Dear Artists,First of all; we are really glad to hear that you are interested in getting your music onto Spotfiy. We appreciate your patience since you signed up to the Spotify Artist and Label list. The reason why we haven’t gotten back to you earlier is that we haven´t been ready to launch our own uploading-platform. Our time and energy has gone into uploading thousands of tracks every day from our existing partners which is a continuous process. However, getting independent artists music onto Spotify is important to us so we’re working on various solutions to assist artists.The current solutions we offer indie artists offer are CDBaby,Ditto Music and Record Union. They are artist- aggregators, who we’ve recently made an agreement with, and we highly recommend to you as a method to get your music onto Spotify. With them you can create a standard agreement and upload your music onto Spotify as well as deliver your music to other great services such as 7digital and Amazon. So if you want to join Spotify as soon as possible we strongly recommend you to go one of the following sites:http://cdbaby.com/ http://www.dittomusic.com/ http://www.recordunion.com/ We’re really looking forward to having your music on Spotify soon!Regards,The music team at SpotifyThanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogUpload your music onto SpotifyRelated posts:Spotify to halve free music allowanceMusic business models for internet artistsEmbedded music player from last.fm
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Upload your music onto Spotify
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/16/upload-your-music-onto-spotify
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July 16 2011, 12:59am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven
As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini
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May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/16/apple-studies-patent-infringement-claims-by-lodsys
Patent holding firm Lodsys claims revenue from Apple iPhone and iPad 2 app developers, but critics say it is abusing the patent system
This article titled “Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th May 2011 16.24 UTC Apple’s legal department is understood to be “actively investigating” claims by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas, to have a claim against iPhone and iPad developers who use in-app purchase systems.
So far Lodsys has served papers on about a dozen iOS developers who it says are infringing its patent 10/732,102, which it bought in 2004 from the inventor, who filed it in the 1990s, covering user interaction over a network.
Apple is not expected to respond to the claims, which have been passed to it by affected developers, until later this week.
Lodsys is asking for 0.575% of US revenue for in-app purchase. Although that may not be substantial for individual developers, one told the Guardian: “0.575% of the in-app purchase market across all platforms would be a very nice figure to have indeed. And, of course, it’s 0.575% for this patent today. Tomorrow it’s another 1% from some other company, and so on.”
Lodsys says that Apple has licensed the patent covering in-app purchasing – but adds that it can still claim for payments that use the technology in developers’ own apps. “The scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide ‘pixie dust’ to bless another third-party business applications [sic]. The value of the customer relationship is between the Application vendor of record and the paying customer,” notes the blog’s author, believed to be Lodsys‘s chief executive, Mark Small. “The operating system is acting as an enabler and the retailers are acting as a conduit to connect that value.”
In a series of blog posts, the company notes that Google and Microsoft have taken out licences, but notes that “so far no one has asked” whether apps written on those platforms might be liable for licence fees.
A number of iOS developers received couriered documents last week from Lodsys claiming payments were due following their use of in-app purchases.
The move has worried app developers, who see it as a dangerous and slippery slope where they become liable for payments to third parties after using the in-system APIs that they are required to by the mobile OS company. Apple does not allow apps that use other systems for purchasing to be sold through its app store, and Google is also tightening its rules on app APIs.
Lodsys is also suing a number of larger companies including Samsung, Brother, HP and Motorola Mobility.
Lodsys comments on its blog that:
“There are lots of bills in life that it would be preferable to not pay if one didn’t have to. Lodsys is just trying to get value for assets that it owns, just like each and every company selling products or services is, trying to do business and make a profit. It’s odd that some of the companies that received notices had such a visceral reaction. Some of these companies have our favorite apps, for which we paid the asking price. We realise you have to get paid for your work and so do we.”
One developer told the Guardian: “They do imply they’ve have a horrible weekend, but then again, I seem to be the one who hasn’t slept properly since Friday, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who sent the letters in the first place! It feels very hypocritical for them to paint themselves as the victim here.”
