Hall, which just launched about one month ago, now sports a new look that is optimized for a wide screen, an activity bar to show you a live feed of Hall activity and two new real-time apps: to-do and notepad.

Hall lets people post discussion threads on topics including startups, ESPN, Apple and the NFL, and now provides more chat room-like communication for teams and communities with chat and hall activity split into two tabs. The activity bar also includes a list of halls and lets you set halls as "favorites" to access them quickly in the future.

In an email sent to Hall users, Hall CEO Brett Hellman wrote that the most requested features were to make the halls feel more like chat rooms, add an activity feed and offer more ways to be productive with apps.

"We're taking a bigger drive toward productivity," Brett says. "Eventually we'll let people build...

The Google Music tour offers an incredibly interactive experience where you build a song while learning more about what Google Music has to offer.

On the site's landing page, you can mouse over each colored line to hear a different note. Moving your mouse quickly across the lines reminds us of playing up and down a piano scale.

While you cannot create your own original song, you can build "Zero Gravity," an electronic song by Teddybears.

"Pick a feature below to start the tour and build an exclusive song that's yours to keep," the landing page states.

Each feature -- discover, shop, listen, organize and share -- is...

[UPDATE: A Google spokesperson says that it is more so facial detection, rather than facial recognition. ]

Google+ now has face recognition software in its photo uploader to make tagging "quicker and easier," Google+ Photos engineer Nathan Davis writes on G+.

"Whenever you create an album we now show you all the faces found in that album in one place," Nathan writes. "All you have to do is group the photos of each person’s face together and tag them...

[ SV Angel investor Ron Conway. Image courtesy of Kevin Krejci via creative commons license. ]

Twitter might soon become a one-stop shop for artist promotion, fan engagement and concert ticket sales.

Yesterday at the Billboard FutureSound conference, long-time Twitter investor Ron Conway hinted that ticket-buying would be coming to Twitter soon.

Conway called Twitter a "greenfield" waiting to be colonized by music tech companies facilitating live ticket sales, tour information and merchandise sales. He also told the story of what happened when he and MC Hammer visited Twitter several years ago. Hammer described how artists could build their audience, advertise concerts and also sell tickets through Twitter.

LAUNCH has contacted Conway and Twitter and will update this story if we receive a response.

If Twitter starts selling tickets, does that mean we'll start seeing ticket offers right in our stream or will Twitter add an additional tab for music? We wonder if Twitter would create its own payment platform or if they would make a deal with ticket distributors such as Ticketmaster, Tickets.com and Groovetickets.

Conway also discussed how startups should let major labels take 2% equity stakes in exchange for licensing their content. That way, labels and startups will share the same interests.

"Success breeds success...," Conway said at the conference in regards to Google's recent entry into the digital music business. "There's a lot of optimism that...

RAVN, an activities search and booking engine that lets people discover and schedule activities, classes and tours online, has an awesome splash screen for its beta invitations.

"Beta invites are boring, so we made this little game called RAVN Hunt," the site states. Every day, the top 10 players get instant access to RAVN Beta.

To receive a beta invite, you must enter your email and play the game to kill ravens, which is based on Nintendo's Duck Hunt game.

"Our landing page was pretty traditional beforehand, but after the game, user conversion went up [300%] as people became more engaged, and kept playing for the invite code," RAVN co-founder Dennis Liu writes on Hacker News.

Some users have found ways to hack the game and inflate their scores, Catalyst Studios develo kyledr writes on Hacker News. 

"Honestly we didn't try at all to make it difficult to hack," RAVN co-founder Steven Ou writes on HN. "Figured that no matter what we did...

Amazon seems to be blocking competitive browsers like Skyfire, Opera, Firefox and Dolphin on Kindle Fire. Amazon suggests the Android apps when you search for them, but when you click on the apps, they are nowhere to be found in the store for download.

Amazon essentially teases you with the apps, but makes it nearly impossible to access them, which we think is incredibly sleazy.

The native browser on the Kindle Fire, Silk, is powered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon introduced the browser back in September and touted it as: "Extending the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud." 

Dolphin, on the other hand, lets you search using gestures and offers webzine-based browsing. In October, the company added Dolphin Connect to enable storage of add-ons and preferences on the cloud. 

Online, Amazon advertises that Dolphin is available for your Android device but not compatible with the Kindle. To try to get around this, we went to settings to enable third-party downloads. See screen shots below for directions on how to do this.

LAUNCH has contacted Amazon and will update this story if we receive a response.

We then proceeded to Amazon.com to install the app from the website. After "purchasing" the free browser, the Amazon page stated, "Open the Amazon Appstore for Android on your device to download and install your app."

Still, the app was nowhere to be found. The trick seems to be...