music

Angry Birds boss doesn’t see Piracy as a bad thing

Rovio boss Mikel Hed has said he doesn’t necessarily see piracy as a bad thing when it comes to Angry Birds. Speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes, the Angry Birds maker explained the company sees efforts to pursue pirates in the court system as ‘futile’ – so long as pirated products are not harmful to the brand or ripping off fans. “We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy. “We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products,” he said. “There is tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products.” Hed also explained he believes there is a lesson to be learned from the music industry – namely, approaching customers as fans, rather than users. “We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have,” he said.

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Angry Birds boss doesn’t see Piracy as a bad thing

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Flagging Kindle Fire to be stoked with update

Despite its name, the Kindle Fire – Amazon’s highly promoted tablet – has seen relatively lukewarm success with its early users; however, a soon to be released update will seek to rekindle the fire (pun intended). When the device first hit the market, Amazon insisted the Kindle Fire was a hot top-seller . However, enthusiasm has somewhat cooled as the list of user complaints have grown, including: no external volume control; an off switch that is easily hit by accident; no privacy on the device; sluggish touch screens; as well as the ‘fat finger problem’ – where items on the screen are too small, leading to tap errors and accidental activation. According to a recent report in the New York Times , the individual grievances recorded on Amazon’s website have received some confirmation. Nielsen Norman Group co-founder Jakob Nielsen said the Fire offered a “disappointingly poor” experience and added, “I feel the Fire is going to be a failure. I can’t recommend buying it.” All of this would be enough to augur an early death for even the most heavily marketed item, but Amazon sees the Kindle as critical to its future success, and is willing to acknowledge it is working on improvements. “In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman. The update will reportedly include improvements in performance and multi-touch navigation, as well as allowing customers to edit the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. As the New York Times put it, “No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.” Additionally, an improved version of the device itself is due soon, though Amazon has declined to say exactly when.

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Flagging Kindle Fire to be stoked with update

music

YouTube acquires RightsFlow

YouTube has acquired licencing service RightsFlow, it has announced. The popular video-sharing website will use RightFlow’s muscle to help tackle online copyright issues and provide “smart copyright management” to its platform. “We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired RightsFlow, a New York-based company that helps songwriters, recording artists, record labels, distributors and online music services manage music rights,” product manager David King wrote on the YouTube Blog . “As new ways of consuming music have emerged, RightsFlow has been at the forefront of solving the complex issues of licensing and royalty payment management. “By combining RightsFlow’s expertise and technology with YouTube’s platform, we hope to more rapidly and efficiently license music on YouTube, meaning more music for you all to enjoy, and more money for the talented people producing the music.” As YouTube has evolved, so have licensing agreements and copyright issues. In its earliest form, YouTube came under fire from critics who claimed the video site allowed and encouraged materials to appear on its site that infringed copyright laws. Both YouTube and its parent company Google have been involved in several legal disputes on the issue – including a class action suit lodged by a group of music publishers accusing YouTube of allowing pirated materials to appear on site. After reaching a settlement in August, the publishers said in a statement: “As a result of this resolution, music publishers will have the opportunity to enter into a license agreement with YouTube and receive royalties from YouTube for musical works in videos posted on the site.” YouTube has since worked to shake any pirated content out of its site with a filter system, and by adding RightsFlow to its arsenal the web’s most popular video-sharing service will conceivably be in a better position to help artists and groups tackle issues regards rights and distribution.

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music

Skip all you like with Spotify Radio

The good folks of Spotify are certainly changing things up. Last week they announced the addition of music based apps to their service, and now they’re taking on Pandora. “We’ve built a radio app on top of our platform,” said Spotify co-founder and Chief Executive Daniel Ek during his announcement at LeWeb. “It’s kind of like Pandora, but with unlimited skipping and unlimited stations.” Up until now, Spotify has only allowed subscribers to play the specific songs or albums they chose. With stations, users can now choose a category and let Spotify do the picking. And, the unlimited skipping is likely to be a big draw. In contrast to Pandora – where skipping is limited due to the fact that they pay music labels by the song – if subscribers dislike the Spotify song choice they can skip to the next one as many times as they like. According to the company’s official blog post: “Starting a radio station is easy. Click ‘Start Artist Radio’ at the top of any artist page or just drag a track to ‘Radio’ in the left sidebar