Florian Mueller, who has tracked patent disputes in the US and EU, suggests on his blog: “Lodsys is trying to abuse the patent system in a way that could ultimately destroy the entire mobile apps economy, which is not only thriving on its own but has been and continues to be a key factor in making new mobile devices so useful and popular.”
He says: “It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid,” adding: “Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and” Lodsys, which bought them from the inventor.
Mueller fears that if Lodsys prevails it will buy more patents and use them against small app developers who would be unable to defend themselves; and other companies would follow its business model, “shaking trees for money that you just can’t lose because your opponents can’t even defend themselves”.
The risk to the mobile app economy is huge, says Mueller, and this move by a small, relatively unknown company might be the final straw needed to get the mobile companies, including Apple – which is the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue – to lobby the US administration finally to do something positive about software patents. The problem is, what?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogApple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys
Related posts:Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’
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May 16 2011, 11:39am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe
This is a wonderful recipe combination of spicy chorizo sausage and meaty sustainable fish. The vinaigrette could be made with apple cider vinegar.
This article titled “Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe” was written by Angela Hartnett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 20th April 2011 16.30 UTC Pollack is a member of the cod family – a greeny-brown carnivore that can grow up to a metre long. It is common off the coast of Britain and Ireland, especially around wrecks, where it is popular with amateur anglers. It has traditionally been less of a hit with cooks, but with the push to eat more sustainable fish, pollack has emerged as a viable alternative to cod and haddock. Most supermarkets stock it, though you may find it labelled, French-style, as colin. Not only is it cheaper than cod; as far as I’m concerned it’s just as tasty. Like all flaky fish, pollack can break up during cooking; a quick solution is to salt it beforehand. Just cover the fish with rock salt and leave it to firm up for 30 minutes, before giving it a quick rinse and patting it dry. If you do this, remember not to salt the fish again before cooking. I love this combination of spicy sausage and meaty fish, but you can leave out the chorizo and finish the dish with extra vinaigrette. Ingredients (Serves 4) 4 100g portions of pollack fillet 12 large new potatoes, washed, with skin on 1tbsp diced black olives ½tbsp chopped basil 50ml vinaigrette 100g chorizo, chopped into lozenges 3tbsp olive oil Rock salt Method Fill a pan with cold water, a little rock salt and the potatoes, and bring to the boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until just done. Drain the potatoes well, crush with a fork, and mix while still warm with the vinaigrette and olives. This ensures that they take on the full flavour of the vinaigrette. Set aside. Season the pollack with salt (unless you have previously salted it to firm up the flesh). Heat the oil in a non-stick pan (medium heat) and add the pollack, skin side down. Give the pan a quick shake to prevent the fish from sticking. To cook it should take about two minutes each side, depending on the thickness of the fillets. The fish is ready when you can easily push the handle of a spoon through it. Remove the fillets from the pan and place them somewhere warm. Add the chorizo to the now-empty pan and lightly sauté until it starts to release its oil. To serve, dress the potatoes with the chopped basil. Place the fish on top and finish with the chorizo lozenges and the oil from the pan. Any extra potato can be served on the side.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAngela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe
Related posts:Nain’s bara brith recipe The ultimate Cornish pasty recipe Angela Merkel orders safety checks on Germany’s nuclear power stations
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April 22 2011, 10:23am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
OFT launches extended warranties investigation
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/14/oft-launches-extended-warranties-investigation
Extended warranties are just a type of insurance, which in turn is a form of gambling with the odds always stacked against the consumer.. Except for AppleCare of course, which is usually worthwhile.
This article titled “OFT launches extended warranties investigation” was written by Jill Insley, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 10.39 UTC The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to examine whether extended warranties for domestic electrical goods, a market worth more than £750m a year, offer consumers value for money.
