Square officially launched yesterday (on the iPad, initially) and the technology is already outdated. Square relies on the old fashioned ‘swipe and sign’ method of accepting credit card payments, which while still accepted in the US, is practically non-existent in the rest of the world. Most countries have either already switched to ‘chip and pin’, or are in the process of adopting this more secure method of accepting credit card payments. The US seems to be lagging behind – but I suspect it won’t be that way forever.

So what does this mean for Square? Does Jack have an ace up his sleeves, or is Square simply going to remain a US-only product, until America joins the rest of the world, with ‘chip and pin’ technology? As brilliantly designed as the Square app and device are – is there a plan for this business to survive in the long-run?

Dropbox keeps all your files in the cloud, important documents and crap alike.
If you want to keep things 100% cloud based of course, there’s Google Documents – now that they allow uploading of any file type.

Spotify is my favourite app, music used to take up so much space on my macbook pro, now it’s all streamed directly from the cloud. If I know I’m going out of coverage, I can mark playlists for offline use. The libraries are vast, and once Spotify allows mp3 imports (which it will, soon), iTunes will be under a great threat.

Everyone’s familiar with Flickr. With programs like iPhoto you can upload all your photos and share them with your friends in a matter of clicks, or mark them as private for your own reference.

The best thing about all of these apps is that they’re not desktop exclusive – I have them all on my Google Nexus One and iPhone too.

I’ve never been very good at backing up – I bought an Apple Time Capsule for that very reason. It takes care of everything for me, in the background. I remember frantically searching through backup DVDs, CDs and even floppy disks, when I suffered a data loss in the past. Bloody hard drives are so unreliable! These days it’s so damn simple.

The ‘Documents’ directory on all my computers is an alias to my Dropbox directory. Everything is saved in the cloud. My mp3s are long gone, backed away on an iPod Classic in a drawer somewhere and all the images I care about are on Flickr. There’s no need for mp3s and photos clogging up disk space when all my devices are running Spotify Premium, Flickr Pro and Dropbox.

Of course, all these subscriptions add up. But when the basic services are so good, there’s not always a need to go pro.

Keep it Cloud™

Le Web

Paris is an amazing place for a web conference. People from all over the world gathered together in this beautiful city to network and attend some really interesting workshops. There were a lot of top industry people speaking at the event, but none of that compares to the appearance of Her Royal Highness, Queen Rania of Jordan – who’s on Twitter! Queen Rania spoke about changing the world with online media, it was an inspiring speech, which I’m sure is on YouTube somewhere.

hanukkahLDN

So the idea was simple, let’s host a party for the winter holidays and raise some money for charity. We acquire the splendid G Casino in Piccadilly Circus, MoonBingo sponsored the bar, and we gambled, drank and had an amazing night of fun and stories. We raised money through Poker & BlackJack, which went to support JHAfrica.

XmasCrunch

Another fantastic 2pears event. XmasCrunch ended the year with startup pitches, presentations and drinking games. There was the now traditional 3 minute pitch, followed by a very odd one minute pitch. I’m all for short pitches, but I feel the one minute pitch barely gave presenters enough time to say the company name and tagline – stick to the three minutes I say. Speakers and Pitches video content is available on TC.

After all the official business was over, the 2Pears/TC party got under way. We had the TC Air Guitar Competition, Raffle prizes, lots of free booze and the traditional ‘run around with Mike Butcher around on our shoulders’ to congratulate him on another good event/year and say thanks. All the video proof is here. Really, really fun event in a great choice of venue; Gilgamesh (Covent Garden) offers something a bit different. The event ended in the AM, which was followed by a pub crawl around Covent Garden.

Great end to the year. May 2010 bring many more.

Grooveshark started out as something really interesting. It was a peer-to-peer music sharing platform with a difference – legality. You had a little system-tray widget installed on your computer, which would gradually upload your enitre music library to Grooveshark’s servers. Users could then purchase these tracks from Grooveshark, who would give you a cut (we’re talking pennies here), and pay the royalties, making the whole thing quasi-legal.

However somewhere along the lines the business model switched. They started to focus more on the music player, than the sharing software, or the p2p aspects. They launched a “Grooveshark Lite”, which was simply a player, to browse the hundreds of thousands of tracks being uploaded by their uses in the hopes of making some spare cash. This ‘Lite’ player was optional, a subdomain of the actual Grooveshark site.

Eventually the original site was dropped, and Grooveshark ‘Lite’ became the default website. I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but somewhere along the lines Grooveshark stopped being about p2p and become a music streaming service. A player. Think Spotify but in a web browser. This was interesting, because all the music in the library was uploaded by users in the hopes of sharing it with other people in return for cash.

