through the Duedil API.

In addition, the London, UK-based company is releasing a brand new developer portal to cater to third-party developers and partners.

The moves come after Duedil raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Notion Capital and Oak Investment Partners, with participation from early Spotify backer Shakil Khan and prior investors such as Passion Capital.

In short, the new API enables businesses and developers to integrate 20 years of private data on companies and directors across the UK and Europe directly into their applications.

Information available through the Duedil API includes financial accounts, industry profile, location details, employee numbers, credit ratings, directorships, corporate group structures and more.

A company spokesperson tells us that Duedil can now dig up more than 80 million live company and director records, which it claims enables it to rival the oldest business information company in the world, Dunn and Bradstreet, at least in terms of access to international company data.

Newly supported countries include France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Iceland, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovakia.

These new regions are in addition to those already available: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Duedul was launched in April 2011 by founder Damian Kimmelman in order to increase trust and transparency in business.

Prior to launching Duedil, Damian set up two other businesses: a p2p Chinese gaming platform and a London-based digital agency whose clients included the BBC, Virgin and General Motors.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Opera’s WebKit-powered browser for Android has completed its beta period and is out in full today, the company has announced, with a few additional tweaks.

The much-anticipated beta launch came in March, some two months ago. Now, in addition to the existing features – which include a new user interface and Discover — users of the browser can now choose to place their navigation bar at the top or bottom of the screen. Text wrap and full screen modes for active tabs have also been added, as well improved stability.

The browser was one of the highlights of Mobile World Congress in February, where it was unveiled off the back of the Norwegian firm’s decision to ditch its Presto engine in favor of the open source WebKit. That explains the speed gains that users of the new browser will enjoy on their device.

The browser runs native Web apps, but the headline feature is Discover, which recommends content for users — encouraging a “lean-back surfing experience”, as CEO Lars Boilesen puts it — based on a range of factors that include previous clicks, Web page history and their location. On the downside, Discover content is curated by Opera itself and is not automated.

The Off-Road setting utilises Opera’s network optimization expertise to lower the amount of traffic used per session, and get the most out of slow and unreliable connections. That’s particularly handy in emerging markets, where Opera has a particularly sizeable presence.

Other features — while regular on rival browsers — that mark a change for Opera include private browsing and a unified URL-search bar.

If you still don’t have it yet, you can find the browser on the Google Play Store or m.opera.com.

From Mobile World Congress: Opera CEO Lars Boilesen talks acquisition rumors, plans and Firefox OS [Video]

Image via Opera

Samsung Wallet, an Android alternative to Apple’s Passbook, was quietly unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February and Samsung has, once again, without a media fanfare, launched the service for consumers with an initial rollout in Korea.

An announcement in Korean (via Engadget) states that the service is available for a range of Galaxy device owners — initially those with the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy S II HD LTE — who can store their credit card details on their device in order to make transactions with online merchants. Payment is verified using a PIN and a one time password.

The company says that some 30,000 domestic retailers are supporting the service on launch. There are plans to add support for a number of Passbook-like services, including tickets, membership cards, coupons and other services that were showcase earlier this year.

There’s no word on a timeline of other services — we already know NFC payments will be supported in time — nor do we have an update on when it will launch outside of Korea. For now, it looks like this will be a test deployment ahead of a wider expansion.

Like Apple’s Passbook, Samsung Wallet is able to deliver time and location based push notifications, notifying you when you are near a store or location that you can use a Wallet card. Always connected, membership cards and boarding passes can be updated in real-time.

Samsung Wallet includes an open API which allows other services to feed into it for payments. So, once the global launch kicks off, we can expect integration from the existing base of partners which includes including Walgreens, MLB, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Lufthansa.

Here’s a reminder of what was announced back in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress:

Headline image via Jung Yeon Je / Getty Images

Earlier this year, Tencent-owned WeChat, a mobile messaging app with more than 300 million users, came under fire for censoring ‘sensitive’ topics that its users were discussing. Now, Line, a rival app developed in Japan which has 150 million users, is the next in line to pal up to the Chinese government and restrict the use of certain phrases on its dedicated China service: Lianwo.