Extended warranties are insurance policies that cover the cost of repairs or replacement for a set number of years beyond the manufacturer’s own warranty. They are typically sold at the point of sale on electrical items such as televisions, washing machines and computers, with most policies running for three or five years.
The OFT’s decision to probe this market follows its review of “aftermarkets” for domestic electrical goods launched in November 2010. This revealed concerns that competition between extended warranty providers was reduced because of retailers’ ability to promote policies when selling an electrical item. Some parties responding to the review also complained that warranties are not good value for money.
Rules controlling the sale of extended warranties were introduced in 2005 following a Competition Commission investigation. These include the requirement for retailers to tell customers that buying an extended warranty is optional, that they have up to 30 days to buy the extra cover, and there is a 45-day cooling-off period if they change their mind after doing so. But an OFT evaluation has revealed that these measures only address consumer detriment worth about £19m a year out of an estimated total of £366m.
Claudia Berg, director of the OFT’s consumer and goods group, said the results of the study would be published in the summer.
“Consumers buy millions of extended warranties on domestic electrical goods each year, and we want to make sure they are getting value for money. We plan a short and focused market study to find out quickly what, if any, action is needed to make this market more competitive, to the benefit of consumers and the wider UK economy,” she said.
However, the OFT has decided against looking into the repair of electrical goods. It said it had not received sufficient evidence to support initial concerns that manufacturers might be limiting competition in this market by restricting independent repairers’ access to technical information and spare parts.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogOFT launches extended warranties investigation
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April 14 2011, 6:08am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad
New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.
This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.
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April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/30/ipad-2-where-can-i-buy-one-in-the-uk
Supplies of Apple‘s iPad 2 are running perilously short – but more iPad 2s are expected to surface before the weekend.
This article titled “iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 30th March 2011 15.04 UTC Apple’s iPad 2 has been virtually out of stock in the UK since its launch on Friday. Streams of shiny geeks have been left dissapointed and empty-handed by gadget shops up and down the land. But we have good news. Dixons, PC World and Currys expect to get more iPad 2s in stock today. Most will be going to those who have pre-ordered, but if you hurry you might just be able to buy one over the counter. Fancy that. Argos, meanwhile, has been left woefully short handed. Its 750 stores in the UK and Ireland ran out of stock on Monday – and doesn’t expect to get any more until 25 April. Sounds like a bad April Fools’ joke. At Phones4U, which was reported to have been given just one iPad 2 for each of its 500+ stores, the devices are only “down to the last few”, according to a spokeswoman. No word, yet, on when more will be available. John Lewis, which is famously “never knowingly undersold”, has sold out. The retailer says it will have more of the Apple gadgets in time for the weekend. As does Tesco, which encourages customers to order online. Now, over to you. Tweet @GuardianTech or @JoshHalliday with the store name, location (preferably with the postcode), and whether there are any iPad 2s in stock. We’ll update the map below.
Click here for a larger map.
