It’s not long now until habbo Trax comes out, however, earlier today djtruefitt and myself got to go to a special fansite preview.
In this preview we were shown multiple rooms with habbo trax players in and got to listen to lots of different styles of music from each one. The selection appears to be highly customisable.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the editing panel, so we haven’t seen first hand how you form your own trax, however we did find out the following information:
This is the first time music has really been introducved into Habbo hotel and it will be interesting to see how popular it becoems amongst peoples rooms. Alongside this, it wil be interesting to see how easily people become annoyed with it. Within rooms they can only be turned on/off by specific people. Individual users just have an over-ride mute button within the hotel – an actual volume adjuster would be nice.
It will also be interesting to see what impact it has from a quality of service point of view. The article mentions that at the preview the hotel was suffering from a lot of lag and things weren’t loading. I wonder if this will get worse when more people have trax machines.
Steve Jobs at the D5 conference: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could see YouTube in your livingroom?
Looks like we’ll be getting youtube on Apple TV shortly. I look forward to seeing it and hearing reviews. I’m guessing the quality is going to vary quite a bit though depending on the uploaded quality
Sure, you can now download music from the iTunes store without DRMbut that doesn’t mean you should just willy nilly start sharing thatmusic with your friends. For one thing, it’s illegal. For another, youraccount information is embedded into that m4a music file. Don’t believeme? Try this yourself.
1. Launch Terminal. You’ll need to be comfortable at the command line to perform this check.
2.Navigate to one of your iTunes plus downloads. If you have a US iTunesaccount, you can download the iTunes plus “Ooh La” single of the week.
3. Use the UNIX “strings” command to look at the text in your data and grep to search for your name. e.g.
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | grep name
Alternatively, open all the strings in TextEdit:
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | open -f.
Bottom line: DRM-free doesn’t mean that Apple suddenly supports piracy.
It’s interesting to see how Apple have gone about this. What will be even more interesting is to see if there will be any lawsuits as a result of being able to track the original owners of songs who have shared them on a mass basis.
Testfreaks.com is a new website that collates product reviews for all your favourite gadgets from over the internet.
Testfreaks is created by the creators of pricerunner, a shopping portal site offering users the chance to compare prices from many stores. Read the rest of this entry »
The quickly growing music social network Last.fm has been acquired by CBS for $280 million in an all-cash deal.
UK based Last.fm launched five years ago and has become a social networking favorite with 15 million active users. It has become a massive repository for music information (artist and song wikis, listening data from users, etc.). In the U.S., companies like Pandora, MOG and iLike all compete with some of Last.fm’s features, although none of those startups has built the basic social network/community of last.fm.
The deal sees Last.fm’s management team staying in place and the site maintaining a separate identity.
It will be interesting to see what CBS does with last.fm, if anything at all. For the acquisition to take place they must have something planned, but off the top of my head I;m unsure what real reason they would have for wanting the service
Apple released iTunes 7.2 updated in the Mac OS X Software Update tonight, which offers “iTunes Plus”, Apple’s new DRM-free $1.29 offerings
With iTunes 7.2, preview and purchase iTunes Plus music —new higher-quality, DRM-free music downloads from participating music labels.
Anyone in the UK can probably remember some of the mint adverts mainly based around the shape of the card or restoring the clever dumb balance.
View an advert:
Mint does have a new very clever offer available on it’s uk credit card. They offer a card with an attractive introductory offer and have recently lowered their typical APR. Read the rest of this entry »
Internet users in Morocco who have been unable to access YouTube have voiced concern that it is being deliberately blocked by the authorities.
Many Moroccans have been unable to see the video-sharing site since 25 May.
Some people have linked the problem to videos critical of Morocco’s actions in Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Morocco took control of in 1975.
But state-controlled service provider Maroc Telecom said the problem was the result of a technical glitch.
It seems to be ever more frequently that youtube gets blocked on a mass scale due to problematic content.
In my opinion that’s not particularaly fair as it isn’t youtube who puts the content up. However, if they have been notified about problematic content and not taken down within a reasonable time, thats when action should start to be taken. I would suggest just blocking the individual videos – however, this wouldn’t jump youtube in taking action. Blockign the entrie site would have that desired effect as it could result in a lot of lost advertising revenue.
Everyone likes to talk. Now with mobiles, everyone likes to talk on the move, the problem associated with this is the cost – especially when trying to call internationally. Rebtel provides a way around this
Rebtel offers millions of mobile phone users the ability to make free or low-priced international calls to more than 36 countries around the world, regardless of the model of their phone, and, without the use of any special hardware or downloads.
Plus 10 of these international calls per month can be free Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not long now until habbo Trax comes out, however, earlier today djtruefitt and myself got to go to a special fansite preview.
The quickly growing music social network Last.fm has been acquired by CBS for $280 million in an all-cash deal.
Internet users in Morocco who have been unable to access YouTube have voiced concern that it is being deliberately blocked by the authorities.