OurielOhayon

MUSIC AND NEWS MAPS

I discovered 2 new free services using visual mapping to help you learn more, better and faster on art and news:

– LivePlasma: if you like Miles Davis, you will like John Coltrane and Bill Evans. Let that engine map predictively your taste according to your favorite artist, movie director, actor. An excellent way to discover new artists…

– NewsMap: quoting “Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator”. It works on all languages. An easy way to know at once and instantly what is happening in the world

 

IS IT WORTH BUYING AN EXTERNAL HD?

No: I bought DVD-R the other day and a reflexion stroke me: it is really not worth buying an external Hard drive. They are much too expensive:

– Tower of 50 DVD-R 4.7G = 225 giga (you can burn only 4.5)  = 39 USD

– External Hard Drive (cheapest model) of 250 Giga = 200 USD

“So?” you will tell me: There is more convenience and safer storage and all in one place: i answer is it worth that much? I believe i will keep on burning DVDs untill external HD become cheaper.

BLOG DAY

Nir is suggesting to celebrate blogs with a blog day on the 31/08: why that day because if you pay attention 31/08 can be read “Blog”. It could be an interesting opportunity to promote blog better worldwide. I invite you to participate in this initiative.

Itunes VS JAMBA

Will the war over (legal) digital music download happen finally over the mobile phone (vs the computer)? Well a few elements strike me:

• Prices of music download over itunes and its brothers (napster,..) are around 99cUSD. Prices of polyphonic ringtones for an extract of a song are at least 1USD or more.
• The success of both market cannot be compared though: digital is increasing but still is small (hundreds of millions USD max), ringtones market is huge both in volume and revenues (billions of USD).
• There are more mobile phones than mp3 player and mobile phone become more and more musicphones. SK a mobile phone constructor even bought a music label to produce its own ringtones
• new mobile phone allow mp3 quality ringtone and not just polyphonic ringtones and big hard drive: enough to compete with ishuffle and other disk on key.

Meaning that people are ready to pay a high(er) price for an extract of a song rather than the original music itself. Can we bet that with more and more sophisticated phones in the market this trend will be growing and extend from basic ringtones to the Mp3 market?

I think Itunes main competitors are not napster or real.com but ringtones distributors like jamba and mediaplazza. Here is why:

SKYPE ON KEY

This is what i call a great innovation: diskonkey, skype embedded, embedded microphone and speaker….Just the design sucks

 “The FlashPhone F1K will focus on mobile user who working at different place. Travel and drop in any internet bar, keep your important file and chat record, plug and talk, unplug and leave.”

WEBALOGUE : INTERACTIVE CATALOGUE

Just tried this. Auchan, one of the biggest french retailed, created that format. I find it amazing, easy and catching. When an old idea re-birth thanks to technology…

BLOG AND REPONSIBILITY

Loic points that blogging can be a risk for its author if he does not comply with a few rules. Therefore i realize it is necessary to add a legal mention to my blog in order to be protected against “risky” readers comments/ trackbacks. Indeed bloggers can be considered as legally responsible for what they publish but also for allowing 3rd party comments/trackbacks to be published on their blog . For example someone put a trackback on one of mypost redirecting to an free p2p music plateform: out of the fact the trackback was totally irrelevant to my post it was an illegal redirect. I did not see it right away but deleted it as soon i was aware of that.

I already published my personnal details. Because it is legally required. I also started to write a legal mention, but i believe it would be better if a lawyer or even Typepad could help us, bloggers, in providing a standard legal text to be published on our blogs in order to define our responsibility and protect us in case of conflict.

Here is what i started to write

NEW SKYPE VERSION WITH MINOR CONS

The new skype version (built 1.3.0.48) is available. You can download it but before know this:

• Slower to log in than before. Even “heavier” than before
• Slower to have contact list synchronized
• Appearance bug in chat (colors suddenly disappear)
• bybye the green graphics codes and background, hello the blue skype.
• New base line (that i don t like so much) :the world can talk for free (and also not so free to call regular phones) 
• better ergonomy: better integration of premium services (voicemail, events,…)
• If you want to add video you can with Vskype (not skype proprietary solution but fine)

DOUBLE WILLIS?

 

Look carefully at these 2 movies posters. No you don t see double. all these items appear in both: Black background, red police type, bruce willis, handling a gun (nearly the same), under the rain (falling in the same direction).  The funny thing is that, although these movies are both action movies and were released nearly at the same date, they are really different. So mister willis, never thought of supervising your marketing campaigns?

FIRST POST FROM A PLANE

Incredible! i am connected to the net through wifi on a flight from Frankfort to tel aviv. A bit expensive (20 USD for the flight), but amazing experience.

Just talked to a friend through skype. And this is my first “air post” sent directly from the flight