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March 30 2011, 10:58am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The sale of Warner Music is a turning point for the whole music industry
Recorded music, record labels, the breaking of new bands and the selling of their work is a business in crisis. The old music industry is dying and Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world
This article titled “The sale of Warner Music highlights a turning point for the whole industry” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Edgar Bronfman Jr, the music mogul heir to the Seagram whisky fortune, deals in trophy assets the way other people swap knick-knacks on eBay. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, Picassos, Rothkos, huge chunks of the family’s business – Bronfman has traded them all. In the process of moving his family back from London, he is selling his $28m Manhattan townhouse, once owned by the Muppets’ creator Jim Henson, and looking for another. It’s the third piece of prime property he’s sold in less than two years. But it’s another set of assets that Bronfman has on the market that is attracting the most attention – Warner Music, the home to Led Zeppelin, Bruno Mars and Plan B. Given the parlous state of the music industry in recent years, when Goldman Sachs was appointed to look at Warner’s options back in January, the big question was would anyone care at all? Now a colourful set of contenders are cutting up rough as they line up bids for all or part of the firm. There’s Len Blavatnik, a Russian-born oil magnate turned media player; Ron Burkle, the politically connected supermarket mogul dubbed the “Billionaire Party Boy” by the New York Post; music rivals Sony, and maybe Universal; and a whole host of financial players. And hovering in the wings is the man who killed the music industry, Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster, the downloading service that kick-started the digital revolution, before first joining and then quitting Facebook. A casual observer might surmise that the music industry is hot again. A look at the numbers suggests otherwise. Warner was Bronfman’s comeback deal after his 2000 merger of Universal and Vivendi went disastrously wrong. Backed by Thomas H Lee Partners and others, Bronfman paid $2.5bn for Warner Music in 2003 when the music industry was already struggling. It’s got a whole lot worse since. If Bronfman does decide to sell, he will only make a profit thanks to a successful IPO in 2005. He and his investors made their money back then; subsequently the shares, listing at $17, peaked at $30 in 2006, but are now worth less than $6. Part of the problem is that nobody, not even Bronfman, really knows what is going on. Rumours and counter-rumours are circulating. No one talks on the record. Bronfman had wanted to sell his publishing assets and then bid for EMI, say some well-placed industry sources: a marriage between the two smallest of the sector’s major companies has been on and off for the better part of a decade, and Bronfman sees a future where music firms make their money in “360″ deals – owning rights to everything from merchandise to tour tickets and digital sales. He believes he could turn EMI’s troubled recorded music division around. Scott Sperling, the co-president of Thomas H Lee, is said to have disagreed and pushed for the whole company to go on the block. The sale has not been made any easier by EMI. Its disastrous takeover by Guy Hands’s private equity firm Terra Firma ended in court and control by the deal’s largest backer, Citigroup. The bank has begun tentatively talking to potential bidders about selling all or part of the business. EMI arguably has better publishing assets, Warner is stronger and certainly better run in recorded music. The two music firms could argue, and have argued, about who has the stronger assets. In the end it’s like asking who do you like better, EMI’s Beatles or Warner’s Led Zeppelin? The end price is likely to be much the same for either firm. There are probably so many permutations to this fugue that even Bach, let alone Bronfman, couldn’t resolve them. Sadly the same holds true for the entire music industry. Both Warner and EMI have outstanding publishing assets, collecting royalties from a catalogue of the world’s best-loved music. Music publishing is a steady, low-risk business that generates lots of cash – just the sort of thing private equity types love. But recorded music, the breaking of new acts and the selling of their work, remains a business in crisis. As Hands will tell you, it will take more than money to change that record. Glenn Peoples, a senior editorial analyst at the music industry bible Billboard, says he has been surprised by the level of interest. “Publishing I understand, but recorded music? I wonder what the attraction is. The digital age has been great for consumers but it’s been catastrophic for music companies, and the bottom isn’t in sight. You are probably looking at another decade before anyone comes up with a solution.” In 2000, when the industry and the CD market were at their peak, the total number of music buyers in the US was close to 160 million. Over the course of the past decade that number has fallen to below 130 million. Worse still, the average US music consumer now spends $43 a year buying it, down from $60 in 2000. Apple’s iTunes solved one problem for the music industry, offering a legal alternative to Napster and other free download services. But it presented a new one. Instead of selling CDs at $12 a pop, the industry now sells singles at 99c. “We have moved from a dollars business to a pennies business, sometimes a fractions of a penny business,” says one music executive. In this environment only the big survive, he argues. The same holds true for stars. Lady Gaga can cut a deal to promote Polaroid, Justin