The power of Spotify is its expansive database of music that you can stream on your desktop or with a premium account, a mobile device. You’ll be extremely hard-pressed to not be able to find a particular track or musician that you like on the service.

As the company is turning itself into a music platform complete with its own app store and public API, more and more great apps are popping up around listening to tracks on Spotify.

One absolutely gorgeous app is called SpotON Radio and it’s available for iOS. The premise is simple, you enter an artist that you like and the app uses the popular Echo Nest API to create a radio station of songs that are similar to the artist you chose. This functionality might sound familiar, as it’s exactly what Pandora has done quite well for years.

The difference between an app like this and Pandora is that you can save tracks to your existing playlists or create new ones, since the app is built around Spotify. You must have a premium Spotify account to use the app, so if you’re still on the fence about dropping down $10 a month, SpotON might change your mind.

Thumbs up!

As I mentioned, if you’ve ever used Pandora you’ll be extremely familiar with what SpotON has to offer. As soon as you log into the account with your Spotify account you’re shown a list of your top artists, meaning the ones you listen to the most. From there you can let the app build radio stations comprised of tracks and artists that are similar to the one you chose:

When a station is created, you’ll be able to do a few things with it; save it as a Spotify playlist, thumbs up and thumbs down tracks to help the app choose music for you, and share your stations on Facebook. The app itself is beautifully designed and having used it for a better part of the day, I can see myself not using Pandora as much since being able to find new tracks and save them directly to a Spotify playlist is something I just can’t do with Pandora.

The great part about jumping between tracks is that you don’t have the constraints that Pandora puts on you by limiting how many times you can jump ahead to the next track.

The app is currently free but hints on its app store copy and website that it could have a cost associated with it in the future. While I would highly suggest this app even if it cost a few bucks, the fact that its free makes the download an absolute no-brainer. Again, if you haven’t picked up a premium account for Spotify, you’re really missing out. SpotON is just one way a seemingly infinite database of great music can be put to use in a whole host of ways.

➤ SpotON Radio for iOS

Today we got sent a video called “Psycho Siri” that is so well done, it could pass for a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. The storyline involves one of the characters finding an abandoned iPhone 4S, but I won’t ruin the rest of it for you.

Try to not get creeped out when Siri says “it’s futile for you to run and hide”.

It’s about rating things, not venues. It’s about rating things like roller coasters in an amusement park or the chairs in a restaurant. Anything, really. That is what Oink is all about, a location based services app, available on iPhone only. Oink is the brainchild of Kevin Rose, the former founder of Digg, who’s now leading his next venture called “Milk“.

The app, described as a ‘way to rate and rank the things around you’, topped 100,000 downloads in just under three weeks from its launch, adding another 50,000 downloads in 16 days.

The head of Oink’s Business is Chris Hutchins, the former Business Development head at SimpleGeo. We caught up with Hutchins at LeWeb in Paris this past December and interviewed him about Oink’s integration with Foursquare, the company’s business models, plans to raise money and focusing on “the inside”.

Watch out video interview with Chris Hutchins below and catch the full text interview after the jump:

TNW: You’re leading business at ‘Milk’ and you’ve recently launched a new version of ‘Oink’. Can you tell us what you guys are up to at Oink?

Hutchins: Sure, Milk is about 6 months old. We started the company with the goal of bringing together a really small, talented team and trying out a few business ideas we had and really kind of incubating those ideas with the concept that if the ideas don’t work, we can try something else. And two months ago, we’ve launched our first app called ‘Oink’.

TNW: You know in Holland when we try to do the sound of a pig, it’s ‘oink’…

Hutchins: It’s much easier to explain it to Dutch people because in France and in Korea, the word for a pig is very different. So Oink is an application for rating things. You have sites in the US like Yelp, in Europe like Quipe where you can rate different places and you can say ‘I like this restaurant, I like this bar’. But we found that you might go to a restaurant and they have terrible food but wonderful wine and we really felt like there was nobody getting the items in the place. So with Oink you can rate any items at anywhere. You can go to an amusement park and rate a roller coaster, you can go to a park and rate a running trail, you can rate food, so that when someone comes to that place and they come to Oink, you can get a list of what’s the best thing in this place.

