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™

The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

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.

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!

So last night was The Europas – an award ceremony for Europe’s finest Internet Start-ups, hosted by TechCrunch UK. I have to say this was easily the best Tech-scene event I’ve been to. There were so many interesting people to talk to, the awards were greats, and of course the sponsored bar was better than a kick in the teeth!

I’m still quite hungover actually, so I’ll write up a more in depth review of the actual event on Sporkings.com over the weekend. But for now here’s my experience; What a night! I spoke to so many people, about so many cool projects, namely;

The nice guys (and girls) from MindCandy.com,
Paul Walsh, the Irish opportunist himself.
It was great to see Nikhil Shah again, he’s doing big things with new startup mixcould.
Nick Ferris Photography (your site is down! where can I see all those photos?)
Miranda, Jon, Tash and Sandy from the soon to be launched odbody.com, Huddle, Clio Collins, Said, Amazee, comufy, Morgan Stanley, ViCommerce (Gemany), econsultancy.com, Google, Spotify, Seraphim, hub.india, Infocomm, and of course Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica – I bumped into these guys on Monday, just outside our office. Farringdon’s a small place.

There were so many other internet peoples I can’t possible list everyone. Plus alcohol seems to affect the memory – who knew!

Speaking of bad memory, I cannot recall what time the actual event itself ended, but there was a very packed after-party across the road at ‘The Hide’. I remember backing up Jasper from oneDrum when some drunken guy was wanting to pick a fight lol. Something to do with Jasper greeting the drunken guy as ‘baldy’. Then once the after-party dispearsed, Ruk and I ended up at the odbody.com appartment, where we ate cheese on crumpets (yes, we’re British!) from a roof-top apartment with views of the London Eye – dangerously high after that many units.

I also remember getting a decent discount on cab ride to Oxford St due to being able to have a Germany conversation with the taxi driver. That’s entrepreneurship right there, lol.

The beautiful @rassami has setup a new venture off the back on The Europas, with co-organiser @petrajohansson . So watch this space for more interesting events in the London Tech-scene, hopefully in the not-too distant future. More start-ups launching off the back of start-up events, got to love it.

For everyone I met last night, it was really good to meet you. Even @yiannopoulos, but I’ll so no more on that one