Amazon Cloud Player was first released to stream music to Kindle Fire, iPhone and Android devices. Importing 250 songs is free and users can import upto 250,000 songs for $24.99 a year. This week, Amazon has announced that the Cloud Player is available on Windows. Anyone with Windows XP/Vista/7 PCs can use this application (31.9 MB in size). Great thing about Amazon Cloud Player is that on first launch, Amazon Cloud Player add music from iTunes, Amazon and Windows Media Player music making this the one stop app for all the music needs.

Runtastic, maker of fitness tracking application on iOS and Android has announced launch new products and services to manage health and track fitness data. With 25 million mobile users and 10 million registered users on runtastic.com, a lineup of fitness apps is definitely the way forward.

Sony Xperia Z is without a doubt one of the smash hit smartphones that Sony has released and building on the buzz that Z lineup has generated recently, Sony has released smaller and lighter smartphone, Xperia ZR. While Z is meant for those who were looking for ‘the best of Sony in a smartphone’ ZR will cater to those who are looking for something that is smaller. Xperia ZR is nearly identical to Z except that it comes with a smaller 4.6” 720p display, 8GB onboard storage (16GB for Xperia Z) and a VGA front facing camera (2.2mp fullHD front camera on Z). Xperia ZR does come with water and dust resistant capabilities that made Xperia Z such a big hit. We do not have any information on pricing but Xperia ZR will hit retail stores across the globe in Q2 2013.

Sometimes, we don’t understand why Sony continues development on a technology that was supposed to be out a decade ago and in fade-out phase today. e-ink is one such technology that is fast fading out for past few months and today Sony has announced a 13.3” A4 sized e-paper prototype that is targeted at students to replace their notebooks. Well, isn’t this what tablets are doing right now?

Google’s Chrome dev team announced that Chrome extensions can now make use of Google Cloud Messaging for Chrome for push notifications so that the extensions need not poll the respective servers again and again. GCM for Chrome works in same way as GCM for Android. GCM for Chrome can be used across all channels of Chrome. All you need to do as a developer is get a token/channel ID and pass the received token to your server. Attach the token to the GCM server side API whenever you are sending a message to your app extension. The image below gives a better picture on this process. Developers can find more detail on this server here and sample apps having GCM can be found here.