TNW: Why would I want to rate a roller coaster? And are people actually doing that at this moment? What’s the user base, how is it going?

Hutchins: We launched about one month ago and this past week we were featured as the iTunes app of the week. We have about 150,000 downloads so far. It’s all over the world. We’ve got a strong presence in Europe and the Middle East. But a majority of our users are in the US. My colleague, Amber, was in Bali this week and she opens Oink and takes a screen shot and send it to us and there’s items all over Bali. So it’s really cool. About the roller coaster, I actually went to an amusement park in Los Angeles one month ago and I only had half of a day and I didn’t know how to spend my half a day because they have maybe 25 roller coaster and I looked at Oink and I saw that these 3 roller coasters were the top 3 so I’ve made sure to visit those first and I got the best experience.

TNW: And did you compare them with other ones that weren’t rated and were they much worse? In other words, is your app working?

Hutchins: So this was like 2 weeks after we launched to be fair. I also tried other roller coasters and they were also good but eventually when the database is filled out more, you will be able to find a better look at every place. I think at the early stage instead of trying to stay “we have a comprehensive view of what all the best things are”, we have the ability to tell you good things at a place. So there might be other dishes at a restaurant that are good but the ones in Oink that are rated well, they are good.

TNW: Are there any restrictions of how detailed the information can be? I mean, can I rate a chair? Then it’s a whole data blur and nobody can see it anymore.

Hutchins: Sure, so every item has a description and it’s free text.

TNW: How must we compare this application to other location based services like Gowalla, Facebook Places, Foursquare and all other stuff  out there? Can we rate venues also at Oink?

Hutchins: Right now, no. All of our place data is actually coming from Foursquare. I believe Foursquare probably right now has the best location database for the world. And so we’re using them to get venue information. We leave it up to people like Foursquare and people like Yelp and Quipe and all these companies to rate places. And we get it what the items are inside. Eventually, if we know all the items at all the places, we will be able to give kind of an aggregate score of ‘this place has 10 amazing things, this place has 1 amazing thing. But our goal is not to focus on the places, it’s to focus on what’s inside.

TNW: You’re a business man, not a designer and not a developer, so…  let’s talk business. What’s the perspective for Oink? Did you raise any money? What are business models you’re thinking about right now?

Hutchins: Milk, the parent company of Oink has raised about $1.8 million from angel and seed investors. And right now, as far as a business model for Oink, we have lots of ideas and we have lots of interest from restaurant owners wanting to have access to their customers and people who have been to their restaurants. People who love wine are very interesting to people who own a wine store or wine bar. So there’s plenty of opportunity but the idea behind Milk is that we really want to test an idea and see if it has the ability to exist on its own. And until we know that Oink, for example, is the idea that we want to focus on and spend all of our time on, we haven’t incorporated a business model into the application and we are more interested in just getting passionate users and building a global community.

TNW: What is your strategy to grow your user base? A lot of people I hope after this interview know Oink, but in Holland they don’t, right now.

Hutchins: Right now, we’re using lots of social sharing tools. So if I wanted to rate the chairs here at LeWeb, I can rate this chair and I can push it to my Twitter, to my Facebook. I can check in the picture on Foursquare and spread it to my friends. At the beginning we’re starting small; we’re not trying to say that we have the best application in the world because what we really want to do is grow the community of people creating content. We want to really build the user base of people who want to add items and add ratings and then eventually we’ll have the kind of application that someone could just download and use just for discovery. But right now we’re starting small to build a kind of community of builders if you will.

