David Emery Online

Three Wins

So, at the Digital Music Awards that just happened this evening, you’ll know having read previously that we were nominated for 3 awards.

The title of this post, and the picture above may well give away the outcome.

We won!

Three times!

I’m still quite bemused by the whole thing; going up on the stage, shaking Edith Bowman’s hand (and telling her off for heckling the winners…) was weird enough the first time, but the second and the third it just got silly.

We sort of had an inkling that we were in with a good chance for the Best Use of Mobile award – which was the first one – and after we won that we really thought we were done for the night. The second award for Best Artist Promotion for White Stripes was also very nice to get as I think it was a pretty nifty bit of promo, but the one I personally wanted to win the most was Best Artist Campaign for Thom Yorke, so to get that was tremendous (and to beat Robbie Williams whilst doing it even better…).

What a strange evening…

Web Applications

Riding the wave of hyped-up “Web 2.0” online applications comes a related wave of developer tools and libraries aimed at making modern online development easier. On the server side Ruby on Rails gets by far and away the most hype – and it certainly has its merits, but also strong negatives (like difficulty in deployment) – but it’s certainly not unique – there are ever larger numbers of rapid development frameworks for almost every language out there.

Similarly, there’s a huge proliferation of client side libraries concerned with the GUI and end user experience. The ones I’ve been looking at have all been Javascript based, but there’s also some interesting work going on using Flash and Adobe’s Flex platform – while I’m not normally a huge flash fan (as it’s abused more often then used appropriately) I think there’s interesting possibilities when using it to build online applications. Flash’s traditional problems – accessibility, usability and inflexibility – seem to have been solved if you have a competent Flash developer, and Flash seems quite inherently suited to web app development, with its rich set of user interface abilities.

Back to the Javascript libraries, there are a few main contenders. By far and...

Always busy

As much as I would like to write a nice full post today, two things are stopping me; firstly, not much has happened in the world and secondly I’ve just been way to busy to think though anything more substantial.

Some products of the busyness that we launched today:

New Tapes ‘n Tapes site – Not that you’d know it to look at it but we’ve completely rebuilt the Tapes ‘n Tapes site – if you haven’t checkout their album, please do (it’s one of my favourites of the year) – on Textpattern, or course.

Johann Johannsson – A User’s Manual – Not built by me but done externally the new site for the upcoming Johann Johannsson release builds on the original v23 artwork superbly – in fact, I think a post on v23 may well be looming on the horizon…

Plague Songs – If you checkout one site out of these three, make it this one. The animations Graeme the designer has created for each songs are really nice – I’m not a huge flash fan normally, but this just works out really well.

Zune End

$249.99

November 14th.

It’s all over folks. Move along. Nothing to see here.

At the same price as the iPod, why would you buy one unless you have something against Apple? It has about 2 features that the iPod doesn’t have – wireless and built in radio – but they’ve crippled the wireless with nasty DRM and you can get radio add-ons for the iPod so really; they’ve got nothing.

In addition, you get to use the wondrous Zune store – using the same pricing model as iTunes, as well as a pricey ($15/m)subscription option. Couple this with the news that in Windows Media Player 11 they’re tying your DRM’d downloads to one machine ( source ) – so if your disk dies, or you get a new machine all your files are lost – and you get a really great customer focused experience.

Oh, sorry – no you don’t.

I got all mixed up there for a moment.

I really wish the Zune had been good. Seriously – there’s nothing worse for the end user then a dominant player that has the market all sewn up, as they no longer have the drive to keep innovating. If someone comes along with a player that’s better...

Every dog has its day

Nokia have just launched the N95 and boy, is it a good phone! The headline feature has to be the 5 megapixel camera, which is just stunning – essentially killing at a swoop the low range digital camera market (at least it will when it trickles down to cheaper phones).

What’s possibly more interesting, though, is the inclusion of GPS meaning that the device can tell where it is at any one time. This has the knock-on effect that any pictures you take automatically get tagged with the location you took them! Couple this with a large QVGA screen and also the ability to do 640×480, 30fps video and you start to get a window into where mobile tech is going; it’s going somewhere interesting.

