Will Paying For Music Return To Being the Norm?

With the gradual sinking of the ship that is The Pirate Bay, can music subscription services finally triumph over torrent users? My go-to website for downloading music has been The Pirate Bay for the last couple years, but lately with all the complications that are occurring within the website, service has been shotty at best. There are other torrent sites out there, but I have yet to find one that I feel is as user-friendly and ad-free as The Pirate Bay.

When downloading individual songs, I usually use Limewire or Bearshare, but again, I find the quality of these sites have been on the decline. More often that not, the list of downloads available for any given song on Limewire is scattered with dead links. I know I shouldn’t be complaining because I’m choosing to use these free P2P tools, but what I’m trying to say is that I may have to find an alternative to free music. Maybe it’s time I start paying for my downloads.

P2P was fun for a bit while the internet was a new phenomenon, but the quality of the service isn’t adequate for my needs anymore. Which company should I use? Amazon? iTunes? I’ll probably wait and see what the future of P2P comes to, and jump on whoever has the largest bandwagon.

Blue

IKEA Gets Social Media Marketing Right

Using some of the most popular features on the most popular social networking site, IKEA created a wildly popular viral marketing campaign for cheap.

In order to promote IKEA’s new Malmo store that opened this Autumn, their marketing team created a Facebook profile for the store’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson and uploaded 12 picutres of IKEA showrooms over a two-week period into a photo album on his profile. People were encouraged to add Gordon as a friend in order to take part in IKEA’s contest: Whoever tagged themself first on any product in any of the photos, would win it. The constant tagging and comment on these photos, not to mention people writing on his wall asking for more photos, ended up on the News Feeds of thousands of Facebook users. This created a ripple effect, as their friends got into it and put it on their News Feeds, etc.

Getting people to personally promote your brand voluntarily is basically the definition of viral marketing, and IKEA hit it right on the head. I love IKEA’s innovation in the social media network, instead of simply tweeting about the new store or posting some lame video on Youtube.

Bunyan

Court Rules Against Rogers ‘most reliable network’ Claim

 

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of British Columbia barred Rogers from making claims that it has Canada’s “most reliable network” for mobile phones. This comes from a compaint lodged by Telus Corp. that Rogers no longer could claim it had the ‘most reliable’ or ‘fastest’ network in Canada since both Bell Canada and themselves had launched their HSPA netwrok, which of course uses the same technology as Roger’s HSPA network. Bell Canada had recently been running ads touting its network as the ‘best’ in Canada, which Telus obviously hasn’t complained about since it runs on the exact same network.

Ironically though, Bell actually uses the phrase “Fastest, largest and most reliable” in describing its netwrok on its website.

Telus’s website claims it 3G+ coverage is four times greater than that of Rogers’, which makes me wonder why they haven’t instituted some coverage map vs. coverage map ads like Verizon has in the U.S. It may be possible that they know Canadian courts can be more stringent that U.S. ones when ads hurt other companies feelings. Probably because Canadian companies always play second fiddle to American one’s anyways, and there’s no need for infighting.

 

Bunyan

Toyota Announces Largest Recall in Their History

Early Wednesday morning, Toyota Motor Corporation announced that it would repair or replace 4 million faulty accelerator pedals.  The models affected include basically every top selling car or truck from the Toyota over the last four years; 2007-10 Camry sedan and Tundra pickup, 2005-10 Avalon sedan and Tacoma pickup, 2004-9 Prius hybrid sedan, and three Lexus sedans: the 2007-10 ES350 and 2006-10 IS250 and IS350.

This massive recall is in the aftermath of an August crash which killed four people, including an off duty Highway Patrol Officer who was driving a loner 2009 Lexus ES350.  The car he was driving reached a speed of 120mph before tragically colliding with a Ford Explorer, flipped, rolled, and then burst into flames.

It’s good that Toyota is taking this precautionary measure, as they have received several reports of Toyota owners finding the accelerator sticking, and it shows that they are taking responsibility for the incident.  An otherwise reliable manufacturer, Toyota’s stock on the NYSE hasn’t slid at all since the announcement.  Recalls like this have resulted from cars being created around a functioning, master computer.  We end up trusting the computers with our lives with little hesitation, until something like this happens.  Apparently the problem with the August accident was that the computer that was supposed to shut down the car, didn’t.  What will happen when we’re all driving around electric cars and a fuse breaks?

Blue

WordPress > Twitter

This month growth trends have begun to show the inevitable that blogging (on sites like WordPress) is more popular and sustainable than microblogging (on sites like Twitter). The introduction of Twitter was actually supposed to be the end of blogging all together. It was so much easier to express your thought in 140 characters than in long boring paragraphs. Right?

