David Emery OnlineFans Crack Twitter Code for Sneak Peek at New Batman Film
Hardcore fans of Warner Bros.’s Batman trilogy undertook code cracking of epic proportions Friday after the site for the next film, The Dark Knight Rises, hit the web.
It’s pretty “marketing”, but still kind-of cool (I’m a big fan of the “hiding messages in audio waveforms” thing).
Visit ➔Hype
Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.
Looks pretty interesting, although the demos are full on Flash-style microsites – complete with loading bar – which is a little worrying…
Visit ➔wahwah.fm
Other wahwah.fm users can tune into your broadcast and hear the exact same music you are listening to. It's like running your own mobile radio station. Anywhere you are. Anytime you like.
Looks quite interesting – reminds me a little of the Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx Album Transmitter we did a couple of months ago.
Visit ➔Google And Amazon May Have Just Handed Apple The Keys To The Cloud Music Kingdom
So the labels, which for the better part of a decade now have been looking for someone, anyone to help counter Apple’s power in their business, is turning right back to Apple when they need help. And Apple will obviously gladly welcome them with open arms. After all, with these licenses, Apple will have secured the cloud music high ground despite being the last to launch.
My prediction (based on no insider knowledge): Apple will launch their cloud service in September which quickly becomes the market leader – due to the fact you won’t have to spend 3 days over ADSL uploading your music library to it – even though it’s more expensive then Amazon and Google. Amazon and Google will then scrabble around and get licenses from the labels but by that point Apple’s service will be entrenched, in much the same way the iTunes Store is.
Apple wins again, and the labels still don’t have a decent digital competitor for iTunes.
I love the fact that for years I’ve been hearing things like “we shouldn’t have let Apple come in and take over digital music retailing, we should have built our own store first” yet the exact same mistakes are being made again with cloud music. And it’s not as though this kind of venture is beyond the major labels – look at Vevo, which is a pretty good stab at this kind of thing but for music videos.
Visit ➔Made by Ideas
Made by Ideas is a service for people with too many ideas.
All ideas are anonymous until you start working on one, at which point you are invited to join a private conversation with the brain behind the idea.
I hold out very little hope that any of these ideas will actually happen (ideas are easy, implementations are hard), but still a fun site nevertheless.
Visit ➔An end of magic
No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.
Interestingly timed post from Seth considering my last post.
Visit ➔Check Out Danger Mouse's Interactive 3D Video
Rome, the new album from Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi, is inspired by spaghetti westerns, so it makes sense that a video from the album would be a filmic experience unto itself. Danger Mouse has teamed up with Google and director Chris Milk, the man behind Arcade Fire's amazing interactive "The Wilderness Downtown" video, to make "3 Dreams of Black", an interactive 3D complement to the Rome track "Black", which features Norah Jones on vocals.
Looks beautiful, and an amazing demonstration of what you can do with the right browser without Flash these days, but the interactivity seems like an afterthought.
Visit ➔"Location, location, location": Radio 1 Big Weekend Check-In Experiment
The Radio 1 Big Weekend offered the perfect opportunity to try this. We know the line-up in detail, and where each stage is located, and we know the audience has an appetite for 'sharing their pride' via social networks. Some research was conducted to see which platform would reach the most users, and somewhat unsurprisingly Facebook was in the top slot.
Nice HTML5-based location check-in work by the BBC.
Visit ➔CSS Regions Prototype
This page contains information regarding a WebKit-based prototype of CSS Regions, the proposed additions from Adobe to the W3C CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) modules to build complex, magazine-like layouts using web standards. Capturing in digital form the complex layouts of a typical magazine, newspaper, or textbook requires capabilities beyond those possible with the existing CSS modules. CSS Regions is a proposal that describes how content creators can use some additional basic building blocks to express complex layouts with CSS.
Quite an interesing development – Adobe are obviously looking to move to HTML for their emagazine publishing workflow, which will be far better then what they use currently (which is essentially lots of pngs outputted by InDesign).
Visit ➔Top Ten Most Powerful
Spotify: It’s been too long and the message has been muddled. Now there are listening limits and purchase options and…didn’t Apple succeed by keeping it simple? Spotify is playing to the labels as opposed to the audience and it’s hurting them, like everyone else who’s tried to play by rights holder rules in the past. You can only win by being a renegade. Right now, Grooveshark looks more like the future than Spotify.
Completely agree with this – it feels like a death by a thousand (music industry) cuts with Spotify at the moment. They’re a lot less interesting then they used to be, and I don’t think a subscription product without a decent free ad-supported version is a mainstream product.
I think TopSpin’s importance is being overstated here though – haven’t we all realised that direct-to-fan retailing can work for some artists but is by no means going to be a massive part of the industry? It’s a niche market, but a potentially lucrative one.
Visit ➔Without The Labels, Google’s Music Locker Service Will Look Like Apple’s Ugly Sibling. Again.
This evening the WSJ reported that after a year of (failed) discussions with the labels Google will finally be launching a music service tomorrow at Google I/O — and it’s very similar to Amazon’s, which also doesn’t have approval from the labels. I spoke with Google’s Jamie Rosenberg, head of digital content and strategy for Android, who confirmed the news. And while he says that Google will improve on Amazon’s offering in many ways, one month from now I’m guessing it will look significantly less impressive.
A Flash-based music locker without label involvement (meaning you have to upload all your MP3s yourself, which will take ages) is hardly very exciting or innovative, is it?
