20/11/07
Posted in Advertising, Apple, Marketing, Music, Radio | 1 Comment » 
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A few weeks ago we got iTunes on the iPhone so we can download any song we want over the air. Kewl!
I bet the Adbusters guys must be really happy with this impulse purchase temptation right on the palm of our hand!
But it doesn’t stop here. A while ago there were some rumors about iTunes booths on Starbucks so customers could download via WiFi their favorite songs. Well it got actually way better (or worse) than that. Consider the following scenario:
You’re sitting in a Starbucks and you hear a song. You fire up your iTunes app on your laptop or on your iPhone and “boom” there comes the artwork for the current song plus the ten previous ones. One click or one tap and the song is yours forever (and your dollar is Apple’s).
Check Apple’s info on the matter.
The system could be generalized to any web based radio station or broadcasting platform for the matter opening new marketing opportunities in the music distribution arena. I bet Steve is on the job already.
Bonus 1: here’s the longest Starbucks order: Double Ristretto Venti Nonfat Organic Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino Extra Hot with Foam and Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended
Via Laughing Meme
Bonus 2: You get free WiFi if you own an iPhone or a laptop with iTunes.
08/06/07
Posted in Interface, Music, Programming, Radio, TV, Videoclips, Web 2.0 | No Comments » Tweet This Post
If you are a Web 2.0 freak, own a Last.fm account and spend countless time digging in YouTube, LastTube is the right web service for you
The best of both worlds comes in the shape of a Mashup called LastTube that uses Last.fm’s and YouTube’s APIs.
It’s a web service that reads your preferences from your Last.fm account and “scrobbles” YouTube for related videos. I have to say that it got my preferences quite right. It even found a Bestie Boys live act on Letterman’s Tonight show.
The good: great concept. Serving audiovisual contents according to our musical preferences.
The bad: Firefox freezes while trying to load some videos.
The ugly: the Flash interface. Still, I can live with this at this stage of the project.
Here’s the developer’s blog.
And here’s some of his notes (pay attention to the development time):
Motivation: Create a “useful†client mashup using Flex 2 and public Web Services and RSS feeds in only one day without write any custom server side code.
Total development time: One day (Includes coding, testing, googling and lunch time)
Number of Developers: Just Me.
Server Side Code Created: None
Data Feeds, Web Services and Web Sites Involved: Last.fm, YouTube, Yahoo Pipes, Google Analytics.
Programming Languages and Tools Used: Actionscript 3, MXML, Javascript, Flex Compiler.
Known Issues: Sometimes Firefox “freezes†after video playing. Flash Video that doesn’t have complete metadata can “crash†the app.
Lessons Learned: Datatipfield doesn’t work “perfectly†with xml datasources. Handling Flash Video Metadata is a little bit “trickyâ€. ExternalInterface Rocks!
Btw, check the funny URL for the project.
Enjoy!
Via programmableweb.com
05/05/07
Posted in Music, Radio, Web 2.0 | No Comments » Tweet This Post
To all my American friends who will never see this nice page.
(This is a follow-up of my previous post If you’re not in the US say goodbye to Pandora)
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Spain (your IP address appears to be xx.xx.xx.xx). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely,
Tim Westergren
Founder
02/05/07
Posted in Music, Radio, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments » Tweet This Post
Pandora, the awesome online personal radio service, will block any IPs not coming from the US because of copyright related issues. It looks like the US are blessed to have something called Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows Pandora to stream their music there. Outside the US nothing such as DMCA so no Pandora for us. Nice.
Yet another example of how the industry gets it all wrong.
In the best interest of their artists, shouldn’t copyright holders want as much exposure as possible via “controlled” platforms such as Pandora instead of letting the “free” pirate market set the pace? Call me naive but more exposure means more chances of selling a record to the online listener and more chances of filling a concert hall.
If any lesson is repeated over and over in the digital world is that you can’t put fences to information as they tend to wear out in no time. First it was Mp3 compression allowing for faster downloads of high quality audio, then per to peer networks allowing for decentralized file sharing and now, user generated content that competes with expensive productions of large media corporations.
Here’s the letter Pandora is sending to their users.
Dear Pandora listener,
Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora’s streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S.
It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.
Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music – we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.
Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener’s country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. We will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you. We deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
25/04/07
Posted in Radio, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments » Tweet This Post
(life blogging from the MAC 07 in Granollers, Barcelona)
I’ve been invited to participate in the MAC 07 (Mercat Audiovisual de Catalunya) held in an old warehouse in Granollers (Barcelona) the 25nd and 26th of April. The Catalan radio station RAC1 was kind enough to propose me after my role in developing the RAC1.cat and RAC105.cat websites.
I’m participating in a roundtable about “New Content For Digital Formats” and I guess I’m gonna be the bad guy who tells radio executives the future of radio is internet. Is it? Well, yes and no. Of course nobody knows what the future is going to be especially in the internet area (could anyone guess the explosion of the blogosphere five years ago?) but we can make a wild guess.