The music was still being shared with the masses, all be it in a streaming sense. Grooveshark were slightly ahead of their time with this move, which is something other companies have done much better in more recent times. Spotify for example went straight to the labels for their music. Grooveshark ‘stole’ the music off their userbase, then were surprised when the labels wan’t nothing to do with them – and still don’t, if their own PR is to be believed. Grooveshark now make money from big ads on the site and VIP signups (to remove the ads), since they no longer take a huge cut from the purchase of songs.

What really struck my nerve, is the fact that Grooveshark had the audacity to send me a harsh e-mail threatening to ban me from the website, after they had received a DMCA cease-and-decist regarding a couple of my tracks. So not only do they steal or my music under false guises, but they leave me responsible for them publishing the music on their new site. Ridiculous!

A few months later I received this followup e-mai;

Hi Calvin,

You may remember a few months ago, we wrote to let you know that some music files you uploaded to Grooveshark had to be removed from the website. In it, we also mentioned that if any other content were uploaded from the same Grooveshark user account, said account would be suspended.

This is just to let you know that we’ve revised our policy for the better–your Grooveshark account is in no jeopardy whatsoever, and all of your information remains unchanged. We have turned off the ability to upload further new music to Grooveshark for the aforementioned account, but otherwise nothing has changed.

Sorry for any confusion or panic, and keep grooving.

Yours,
The Grooveshark Team

What?! Firstly, I have no way of uploading new music to your website, since you closed down the music sharing part of your website – unless it’s hidden aways somewhere that I’m unaware of. Secondly, I have no wish to upload any more of my music to your website. I uploaded my mp3s to Grooveshark, the p2p website where you get paid to upload, and it ended up on Grooveshark, the streaming service (WITH ADS) that earns Grooveshark money, and I get absolutely no benefit from it.

Grooveshark could not sink any lower in my opinion right now. Oh, and by the way, they’ve launched a new design on their website, making their adverts even more prominent. Lovely for them. This new layout, incidentally, is almost identical to the Spotify client.

There is one good thing about the current Grooveshark, and that’s I can still see all the music I uploaded in my library – which I lost during PC troubles a couple of years ago. I have used this list to re-acquire my lost music. Shame I couldn’t re-download it from Grooveshark, but meh.

The idea behind Helloapp is absolutely brilliant. When you sit down in the conference hall, you ‘check-in’ to your seat, by tweeting @helloapp with a code attached to your seat and giving a few hashtags to describe yourself. Then if people want to approach you, they know where you are. Whenever you meet someone throughout the conference you tweet “@helloapp met @cr” for example, and then if the person tweets helloapp back, you both get 10points. This is where the points system comes in.

Whoever collects the most points throughout the conference wins a prize. You can earn prizes through several different means. If someone Hi5′s you (@helloapp hi5 @cr) that’s a one-way shout-out that’ll earn you 20points. There are tokens hidden around the venue, that once claimed will earn you 5 or so points. Certain vendors also have their own selection of tokens to hand out as they see fit. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (Sun Start-up Essentials) were handing out a code to anyone who would sign up to their program/newsletter.

The reason this app is so cool, is because the whole purpose is to encourage people to network and make more connections. I’d love to see it being used in more events, not only Carsonified hosted. No to mention everyone loves a bit of competition, and as the gaming industry is demonstrating lately; everyone loves a sense of achievement, however small.

Of course there are a few tweaks that need to be made to this app. The biggest two problems I faced over the last two days were these;

• Finding your own profile page is not exactly self-intuitive. There was a UX lapse here. The only way to view your profile, or that of other people’s is to know the URL (http://hello.carsonified.com/Profile/cr) or to click someone’s thumbnail photo on the seating plan. It’d be  nice to have a ‘Go to user profile’ search, where you can type in the name or twitter handle of someone to view their profile.

• Special codes that were hidden on tokens around the venue not only gave users tokens but they added badges to your profile. There were some rare tokens (for this event they were Star Wars themed, i.e. Millennium Falcon). The system *should* have a mechanism to stop users simply searching “@helloapp claim” and copy & pasting the codes themselves. The idea was that you share (or trade) the codes with other people around the conference. So maybe only allow these codes to be used a certain number of times or something.

I was lucky enough to find a couple of tokens downstairs in the Sun Start-up Essentials Chillout Lounge (with the help of @scoobeesnac). If you search the codes for these, you can see people claiming the code, who I’d never even met – cheeky!

So I managed to get to about 200something points by claiming the codes I found, other people had found, and the ones vendors had handed out, then my score was practically doubled when my friends started Hi5-ing me, bringing me up to 570. It’s at this point people started telling me to check Twitter, because Ryan Carson had called me out. Brilliant, I had won! I got to take home the excellent remote control car – but not before charging it up and rampaging around the venue with it . I also got to quickly pimp my company (SRCLDN.com) on the stage. It would have been a nice prize to do a short 3 minute pitch – maybe something to think about for the future.