We recognize we can’t do that everywhere in the world on day one. If you go to San Francisco right now, there’s thousands of items and it’s such a beautiful experience using Oink. Since, we launched in Seoul, Korea and to Paris, France, so hopefully those cities are quite filled out. But we realize it will take some time before every country in Europe or Africa will have content. Pretty much all major cities now in the world have a least a few items on Oink and so hopefully anyone visiting those cities will at least be able to find one great experience.

TNW: How do you encourage users to rate products and stuff they see? How do you drive that intrinsic motivation they need to have?

Hutchins: Two things. We basically make it very easy to take a picture of an item and share that picture with your attached opinion of that item with your friends, both on Oink, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. So, if I want to rate the wine they are serving here, I could take a picture and put it on Twitter but I know that picture, even with the text I write, just kind of gets lost eventually. So we give people a way to create an indexable view of opinions. And also, we let every user choose up to 10 things that they want to build their credibility in. So, when you look at the feed of people rating items, you see that you might be in level 3 in cocktails, so people might say ‘wow, you know a lot about cocktails.

If you look at Wikipedia, the top users are very well known in that community because of how many edits they’ve made and how many pages they’ve started. We’re doing the same thing with tags, you could take a tag and say ‘I want to be known for beer, I want to be known for pizza, I want to be known for sushi.’ People are motivated to rate and add more items in those categories so they can become local experts in that community.

TNW: When will you consider this project a success? What KPI’s have you determined and what amount of time do you give yourselves at Milk?

Hutchins: Someone said yesterday at LeWeb, “If you launch a product that you’re 100% satisfied with, you launched too late.” We definitely have a lot of big ideas for Oink that we want to incorporate in the next few months and I think once we’ve really got Oink to the point that we’re really satisfied with, all the features we wanted to add, I think then we take a good, hard look at what are users doing, are users coming back? A metric for me is ‘how does a specific users’ activity the second week compare to the first week.’ A lot of users will download the app and give it a try but are they coming back? That’s really interesting for us. We’ll kind of give it a few months to run on its own and build the community and that’s where it’s less about the developers at Milk and it’s more about my role and Kevin’s role really helping grow the users base.

TNW: Do you see any role for market research here? Because there’s a lot of talk about brands; I guess there will be brands uploaded, on video or photos or named. Do you see any models there that marketers can use in the future?

Hutchins: Yeah definitely, it’s interesting to see. People upload ‘I like this brand of soda or this brand of wine’ and we’re building voting possibilities, like thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways. So were basically building that sentiment around all of these items so a brand could see, Ok, maybe I have a brand of yoghurt. I have 15 products of yoghurt and if I look on Oink I can see of all the yoghurts from Yoplait for example what do consumers love the most and what do they love the least. So it gives brands an opportunity to understand how people feel about their products.

Video/interview & edit: Matthijs van den Broek, InSites Consulting
Audio to text: Lisa DeRycke (TrendWolves)

You can view it in its full glory here, and marvel at the zero image, 3,395 lines of CSS and 335 lines of Javascript version of the iPhone 4.

You can even click the home button, slide to unlock it, and shut it off with the power button.

The fact that all of the features of the phone and design of the icons were done without use of images is astonishing, and impressive. Well done!

There are quite a few games for iOS that make your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad feel like a pretty hip version of a Game Boy. You don’t play them for hours on end, but they’re good for wasting time now and again. Having said that, calling an iOS device a “gaming console” still feels like a reach. Gaming consoles like XBox and PS3 give you more a lean back experience, meaning you’re probably plopped down on the couch playing them and not touching a screen.

A company called 60Beat aims to change that with the release of its new iOS accessory, the GamePad.

There’s no doubt that gaming consoles are a massive market, with 1.7 million of Microsoft’s Xbox flying off of the shelves last November. I’m actually quite surprised that Apple hasn’t come out with its own controller, but that could very well be something it’s working on for 2012, along with new iPads.