So, now we have all this technology in our pocket, what effects does that have? We can now record high quality video on-the-go; we don’t have to cart around a bulky camcorder or much around with tapes – we’ve got the camcorder on us all the time. The repercussions of that I think could be huge – for a start, if you think YouTube is popular now I think phones like this could change the game...

Nominated

This year at work we’ve been nominated for 3 awards at the upcoming Digital Music Awards – it’s nice to be recognised for all the hard work we’ve put in recently!

The first award is for “Best Artist Promotion” for the promotion we did for The White Stripes last single, The Denial Twist. It was a pretty fun promo idea – after every gig on the Stripes’ tour you got a free cdr, with full artwork, for the Denial Twist – each one was unique for each date – and when you got home you could download and burn the live version of Denial Twist that was played at the gig you went to. This worked out really nicely, as The White Stripes are very spontaneous live, so every version was completely different.

Next up is “Best Artist Campaign” for Thom Yorke, and I think this one is the one I’d most like to win (not that we will – we don’t have the majors money…) as I was involved pretty heavily with both the sites and also the strategy. Personally my favourite aspect of the campaign was the Have You Seen This Man promo, where we...

Podcast™

As you may have heard, Apple has been getting some flak over its alleged crackdown on using the word ‘podcast’. First things first, though – Apple is not trying to say they “own” the word “podcast” – it’s not one of their trademarks. What they are trying to do, however, is police the word “pod”, obviously due to their ownership of the iPod trademark.

Why are they doing this?

You would have thought the last thing Apple would want to do is start cease-and-desist-ing companies left right and center – just look at the amount of bad press that have come out of it; although – not for the first time – no where near as much as if it had been Microsoft at fault.

So, why bother?

Because they have to, by law.

It’s very simple really; if they don’t be seen to be defending their trademarks, those marks become invalid. So, as long as Apple wants to be able to stop someone coming out with on “eyePod”, for example, it has to try and defend any occurrence where its mark is at risk.

Taking the “myPodder” example, it’s not too hard to see that someone could potentially confuse this with an official Apple...

Just say no

“No” seems to have been banned.

No-one seems to be prepared to say it anymore.

Even at the most preposterous idea.

It’s bubble side effect #324.

Just say no.

Worth

As you can read on Techcrunch Yahoo! is reportedly in talks to buy Facebook for $1billion.

If anyone still had any doubt we were in a bubble right now, I hope they’re rethinking their position.

Facebook, is in no way at the top of the tree – that obviously falls to MySpace – and is still limited almost exclusively to college students, although they’re now trying to branch out to regions and workplaces (with limited success, from what I hear).

Are they really worth $1billion?

Are Yahoo! (got to love the Web 1.0 left over exclamation point) really going to their $1billion back from Facebook? Even when you take into consideration the gain by them owning Facebook as opposed to a competitor owning it, is that really worth that much.

Only time will tell.

I did, however, love the quotes Techcrunch pulled out from the article regarding Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’s refusing to come to work early and on weekends for the talks with Yahoo.

Well done him – most people these days seem to forget the whole concept of “work to live”, as opposed to the ever-popular “live to work”.

Personal Content Publishing

Cross posted from the Culture Blog

•••

Yes, the acronym is PCP – we may have to think of something better.

That’s what Anthology is about, though – allowing you (yes, you! Errm, except you there. Not you. Everyone else.) to publish online your content. Your content, of course, comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes – some people may want to publish photos, some people want to have a blog, some people want to publish news, album details and tour dates.

Anthology will do all of that.

Oh yes!

Currently, the solutions for this problem of getting your “stuff” online are not very nice (in the same way cougars aren’t*), and if you want to do anything other then a blog they’re really not very nice (at all). It’s very much like trying to put a square peg in a round hole – possible with a large hammer, but not very practical in the long term.

I’ve been using Textpattern a lot recently to solve exactly this kind of problem, and I think currently it’s the best solution out there. It’s perfectly possible with Textpattern is post several different types of content, and construct things like photo galleries and event...