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MusicThinkTank.com Weekly Recap: The 3 Most Profitable DIY Revenue Streams, And Why Many Artists Succeed at Only One of Them | Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

Kyle Bylin | The 3 Most Profitable DIY Revenue Streams, And Why Many Artists Succeed at Only One of Them

Rajiv Agarwal | 10 Great Tips for Home and DIY Recording

Jesse Cannon | The 4 Places You Should Be Entering All Of Your Concert Dates To Increase Concert Attendance

Rhinofy-Traffic | Lefsetz Letter

Reposted from http://bit.ly/13RjfxW on May 25, 2013 at 12:19AM

Not the band, THE ALBUM! Then again, it was the band. The cognoscenti tell you it’s all about the first, with “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and those songs other people covered, like “Heaven Is In Your Mind” and “Coloured Rain.” But I’ve always maintained the follow-up was the definitive statement. Then again, “John Barleycorn” was quite […]

Google Planning Wireless Networks To Connect The Next 1B People - WSJ | Read/WriteWeb

If Google had its way, everyone in the world would be on the Internet, using Google services. To bring that goal to fruition, Google is reportedly working to build cellular networks in Africa and Southeast Asia to help bring hundreds of millions of people online for the first time.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with countries like Kenya and South Africa to fund and deploy cellular networks in those countries, using wireless spectrum reserved for television broadcasts. 

Bone deep in Google’s business strategy is that the more people that use the Web, the more Google benefits. That is why the company is testing its Google Fiber high-speed Internet access in various locations in the United States and why it bid in U.S. wireless spectrum auctions in 2007 and 2008. Google has long been planning to enter the cellular service market and there is no better testing ground than those portions of the planet that still lack Internet access.

Owning The Plumbing

Google’s play is to not only own what you do on the Internet, but the pipes you use to access it. 

Google would provide much of the critical infrastructure, such as the base stations and processors involved in building the networks, the Wall Street Journal reports. It could also employ “high-altitude platforms” – blimps and balloons – that could broadcast cellular signals for hundreds of miles. Google could also build out the network using satellites, a technique that a many remote areas use to quickly add telecommunications services. 

If Google can get the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia on the Internet, it can then sell low-cost Android devices into those regions through its manufacturing partners like Samsung, LG, ZTE, HTC and Huawei. Once those eyeballs are online, Google hopes to find ways to make money from them with its advertising and search products.

Google could also push various Android services to these newly connected Internet users. The Android Google Play app store is able to accept payments in 134 countries - giving the company the ability to sell apps, books, music and video to a large portion of the world’s population. 

In the end, this is a pure volume move for Google: get more people the capability to get online, give them a portal to do so (smartphones) and get them using Google. 

New Apple TV ad series: Every day, more people … | CNN Money Blog

Reposted from http://bit.ly/13RipBr on May 24, 2013 at 05:58AM

Google Has A Trojan Horse To Disrupt TV: Really, Really Big Data | Read/WriteWeb

It’s a huge year for TV’s future. Yet for all the excitement about Web-first soap operas, data-driven programming and the disruption of broadcast, the Internet TV “inflection point” that 2013 has become is just the beginning. A Trojan horse is slowly rolling into town, and it’s bursting at the seams with data. Wheeling it along is none other than Google. 

Indeed, if the data-fueled success of Netflix’s House of Cards is as crucial to TV’s future as many believe, what Google is most likely planning will make the transformation we’ve witnessed so far look like early innings in a very long ball game.

First, though, a caveat: Google has said almost nothing about its plans for taking on the TV market, and I don’t have any new inside information to offer on that front. What follows is instead a giant thought experiment — a plausible (to me, at least), fact-based extrapolation of just how thoroughly Google could disrupt the TV industry should it put its mind to it. And should users consent to its plans.

TV’s Future Hinges On Content, Data and UX

Whatever TV looks like in the future, it will be built atop three crucial components: content, intelligence and user experience. A fourth element, known as actually making money, hinges heavily on the “intelligence” part — which is to say, data. 

The industry is collectively still figuring out the user experience part. Apple is rumored to have “cracked” the interface problem, but until Steve Jobs’s prophetic words find a home in reality, we’re stuck with the puzzle’s most promising pieces: the likes of AirPlay, Roku and a small army of creative video app designers. 