The 60Beat GamePad plugs into the headphone jack of your device, and can only be played with compatible games. Unfortunately, 60Beat only lists two games that are compatible with its GamePad, Aftermath and Bugdom 2. While that might scare you away from its $50 price tag, the company does promise more of a selection by February.

Check out this demo of the GamePad:

As it goes for any device, the library of games compatible with the add-on will make it or break it. If you’re wondering how you’ll be able to hear the sound from the games with the GamePad plugged in, it comes with an audio splitter that will require headphones or an external speaker.

While the GamePad does negate the coolness factor of the touchscreen features on iOS devices, the fact that you can put your slim iPad in a stand on a table and sit back for video game playing is a neat look towards Apple’s future. You can’t put your Xbox in a backpack and easily set it up on the go, can you?

➤ 60Beat GamePad

The world loves to Instagram their lives, apparently. The app made our top 10 social apps of the year list, and was named Apple’s app of the year. All of this popularity is thanks to iOS and its web presence.

The app has over 15 million users, and has promised an Android app sometime in 2012. That leaves a lot of people out of luck when they want to view some of Instagram’s best photos.

There are quite a few sites that let you search for Instagram photos, but we found one that is absolutely gorgeous and creates an experience that Instagram should think about porting over to its own site. It also lets people without the app check out your photos in an artistic way.

PhotoPile generates a pile of photos for you to click-through, showing the people who favorited them, and the comments that they left.

Forget tweets and Facebook posts

All of your friends who don’t have an iPhone can only see your photos when you tweet them or post them to your Facebook wall. They don’t stand out on these sites, since everything flies by so fast. PhotoPile gives you a well designed presence for your Instagram photos, and lets people discover everything you’ve filtered and shared using the app. Just authorize the app, and you’ll be presented with your own page that looks something like this:

While it just looks like a pile of photos at first glance, you can click on them to get to the full details of the photo. The site uses really fun fonts to display comments, and it’s actually a better way to view photos than Instagram’s own app stream. When you’re in the app, you can click over to someone’s profile and see their photo thumbnails, but it’s not really exciting or special. The experience on PhotoPile is, though.

In addition to showing off your own pics, you can search for users and tags, which will then be displayed in the same way as your own photos. You can cycle through all of the results by clicking “More Photos”, and you’ll find yourself clicking away until you’ve realized how much time you’ve spent.

In addition to an Android and Windows Phone version of its app, I would love to see Instagram spend more time on its website in 2012. The folks who made PhotoPile would be a good group of designers to bring in for the project. This is proof of why I love APIs, you never know what developers are going to come up with for your favorite services.

➤ PhotoPile

The best one of the lot might be by comedy team Rooster Teeth. It’s called “Siri: The Holiday Horror Movie (Trailer)”, and has all of the fake gore and cheesiness you’d expect from a really crappy Horror movie. The only difference is that the evil force that stars in it is none other than Apple’s Siri.

Enjoy!

The notification center for iOS launched with version 5, and it has helped us keep our most important notifications handy, in a “top of stack” location. By simply dragging down the notification center, much like you can on Android, your latest emails, texts, and phone calls are waiting for you to interact with them.

Unfortunately, this notification center doesn’t allow for any customization or additional widgets like it does on Android devices. Not until the Quickpick app that is.

Quickpick lets you create shortcuts which will then show up as a constant notification in the iOS notification center. The shortcuts are extremely helpful and customizable, and quite a brilliant way to hack a system that should allow for a more customized experience.

New Email shortcut anyone?

While creating a new email isn’t an arduous task, it does take several taps once you’re in Apple’s email app. With Quickpick, you can create a customized shortcut that will open a blank email, or one that emails someone specifically. This is extremely helpful if you email the same person often.

Quickpick has a composer to help you set up a shortcut for a new phone call, email, SMS, or opening a specific website.

Once you’ve set up your shortcuts, you can find them sorted under Quickpick’s notifications in the iOS notification center. The new email shortcut has to be the handiest one out of the bunch. For example, you could set up a shortcut to email tips@thenextweb.com with all of your hot tech news tips.