The one interesting thing about this is that this beta version is going to be free, and I can see it staying that way (with ads, of course, but also just to fortify the Android platform). That’s going to make Amazon’s life in this market pretty difficult…
Visit ➔A zoom lens is never wide or long enough
I was taking photos at Angkor Wat in Cambodia yesterday with my Olympus E-P1, and noticed something about my pattern of taking photos: Most of the time, I'm taking pictures either fully zoomed in, or fully zoomed out. It was annoying me, because I figured that showed a weakness in the lens: Basically, it was never wide - or long - enough for the photos I really wanted to take.
When I used to use zoom lenses this is exactly what I found – with my 24-70 I was 90% of the time either at 24mm or 70mm. I much prefer now using primes (fixed focal length lenses) all the time; I think it’s much easier to focus on composition when you take zooming out of the equation. The trade-off is that you might not have the right focal length on the camera at the right time, but you can’t always be in the right place at the right time.
Visit ➔Spotify says hello to the iPod
You’ve been telling us how much you love discovering, sharing and talking about music in Spotify - and you’ve created well over 200 million playlists to prove it. But you’ve also said you’re listening to a huge amount of music on your iPods, and that getting your Spotify playlists onto them as MP3s has been a serious hassle, forcing you to juggle multiple music players. That’s until now…
Spotify are pretty clearly trying to supplant iTunes as peoples music player of choice which is no bad thing – Apple could really do with some decent competition in this regard, as iTunes has turned into a bloated mess over the years.
I’m intrigued by their download store offering as well, which obviously pares nicely with their new limits on how many times you can listen to tracks if you’re not a premium offering. The focus on bundles of tracks – ostensibly to allow purchasing of playlists – doesn’t seem like a feature that the majority are going to be interested in, however; sounds cool in theory – “people can share playlists and buy them” – but iTunes has had that feature (albeit without the pricing incentives) for years without much success.
It does also strike me that this is a slightly backwards move for Spotify, all in all – dealing with actual files and having your own library was what they originally rebelled against; I guess this is just a reaction to the constraints they’re in, but it certainly dilutes the brand a fair bit.
Visit ➔Kill Screen Profile: Craig Adams
To put it mildly, the hype machine has shown nonstop love for the upcoming Superbrothers production Sword & Sworcery EP. I played through a fair bit of a mature beta, and it is every bit the smartly crafted affair I had hoped for. Sword & Sworcery feels like a game created by one of us. Among those who desperately try to convince non-gamers that Super Meat Boy is a feat of engineering genius, or that Metroid Prime can go toe-to-toe with many of the great narratives of the past 50 years, someone has quit talking and decided to just create something beautiful. Sworcery isn't grandiose-- but the sneaking suspicion is that it may be our "one small step for games" moment.
Sword & Sworcery EP is one of the best games I’ve played in ages; if you’ve got an iPad I urge you to download it if you haven’t already, it’s beautiful.
Also, whilst I’m not sure if Pitchfork should be losing focus from music it’s nice to see a decent bit of writing about games for a change.
Visit ➔The “book” is dead
But more to the point, it would be full of piracy-related terms because that’s what people search for. Google’s suggestions come from actual searches. It’s a mirror onto the world, descriptive not prescriptive. If you don’t like how the world looks in the mirror, don’t blame the mirror.
Interesting post on how the book industry is now facing up to digital piracy, much in the same way the music industry has (or hasn’t, depending on your point of view). It also shows how much work Google needs to do with its search results – not to eliminate copyright infringing results, as that’s practically impossible, but to eliminate the huge amount of fake sites that clog up most results pages.
Visit ➔later.fm
With later.fm you can bookmark music while you browse and listen to it later.
I love the Internet – I’ve been thinking about this very idea for a few weeks now, to the point where I was seriously considering trying to make it myself (which would have never worked) and lo and behold someone’s already made it.
Visit ➔Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money.
Such an easy thing to forget – you can’t please all the people all the time, so there’s no point trying.
Focus is the key.
Visit ➔Push Pop Press: Al Gore's Our Choice
Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.
I’m a fan of both eBooks and eMagazines, and consume quite a lot of both on my iPad; this makes all of that look a bit trivial. The potential of tablets as a new medium for information really excites me.
Also, the site has a lovely little design detail – on a desktop it says “Click” and “Rollover”; on the iPad it’s the same design but it says “Tap” instead.
Visit ➔Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available
We’ve had the pleasure of using Photosmith during its beta period and it has already joined our list of must-have photography apps for Apple’s tablet. If you use Lightroom and own an iPad, we strongly recommend checking out Photosmith.
I do hope Apple have something similar up their sleeve for Aperture and the iPad (and I’d be pretty happy if that involved iPhoto for the iPad at the same time…).
Visit ➔I Just Facebook Like You
Brands dramatically overweight the value of the ‘likes’ their campaigns accrue and treat it as pure social signal. And they make spending decisions based on these unformed notions of community, commitment, sociality. They play for the wrong endgames (high like counts, ‘virality’, shares) without architecting deeper, long-lasting experiences that break out of stream thinking.
Facebook “Likes” are a pretty weird thing now they’ve been turned over to marketeers, aren’t they? Speaking from the position of a marketeer, of course.
In the space of a year they’ve managed to completely own and redefine the meaning of the word “like”.
Visit ➔