Re: [backstage] O2 wins Apple iPhone deal - at a hefty price

[Adam Lindsay]

Ian Forrester wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/17/mobilephones.apple


(I'm quite curious about the "as much as 40% of any revenues" quote in 
the article: everywhere else has reported a consensus of 10%.)



In the light of the amount of "unlocking" or hacking going on. Don't you think 
the rest were actually quite lucky to have not got into this deal with Apple?


Well, I would also consider how mainstream mobile phone unlocking is
today, and how much of a deterrent it is to the mobile operators in 
seeking phone exclusives.


I would then also consider Apple's end-to-end system for delivering 
software updates, easily capable of invalidating any unlocks, as well as 
Apple's stated commitment to delivering new features for the iPhones 
over at least two years (thus making consumers want to update their 
phones). I don't know of another mobile phone maker as interested in 
managing already-sold devices.


Speaking more anecdotally, I know that O2 is likely to get my wife's 
custom with the iPhone, and I'm likely to follow, eventually.


adam
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Re: [backstage] Mobile Developer Un/Conference/Camp

[Adam Lindsay]

Jason Cartwright wrote:
The mobile industry frequently simplifies these bandwidth caps to 
layman-friendly numbers (such as an approximate number of pages), 
because the average consumer doesn't understand what " xGb" means. This 
"1,400 pages" number was said in a press conference with mainstream 
media - pretty understandable to simplify the jargon down.


I'm sure the actual cap numbers will come out sometime soon.


My guess is that "1400 internet pages per day" translates to 100MB, or 
~70KB/page. Whenever says "14" of something, I immediately think of that 
as an approximation to 100/7. (That's an odd product of growing up in a 
place with 7% sales tax.)


And since people seem to be interested in this topic, I'll throw out 
this provocative titbit: thanks to O2 being pretty open about their 
"Simplicity" tariff, it's pretty easy to piece together a guess that 
Apple is being paid £14 per month per iPhone customer on O2.


Apologies to Ian for doubting the up-to 40% revenue share in the article 
he pointed to. That ends up being completely plausible.


More details here:
http://lindsay.at/blog/archive/2007/09/19/the-hidden-cost-of-the-uk-iphone-269-252.html


adam


On 9/18/07, *Frank Wales * <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

Jakob Fix wrote:
 > Matthew: "18 months contract. There is a limit: 1,400 internet pages
 > per day would break the deal as part of fair usage agreement."
Wait, what?

Which internet page do they have in mind, I wonder?  I bet it's more
like
google.com  than amazon.com
.  I also wonder about the exchange rate between
internet pages, AJAX requests, MP3 files and e-mail messages; a limit
based on requests rather than total bytes transferred would be
highly comical.

And is the limit a cap, or merely the threshold to the land of
severely enlarged bills?
--
Frank Wales [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
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--
Jason Cartwright
Web Specialist, EMEA Marketing
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
+44(0)2070313161



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[backstage] iPhone SDK news

[Adam Lindsay]

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/

Native third party applications on the iPhone (and iPod touch) will be 
enabled via an SDK as of February 2008.

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Re: [backstage] iPlayer usage

[Adam Lindsay]

nick richards wrote:

Hi guys,

I saw a del.icio.us post from Tom Coates earlier asking how many
people actualy *use* the iPlayer:



I went back and noticed that the original poster's question wasn't 
answered: are there any plans to reveal statistics on iPlayer usage?


adam
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Re: [backstage] iPhone Apple opens up iPhone to app developers

[Adam Lindsay]

Steve Jolly wrote:

Brian Butterworth wrote:
Why does it take four months to publish a SDK?   Surely Apple must be 
using the SDK already to create their own applications? 


Steve Jobs gives a reasonable explanation in his announcement - that 
they want to implement a robust security model for third-party apps, 
something they don't need for internal development.


http://www.apple.com/startpage/


And as I can attest to, having recently hacked my iPod touch, the 
security model that's in place right now is not sufficient.


