Tag Archives: cloud
With summer musical festivals there’s still a lot to look forward to on the music scene in 2010. But this isn’t a collection of up-and-coming artists or a rant about Ticketmaster. Instead, it’s a collection of upcoming developments that will how we obtain and consume music- coming soon to a digital device near you.
Sharing all of your music across the internet to any device
Earlier this year, Google acquired Simplify Media in a move that will open digital syncing services to the masses. Simplify Media provided a service that let you seamlessly share music and photo libraries through the web.
By running the service on two computers, each other’s music collections would appear as a local iTunes shared library, even if each machine was thousands of miles apart. The service also allowed you to connect to libraries of up to thirty friends to stream all of their collections too. The real game changer came when the company released its iPhone application, allowing you to pull down your entire library wherever there was an internet connection.
This signaled a fundamental shift in media consumption: No longer was it the case that a device’s media capacity was limited by internal storage. As long as the device was online, it could pull down entire libraries of content. Storage space became irrevelant.
The service ceased in June and the software has been pulled from the website and Apple’s App store. It will certainly be interesting to see how Google, known for creating web-based solutions and shunning desktop programs, will implement this service. There’s speculation the company may incorporate the syncing technology into its own Android OS software but I’m hoping they maintain a presence across all platforms.
Adam Bracegirdle | Critical Mass Calgary
This year marked my second at the SXSW interactive festival and it’s escalation was palpable. As one firmly rooted in the cerebral, esoteric environs of the creative department, I was expected by many to attend those “creative” sessions in which my peers debate, among other things, the value of the word press theme, or typography on the web. Although important work, I found conversations on the future of my medium to be a far more tantalizing proposition this time around. With that in mind I siphoned a rather crowded schedule down to a multitude of unfamiliar topics ranging from scaled multi-touch platforms to the economics of high quality content creation online. Much to my delight I found something compelling in nearly every one short of a distant few (some were vain attempts at self marketing rather then an argument of any substance. I haven’t the appetite for that.). After a short while, in fact from the very first of my lectures, I began to notice a pervading thought in nearly every talk I attended.
Convergence seemed to be on the minds of every eminent social guru and internet famous CEO at the conference. Wary as I am of the dreaded interactive meme, I could not help but feel that convergence wasn’t just another passing interweb buzzword. It seemed to permeate every lecture regardless of bent. Hardware discussions would invariably turn to talk of real-time repositories that could be accessed from anywhere; hardware as we know it becoming usurped by its more powerful, cloud-based counterpart. And although I suppose one could say that it’s an obvious (and dated) example of where convergence is headed, the example becomes substantive when watching a mob of displeased technophiles assault Mark Cuban, chairman of HDNet, demanding access to a`la carte content at a whim, from anywhere.
Talk of convergence extended well out of the traditional confines of platform and hardware though. Point in case, “social” was a virtual non-event this year as it has become almost totally ubiquitous; no longer considered a back channel for passive content. The emergence of the front channel was happening before us at SXSW as Twitter blew up during the keynotes with a frenzy of discussion, valuable or not, and location based services like Gowalla begin to provide tangible value in finding anything from Migas for breakfast 
to the best dive bar in Texas. I found myself at one point wondering if I was the only one in my lecture becoming confused by the direction of the conversation, only to find that several others were tweeting from within the room and getting informed responses from the moderator, in real-time. The convergence of channels is happening rapidly in these circles as the term “multi-channel” exits the lexicon and is replaced simply by “interaction”.
