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So Nokia makes it’s big music play. Key facts:

• Pay-as-you-go + £130 handset
• Catalogue from the Big 4 Majors
• DRM – won’t work on an iPod
• Tracks playable on mobile and PC (2 device)
• After 1 year you can ‘keep the tracks’ if they remain on the same handset or you transfer to a new Nokia handset.

I do support new business models and anything which shakes up the industry and challenges Apple’s dominance but I’m not sure this a good deal for artists or consumers. For the artist, I’m doubt very much they’ll see much of the cake from this deal and it feels like it’s another step towards commoditisation of their output. For the consumer, you’ve now got another proprietary segment of your music- I believe consumers want total interoperability across all devices (a la MP3) – but the real whince for me is that I don’t belive 80% of consumers understand DRM and what they’re actually buying into. It’s only when your PC crashes or you try and swap operating systems that it then dawns on you that you don’t own that music after all – it’s licensed to you by a technology company. But on the plus side, it feels almost free so why wouldn’t the average teenager go for it…look forward to seeing the ads for this service

Full details at Nokia site

Love this Diesel XXX campaign. Bit saucy but it’s very well done

Texting Your way to Love. US is really embracing texting these days. This is quite funny, came from a Stanford blog

Seesmic – i really want to like them, want to use it but just can’t see why I would. Of course, I may not be the target audience but I just don’t get why i’d want a non-real time video conversation that has so much friction (time to make it, send it, watch someone else’s commets etc…). I think Loic Le Meur is v cool, has bags of energy but I just don’t get it currently….if I want real time then video/phone/IM works, if real time not an issue then I use email, text but video? Help me someone?

Just as the news came in that Napster had been sold to Best Buy for $121m, i received this shareholder notice which I have to admit made me chuckle. The description of the dissident group’s experience included Musician (obviously inappropriate experience for a digital music company?), and then Ice Cream Franchisee etc…Hee Hee. On a more serious note, the deal pays $2.65 per share which is twice the closing price but still far below historical positions.

Thinking back on my time at the Guardian I remembered a viral video we produced (before they were really called viral videos- it was basically a TV Ad concept but too expensive to put on air so we sent it via email to friends). It wasn’t terribly successful but YouTube exist back then and so there were very few outlets to ‘Broadcast Yourself’ and here it is. Still makes me smile.

Had a wonderful lunch the other week with Vic Keegan from the Guardian and Mark Headley (too shy to have a professional web presence but can be found in his creative outlet here). Back in 2001 we worked together on Text Message Poetry – which was one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever had the privilege of being involved with. Looking back now and seeing how mobiles have advanced it seems a little primitive (we’re no longer restricted to 160 characters) but it’s still charming on many levels. I still recall bits of the winning poem from the first competition (it was so successful we ended up repeating it the following year).

txtin iz messin,
mi headn’me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she’s african

This competition was a great example of how ‘restriction breeds creativity’ but this is at odds with the infinite nature of digital media…but I wonder if there restriction can be applied to digital media in other ways?  Perhaps mini sagas could be taken in to the digital world

Vic’s a real enthusiast for mobiles and during the conversation the topic of how do people get music on their mobile and I recalled seeing some research so bit of digging. According to m-Metrics in Jan 2008 a staggering 83% was sideloaded.

“83% of mobile music was sideloaded onto cellphones in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. M:Metrics also found that the second most common way of getting music onto mobile phones was to share it with friends via Blue-Tooth” but this was only at 12% in the most popular market.
Full details here

Just spotted this on Media Guardian. It’s gonna be mobile mobile mobile in the news for the next few days…

“Significantly, Amazon has confirmed VentureBeat‘s story that it has created a music retail application for the G1 that will let users search, buy, download and play music from the Amazon music store. That has a catalogue of 6m songs from all four major labels and, just like the iTunes store, will only be accessible when the user is on a wireless network – so as not to cripple the data network.