Bieber can make 3D movies and shill for Proactiv spot cream, but the cash they make from recorded music will not rival the cash Madonna or Michael Jackson made from selling CDs. Lesser stars have little to prop them up, says Peoples. It’s a sad song that is playing across the industry. Warner’s revenues fell 13% between 2004 and 2010, EMI’s fell an estimated 22%. Cushioned by a big company like Sony or Universal’s Vivendi, the leading majors can wait it out, hoping digital dollars will emerge. EMI has already lost its independence. Warner may be the better-run company, but its prospects of keeping running for long don’t look healthy. However, developments over in California could offer a glimpse of salvation. Marissa Mayer, Google’s hotshot vice-president of consumer products, is pushing the search firm to focus on music. She recently interviewed Lady Gaga, for example, for its Musicians@Google series. Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world. Its service is likely to provide an alternative to the iTunes model – offering subscriptions, making all of a consumer’s music available anywhere on any device, and moving away from Apple’s death by singles sales approach. Google’s entry will shake up a market Apple has so far defined, and coincides with a second wave of music services coming online from Spotify and others catering to a smart phone, iPad and tablet PC customer base that’s expected to reach nearly 1.5 billion by 2015. Maybe, just maybe, there is a way the music industry could make some money out of all the music that will get played on those devices. That future seems a long way off to Peoples, however. “At the moment all the music companies are leaky ships bailing water,” he argues. Although they may be getting better at bailing, he adds, the leaks are far from plugged. Still, as bids for Warner start to take shape, Bronfman must be encouraged that someone is crying “land ahoy!”
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March 28 2011, 5:16am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/how-the-ipad-revolution-has-transformed-working-lives
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launched, Charles Arthur looked at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work.
This article titled “How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives” was written by Charles Arthur and Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb”, designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net], to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF
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March 27 2011, 4:51am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2
Australians have been queueing up for the Apple iPad 2 for just as long as Britons – almost two days – and the numbers in the line built up to more than 300 in many locations
This article titled “While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2″ was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th March 2011 06.29 UTC While you were sleeping, the iPad 2 went on sale in Australia, and it seems to have drawn a lot of attention. This was the queue at 0704am this morning in Sydney…
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved …and this was the queue by sale time at 5pm:
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved (Thanks to Beau Giles in Sydney who took a whole set of pictures through the night. People had been queueing outside the Sydney Apple store for almost two days: some told World News Australia that it’s all about meeting people: Canadian backpacker Alex Lee arrived in Sydney on Wednesday to be first in line to buy Apple’s iPad 2 and has theorised on the phenomenon. “I call it the 90/10 rule for Apple – 90 per cent is about the people, the experience and just the whole feeling and 10 per cent is about the product itself,” the IT consultant said. CNet Australia says there were around 300 people queueing at the Brisbane story in Chermside and that they had started at around 5.30am that morning. Large queues were also seen in Hobart. And lest you think it’s only a game for the whippersnappers, the Australian newspapers found Sally Johnson, aged 73, who “may be hot and tired, but that hasn’t deterred her from queueing…” (It’s not the heat of summer in Sydney – it’s just turning to autumn. Which is still hot compared to the UK, of course.) Johnson has recently emigrated from Nottingham. She was roughly 250th in line. And why was she there? “Queuing for her son Mark, who was at work.”
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March 25 2011, 7:43am | Comments »
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Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?
Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them
This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.
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March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »
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Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
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March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
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Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire
If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook
This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate. This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.
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March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »
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The future for UK wines looks rosé
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/28/the-future-for-uk-wines-looks-rose
I think they mean English wine really, rather than UK wine, but surely the traditional English wine is made from apples and called cider?