And anyway, classes and methods do not a full API make. Nor is an API 
alone the full SDK toolchain that is needed (and, now, promised).


adam
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Re: [backstage] Use of Tinyurl in Emails

[Adam Lindsay]

Martin Deutsch wrote:

But if you're talking well-designed URLs for journey planning, see:
http://www.traintimes.org.uk/cardiff/birmingham/8:00



Thank you for that site pointer. An excellent example, and a great one 
to bookmark!


adam
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Re: [backstage] Use of Tinyurl in Emails

[Adam Lindsay]

Steve Jolly wrote:

Jonathan Tweed wrote:
Don't forget to also drop at least u, otherwise you might end up with 
offensive short codes.


You may have noticed that the programme ids don't have any vowels in 
them. This is deliberate ;-)


Sounds like an interesting little algorithmic challenge - what shortcode 
generation algorithm eliminates accidental real words while compromising 
optimally between simplicity and efficiency?


It's been discussed in the Mac blogosphere recently:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Random/RASN2-Swears-2007-10-16-15-00.html

Essentially, generate as normal, and reject on matches from a dictionary.

adam
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Re: [backstage] Use visualisations of audio in your mashups!

[Adam Lindsay]

Alia,

Again, that looks nifty. For my thinking, though, I'd be much more drawn 
to the feature vectors that you're extracting, especially as it could 
possibly be combined with:

 http://developer.echonest.com/docs/analyze

Any possibility of this happening?

adam


Alia Sheikh wrote:

Hi again!

We've been doing some work on automatically extracting colours from 
audio, to allow us to better navigate that audio.  It works suprisingly 
well at actually revealing the structure of a peice of audio content.


For Mashed we're making available a web-based service that allows you to 
put an mp3 in and get a coloured jpg out, for use in any way you see fit.


More info at: http://mashed08.backnetwork.com/event/?articleid=26

Email me ifor a username and password to the service, if you'd like to 
have a play beforehand.


Alia Sheikh
Research Engineer
Kingswood Warren
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Re: [backstage] Use visualisations of audio in your mashups!

[Adam Lindsay]

Coool.
That, indeed, is flap-worthy. I think I need to find a proper sleeping 
bag now.


adam


Alia Sheikh wrote:

Hi Adam,
sounds like you've read the white paper?:)
so the current flap is about this promise we've made on the website:
"At this web page <http://mprr.kw.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/vis/avn>you'll be 
able to generate your own jpg visualisatons for your mp3 files and use 
them in your mashups. You will also find a download link to get the 
visualisation data as a text file of RGB values (once we've added this 
functionality!)"

Would that do you?:)
I can talk to you at *great length* on the day about where the rgb 
values come from and how to generate them from scratch.

Alia-currently-typing-this-with-one-finger-while-eating-lunch

Adam Lindsay wrote:

Alia,

Again, that looks nifty. For my thinking, though, I'd be much more 
drawn to the feature vectors that you're extracting, especially as it 
could possibly be combined with:

 http://developer.echonest.com/docs/analyze

Any possibility of this happening?

adam


Alia Sheikh wrote:

Hi again!

We've been doing some work on automatically extracting colours from 
audio, to allow us to better navigate that audio.  It works 
suprisingly well at actually revealing the structure of a peice of 
audio content.


For Mashed we're making available a web-based service that allows you 
to put an mp3 in and get a coloured jpg out, for use in any way you 
see fit.


More info at: http://mashed08.backnetwork.com/event/?articleid=26

Email me ifor a username and password to the service, if you'd like 
to have a play beforehand.


Alia Sheikh
Research Engineer
Kingswood Warren
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Re: [backstage] So was *this* what Mr. Cridland was referring to recently?

[Adam Lindsay]

Christopher Woods wrote:
Tech question - what encoder(s) are you using? If it's software in 
realtime or close-to-realtime, please (please please) say it's Lame 
3.97. If the backend is using the Fraunhofer FhG codec, I think I might 
contemplate going and banging my head against a wall for a little while.


Wait, what?
You don't believe in inventors being able to profit directly from their 
inventions by selling software? I mean, there are lots of things wrong 
with the patent system, but it's not like FhG are patent trolls or this 
is a submarine. They're (co-)inventors, and they even sell software 
based on it, not simply lying back and collecting on past IP...


adam
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Re: [backstage] Track Playing (http://www.trackplaying.com)

[Adam Lindsay]

Wow! Looks good.

I've not been tracking backstage very closely, so I'm a bit baffled as 
to where you're getting your currently-playing feeds from. I had been 
depending on the A&MI hackday feeds, which were turned off last month.


