David Emery OnlineSony's Qriocity music service leaves Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm and we7 unruffled
Someone should have told Sony that trying to get people to pay a monthly subscription for a service just like people can get for free is probably not a winning business model
Come on guys, surely you can do better then that?
Also, “Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity” really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Visit ➔Radi
Heard about HTML5 yet? It's the new standard for the web. Apple loves it. Microsoft fully supports it. Google says it rocks. And Radi lets you enjoy it without learning to code. Radi is designed from the ground up to help you create content that will take full advantage of HTML5 features.
It’s an early beta from a one man shop, but it shows promise that hopefully sooner rather then later we’ll have a decent HTML5-based animation tool (which desperately needed if we really want to get rid of flash).
Visit ➔Apple releases iAd Producer: Mac app to create iAds
iAd Producer makes it easy for you to design and assemble high-impact, interactive content for iAd. iAd Producer automatically manages the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript behind your iAd to make creating beautiful, motion-rich iAd content as easy as point and click. For advanced developers, iAd Producer offers sophisticated JavaScript editing and debugging, along with a powerful extension mechanism that enables them to create and re-use their own page templates and components.
Go on Apple, just cut to the chase and release a killer HTML5/CSS3 IDE. Between this, Dashcode, the Webkit inspector and Xcode they’ve basically got all the bits already, they just need to glue it together.
Visit ➔Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning
Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined.
Loving this, especially considering that the iPad version of SimCity has kickstarted that particular addition again… (p.s. if you haven’t got it yet, get it – it’s a steal for 59p).
Visit ➔Archive Fever
What were you thinking about on November 23rd, 2009? You probably have no idea, but Twitter might. What was your personal soundtrack to the summer of ’07? Ask Last.fm. Hit up Dopplr to find out how many miles you travelled last year, Foursquare for the Berlin bar that people you know check in to more than any other, or Facebook to see the photos of the last time you hung out with your best friend on the other side of the world.
Without deliberate planning, we have created amazing new tools for remembering. The real-time web might just be the most elaborate and widely-adopted architecture for self-archival ever created.
I’ve wanted something like this for ages – in fact, almost every time I come to redesigning this site my first thoughts are around the idea of making it timeline-based, across all the different medium I spew content out on, so you could scroll around and see what I tweeted, took photos of and blogged about in June 2009 (for example).
Sadly time has always got in the way…
Visit ➔London tuition fee protest
Yesterday, in central London, thousands of students and others gathered to protest as Britain's Parliament met to vote on a proposal to raise university tuition fees significantly - nearly tripling them - as part of a continuing set of austerity programs. During the protest, several clashes took place between police and protesters, resulting in numerous injuries and 43 arrests. Late in the demonstration, a group of protesters attacked the car of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as the couple were inside, being driven to the London Palladium. The car was slightly damaged, the royal couple unharmed, though a bit shaken by the incident. Parliament did end up narrowly approving the measure, and the fee increases are set to take effect in 2012. Collected here are images from London last night.
Amazing set of photos from yesterday. Interesting times that we live in…
WebKit Clock
This site is driven with HTML5 canvas, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Fonts, SVG and NO image files. It's optimized to WebKit rendering engine and you can see it with Safari and Google Chrome.
Very impressive. I really need to get a handle on all of this Canvas stuff…
Visit ➔Spotify CEO: Music on the Web Will Be More Popular Than Photos
Speaking at All Things Digital’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday in San Francisco, Ek said that he thinks “music on the web will probably surpass the popularity of photos.”
Interesting that he says that for two reasons:
1) Arguably it is already.
2) Spotify isn’t on the web; it’s a internet connected client application. I’d love them to be a web app, with embedable tracks á la YouTube, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Visit ➔Lawyers warn about Facebook’s terms and conditions
One of the recent changes they made is that you cannot incentivize users to take any action on Facebook. For instance, you can’t say, 'Become a friend and we’ll give you something for free.'