That leaves the content and intelligence parts, which are what Netflix is purported to have mastered with House of Cards and what Amazon hopes to mimic with with its own Internet-first TV pilots. Hulu has taken its own stabs, but has yet to score a House of Cards-sized hit.

For the last few years, Google’s YouTube has also invested quite heavily in original, TV-quality programming for Internet audiences. It, too, is still trying to find its Kevin Spacey. But it’s likely only a matter of time before everybody’s buzzing about the new show on YouTube, much like we’ve long chattered about double rainbows and finger-biting babies. 

Google will find its killer content. It will do so in part by leveraging the very thing that gives the company an advantage in just about any space it enters: all that data. 

YouTube: A Burgeoning Trove Of User Data

An absurdly funny standup routine by Louis CK? Thumbs up. A mini-documentary about 3D-printed guns? Consider the “Watch Later” button tapped.  Every music video I ever wanted to see? YouTube has them too, and designating my favorites is effortless. With every tap of each of YouTube’s buttons — thumbs up, add to a playlist, watch later and, most importantly, “play” — I’m feeding fresh data to the world’s biggest video site. Which, in turn, it uses to build out personalized recommendations, not unlike the special sauce Netflix used to wipe out Blockbuster.

Of course, the data on Netflix’s servers is a bit more useful when it comes to recommending long form, Hollywood-caliber video to its users, since that’s what Netflix specializes in exclusively. It’s the type of knowledge Google will presumably get better at building as its selection of professionally-produced video expands. 

What Google Knows - And Will Know - About Us 

In the meantime, Google is building out a much richer profile of its users than Netflix and Hulu could ever dream of creating.

Outside of YouTube, Google knows a great deal about us. Just how much it knows varies depending on how heavily you use Google’s services — and how finely you tune your privacy settings.

For me, that data includes my browsing history (across devices), email, documents, voicemails, eight years of search queries, detailed location data from Maps, a limited view of my schedule from Google Calendar (I mostly use iCal) and a smattering of other data points from the more than 25 different active services tied to my Gmail account/ And I’m not even an Android user.

These services don’t all swap data freely — and my Google Drive may well contain no information that’s of value to YouTube. But collectively, these services build out a rather richly-detailed general profile of who we are, what we do, where we go and what we enjoy. In theory, YouTube has the capability of knowing not just what Netflix knows — what we watch, when we skip, how we rate — but also quite a lot about who we are in general. 

In the future — if Google’s master plan unfolds accordingly — this will all be buttressed with social insights. As its social efforts ramp up, our list of Gmail contacts becomes much more informative: who’s in which circles? What do they +1? Who do I trust? 

Google+ is still the exclusive domain of early adopters and media geeks, but in time the company intends for it to become a viable alternative to Facebook and will eagerly ingest all of the social data points that come with that distinction. You can catch an early glimpse of how Google intends to use social data in the next iteration of its Maps interface, which will leverage your social connections to provide recommendations about where to go next. Think Google Now for your physical location. 

How Google Could Use This Data To Win At TV

Similarly, we may one day see Google Now for TV. That is, anticipatory content recommendations fueled by your viewing history, social connections and insights inferred from a complex tapestry of data points from across services and devices. 

Recommendations are important (indeed, cracking this code certainly helped put Netflix in a position to win with House of Cards), but they’re only the beginning of what’s possible when television is fueled by very, very big data. As its video efforts ramp up, Google — like Netflix before it — will be able to factor in mountains of user data to determine not just what to recommend, but what content to buy the exclusive rights to, or even produce outright. 

Unlike other Internet TV shows, these new premium productions will sit within the world’s biggest repository of online video. Sure, much of it is garbage, but the sheer scale of the material it has on hand increases Google’s ability to smartly serve up relevant, worthwhile videos to people who come to check out its new shows. Not to mention how easy it would be to rope YouTube’s casual, cat video-watching users into clicking the play button on their next big TV-style program. House of Cats, anyone?

