The Streema Blog

For the first time in history, the total number of smartphones and tablets in the world will surpass the total number of PCs – and it will happen this year.

What you’ve read above is one of the most important points of the report Mobile Trends by KPCB (see slide 26 for more details). As you can see, 2013 will bring an important inflection point for people’s interaction with computers. Since mobile is becoming increasingly important in terms of Streema.com‘s usage, we have been working on a few improvements that we wanted to tell you about.

To start off, when you visit http://streema.com from an iPhone, iPod, iPad or Android device’s browser, you’ll find we’ve developed a mobile-friendly homepage with some featured radios that our users can start listening to – sweet and simple.

Also, since not all streams are supported by mobile web browsers, we only show the stations that can actually play in each of those platforms. We know that having only a fraction of the stations available is less than ideal, but the truth is that we want to make your life easier and give you the best experience possible.

Finally, as we’ve mentioned in our previous post, we’ve improved our customer support, and that also includes our Mobile Support. It’s very important for us to hear your opinions, so please, don’t hesitate in giving us your feedback. Do bear in mind that this is a work in progress and that it will be evolving over time. :)

For those registered users out there, we’ll soon be working on letting you log in to your account with your mobile phone so you can find and edit your favorites. Additionally, in the not-so-distant future, we’ll start showing the “now playing” information, offer the possibility to comment on a station’s Wall, as well as add compatibility to more devices and much more for our mobile users, so stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Over the past year we’ve noticed a very important increase in mobile browser users, specifically on the Android platform.  We thought, how could we cater to these users?  While obviously an Android app would probably do the trick, the truth is that given how mobile has evolved – and is evolving – then it might be simpler for us and for users to be able to interact with a mobile-friendly version of our site.

So, we started experimenting.

One interesting fact is that many of our mobile users tune in via the radio station profiles, so we decided to start there and adapt these pages for the Android browser.  Additionally, we included a mobile search box as well as a list of “Featured Radios”, since not all the stations can be played through the Android browser.  Unfortunately, only stations with MP3 stream can be played for now, but we’re hoping that will change in the future.

As for the technical details, if you’re interested, the whole front-end was developed using JQuery Mobile. This is a powerful framework that will make it easy to export the User Interface to other platforms such as iOS, Blackberry, Nokia… you can see the complete list here.

Hope you enjoy our first very small step in mobile and do expect new announcements soon!

Ever since we started Streema, we knew that sooner or later, we would need to go mobile - actually, Maxwell Smart did exactly that with his “shoe phone” decades ago.

Over the past year, more and more mobile users have been coming to our site to listen to radio – and these same users have been requesting a Streema application for their mobile devices. We’re thinking we should do something about it!

The mobile options today are so many, with platforms such as the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry…  choosing between stand-alone (native) apps vs web applications, it’s not easy to pick the right one!  Some people even recommend that we develop something that works for all devices. Anyway, right now the only thing that we’re 100% sure of is that there’s enough evidence that radio is and will be consumed more and more while you’re in a car, going out for a run, or anywhere away from home.

So, we are still trying to figure out our next move in the mobile space and here YOU can help us. :) We’ve prepared a short survey that you can answer anonymously. Every second of your time can go a loooong way for us!

Once again, we’re REALLY happy that you are a Streema user. Thanks for belonging to our community!

The Streema Team