This article titled “The future for UK wines looks rosé” was written by Andrew Mourant, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 17.00 UTC At his vineyard near St Emilion, Martin Krajewski makes some of France’s best-known rosé wine. But, in an increasingly competitive market, he’s anxious to improve it. Yet while the University of Bordeaux, 20 miles or so down the road, is a leading centre for wine studies, it’s to Plumpton College, in the South Downs of Sussex, that Krajewski has turned for help. Moreover, he’s given the college £75,000 to help fund research programmes. And Krajewski, a lifelong wine enthusiast who made his first batch of elderberry aged 12, isn’t the only donor. Aspiring wine-maker Mark Driver, intent on becoming England’s leading producer of champagne-style fizz, has invested £100,000. The college now hopes to double its money through gift aid and the government’s matched funding scheme, which aims to increase voluntary contributions to higher education providers by matching donations, pound for pound. Both men prospered in the City of London before dedicating themselves to wine production. Krajewski had increased his investment at Château de Sours over several years before taking over entirely. Last October, Driver, a former hedge-fund manager, sank £3.5m into buying Rathfinny Farm, near Lewes, which he plans to cultivate with 400 acres of vines. Plumpton College was an unknown quantity to Krajewski until his daughter Charlotte, who inherited his passion for wine-making, chose to study there. At first he had doubts. “I said ‘Are you sure’? But I read up about it and thought it sounded interesting. I’m amazed by what it’s achieved in quite difficult circumstances. It compares well with any other college or university around the world.” What impressed Krajewski was that graduates of Plumpton’s wine-making degree course – unique in the country – hold senior positions in vineyards across the globe. “Plumpton is small; it’s really hands-on. If you go to university in Bordeaux, you stay there. You’re assigned to one particular chateau where all your practical experience is done.” About half of the Château de Sours production is rosé, described by the late Auberon Waugh as probably the best of its kind in the world. “We’ve invested in processes and equipment,” says Krajewski. “But although we do our own research, we’re a small business and don’t have a lot of time. “We believe Plumpton can improve our wine. They’ll be doing research on the terroir [land in which vines are planted] and taking samples for analysis. They’ll have different approaches. Hopefully, the benefits will be mutual. But the donation I’ve made isn’t just to research rosé. I believe what the college is doing is exciting for the next generation of student wine-makers.” Krajewski says the English wine industry is “very important, but not recognised”. Driver, who is enrolled as a student at Plumpton, agrees. He was impressed by seeing college alumni working around the world and at English sparkling producers Nyetimber and Ridgeview. “I think it [investing] is one of the best things we can do for the future of English wines,” he says. “Research is really important, but none has been done in the UK apart from bits and pieces. No one’s pulled it all together and written definitively – for instance, about successful clones that will produce the right results in the right environment. There are no journals to compare with those in America and Australia. “What we need in England to take wine on to the next level is a top-quality research institution that will provide information for wine-makers and vineyard owners. It will raise skill levels.” Driver finds himself in the odd position of being a first-year student making business decisions normally taken by an experienced graduate. He is employing consultants to help. Rathfinny’s first harvest is due in 2014, and his first sparkling wines, after maturing and secondary fermentation, should be ready by 2017. The donations have allowed Plumpton to retain Dr Belinda Kemp as wine lecturer and department research co-ordinator. Kemp graduated from Plumpton with a first-class degree in viticulture and oenology, then completed a PhD at Lincoln University, New Zealand, researching the effects of vine-leaf removal on fruit ripening. Climate change cuts across several of Plumpton’s research projects. But although warmer temperatures are welcomed by England’s vineyard owners, they come as a mixed blessing. “It isn’t as easy as just saying we can now grow grapes for champagne,” says Kemp. “Everything is complicated.” For instance, last year some English vineyards suffered their first infestations of light-brown apple moth, whose grubs damage leaves and fruit. “We’re looking at ways of combating it without using pesticides. It’s the sort of project we’ll see more of. We’re such a new industry – we have everything to learn. There’s a range of projects under the climate-change umbrella.” Plumpton is also studying the chemistry of wine and innovations that could be used in the UK. England is on the northern rim of wine production and one problem is excess acidity in the grapes. Meanwhile, the college will continue its existing research into three different ways of making rosé and work on refining the methods used by Krajewski at Château de Sours. There will be further studies into champagne-style wines, which look to offer the best chances of commercial success for the English industry. Plumpton can now afford a collaboration with Professor Richard Marchal from the University of Reims to investigate, among other things, how juice changes in quality immediately after grapes have been pressed. “Richard Marchal is an expert on production of champagne and sparkling wine, and his coming to Plumpton is recognition of the possibilities in the UK,” said Krajewski. Soon Plumpton will be home to Britain’s first purpose-built wine research centre, currently under construction, and costing about £500,000. Kemp will establish new research links with the University of Brighton, of which Plumpton is a part. Industry collaborations are planned with UK and international companies, and the college hopes further private funding will allow sponsorship of MSc and PhD research students. Wine studies at Plumpton have come a long way since Chris Foss, who heads the department, set up the first part-time course in 1988. There are now 500 students, including 140 undergraduates. The donations make a tremendous difference,” he says. “They allow us to go beyond teaching into proper research, which is fundamental for a university. “More important, the wine industry now has a dedicated problem-solving tool, which it can use to support its developments. It will be a case of ‘We have this problem … Plumpton can sort it out’.”