Anyway, here’s my HelloApp profile. Check out my pro badges . I’ve been playing around with the system a bit more and by exploiting I managed to get over 1,000 points. A good job nobody figured this out during the event!

I want to end on a quick ‘props’ to Elliot Kember for Tweets From FOWA – this live twitter stream monitoring the #FOWA hashtag made for huge fun during the Gary Vee and Kevin Rose show at the end of the final day.

I saw Shak at FOWA yesterday and he mentioned Spotify have offline support on the desktop now – flipping pro! This is a killer feature, and another reason for me to keep my Premium subscription. All I need now is for the guys to get high-bitrate tracks working again. It’d also be nice for the mobile version to support Last.fm scrobbling.

Of course it’s always a constant battle, with such a high subscription. If only they could offer discounts on the year subs, I’d be truly sold.

I’m paying for Premium, and it just doesn’t work. The desktop app constantly gives me an error “There is a problem with the connection to Spotify. Please try again shortly” whenever I try and play a high-bitrate track. I’ve followed all the instructions and keep checking back on the Spotify status page. Obviously I don’t want to be paying for premium and listening to songs in a low bitrate, that kind of defeats the purpose.

I’ve also had some trouble with the iPhone app too. See the attached image. I have only ever used the Spotify app on my iPhone 3GS, so I have no idea what this error is about, but either way it erased all my downloaded tracks.

Therefore I have now un-subscribed from Spotify Premium. Back to the advertisements for me.

Just imagine in a few years, if Spotify becomes ‘the way’ that people listen to music. Everyone around the world listens and shares music via Spotify – which is very possible. For years we’ve relied on mp3s and CDs. Let’s face it, nobody buys physical media any more, and with services like Spotify, piracy is becoming less of an issue.

The music industry has failed to modernise. They failed to provide people with what we want: easy access to music, on any device of our chosing. They tried to tie us down and it will be the death of them.

Now, back to Spotify ruling the world. Once Spotify become popular enough, I predict they’ll start going directly to artists, more and more, to arrange royalty deals. Of course is Spotify are dealing directly with artists, this cuts out the evil middle man – the record labels.

Spotify (and/or similar music services) could be the end of the music industry as we know it. By killing off the record labels completely, they make music about music again. Give control back to the artists. After all, record labels are not needed for distribution any more.

Of course there’s still the issue of marketing (which is about the only service record labels seem to offer these days), which will also solve it’s self in due course.

I look forward to a time with no Record Labels and in turn, no RIAA!

I really like Spotify. I recommend it to everyone, I use it all the time, yet I won’t pay for it. This makes me feel rotten, just a little bit, so I’m going to justify myself.

This has nothing to do with liking the product, or even about affordabilty, this is purely to do with justifying the cost.

I think the PS3 Slim looks nice, I want one, but I have an Xbox360 and an over-powered PC for gamer, so although I can afford one, I can’t actually justify the purchase to myself. This is the exact problem I have with Spotify. I never used to pay for music, so now that I stream my music I’m not saving any money and although I am loyal to the product, the pricing is too high for me to put my hand in my pocket.

Now if the £100 bought me a lifetime license I might consider it. Of course I’d be worried about the service shutting down, as we’ve seen in the past with pay-and-go music download services – similar business model, where you rent DRMd music instead of straming it. In these cases customers were left with no music when the system shut down, which would of course be the same result with Spotify.

£100 a year is just too much to pay for music, especially for the Napster generation. Not only do we want everything now, and everything for free – but we’re accustomed to it.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I will pay for products. I buy iPhone apps all the time. I even bought a Spotify day pass for 99p when I was ‘DJing’ at my friend’s BBQ.

So how can Spotify encourage more of us to purchase their packages? Drop the prices. A 50% drop in prices would bring Spotify to the level of most other web apps. £35 – £50 a year is an amount that people see comfortable to shell out for a web application. £100 isn’t. Simples.

I whipped up another Twitter app over the weekend. Or rather I upgraded my current Twitter app.

Now you can browse your TweetDeck groups via RogerThat. From here you can copy/paste the contents of any of your groups – for backup purposes. The TweetDeck client itself offers very little group management.

I’m going to work on integration a little more too, so you can follow/unfollow directly from the list, instead of having to copy/paste back to RogerThat’s mass follow tool.

Got a few more ideas to add to my little Twitter project. I’m loving the Twitter API, it’s fun! Last time I used Python, this time I used PHP – a little reverse engineering of TweetDeck’s database files.

If you have any ideas of features I could add to my little Twitter project just let me know ^_^.

And yes… I will add a design to the page at some point! I know it’s ugly. It’s like pure code right now.