Whatever you use, I'd love to hook it back up to my 
born-at-Mashed08-but-just-deployed-today Twitter bot at:

 http://twitter.com/recomme

adam

Chris Riley wrote:

Hi all

I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com 
 - it displays information about the track 
currently playing on the radio.*
 
It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and 
is hosted on Google App Engine.  Mashup heaven!
 
It is based on my previous attempt http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ that 
some of you may recall.
 
Hope you all find it useful / of interest.

Chris Riley

*Lets hope this gets the BBC Radio2 Last.fm feed fixed ;o)

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Re: [backstage] Track Playing (http://www.trackplaying.com)

[Adam Lindsay]

Erp, I hate self-repliers.

I just re-read Chris's message from 1 August, which gave some URLs. 
James Cridland's disclaimers and promises of what were to come put me 
off relying on them deploying http://recom.me/


adam


Adam Lindsay wrote:

Wow! Looks good.

I've not been tracking backstage very closely, so I'm a bit baffled as 
to where you're getting your currently-playing feeds from. I had been 
depending on the A&MI hackday feeds, which were turned off last month.


Whatever you use, I'd love to hook it back up to my 
born-at-Mashed08-but-just-deployed-today Twitter bot at:

 http://twitter.com/recomme

adam

Chris Riley wrote:

Hi all

I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com 
<http://www.trackplaying.com/> - it displays information about the 
track currently playing on the radio.*
 
It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted 
on Google App Engine.  Mashup heaven!
 
It is based on my previous attempt http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ that 
some of you may recall.
 
Hope you all find it useful / of interest.

Chris Riley

*Lets hope this gets the BBC Radio2 Last.fm feed fixed ;o)

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[backstage] Music Hack Day

[Adam Lindsay]

Hey all,

I'm peripherally involved with the organisation of the upcoming Music 
Hack Day , and I only just realised it didn't 
get a mention here. It will be 11-12 July 2009, at Guardian Offices near 
Kings Cross, London.


It'll be a weekend event about music APIs, with the usual 24-hack-a-thon 
in the middle. Current representation is from:

* 7digital
* The Echo Nest
* Gigulate
* Last.fm
* People's Music Store
* Songkick
* SoundCloud
With further workshops from:
* RjDj
* Tinker it!

(I also note that there are a lot of folks signed up with a BBC 
affiliation--drop me a line if you're one of them...)


We're at the point of looking at who to invite, it's not long before 
invites go out, so drop by the registration page ASAP.


 http://musichackday.org/info/Register

Cheers,
adam
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Re: [backstage] Music Hack Day

[Adam Lindsay]

Good question.
There's been talk of opening things up to ad hoc workshops beyond the 
official ones (I'll be giving tutorials on The Echo Nest's various 
APIs), but I'm not sure how un-conference-y it will be.


adam


Ian Forrester wrote:
I was wondering if it was purely hack or there will be parts of a unconferences too? 


Cheers,

Ian Forrester

This e-mail is: []secret; [x]private; []public

Senior Producer, BBC Backstage, BBC R&D
Room 1044, BBC Manchester BH, Oxford Road, M60 1SJ
email: ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk
work: +44 (0)1612444063 | mob: +44 (0)7711913293 
-Original Message-

From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] 
On Behalf Of Adam Lindsay
Sent: 20 June 2009 12:10
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: [backstage] Music Hack Day

Hey all,

I'm peripherally involved with the organisation of the upcoming Music Hack Day 
<http://musichackday.org/>, and I only just realised it didn't get a mention 
here. It will be 11-12 July 2009, at Guardian Offices near Kings Cross, London.

It'll be a weekend event about music APIs, with the usual 24-hack-a-thon in the 
middle. Current representation is from:
 * 7digital
 * The Echo Nest
 * Gigulate
 * Last.fm
 * People's Music Store
 * Songkick
 * SoundCloud
With further workshops from:
 * RjDj
 * Tinker it!

(I also note that there are a lot of folks signed up with a BBC 
affiliation--drop me a line if you're one of them...)

We're at the point of looking at who to invite, it's not long before invites go 
out, so drop by the registration page ASAP.

  http://musichackday.org/info/Register

Cheers,
adam
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