In the fall, Nielsen is going to start factoring Internet viewing stats into its decades-old TV-viewing measurement methodology. It’s a move that’s widely viewed as being both long overdue and symbolic of where TV is heading. If you ask me, Nielsen isn’t going far or fast enough to stay relevant. The further companies like Google move into the TV space, the less sense the old, panel-based methodology for tracking makes sense. 

In a recent post on the Monday Note, Frédéric Filloux argues that the sample-based method Nielsen uses to track Web user activity is ripe to be upended by Google’s far more sophisticated mechanisms, which even go so far as to use statistical pairing to filter out repeat visitors that may be coming to the same site from multiple devices. Filloux is referring to Web tracking, not TV viewership — the traditional part of which Nielsen is uniquely capable of measuring.

But his argument carries over into the realm of online video and usage, which Google is far better at measuring than Nielsen is. As more viewers turn to the Internet for what we’ve historically referred to as “TV”, Google’s method — and what it means for potential advertisers — becomes a lot more attractive than Nielsen’s.

When it comes time to monetize those shows, all that big data will be just as useful. This is, of course, Google’s specialty. The company that figured out how to make billions by serving contextually relevant ads to people searching the Web is probably well-positioned to do the same with the future version of what we once knew as television commercials. 

What Stands In The Way

Just because Google has the algorithmic capacity to acquire, smartly deliver and monetize rave-worthy content on a disruptive scale, that doesn’t mean it will. If this indeed what Google plans to do, it’s going to have to clear some hurdles. 

For one, there are privacy implications associated with the type of cross-service data sharing Google would need to do in order to build out these rich, super-profiles of viewers. Using that data to sell video ads won’t go over well with everyone, even if it isn’t that far off from what Google does with Web search ads. The change could be as simple as a privacy policy update and opt-in button, but nothing Google does on that front will ever fail to arouse concerns about privacy. 

Then there’s the content issue, which is huge. YouTube already houses a massive amount of video, and Google likely has the intelligence to find its own House of Cards. But when it comes to hosting premium, TV-caliber content, Google is still playing catch up.

As Tim Carmody pointed out recently, Microsoft is much better positioned to win the living room than Apple is, primarily because Microsoft has managed to pull together the most compelling selection of content. (The same argument applies if you substitute Google for Apple.) That includes not just video games like Halo and Gears of War but online video sources and live TV available directly from cable providers.

With the XBox One, Microsoft also takes a pretty compelling stab at the interface problem. It doesn’t eliminate the hand-held remote, but rather augments it with voice control and gesture-based interfaces that make us feel like we’re truly living in the future.

To win at TV, Google is going to have to learn from products like the XBox One and incorporate a level of polish and attention to the user experience as its done with its more recent Android versions and handsets. If Google can create the Nexus 4 or set top boxes, loaded up with with a bulletproof UX and a wide selection of supreme-quality content, the Apples and Amazons of the world will have some catching up to do. And the traditional players will be screwed.

Making Android Pay: 5 Tips To Topping The Charts On Google Play | Read/WriteWeb

This post is the third in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, focusing on the opportunities and challenges that mobile developers face trying to make money from Android Apps.

In the waning hours of the Google I/O developers conference last week, an Android developer stood at a microphone to ask a very pertinent question: “If I am in the top 2% of Android apps on Google Play, how much money am I really making? $30 a month? $3,000? $300,000?”

The two poor Google product managers on stage couldn’t or wouldn’t give him an answer. They declined to cite revenue of other Android apps on Google Play’s top lists. They refused to share a general number of how much successful Android apps earn. The two Googlers, Ibrahim Elbouchikhi (product manager of Google Play Commerce) and Bob Meese (Google Play games business development), had highlighted earlier in their session that average revenue per user had more than doubled in Google Play in 2012.

But the developer in the audience was essentially saying was that twice zero was still zero.

To The Winners Go The Spoils

Unless your apps are massively popular on Google Play, it is very difficult to make a good living with Android app development. Developers building apps for Apple’s iOS still make more money than those building for Android, and Apple’s download rate is considerably higher (50 billion for iOS against 48 billion for Android) despite Apple’s considerably smaller installed base).

During their session, Elbouchikhi and Meese gave developers several tips on how to make money from Android. The focus was on two specific topics: games and the top lists in Google Play. 