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February 28 2011, 1:07pm | Comments »
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I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling
I love my iMac but I don’t sync.
This article titled “I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling” was written by Charlie Brooker, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 00.04 UTC In 2007, I wrote a column entitled “I hate Macs”. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word anti-Apple screed. Macs, I claimed, were “glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.” In 2009, I complained again: “The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them . . . I don’t care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that makes it piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.” The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it. They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium. Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple. Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes. Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating “.docx” Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet. Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven’t been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about “syncing” one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won’t tell you. It’ll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can’t understand why you’re crying. No one uses terms like “sync” in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It’s like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay. Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking. Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin. Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes’ tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple’s own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it’s not a patch on Amazon’s Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform “cloud” system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by “syncing” – but we’ll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.) Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they’ve changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30% cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app. So 30% less for authors and publishers, and 30% more for the world’s second-largest company. And that’s assuming they’ll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they’ll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad. Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it’s a superficial friendship. To Apple, you’re nothing. They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it’s on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog. So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I’m renting them from Skynet.
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February 27 2011, 6:38pm | Comments »
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Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple
Will the iPad 2 really be announced out on Wednesday? Yes, it appears so. How much will it weigh? “more tablets than Mesopotamia” lol.
This article titled “Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Observer on Sunday 27th February 2011 00.06 UTC According to his business card, John Wang is a wizard. Chief innovation wizard to be precise. He certainly seems to be working his magic at HTC, the Taiwanese firm where he oversees new products at a company that is rapidly becoming one of the hottest brands in tech. This week is set to be another Apple week – the second generation of the iPad is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday. But in the UK the biggest-selling launch is likely to be HTC’s. The hyperbolically named HTC Incredible S is Wang’s latest smartphone and has received glowing reviews so far in the tech press. Later this year HTC will launch its iPad rival, the Flyer. With tech firms churning out more tablets than ancient Mesopotamia, Wang says the Flyer will not be another “me-too” device. “Whatever we do has to be quietly brilliant,” he says. He says the Flyer was designed to weigh the same as the average paperback book (420 grammes), about half the weight of an iPad, and will be far smaller. And while it will be a touch-screen device, Wang says it won’t be defined by touch – users will be able to draw and write notes on any part of the device. The aim, he says, is to produce something different, something that produces “moments of delight”. In order to get to these moments HTC has a “magic lab” where ideas are worked through. One idea from the lab is a technology that makes its smartphones ring loudly in a bag or pocket, but softly when picked up. Wang started the lab five years ago and its engineers work through ideas to make their devices as simple and user-friendly as possible. The Incredible S, for example, has buttons that change their orientation depending on which way the phone is held. “When people use the word innovation they are often referring to the 1.5ghz, the 4.4in display, megapixels,” he says. “But it’s often the details, not