Bytes: What’s new in tech

Spotify’s free mobile streaming

It may soon be free to stream the music of your choice on your smartphone, said Hannah Karp in The Wall Street Journal. Spotify is planning “a free, ad-supported version of its streaming-music service on mobile devices,” having secured new licensing deals with the three biggest international music companies: Sony, Universal, and Warner. “Until now, a free version of Spotify was available only on desktop and laptop computers.” The new service will open up Spotify’s music catalog to mobile users by providing them with a custom radio service much like Pandora and “a limited number of songs on demand”—as long as they put up with a few ads as well.

A ‘smart dock’ from Apple

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Siri, Apple’s soothingly voiced personal assistant, is about to move from your iPhone into your home, said Mikey Campbell in AppleInsider.com. Apple has applied for a patent for a “full function ‘smart dock’” that uses voice recognition to control docked devices. Purchasers would configure the device to recognize certain sounds, such as a finger snap, as a signal to wake up Siri in the docked iPhone or iPad to await further commands. The gadget would also feature wireless connectivity to cloud-based databases, allowing users to do things like update their calendar by talking to the dock. Third-party peripherals could also be added, including removable hard drives, environmental sensors, and GPS modules. The docking station, which would be fitted with a built-in screen of its own, could also be used as “a sort of smart wireless speaker system.”

Download your Google data

Backing up your Google Calendar data just became much easier, said Emil Protalinski in TheNextWeb.com. Last week the search giant finally “rolled out a long-requested feature” that lets users download copies of their Google Calendar data and will soon enable the same for Gmail data too. The new service means you can back up your entire archive of emails and calendars, “or just export them temporarily so you can import them to another service.” The feature is part of Google Takeout, “which lets you download a custom archive of your data” from a whole range of Google products. While the Calendar feature is already working, Google is rolling out Gmail downloads throughout the month, promising to provide functionality for everyone by 2014.