Essentially, Google is saying that you need to hit the top lists on Google Play to even have a chance at making a decent living. (Getting there is difficult, of course, but developers ”get a lot of sales [just] from being on the top sellers list.”) The top lists are almost all games - and almost all monetized via in-app purchases. Look at the top grossing apps in Google Play. Of the top 25 grossing apps currently in Google Play, 24 of them are games. The only exception is Pandora, which brings in most of its money from its subscription service.

Top grossing Android apps on May 21, 2013

The domination of games is not unique to Google Play. The Apple App Store’s top grossing and paid sections are also filled with games. Smartphones and tablets are great for gamers, especially casual gamers. This has led us to believe that there is a coming golden age for game developers. 

Non-game developers may be in a bit of trouble though. Yet there are things that developers can do to entice their audience to pay up. The idea is to first acquire users (through a variety of means), retain them by delivering excellent apps and customer service and then turn them into passionate users. It is only then that you can ask them to pay you for your product.

5 Keys To Android App Success

Elbouchikhi and Meese highlighted five important aspects of Android that make it easier to monetize an app:

1. Tablets pull in 70% more revenue than smartphones: It helps to create a version of your app optimized for the tablet form factor, which Google made easier to beginning with Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
2. Employ in-app purchasing systems: In-app revenue increased seven-fold in 2012. While the “freemium” model can be manipulative, it does help developers make money from their users. Once you have created a relationship with a user, you can then hit them up for the “upgrade” (usually in games) or the subscription model (like Pandora). You’ll have to deal with any ethical dilemma concerning in-app sales on your own.
3. Subscriptions work: Android has seen 200% app subscriber revenue growth in recent quarters. This approach can work for app developers focused on businesses and enterprises, media publications or music services. Some games employ subscription models but most go for the in-app purchase freemium model. (Meese noted that almost all of the top apps are free-to-play. “The barrier to success for a paid title is very high.”) 
4. Better ratings means more revenue: Google has done significant work to help developers get better ratings for their apps. That entails standardizing design principles for Android, working to minimize fragmentation and performance issues and letting developers reply to users who have rated their app. This critical, because the higher the rating, the more money the app earns. According to Google, apps that earn a 4- or 5-star rating average almost 29 times more revenue than do lower rated apps.
5. Go global: Google realizes that most of its subscriber base is not in the United States or even in Western Europe. This is why it released its transcription service in the Google Play Developer Console at I/O last week.

“I think we are at the beginning of that and we will see that beginning to happen next as people get used to the process and developers get creative in figuring out how to build those passionate users and when the right time is to ask for payment,” said Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play. “And also what are the types of things that people are willing to pay for. There are things that people are not willing to pay for and some things that they are.”

Top photo by Nick Statt: Google’s Ellie Powers introduces new Google Play Developer Console features at I/O 2013.

Best Windows 8 apps this week | BetaNews

Thirtieth in a series. Several stock apps were updated this week. The Xbox Music app supports the import of iTunes playlists in its latest version, and users of the video app benefit from the improved accessibility of actor and director information.

The official Major League Soccer app for Windows 8, MLS MatchDay, has been improved as well featuring “exclusive content and this season’s schedule, standings, highlights, play-by-play, roster lineups, game stats, goals, cards and substitutions” as Alan notes.

The overall app count in the US Windows 8 app store is now 52,521 apps, an increase of 2365 apps in the last seven days and a big jump in growth from last week’s 1639 new apps.

Free apps crossed the 40,000 app mark for the first time in store. Currently, 40,683 apps are listed as free to download in the store, an increase of 1686 apps this week.

As far as paid apps are concerned, they increased by 700 apps this week to a total of 11,859 apps.

App of the Week

Adobe Photoshop Express

The official Adobe Photoshop Express app is a basic photo editing application for Windows 8. You can load local photos into the app, photos stored by Adobe’s Revel service, or directly transfer a photo from a camera.

The available editing options are displayed at the bottom of the screen:

• Crop the photo.
• Correct the pictures contrast, exposure or white balance.
• Apply filters to the image.
• Correct Red Eyes.
• Use the one-click auto-fix feature.