The contrary seems to be occuring now as WordPress gained 10 million unique visitors to bring its October total  to 51.8 million, while Twitter had 58.3 million unique visitors worldwide, down from 58.4 million in September. Blogger also saw massive growth in October with an 18.2 million visitor increase in October.

Twitter has a number of flaws that have caused its flatlining:

1) It is becoming an increasingly used portal for spam, even by your friends and the people you follow through sponsered tweets and ad.ly.

2) Regular people have nothing interesting to tweet about on a regular basis (nobody cares your on the bus).

3) Its impossible to write insighful and informative content in 140 characters.

Although Twitter does have some unique uses for things in high pop culture, for regular people and writers, the blog is the future.

 

Bunyan

It Pays to Know How to Program

Then again that is assuming that your idea of getting paid is actually quitting your job with no notice via a Mac OS X application.  The man who left this on his computer was in a position that he thought was going to be temp-to-hire, turns out he was just going to continue being a temp.  Sure this guy knows what he’s doing on a computer, but he could learn a thing or two about communication.  Three months as a temp and he never once had a discussion about his future with the company?  Seems like it’s partly his fault for being treated like shit.

I’m envious of his computer skills, but not of his social skills.  Is this a growing trend?  People becoming so attached to their computers for work that they don’t have meaningful interactions with their co-workers around them?

Blue

COD 6: MW 2 Video Footage Proves Sleep Impairment Effects

The video shows a teenager basically entering dementia after playing COD 6 for 17 hours straight with no sleep. Although its quite amusing to watch, it does give insight into a growing trend of obsession. My friend recently purchased COD 6 the morning of its release and has already logged an impressive amount of playing hours. Much of his playing time though is done after homework and before bed. Today I was talking to him about it and he said that he has much trouble sleeping after this, and that even when he does sleep, his dreams are adrenaline pumping recounts of him playing, which cause him to wake up constantly in the middle of the night. At first I laughed at his problem, but then I did some research:

A 2007 study done at the German Sport University Cologne showed that after playing video games before bed, teenagers took longer to fall asleep, spent less time in slow-wave sleep — the type that helps a person form factual memories – and spent more time in stage 2 non-REM sleep – the stage of sleep first crops up right after the initial, “drifting-off” phase of sleep, and precedes deep, slow-wave sleep.

A study that was presented this week at SLEEP 2009 in Seattle, Wash., reported that excessive video-game playing can interfere with your sleep.

It would be interesting to see if there was some kind of scientific parallel between coffee drinking and video game playing before bed… Thankfully I stopped playing my ps2 three years ago

Bunyan

Facebook Is Going Public

Facebook just introduced a two-class stock option today, which will inevitably lead to the company going public.  Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the two-class structure of the stock option will be to help the current shareholders maintain control over the decisions made within the company.

All current shareholders will be moved to class B status, meaning that their votes are worth 10 points in voting matters, while class A will be given one point respectively.  What does this mean?  It seems that whoever buys shares from Facebook will be doing nothing more than getting a chunk of the money, as there is no way Zuckerberg is going to give up any of the control to outside investors.  If the outside investors have ways of eliminating all the applications from Facebook, I’d be all for them taking control of the company.

Blue

We’re All Gonna Look Like This Guy Soon

Thanks to legislation that will eventually ban the use of cell phones while driving, we’re all gonna end up with ridiculous headsets.  Most people now wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Bluetooth headset, but trust me, once everyone else is doing it, so will you.  It’ll be a toss up for some people.. there’s a couple factors that need to be weighed in.

• How bad do I need to make this call
• What will happen if someone I know drives by me and sees me
• What are the risks of simply using my cell phone as opposed to my Bluetooth headset
• Do I even care what others think

Chances are the business people will fully adopt the headset first, with the general population trickling in behind.  Hey, doesn’t this sound like the initial plan for Bluetooth headsets?  Maybe once the legislation kicks in headset manufacturers will finally have their day.

Blue

I Wish Obama Introduced This Campaign When I Was A Kid

Yesterday Obama kicked off the Federal Government’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign, which will provide $4.35 billion in Federal grants to schools that innovate in STEM (science, engineering, technology, and mathematics) learning intitiatives. This campaign will also be helped along by $260 million in private sector funding. This campaign will allow government funding for much more innovative and exciting initiatives than would have been approved under the test-score-centered “No Child Left Behind”. Instead of simply trying to stop the bad, this will help to flourish the good.

This is a great way to get kids interested at a young age in exciting and in demand fields. From my experience it’s very hard to get most kids interested in anything that resembles learning. But introducing them new things on the cutting edge would be something exciting that they would jump at. When I left for high school in 2001, my elementary school was still running Macintosh Classics, circa 1990. Especially showing kids that they can make real contributions at such a young age can be very inspiring, like what Obama recently did with his White House held Astronomy Night.

Bunyan