How can the Amazon app better Apple? TV and video, says VentureBeat. Even better, MySpace‘s very imminent Music store is powered by Amazon and there would seem to be a natural extension onto mobile… but MySpace says that’s not the case because it is still sorting out rights for the mobile side of its music service. Oh do get on with it”

When I first heard Ferriss speak at sxsw2008 i have to admit to take an unusual dislike to his self confidence and self-promotion – may be it’s just because I’m British and we’re just not good at things like that. Anyway, I felt a little foolish/suckered buying his book when I got home (I couldn’t possibly have bought a signed edition from him right after his pitch for God’s sake). Anyway – i bought it and found it quite a good read -even though by buying it I’m feeding his entire philosphy. But as they say never judge a book  by it’s cover, or indeed it’s author. So shown below are the useful things I took from it.

• It’s Better to be Effective than Efficient
• doing something unimportant well doesn’t make it important
• a task that requires a lot of time doesn’t make the task important
• Short deadlines make you focus on execution – long deadliens allow you to think too much and procarastanate about which is the best way to do things
• 80:20 rule applies in everything. Concentrate on the critical 20
• Ask yourself 3 times per day “Am I being productive or just active” – or are you inventing things to do to put off the really important things you should be doing
• ONLY ever have 2 essential To DOs  to achieve in a day – and keep your To Do lists short on a small piece of paper
• You should think at the start of each day – right, if I omly acheive 2 things by 5pm today what would the 2 things that would make me feel happy, make me feel like I’ve earned a beer (I added the last bit)
• Liked this statement relating to the stress that you have to read so much to keep up with everything that is going on
• “the abundance of information creates a poverty of attention” (but I don’t think this is an original quote)
• If you don’t understand something or seek to understand a particular subject intimately with the goal of trying to come across as an expert in a particular new field (note : to be an expert you need credibility)
• Ask people who are experts. Talk to people, phone up the world’s best, biggest etc…
• Read 2/3 best selling books on the subject and summarise on single page
• Join a couple of trade organisations

Been doing a quick bit of research in to mobile gaming – some snippets worth remembering for the future (from YouPark)

1. Most popular games on phones are casual, nonviolent games played predominantly by women, a far cry from the norm in PC gaming.
2. Teens are three times as likely as those over twenty to play cell phone games.
3. Games are among the top five things people do with cell phones.
4. There are three hundred million actively used, game-capable phones in the world.
5. Social Gaming on mobile phones acquires more than forty percent of the total mobile gaming.
6. One Thumb games usually the most popular (love the company name ‘thumbplay’ but will the iphone change the thumb joy stick?)
7. Hmm….any more to add
   Future > Flash games? Java Games R.I.P?

My colleague Steve gave me a book by John Maeda, the eminent digital designer and professor at MIT on the subject of ‘simplicity’ – in design, technology, business and life. A simple read (with only 100 pages) and some simple points ;
Maeda’s 10 Laws of simplicity

1. Reduce – thoughtful reduction aids simplicity. try “squinting” when you’re critiquing design. Use Shrink, Hide, Embody quality (SHE) e.g weight of a B&O remote embodies quality
2. Organise- an ordered list or hierarchy will makes a system of many appear fewer
3. Time – saving time/ speed feels like simplicity (task completion bars aid this)
4. Learn – knowledge/ habit makes things feel simpler
5. Difference – simplicity and complexity need each other
6. Context – what lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral – think how white space “opportunity lost by more white space leads to more attention of what remains – proportionately more attention is paid to that which remains
7. Emotion – more is better than less (no EI on computers)
8. Trust – In simplicity we trust
9. Failure – some things can never be made simple
10. The One – simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningfu

No.10 is thought provoking…
“art is about stimulating questions, design is about clarity”
“there’s little room for personal ego when the true priority is pleasing the customer”
“learning to swim requires people to trust water – try leaning back”
Gestalt- Gestalt psychologists believe there is a variety of mechanisms within the brain that lend to pattern-forming and self organization (give a clue in the design and let the brain work it out). The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.
Accompanying the book is the obligatory blog.
lawsofsimplicity.com