Interesting, especially considering the increasing power and relevance that Facebook has in online marketing. It almost goes without saying, but it’s a huge driver of traffic to music related sites; people used to talk about getting on Digg, Slashdot or other big community sites to drive massive traffic; now with Facebook Pages there’s these kind of communities for every artist and niche.
Visit ➔Around the world with the xx - Britain's hottest band
In the wake of their Mercury-winning debut album, the xx embarked on a year-long global tour. Here, photographer Jamie-James Medina captures the trio's most intimate moments from Japan to the southern states of America
Beautiful set of photos from The xx’s recent tour:
Ben the Bodyguard
Protecting your passwords, photos, contacts and other sensitive stuff on your iPhone® or iPod touch®
Very nifty site design – scroll down for cleverness.
Visit ➔The Decline and Fall of E-Mail
I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying.
The latest in a long line of ‘email is dead’ articles; there’s some grain of truth to it – I certainly receive a tiny amount of personal emails these days, with Twitter, Facebook and SMS (in order of least personal to most personal) picking up the slack.
What these communication methods don’t account for though is work – I wouldn’t dream of using Facebook for work communications and I’m sure I’m not the only one (do you want to be friends with everyone you work with?). Email for work purposes seems pretty unchallenged to me.
Visit ➔Generation Why?
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
A fascinating – albeit long – article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books on The Social Network (a film which you really should go and see if you haven’t already).
Lots of good points are raised, but I’ve picked this quote out as it represents a feeling that I’ve seen crop up in a few places – that being that in someway online communications are in someway lesser then traditional forms – and it’s a feeling that I think is seriously wrongheaded.
Social network presences for me are not a replacement for physical interaction but an additional representation of yourself. In fact, I think often they can represent a person better then they do in real life, depending on the character.
Another point worth pointing out – there’s also an underlying tone of ‘all your data belongs to facebook’ but that’s no more relevant then what phone network you use; it’s just the delivery method – it’s the content, which can be (often simultaneously) on all sorts of sites, that matters.
Visit ➔Some thoughts on the value of music, fan-funding and the bizniz of music
One the biggest things I’ve found in my shift from fan to blogger to running a label, to whatever the hell it is I am now, mixed with growing up with P2P, is my perception and understanding of the value of music.
Don’t agree with all of it – from where I’m sitting the recorded music industry isn’t really having anything like as many problems as is commonly made out – but certainly a lot interesting points in here.
Visit ➔Designing media?
What’s going on here?
A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.
What I think we’re doing is designing media.
I’ve already linked to several o the things referenced in this post; what they’re doing over at BERG is very interesting indeed.
This is marketing – a word often with negative connotations – at its best.
Visit ➔Why the Daily, Murdoch’s “tablet newspaper,” will be DOA
When I first heard the phrase “iPad newspaper” — shorthand for Rupert Murdoch’s not-so-secret-any-more new project — I puzzled over its oxymoronic implications. Forget about the, you know, iPad/paper contradiction and think about the business. Murdoch is reportedly spending $30 million on this thing. Could that possibly pay off with a product that’s tethered to a single, new platform? Puzzled, I tweeted, “Will they stop me from reading it on my desktop?”
I certainly think there’s room for tablet based publications – and money to be made – but not for news-based ones; on an internet enabled device there’s no way to compete against the practically endless supply of free (and quality) news sources.
Visit ➔Benjamin De Cock’s vCard
Fancy CSS
Very nice example of CSS 3 animations and transitions – love the little clouds of smoke.
Visit ➔My iPad Magazine Stand
My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
Khoi picks on (quite fairly) all sorts of problems with current eMagazines, like pricing models and the lack of sharing, copy and paste etc but it strikes me these are all very straight forward to solve.
We mustn’t forget that eMagazines are only about 6 months old (the Wired one launched the end of May, for example) – personally I already prefer them to physical ones, but they’re only going to get better.
Visit ➔