Bombtune

On Google+:
What’s important to Google is getting your biographical data.
Raise your hand if you got duped? All Google needs is 3 minutes of your time to sign up and leave so it can marry that data with future advertising just for you.

I admit I didn’t see it coming but it makes complete sense. Social data is the new oil.

Google knows that competing against Facebook is a joke. Facebook is about to announce some features tomorrow that’ll keep people permanently stuck.

From Google’s point of view, it’s easy as running a few weeks of media ads, getting some major brands and celebrities to join and it collecting 90k new identities to power it’s future advertising.

It may be the best loss leader ever.

Twitter puts people on their couches. I’ve never watched more award shows than I already have this year.

But what stands out is how boring these award shows and TV in general are without Twitter. Conversation, social participation, drives TV viewership and interest. I was done with TV before this and Twitter brought it back. That’s says a lot. Imagine what the advertisers think.

Pigalle Paris _ Nike Stadium / ‘BARBES BASKETBALL’ from PIGALLE PARIS on Vimeo.

Love the beat in this video. Paris too.

Facebook will announce real time analytics this week.

Facebook has really been missing out on the viral engagement and ad revenue Twitter gets through live television.  The Twitter stream will be blowing up again for the Oscars tonight.

Now that brands can follow noise in Facebook during live shows they’ll be able to assess exactly what fans want to hear about or receive at that moment like a piece of exclusive content or a coupon; essentially anything that is topical, newsfeed based, and grabs immediate attention.

Twitter alert!

QR campaigns are rarely successful.  You have to point and shoot at an ugly looking barcode and the unlocked content is typically boring. That’s until you add music to the image.

We needed an interface that allowed us to have a bridge between the real world and the reactive ambience that we wanted. - Nuno Serrão

All museums should augment pictures with a soundtrack.  Sound is the real stickiness, especially for QR codes.

The entertainment industry will fight with streaming until it pays out.

But streaming revenue will never match download revenue.  Not until the Internet reaches every corner of the world and content is accessible to all.

Instead of fighting for pennies, the entertainment industry should be lobbying the UN and The World Bank to spread Internet access more quickly around the world.

The only way to make up for lost revenue is to get millions of people streaming a piece of content at the same time, from all seven continents.

In an ideal world all content would be accessible as it is on YouTube with no strings attached.  No sign up required, public, free, shareable and instantly accessible.

Every piece of content should be licensed for world consumption.

Streaming isn’t the problem.  The problem is global internet access.

John Peel was the greatest DJ of all time. He introduced reggae to the UK and tempted his listeners with what he thought people would like rather than playing the sure hits.

The BBC and the English Arts council announced that they are digitizing his record collection, spanning 40,000 vinyl singles and 25,000 vinyl LPs.

Even though the actual music won’t be digitized, we’ll still be able to google away at his collection. I’m sure half is his collection can’t be heard or found. Peel went that deep into music.

One of the last records Peel made was a mix for Fabric, the progressive London night club. It might be the most educational record you’ll ever hear, combining rock, reggae, drum n bass, and commentary from Peel’s favorite football club Liverpool.

I miss Peel. I made a poster of him after he died. It reminds me to keep discovering.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. - Ira Glass

You know, we started obviously in Apple using the iPad well before it was launched. Of course, we had our shades pulled and everything so nobody could see us. What I started noticing about my own personal behavior, it quickly became 80 to 90 percent of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. - Tim Cook

It gets overstated but it’s worth nothing again and again.  Apple wants to make the tablet a computer.  Amazon wants to make the tablet a consumption device. It all depends on your needs.

In two years time you won’t be able to tell the difference between television and the Internet.

So why does a company like Google with an Internet video monopoly in YouTube want to get in the TV game?

Ice cream sandwich. Attack the other end of the screen and squash the advertisers and content owners in the middle.

That’s domination and it’s coming to a TV near you.

I’m glad to have taken part in the last 2 Startup meetups in my town, Stamford CT.

There have been some exciting startup
presentations including one from Kogeto, a recently released 360 camera that attaches to your iPhone.

And even more excited that the town just announced that its historic town hall will turn into a workspace and incubator for startups.

Stamford is about a 40 minute train ride outside NYC. It’s impossible to miss the stock floor trading grounds just outside the train station. The town is also rapidly building apartments nearby.