Other Apps

Distinct 9

The objective in this game is to fill rows, columns or grids with distinct numbers. If you place the last number you are awarded points and the tiles are filled with your color.

The player with the most played chips on the board is the winner in the end.

You can score double and triple points in the game if a placed digit completes two or three grids, rows or columns at the same time.

It is an interesting game that shares similarities with Sudoku.

NeroKwik

NeroKwik provides you with access to photos on all of your devices, and on the social networking sites Facebook, Google+ and SugarSync storage,

It can take quite some time before photos are displayed. All of your photos, or at least those that the app found, are then displayed in the apps’ interface.

You can browse the photos here, or use the photo collage and sharing feature the app provides you with instead. Collages, called tapestries in the app can be shared via email or publicly on Facebook or Google+.

Crossword Fun

Crossword Fun offers an endless supply of crossword puzzles for you to solve.  You can use the cursor keys or the mouse to navigate, and the keyboard to enter your solutions.

The game jumps to the right across and down positions as soon as you change the location on the board which is a nice feature that makes the app more comfortable to use as you do not have to locate the entries manually anymore.

Make sure you switch the skill from regular to master in the options to disable the hint system that is in place automatically. If you don’t, the game will indicate wrong letters with a red font color automatically.

Gas Buddy

A free application displaying the cheapest gas prices near your location, or a location of your choice. You can set a manual location in the apps’ preferences by entering a zip code in the location field there.

Note that the app is only tracking gas prices across the US and no other countries.

It displays a selection of stations, their current gas price and location, based on the zip code that you have entered on the frontpage.

A click on a station displays the stations’ features, regular, midgrade, premium and diesel pricing, as well as when the current prices where recorded by users of the app.

Sudoku for Free

Sudoku for Free displays random Sudoku puzzles for you to solve. Your tasks in Sudoku is to fill a 9x9 grid with numbers from 1 to 9 in a way that all 3x3 sub-grids, columns and rows contain each number only once.

You add numbers to the board by tapping on a digit on the left and then on the location on the board that you want to place it on. A tap on notations enables you to add possible solutions to a field of the board which may help you solve the puzzle.

You can enable hints in the options that help you solve the puzzle. The game looks really nice but does not offer difficulty levels. If you played Sudoku before, you may find the puzzles too far on the easy side of things.

Pathos

You play the role of an evil spirit in this puzzle game aiming to drive two lovers apart on the map. This is done by placing rocks on the map that block the path the two lovers can take to reach each other.

The goal of the each map is to increase the shortest route between both characters to exceed a distance displayed to you by the game in the lower half of the screen.

The game keeps you entertained for a short while. You can load different levels and since the characters start in random locations on the map, it is sometimes easier and at other times harder to reach the goal.

Wizard’s Choice Chapter 1 (link is broken currently)

This is the first chapter of a series of text adventures that you can play through. The first chapter is free while all remaining chapters are not. It works similar to books of the Lone Wolf series where you are always presented with a set of choices of which you have to pick one.

The app keeps track of your character’s health, mana and gold, and it is up to you to make the best out of every situation described to you.

Beautiful images are sometimes added to the textual descriptions which may help you imagine the situation your character is in at that point in time.

If you like Lone Wolf or do not mind playing text-based adventures, this one may definitely be worth checking out.

Pacman

Pacman is a faithful conversion of the popular arcade game. Eat all dots on the map and avoid being touched by enemies that roam it. When you are touched by an enemy, a life is lost. When all lives are lost, the game ends.

Power dots are located in the four corners of each level that turn the enemies into ghosts that you can now touch to remove them temporarily from the map.

If you manage to eat all dots of a stage you are taken to the next where the game begins from anew.

Now You

Have you discovered an app or game in Windows Store this week that you really like? Feel free to mention it in the comments so that we all can take a look at it.

RIAA: The Copyright Reform We Need Is To Make Everyone Else Copyright Cops | Techdirt

Reposted from http://bit.ly/10YffKT on May 24, 2013 at 10:33AM

The RIAA is gearing up for the big copyright reform battle doing the only thing it knows: whining that everyone else won’t fix its own broken business model. Despite heavy budget cuts and layoffs, the RIAA hasn’t yet realized that singing the same old debunked song isn’t a winner. It’s claiming that the DMCA’s safe harbors are broken and need to be fixed. It’s really quite incredible. They talk how they’ve sent 20 million DMCA takedowns to Google, and then complain that the process isn’t working. Seems odd, then, that they would send so many. Perhaps they should have knocked it off earlier, and focused on things like teaching people how to have better business models.