the specifications that make customers think ‘that is so right’.” The strategy seems to be paying off. According to technology analysts Gartner, HTC sold 3m smartphones in the UK last year, compared with Apple’s 5m. In the last quarter of the year HTC sold 1.1m, close to Apple’s 1.4m. Overall, the company made a net profit of $500m (£310m) for the last quarter of 2010, a leap of 160% from 2009′s final quarter. Sales surged 153% from a year ago. The firm, formerly known as High Tech Corporation, started life in 1997 making notebook computers. It has been building a position in smartphones for years, but Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi says the turning point for HTC was the launch of Google’s Android mobile operating system in 2007. The success of Android and HTC’s close co-operation with Google gave the firm a new lease of life in mobile. Google and HTC are close partners: the search giant’s team used HTC phones when they were developing Android. Initially Android looked like a dud, but it now outsells all its competitors combined in the US. Next up is the tablet, where Google is also keen to make its mark. “I think we are just at the beginning for innovation in the tablet market,” says Wang. Graham Stapleton, chief commercial officer for Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy, said the retailer had seen enormous growth in HTC sales in recent months. “Their customer traditionally has been more of a business/professional user. In the last 12-18 months they’ve targeted more of the pioneering customers, people who want the latest technology.” He said HTC was becoming a brand people asked for unprompted. “That’s a huge change. They’ve done an incredible job over the last 18 months.” It hasn’t gone unnoticed. HTC and Apple are now locked in a patent spat, with each side accusing the other of ripping it off. Milanesi says that’s the price of success. “Can Apple go after Google? No, they don’t make phones. They will go after who they can go after,” she says. It’s probably the biggest compliment Apple is ever likely to pay them.
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February 27 2011, 8:05am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/20/apples-slice-makes-the-ipad-a-bad-deal-for-newspapers
Well you’d think they’d be glad of 70% of something rather than 100% of nothing? This article titled “Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers” was written by Peter Preston, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.05 UTC It’s a straightforward transaction. You produce your newspaper priced at £1. Distributing and selling it – via wholesalers and retailers – takes maybe 33p of that. There’s only 67p a time left to pay for the newsprint and ink you need, plus staff wages, heat, light and the usual stuff. And there’s one added burden. Unless readers are signed up to buy their copies by subscription, you don’t know who they are. You can’t sell holidays or books to them. You can’t market lists of true believers. Conventional news-vending is fatally blind. Now see a digital nirvana on the horizon. Here’s Apple selling 40m iPads this year. Put your paper on an app at an iTunes store and you can hope, gradually, to leave all the problems of print behind. Except that, as of last week, Apple has imposed a new regime for selling from its tuneful store: it wants 30% of everything. Worse, it will only allow subscribers to sign on for marketing purposes – and most, inevitably, won’t. Compared with print, then, distributing and selling your iPad version of a £1 paper will cost only 3p or so less a copy – and you still won’t know the names of those who are buying and reading you. Only Apple will be able to pluck fruit from that particular tree. Good dead, bad deal? Lousy deal on first sight. Whereupon Google promptly launched its own One Pass pricing system for publishers – taking only 10p in the pound and leaving papers and magazines in control of readership lists. A pretty effective response, you’d think: a riposte to make Apple crumble. There’s certainly bargaining leverage here – but don’t get carried away. Some papers, like the Mail, have signed up for possible One Pass use already. But nobody will be able to put together comprehensive, overall figures for advertisers citing a single incontrovertible system while the iPad keeps user dominance over competitors such as Google’s Android system, with its different apps. It’s Godzilla versus King Kong in cyberspace. The sum of all fears – Apple moving from a 30% to 50% cut, for instance – is stark. But rather less terrifying versions don’t exactly bring much cheer, either. You need to produce print papers, website and smartphone versions, an iPad app and an Android app. All work, cost and cash. You need to market your paper in an online environment where hundreds of news sources are struggling for a foothold: more big bucks. And what have you got when you add up the figures at the end of a long, sweaty day? Not profits restored by the wonders of hi-tech. Just another puddle of red ink.
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February 20 2011, 9:31am | Comments »
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