Archive for August, 2005
“Easily the stupidest iPod idea yet”
So says Idiot Toys, and no sane person would disagree.
Why you should be wary of online ticket touts
There’s an interesting discussion on the Record of the Day messageboard about the cancelled Eminem tour: the people who bought tickets are being given their money back - but the people who paid for the tickets aren’t necessarily the people who have the tickets, particularly now that half the world seems to be flogging concert tickets on eBay.
As “zanefan” points out:
If they are ebay touts (>80% of them) most will refund the face value to keep up their feedback.
However, “a” responds:
[You] can only leave feedback once and most buyers would have done so after receiving the tickets.
Caveat emptor…
Cracking open BigChampagne
This fascinating article about P2P monitoring firm BigChampagne suggests that P2P is transforming the way record labels market their artists.
To take an example, here’s what I can tell you about the Arcade Fire, thanks to a BigChampagne report. The week of August 4, 1.3% of filesharers– maybe 200,000-300,000 people– were sharing the band’s music, up from just .20% last December. From their debut LP Funeral, “Rebellion (Lies)” scored the most listeners– and the most searches– and “In the Backseat” got the least. San Francisco is their biggest market this week, with 2.17% audience penetration (far more than, say, a mere .30% in Colorado Springs). And 60.52% of Arcade Fire fans also have Coldplay in their collections, while only 4.22% of Coldplay listeners have Arcade Fire– but you can also see that 34.63% of the Arcade Fire fans have tracks by fellow indie Canadians Hot Hot Heat, and 9.65% of Hot Hot Heat’s fans like to get their Funeral on.
Forget mobile phone viruses. This is much, much worse
New Scientist describes a terrifying new threat to the UK’s mobile phone owners: bluetooth-beaming billboards.
Ignoring adverts is about to get a lot tougher with the development of billboards and advertising posters that use Bluetooth to beam video ads direct to passing cellphones.
As people walk past the posters they receive a message on their phone asking them if they wish to accept the advert. If they do, they can receive movies, animations, music or still images further promoting the advertised product.
Describing the system, chief creative officer of Filter UK - the “brains” behind this wonderful wheeze - explains:
“It’s all about delivering high quality content, tailored for mobile usage.”
Translation:
“Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam egg chips and spam.”
It’s yet another reason to make sure that if your phone uses Bluetooth, it isn’t set up as “discoverable”.
Quick hardware review: the O2 XDA IIs
The good:
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
Quad-band
Nice display
Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
SD/MMC card slot
Cheap depending on contract
It’s black and grey
The bad:
It’s heavy
It’s the size of a house
You look stupid using it as a phone
You’ll need to recharge it every night
Windows Mobile 2003 is a pain in the arse sometimes
The camera is rubbish
There’s no easy way to switch user profiles
O2’s user interface sucks
The work in my house is nearly finished!!!!!
If “nearly finished” means “not even close, and everything looks like vietnam”.
My brother’s coming to stay on Friday.
*weeps hot, salty tears*
Google rumours
Google is rumoured to be launching some new communications tool tomorrow.
It’ll probably be the chat system described here, but it’d be mind-blowing if instead, Google announced the Universal Translator described here.
[Via Metafilter]
Every little helps, unless you’re a PC retailer
Good news for punters and bad news for PC retailers: if you thought PC prices couldn’t get much lower, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As The Inquirer notes:
In the UK, for example, supermarket chain ASDA is, as of this week, selling PCs for under £300. And not bad PCs either, with 256MB of RAM, a 2.4GHz Intel Celeron processor and a 40GB hard disk. Who’s going to compete with that, other than another supermarket chain? PC World must be bricking it.
Physician, heal thyself
Or rather, tech expert! Fix yer PC!
I know it’s inviting hubris but… some tech hack or tech PR who has my details in their address book has got the W32/Netsky-D virus, which is sending out virus-laden emails using forged “from:” addresses. As a result I’m being inundated with “undeliverable” returned mails from various media firms’ anti-virus systems (News International, Sky, etc etc etc). Given the industry the culprit works in, this really shouldn’t be happening.
(Not) doing it for the quids
As some of you know, when I’m not scribbling I’m the lead hollerer in a rock band called Kasino, although the band’s been in hibernation for more than a year (partly because of back problems that prevented me from lifting a guitar let alone throwing rock shapes, and partly because guitarist David now lives hundreds of miles away). Naturally enough, our hibernation means we now get more downloads than we did when we were busily promoting things.
This month, a bunch of complete strangers voted us Artist Of The Month at The Tartan Podcast, which of course gives us a nice warm glow. After saying various nice things about our music, one listener said:
I can’t believe they’re giving away their whole output for free.
I’ve responded and said that for me, downloads are like radio - albeit radio without any royalty payments. The whole point of making music is for others to hear it, so why not give it away? Sooner or later someone will find a way of making money from it, in the same way that musicians get paid royalties for (some) radio play.
It looks like that someone could well be Playlouder MSP, the new music ISP whose launch has been due Real Soon Now for a couple of years. It seems that the service is finally ready for launch, and for £26 per month you’ll get internet access and the ability to share copyrighted music with others. Legally. So far Sony BMG is on board, and the company is confident that it’ll be able to tempt the other big music labels.
I really do think subscription music is an idea whose time has come, because let’s face it, file sharing isn’t going to go away. Playlouder has the right idea, I think, and it’d be nice if Apple were to go down the same road - not necessarily file sharing, but a subscription-based service that not only lets you listen to whatever you want, but download it and play it on your iPod too.