Stuart Dredge of The Guardian writes, “Google has launched its Google Now service for iOS devices, as an update to its existing Google Search app. Accessed by swiping upwards from the bottom of the app’s homescreen, Google Now learns about its user through their activities and their history in various Google services. It then serves up weather forecasts, traffic reports, boarding passes, sports scores and other information when they may be relevant. On iOS, it’s the sole new feature in version 3.0.0 of the Google Search app. Available for Android devices since the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software was released in 2012, Google Now’s iOS incarnation has been subject to speculation this year.” Read more

Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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One week after closing a $3 million funding round, Mobiles Republic has launched version 2.0 of the company’s popular News Republic app for Android and iOS. Paul Sawers reports, “News Republic is a neat app that lets users curate their own news feed by creating ‘channels’, covering broad subjects such as technology, business and sports, whilst also letting them build more topic-specific feeds, such as ‘football’, ‘Apple Inc.’ or ‘Barack Obama’. With version 2.0 now out of the starting blocks, it has been given a brand new ‘look-and-feel’, and we must say it really is rather nice.” Read more

Personalized news app News360 yesterday updated its Windows Phone application, which makes up one of what’s still a relatively few 50,000 apps for the platform in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Right now, the device platform has just under 2 percent of the smartphone OS market, but that could change: Analyst firm IDC, for example, reported in June that, “assuming that Nokia’s transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20 percent share in 2015.” Nokia, whose first Windows Phone 7 devices have been available in the U.S. since earlier this year, is expected to announce two Windows phones on Monday, according to Reuters: a cheaper Lumia 610 and a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone.

News360, which joined the Microsoft BizSpark One program in November, is tapping into the action with the update that now sports a user interface designed around the Metro UI concepts pioneered by Microsoft, according to CEO Roman Karachinsky. It’s marked by “simplicity, cleanliness and efficient flow, which is radically different from the design of our iOS and Android apps,” he says. “The app also uses several features unique to Windows Phone – like live tiles, which allow you to pin the categories that you want to follow more closely straight to your home screen.”

News360 worked closely with Microsoft on this release, he notes, as part of Microsoft’s Mobile Acceleration Week development, a program to get partner companies together with the designers and developers of Windows Phone “to yield amazing apps for the platform.” Other features News360 touts for the latest version also include connecting their social media accounts to tailor news to their interests and Fast App Switching support for a better user experience.

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Got a few things you’re looking to offload on Craigs’ List for some last-minute holiday cash, or perhaps you’re still combing the online ads in search of that special Christmas gift? The EggDrop mobile app accommodates that by making it easy to sell a product online, real-time message questions about it and do price haggling over it, and check buyer and seller reputations. But its leveraging of geotagging and open data also can promote a smarter and someday, perhaps, more discovery-oriented and meaning-rich neighborhood marketplaces.

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Wolfram recently launched “the Wolfram Genealogy & History Research Assistant and the Wolfram Personal Finance Assistant Apps for iOS! These new additions to Wolfram’s wide offering of specialized apps are the first in our series of Personal Assistant Apps, which use Wolfram’s vast knowledge base to enrich topics that matter most to you. Explore the world of your ancestors with the Wolfram Genealogy & History Research Assistant, the only tool that lets you discover what was going on while they lived. Map family relations and expand on what you already know about any of your ancestors with a simple, easy-to-use interface. It’s as if you’re traveling through time with the tips of your fingers.” Read more