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music

Google starts graphing

Students and math lovers alike need search no further than Google next time the battery in their graphing calculator dies. The search seraph has rolled out its newest feature – graphing functionality – to help share the “magical feeling” of seeing a mathematical function in a graph. “Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page – just type in a function and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page,” Google Engineer Adi Avidor wrote on the Google blog . Inside the search engine , users can do everything from convert currency and measurements to translate words, search movie times, check arrival and departure times, or get directions. And with the addition of Google+, Google Music , and graphing functionality, there are few things a user can’t do with Google . While a simple calculator has been available inside the Google browser for some time, the graphing functionality takes the next – and more complicated – step forward in helping users solve complex math problems without ever sharpening a pencil. “You can zoom in and out and pan across the plant to explore the function in more detail. You can also draw multiple functions by separating them with commas,” Avidor wrote.

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Spotify loses support of 200 labels

Spotify suffered a blow last week as more than 200 labels pulled the plug on the music-streaming service. Small, independent labels in particular are rejecting the music streaming service, arguing their artists stand to lose, rather than gain, from making their music available online. “As a distributor we have to do what is best for our labels,” distributor ST Holdings said in a statement . “The majority of which do not want their music on such services. They provide poor revenue and have a detrimental [effect] on sales.

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Spotify heeds complaints over Facebook sharing concerns

Spotify received hundreds of complaints from angry users following changes to the music streaming service after joining forces with Facebook, prompting new privacy settings for the app. Last week’s f8 conference saw the two web heavyweights team up to provide what they described as a ‘frictionless sharing’ experience for users. Friction, however, seems to be exactly what a significant number of users felt following the changes. The GetSatisfaction support forum and Spotify’s blog have been inundated with messages from disgruntled music listeners claiming the changes to the service violate their privacy. Privacy campaigners in the US have also filed a letter of complaint with federal regulators

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F-Commerce | Revolutionising the Way We Buy Online

Social Innovations, the Manchester based Social Media Experts have released the latest version of their revolutionary F-Commerce plug-in. SIIP (Social Innovations Interactive Plug-in) is an application that allows an E-commerce site to be replicated into Facebook. SIIP intelligently targets users by interests, events and likes that are posted on their Facebook pages, this means that businesses who utilise the plug-in can actively target users on aspects such as the music, books or movies they like, where they like to go on holiday, birthdays and other general demographic information such as age and location. This means that the site, once incorporated into Facebook will present relevant products to the user based around their interests and likes. The application also has the facility to incorporate a separate section for ‘Facebook Offers’ giving the user the incentive to use the interactive f-commerce plug-in

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F-Commerce | Revolutionising the Way We Buy Online

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F-Commerce | Revolutionising the Way We Buy Online

Social Innovations, the Manchester based Social Media Experts have released the latest version of their revolutionary F-Commerce plug-in. SIIP (Social Innovations Interactive Plug-in) is an application that allows an E-commerce site to be replicated into Facebook. SIIP intelligently targets users by interests, events and likes that are posted on their Facebook pages, this means that businesses who utilise the plug-in can actively target users on aspects such as the music, books or movies they like, where they like to go on holiday, birthdays and other general demographic information such as age and location. This means that the site, once incorporated into Facebook will present relevant products to the user based around their interests and likes. The application also has the facility to incorporate a separate section for ‘Facebook Offers’ giving the user the incentive to use the interactive f-commerce plug-in

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F-Commerce | Revolutionising the Way We Buy Online

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Blog Writing Tips: Keeping Content Fresh

Content may be king, but to torture a metaphor somewhat, even the most brilliant crown can grow tarnished. Generating good content isn’t always an easy thing, and it requires a great deal of effort to avoid getting into rote postings and halfhearted content that isn’t of the quality a blog and its audience deserve. A lot already has been written about the common mistakes bloggers can make. Text walls, keyword cipher content, bland posts on stuff that’s been covered before — these things are not good. But simply pointing out what not to do isn’t very helpful. After all, anyone can “not do” certain things. But as any fiction writer worth the name will say, listing and focusing on all the things one isn’t going to do results in one not doing anything at all. There has to be a positive focus and some manner of a goal. To that end, what are some of the things bloggers can do to keep their content fresh and interesting?

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Blog Writing Tips: Keeping Content Fresh

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