A section of code within the app — spotted by Twitter user @hirakujira – shows that Line has a mechanism that will detect selected phrases. As the image below shows, there is a warning for ‘bad words’ which prompts the following Orwellian message (translated into English): ’Your message contains sensitive words, please adjust and send again.’

In addition to the code, @hirakujira gained access to Line’s service and obtained a list of 150 ‘bad words’ (in this pastebin note) that the company will monitor for.

Words on the list include references to the Tiananmen Square massacre (a phrase that previously got Foursquare blocked in China), recently ousted Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his family wealth (which was subject to a NY Times exposé), ‘criminality in the communist party’, ‘Jasmine Revolution‘ and other terms which are routinely deleted when posted to Chinese Web services like Sina Weibo.

The censorship feature is not currently activated, but, it has been suggested, that Line could monitor the conversations of  its users worldwide, that’s despite it only blocking language used in China.

TNW carried out a range of tests and was able to receive a number of phrases from the block list without a problem — in both Chinese and the English equivalent.

Though it is not switched on yet, @hirakujira proved that the feature exists by hacking his/her iPhone to get packets from Line, which then generated the following censorship notification:

Censorship requirements of China

The discovery of the censorship feature and list of terms is a clear sign that Line is focusing on growth in China. Western Internet services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked in the country, while domestic Web companies are subject to censorship and punishment when they fail to manage their users.

Last year, Sina Weibo was made an example of when its commenting system shut down for three days after it was adjudged to have been slow in responding to coup speculation that emerged on its Twitter-like service.

What’s particularly concerning for those in China, is that Line asks users to verify their telephone number in order to install the app. The fact that it then monitors their user chat logs for sensitive words, will raise alarm given the potential repercussions should that data fall into government hands.

Line has around 45 million registered users in Japan, but it has passed 150 million registrations worldwide thanks to particularly fast growth in Southeast Asia, Spain and Latin America. The ambitious company is also targeting China and the US, and is thought to be devoting significant resources to both markets.

Focus on Chinese market

Despite WeChat’s dominance in China — all but 40 million of the service’s 300 million-plus users are on its home turf — Line launched there in December 2012. While it is the underdog in the battle, its lack of censorship was one advantage that it had over WeChat from a Chinese user’s perspective. At least until this discovery was made.

It isn’t clear if the creation of this feature is a response to a request from the Chinese government, or whether Line made the change on its own. The dilemma between following legal regulation from authorities or choosing to operate from outside of China is one that many companies juggle when committing to having a business in the country.

Line could opt not to censor Chinese words, but then it runs the risk of being blocked by the government.

Twitter, Facebook and Google are among those that have refused to kowtow to censorship, but many others have relented in exchange for the chance to gain a foothold in the country’s vast and fast-growing Internet space.

Potential to impact global growth

Tencent apologized for its WeChat censorship, which affected users worldwide, but referred to the issue only as “a technical glitch” that meant “a small number of WeChat international users were not able to send certain messages”.

Despite that, the issue was enough for many to suggest that it would impact WeChat’s global growth potential. Quartz went so far as to say that WeChat had “messed up its best chance of beating Facebook”.

While Line’s censorship is limited to China, it remains to be seen how this issue will affect its ambitious goal of becoming a truly global service and widening its income base worldwide. The company recorded $58 million in revenue during Q1 2013, but a whopping 80 percent came from Japan highlighting that it is still to turn a global user base into global revenue streams.

We reached out to Line for comment more than seven hours before publishing this news. Though a representative confirmed receipt of our request, we are yet to receive a response from the company.

Headline image via Thinkstock, additional images via @hirakujira

Thanks to our anonymous tipster and Richard Lee for helping with Chinese-English translations.