But, that’s not how the RIAA functions.

Rather than having a useful employee, like a VP of new business models, the RIAA has a VP of anti-piracy (I actually believe they have a few), and one of them, Brad Buckles, wrote the latest misleading screed against the safe harbors. The short version is basically: everyone else needs to prop up our business models by randomly taking down content that might, possibly be infringing. Of course, this makes no logical sense, no matter how much the RIAA wants to play pretend. Already, we see stories practically every day about how the copyright holders themselves — including the RIAA — send bogus DMCA takedowns all the time. And those are the guys who are supposed to know what’s infringing.

And yet they magically expect some third party, who has no idea if the content was put up in an authorized manner or not to make that determination for them? Really? Do they not realize (or not care) what a massive chilling effect that would have on innovation? If service providers are required to proactively guess at what is infringing and what’s not — and face liability for guessing wrong — then the obvious is going to happen: a lot less innovation in any service that includes user generated content. The risk of liability would be way too high. That may not matter to the RIAA, who has never been a fan of the internet, but it sure as hell matters to the public, who has received tremendous value from the internet. I’d also imagine it matters quite a bit to tons of musicians who are not a part of the RIAA machine, who now use the internet to have a better career than they ever had under the old system.

So, here’s a suggestion for the RIAA, while they’re laying off a bunch of staffers (despite giving boss Cary Sherman a hefty raise to $1.5 million per year). Maybe layoff the “anti-piracy” team — since clearly that’s not working for you — and hire a “new business model” or “innovation” team, and give them a shot to help your members.

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Facebook delays U.K., France release of HTC First to improve software | LA Times

Reposted from http://lat.ms/18dO9Uw on May 24, 2013 at 04:21PM

Facebook has decided to indefinitely delay the release of the HTC First, the so-called “Facebook phone,” in the United Kingdom and France in an effort to improve the device’s software before entering another market.

With Truth To Power Comes Great Responsibility | FutureBlog

800px-David_Lowery.jpg

Post authored by FMC Communications Associate Kevin Erickson

read more

Rumor Roundup: An Uber Blunder, Tickets to Dick Costolo’s Gun Show, and David Karp Is Having the Best Week Ever | BetaBeat

The Gun Show This week, Twitter launched a shiny new client-friendly TV ad tracking product. But there was a guest of honor at the announcement, as AllThingsD scribe Peter Kafka noted: CEO Dick Costolo’s biceps. “Most important news at Twitter event today: @dickc has been working out. A lot,” Mr. Kafka observed. Wonder if Mr. Costolo and Sergey Brin frequent the same personal trainer?

Music Class Are you excited for the new Daft Punk album? Well, we’ll tell you who’s really excited, and that’s Square CEO Jack Dorsey and VC Fred Wilson. “The new Daft Punk album is a knockout. Pure joy,” Mr. Dorsey said in a micro-review of the album on Twitter. Mr. Wilson responded: “yup. I’ve had it in heavy rotation all week. It was even on in the coffeeshop today.” Just an FYI in case, for some reason, you get stuck in a car with both of them sometime this summer.

Pleased as Punch Betabeat bumped into events maestro Gary Sharma last night at the Webutante Ball. He told us that, while making his Internet Week rounds, he’d recently found himself in an elevator with none other than newly rich-as-Croesus Tumblr founder David Karp. You’ll no doubt be delighted to hear that, according to Mr. Sharma, the spindly motorcyclist looked pretty damn cheerful.

He might want to enjoy the fun while it lasts, though. Business Insider reports that HuffPo cofounder Arianna Huffington had some dour words of wisdom for Mr. Karp at the Webby Awards: “Soak it all in, because then come the lawsuits.” Presumably she was referring to the legal action taken by her own site’s unpaid contributors. Honey, you don’t know the half of it—if you think the Huffington Post’s bloggers are pissy, you’ve never dealt with a fan-fiction-writing, Homestuck-loving, social-justice-advocating, dyed-in-the-wool Tumblr user.