The future is not the internet. Internet will be the “new” radio and the radio and the rest of traditional media, will be the building blocks of a new medium we still don’t know the name but we know it will be fun. Call it Negroponte’s “Media Convergence” call it Andersen’s “Long Tail” applied to audio, call it Web 2.0 or whatever you want.
We should probably redefine the meaning of “the golden era of radio” as never before so much radio has been produced, be broadcast radio, on-line radio or podcast. Different names and technologies but radio at the end.
Here’s my today’s presentation (only in Catalan but it has a lot pictures don’t worry)
For those who’ve read my previous presentation Web 2.0 look how close the two presentations are. This is done intentionally as I think Web 2.0 will have a key role in redefining radio (and also saved me a lot of time preparing it)
Here’s the panel of the “New Content For Digital Formats” (look for the Internet Expert!)
Mr. Lluis Cuevas and Mr. Marc Vicenç (Coordinator and musicalcoordinator of iCATFM), Mr. Bruno Sokolowicz (Co-director of Scanner FM), Mr José MarÃa Delgado (Contents Management project manager of Unión Radio), Ms. Arantxa Ormazabal (head of visual radio product marketing for Telefónica Móviles), Mr. Francesc Xavier Ribes (Image, Sound and Synthesis Research Group in the Audiovisual Communication and Advertising Dept. of the UAB), Mr. Robert Freeman (Multimedia Expert), Mr. Josep Maria Ganyet (Internet Expert).
And finally let me credit Nicholas Negroponte for the quotation in the title of the post. He said it referred to TV and I just adapted it to radio.
The original quote was: “The key to the future of television is to stop thinking about television as television”.
22/02/07
Posted in Design, Interface, Radio, TV, Usability, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
Reading Kosmar’s blog I found a link to The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles. With such an appealing title I couldn’t help clicking on it, only to land on Tomski’s website, a blog about traditional and new media with particular attention to the BBC, Tomki’s employer. As Tomski puts it:
Required verbage: These are my personal views and not those of the BBC, my employer.
Here are the principles taken from Tomski’s blog developed as part of the BBC2.0 project. If you’re familiar with blogs (you should be somehow if you’re reading this) you’ll notice how familiar this principles sound to you.
Tomski: The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles:
1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Lifeâ€: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.
13/03/06
Posted in Radio | No Comments » Tweet This Post
I was invited to the Internauta radio show to chat about internet, web 2.0 and whatever it comes into mind. With 11 years on the air, the show is considered to be the first internet show in the world on a national radio and the show is in Catalan. Remember the “act local, think global” thing? It works.
Vicent Partal, host of l’Internauta radio show and internet pioneer (vilaweb.com), invited me to his show over e-mail (how else) while I was in San Francisco in January.
In the one hour long show we discussed, along with co-host Joan Jofra, about web 2.0, my recent work with San Francisco based gotomedia.com, and the future of internet.
Needless to say that we’ll be wrong about the future, or could anyone imagine ten years ago that we would get online services for free that are way better than their subscription counterparts? Check Firefox or Flickr.
Another example would be the blogging revolution or how audiences are moving away from TV, taking an active role by publishing contents of their interest instead of just consuming what’s being served by tradional media.
To see how things change, take the following examples from the three times I’ve been in the show:
- 1995: I asked Catalunya Radio if I could get a copy of the program and they told me it was very difficult. I taped the program myself from the radio. I later encoded the program in mp3.
- 2000: The second time I didn’t have to record anything, I was able to download a RealAudio file with the show.
- 2006: This time the show went automatically to my iPod without me doing anything as I was already subscribed to the Internauta podcast. I had been podcasted!
—
Link to the show at the Internauta page. (The link is in there somwhere).
Subscribe to the Internauta podcast. (Catalan language)
Catalunya RÃ dio have changed their website and all the shows are available via podcast. A change that will no doubt affect audiences, how and when they consume information and therefore advertising. Check the related article on Advertising 2.0.
25/07/05
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In this week’s broadcast I discuss about the Wikipedia, the largest encyclopaedia ever written. The broadcast is in Catalan language
Writing an encyclopaedia is not an easy task, especially if you try to do it on your own. But if you invite all your internet pals to contribute with their articles, the task becomes more feasible.
This was the vision of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, who in 2001 opened his online encyclopaedia to public participation.
In his own words “[Wikipedia is] an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.”
Today the Wikipedia receives some 60 milion visits a day, has more than 1,6 milion articles in 200 languages, 100 of which are active.
English has the most entries with 670.415, Spanish comes 9th with 58.829 and Catalan has 16.398 entries.
Download the radio Broadcast in real audio format.
Wikipedia home
Wikipedia in Catalan