One simple tap, and your new email opens up. Pretty handy, indeed.

While I imagine that Apple will allow some more customization by way of widgets within its operating system, there’s no telling when that will happen. Quickpicks is a $.99 cent app that will save you some time by letting you display 10 custom shortcuts at any given time. You can cycle ones in and out as you see which ones you use the most.

After I started using it, it made me crave the feature to be a native part of iOS. Maybe Apple will take notice.

➤ Quickpick

UPDATE: Quickpick has been removed from the app store for violating Apple’s guidelines.

Scheduling is not only something that I don’t like doing, it’s something I’m really bad at doing. When you have a lot going on at once, it’s a real pain to stop and think about when you have time to fit something else in. Sometimes I joke that I have to schedule time to manage my time.

One app for iOS called Free Time grabs all of your local calendar information and shows you the gaps in your schedule to fit more stuff into. No longer do you have to spend thirty minutes figuring out when you’re free the next time someone asks.

The app is beautifully designed and requires no sign up or import process to get all of your calendar information, it just works.

Yes, I’d love to grab coffee

Sometimes I say no to thinks simply because I “feel” like I’m busy during that time. Checking my Google Calendar almost gives me a panic attack sometimes. I’m sure you know the feeling I’m talking about. Free Time takes all of the mess out of scheduling and focuses on when you have gaps in your schedule.

When you open the app all of your synced calendar information is right there, and you get instant feedback on your free time. The great part about the app is that you can create filters for things that happen daily. For example, if you eat breakfast every day from 8am-830am, you can add that to Free Time, and it will no longer be available for calendaring. The filtering also is great for those times when you need to find your next “free hour”.

What Free Time does beautifully is add a new interface on top of your existing calendars. When you go to add a new meeting, the app uses your existing iOS Calendar app, but because of Free Time, you can schedule your time more intelligently without having to focus on the actual times and more on when you have time available. It’s basically a complete reverse of how you look at your calendar today, which highlights events rather than gaps between them.

The app is $.99 cents and if you have more than five or six meetings a week, then it’s probably a good idea for you to grab it. With a gorgeous design, next to no setup other that filters, and perfect integration with the way you to do things currently, it’s worth the download. Perhaps the company will add a web version of the service, because I’d love to access it from my laptop as well as my iPhone.

➤ Free Time

So you love taking photos with your iPhone, and Instagram filters just aren’t cutting it for you anymore? Check out this lens filter kit from Holga, built specifically for iPhone photographers.

The lens kit slips onto your iPhone like a case, and brings you photography special effects that no app can give you. It’s stylish too, coming in red, blue, white, black or silver.

Here’s a list of the nine filtering effects and features this $24.99 kit will bring to your iPhone camera.

• Dual Image Lens: Produces 2 identical images similar to a Holga 2 way split image filter
• Triple Image Lens: Produces 3 identical images similar to a Holga 3 way split image filter
• Quadruple Image Lens: Produces 4 identical images similar to a Holga 4 way split image filter
• 60mm Macro Lens: For taking photos at approximately 60mm from the lens
• Empty Hole: For taking images with no effect
• Red Filter with Clear Heart Shape Centre: Reduces absorption of blue & green lights with clear heart shape centre to stand out
• Red Filter: Reduces absorption of blue and green light
• Green Filter: Enhances green colors/li>
• Yellow Filter with Clear Center: Clear circular spot in center to stand out with surroundings in pale yellow to mimic sunset/li>
• Blue Filter with Clear Center: Clear circular spot in center to stand out with surroundings in blue to mimic gentle moon atmosphere/li>

Unfortunately, the Holga lens kit is only available for iPhone 4 and 4S users, but if you’re serious about your “iPhoneography”, you already have one.

Our editors are getting their hands on one for a more-thorough review, as we have several camera buffs on the team.