I’m thrilled to see the East Coast creating its own Silicon Valley. It just makes sense. The talent, knowledge, and money is right there. Now it’s just about the will to create, fail, and establish the next big thing.

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From mouse to touchscreen to Google glasses. Real-time information is coming to the tip of your eyeballs.

Google thinks we’ll need augmented reality glasses for activities like driving and exploration. I thought lasik was the only advanced eye operation I’d ever get.

I rarely click on friends’ links, pretty much undermining the theory of peer to peer sharing.

But this wasn’t always the case. Twitter flipped trust and interest into admiration for people I didn’t necessarily know but had real expertise.

Even for entertainment based links about Jeremy Lin highlights or funny videos, I’m more likely to click from someone I don’t know than someone I do.

I admittedly spend more time checking Twitter.  Still, the click per time spent is still remarkably higher.

I will say though that Facebook’s real time frictionless ticker grabs my eye often. And I’m more likely to click there than within the Facebook stream. This is probably because it displays bit sized information as opposed to long for content which I describe as anything more than 140+ characters with embedded content.

One thing I certainly do less of is search.  The information I want and need is out there in the air and my Tweeps and friends are just giving it to me for free.

Maybe I just want to learn and discover new stuff.

23 Jazzy Hip Hop Instrumentals that can’t be released in the United States because of certain “samples.”

On the Internet, artists go direct.  The world is (beat) flat.

Get it from Bandcamp.

Straight out of Santa Ana.

Websites that want to prevent pinning will now see this error message:

This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!

Pinterest is offering the code to any site owner although users can still download images and upload them to Pinterest as their own. The code enables Pinterest to fence-sit on copyright and warns content owners to think twice about forgoing its 11 million repinning and rabid traffic drivers. Ultimately, Pinterest is banking on hesitation.  It’s free, drives site traffic, and is joins Facebook’s frictionless sharing with its app. Pinterest has the content owners exactly where it wants them.

The Hashtag sign that is now the standard language for every social network.

“If you’re not a hashtag you don’t exist!” - Hugh MacLeod

Bombtune: The Sound of the Future

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I felt like trying something new this week. Above you’ll find the best of summaries of stories from the the past week. My objective here is to break down this week’s highlights into digestible reads and easy viewing. Instead of licensing photos and showing attribution I decided to draw them myself. My wife is responsible for the first three pictures. Let me know what you think.

Clear for iPhone - Available Now! from Realmac Software on Vimeo. I typically avoid list building apps.  There’s work, play, and the Sunday must-do chore items.  That’s a lot of time list building. But I decided to give the new Clear app a shot at prioritizing my day. On first use the app is completely intuitive, seamless, and well designed. It accomplishes everything one needs in an app to organize their to do lists. Here are the key features:

• Batching:  The ability to create a master list and fold the details into it
• Scannability:  Allows me to see all my list items at once, with the most important showing at the top of the list in the brightest color.
• Simplicity:  Drag, drop, and delete completed tasks.

I also like the fact that it excludes any sharing features.  If you want to see your list, you need to come back to the app.  This ensures that you’ll delete finished tasks and keep your lists clean. Clear is only 99 cents in the iTunes store.

China promises to bring in 14 more major motion pictures a year.

There a three significant signals here:

China accepts Westernization.  China is finally acknowledging itself as the world’s oyster.  The Chinese are in the business of idea aggregation and Hollywood movies are just one way to inspire them into action, to create their own things.

China’s soft power investment.  China is setting itself up for the future when it needs its culture to soften its superpower status.  Don’t think one second that China will sit back and passively consume Western films.  China will build its own movie industry like India did with Bollywood.  Chinese films will put its actors on the map in households across the world, bettering its image.

Hollywood’s new market. No American actively goes to the movies any more.  Netflix and free streams save us $20/movie + concessions at the box office.  So Hollywood will absolutely take any extra revenue it can get even if it comes from Internet streams.  Don’t expect the Chinese to all of a sudden run to movie theaters when they can watch them in the comfort of their own homes.  Just imagine how many Smart TVs Apple itself will sell in China.

More importantly, the Hollywood deal gives all content creators hope that they too can break into the Chinese market.  For musicians, that means more shows, for authors that means more paid talks and possible Chinese investment in scripts Chinese investors want to turn into movies.

The implications of this deal are huge for China and the content creators in the West.