Or maybe he was just really chipper because he had advance warning he’d inexplicably be appearing as one of Business Insider’s Sexiest Tech Execs Alive.

SMDH Important dispatch from the West Coast, courtesy of Eric Eldon: “late at night in silicon valley, grown men are sending stickers to each other.”

Scobleized OG (that’s Original Glasshole) Robert Scoble took a trip to NYC this week to visit his son, who’s studying to become a police officer at the John Jay school of criminal justice. As it turns out, the NYPD were more interested in trying on Mr. Scoble’s face computer than they were helping his son learn the tricks of the force. Writes Mr. Scoble on his Google Plus page:

So we’re here looking at his school, finding him housing, learning the streets, and all that. Last night these two cops called me over and said “is that Google Glass?”

I was afraid I might get arrested. But they loved it.

He then went on to describe why cops will love being able to record video while chasing suspects, which makes us think he’s never actually read anything about cops and recording devices.

Uber Blunder Betabeat received an email today from Uber SF stating that our Uber was en route. “That’s strange,” we thought, “We live in New York and didn’t order an Uber.” Turns out the whole thing was a mixup. In their excitement to dispatch an email about the price hikes during Memorial Day Weekend, Uber SF forgot to change the subject line of the email, and sent it out to customers with the subject “[Name], your Uber is en route.” Rest assured your account hasn’t been hacked; it was just a little PR mistake, according to a follow-up email:

Sorry about the confusion! No request has been made from your account. We were overly excited about our Memorial Day promotion, and should have put some more thought into that subject line. With this second email, we just want to clarify that everything is OK; a car will only be sent when you request it.

Phew. We can’t afford an Uber at its normal rate, let alone during surge pricing.

Ab Fab Bradford Shellhammer, the chief design officer of Fab.com and curator of one of the most fabulous Instagram accounts ever, revealed more than a usual shirtless picture of himself this week. In the ‘gram, Mr. Shellhammer appears to be wearing a pair of well-fitting boxers featuring some of pop culture’s biggest flame-outs, like Britney Spears and Whitney Houston. It’s probably the tamest part of his Turks and Caicos haunt, judging by his other pictures. Anyway, where can we get a pair, Brad? You might know of a place.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Lazy Together Tesla, Uber and Equinox have officially achieved douche bag singularity. Until today, members in Los Angeles and New York can get to the gym for free on Uber with the promo code, you guessed it, “EQUINOX.” Those who request a car might even be picked up in a Tesla Model S, so if you were looking for someone at whom you can direct your scorn, just look for one of those ugly cars.

How to learn the periodic table in 3 minutes | News.com

Reposted from http://bit.ly/134qOiv on May 24, 2013 at 07:12PM

YouTube channel AsapScience has recorded what is possibly the most fun rendition of the periodic table set to music that anyone’s ever heard. [Read more]

No multiple statutory damage award for single infringed work ~ Agence France Presse v Morel | Recording Industry vs The People

Reposted from http://bit.ly/18oO8Lk on May 24, 2013 at 06:25PM


In Agence France Presse v. Morel, a copyright case pending in Manhattan, Judge Alison Nathan clarified that there can be no more than a single statutory damages award per infringed work. Memorandum and order dated May 21, 2013, Hon. Alison J. Nathan, District Judge

The Simonsound’s music inspired by an imaginary monorail | Boing Boing

Reposted from http://bit.ly/18oH9lk on May 24, 2013 at 05:13PM

The Simonsound, Simon James’s ’60s space age-inspired experimental music project, has issued a fantastic “radiophonic ride” aboard an imaginary World’s Fair monorail. The two tracks on this Simonsound Tranist Authority release are compelling collages of electronic experimentation and oscillations made from vintage synths, manipulated tape, and acoustic sources. There are multiple versions of the release, […]

Make Something Great with PVC Pipe This Weekend | Lifehacker

Although not one of the DIY All Star materials , people use PVC pipe to create all sorts of awesome things because it’s cheap, sturdy, and versatile. This weekend, grab some at your local hardware store and tackle one of these fun projects.

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