March 2012
1 post
5 tags
January 2012
1 post
5 tags
Online Music Phase II
When I was younger, much younger, I always had this idealistic technological day-dreams about how a better tech-world could look like.
One of them was about the perfect file format for music. Of course it would contain all the metadata like lyrics, BPM, or crowd-sourced genre information. While on pause it would display the cover art, while playing it would show the video (only on devices with...
December 2011
1 post
6 tags
I don't like the word process
The fun part working for a carrier is that you sometimes get to touch the new stuff before it is introduced to the market.
At the moment I’m carrying a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as my primary device. It’s a cool gadget, maybe on par with the iPhone. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
The Samsung phone showed me with brutal honesty how settled I am in the iOS ecosystem....
November 2011
1 post
4 tags
October 2011
2 posts
3 tags
The Android Wishlist Phone
Hey you, Android vendors. Since you are all clearly experimenting with your Google phones at the moment, why don’t you cherry-pick the things I’d like to see in a compelling iPhone rival?
To make my point clear: We are definetly not in a feature race in the smartphone space, I stated that before. But the ingredients listed below could be used to make me forget the great iOS...
3 tags
September 2011
3 posts
6 tags
Not forking is the right choice for Microsoft
The most suspense-packed news from the Windows 8 keynote was their approach to the “Big Forking Decision”. Because the implications are huge.
I’m going even further: Windows 8 is not only the right move, it’s the only one with higher chances to win the title “most used Tablet OS” instead to fail.
So, the critics tell Microsoft to make a clear split and...
6 tags
The myth of the information overflow
It used to be the case that news was limited. A newspaper has only a certain amount of pages. The TV news are condensed into 15 minutes once a day. These artificial limitations are gone - thanks to the internet.
It seems that this change happened too fast for some people to slowly adapt this in their behaviour. They go out and call it productivity decreasing and bad for sanity. This happens...
2 tags
August 2011
2 posts
4 tags
4 tags
Mac OS Lion and change in user behaviour
For almost a week I’m using one of those new MacBook Air devices as my primary computer. (I had already a Mac Mini, but only as my HTPC.)
So far, I’m impressed by the overall experience. Multi-touch trackpads and SSDs will be common standard in laptops a few years from now on [1] - the benefits are too obvious. I’m not missing a DVD-tray or Firewire; I’m missing a 3G...
July 2011
2 posts
5 tags
3 tags
Free Start-Up ideas
In my personal conversations about the current state of the internet I often hear something like “Man, what a great opportunity is here…one only needs one good idea and before you’ll see it, you’ll be rich.”
While I’m agreeing with the first part, the second is just bullshit.
First of all, it’s not all about the idea. It’s about execution. Apple...
June 2011
3 posts
6 tags
6 tags
3 tags
May 2011
4 posts
4 tags
The Check-In in 2011
I’m one of those geeks that like to combine the physical world with a digital layer, e.g. check-in where I’m at right now. (Yeah, it’s this app where you can get mayor. And by the way, the easy to remember USP of the mayor may be the reason why foursquare won over Gowalla.)
I’m using the service on a daily basis for roughly two years now. But check-ins are disrupting, not...
3 tags
Fast Following
In general I agree with consultant Horace Dediu who writes at asymco. He does an amazing job visualizing the mobile industry.
As I’m skipping through some of his older posts I stumbled over “Two turkeys don’t make an eagle, but no penguin will ever soar.” In a nutshell the argument goes like this: Android will never be as good as iOS because their logic is to only do what the market...
Deutscher Humor
Dem deutschen Versuch witzig zu sein stehe ich ambivalent gegenüber. Zu Schulzeiten war das Ganze da noch verhältnismäßig einfach: Mein Heimatbundesland stellte die “Pioniere der deutschen Comedy”, Badesalz, den ersten der gefakte Anrufe im Radio berühmt machte, Bodo Bach, und natürlich das “ey alder, krass” Duo Mundstuhl. In Retroperspektive eine feine Ausbeute. Stand...
April 2011
4 posts
8 tags
My Media Setup: Part 1
The articles about the speculative entry of Apple in the TV business are reason enough for me to write down how I married my computer with the big screen.
[Update] As I wrote this article, I figured that every aspect about my setup would be way to much and complicated for a single post. In this first article we will take a look at media streaming from the internet.
For one and a half-year...
5 tags
3 tags
RedBull as Social Media Showcase
Yesterday the trailer to “The Art of Flight”, a snowboarding film, appeared on my Facebook news feed for the third time because it got shared by one of my friends. (The movie is sponsored hugely by Red Bull, therefore full with product ads and the YouTube clip is uploaded by the official acount.) This result has to be the dream of every modern marketer.
How did they achieve such a...
6 tags
About that cloudy Amazon thing
As you probably heard, Amazon launched this week their CloudDrive along with a Player front-end. Amazon does a very good job in managing online storage and bandwidth for businesses since years. Now they’re getting into the consumer segment.
The overall response from the blogosphere was kind of deflated.
This is why I am excited:
The service has a transparent ($US 1/GB/year) and (through...
February 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Create automatic connections between web-services...
Probably you never heard of this nice little service. I think the straight UI is noteworthy (think of it like a simplified version of tarpipe).
Now I’m not going to describe what the service does, because this is already done elsewhere (in english & in german).
Instead I’ll show you my “Tasks” that are used pretty often to get an idea of possible use cases:
...
5 tags
Export pictures from ffffound
There are a lot of reasons you want to export and download your once submitted images from ffffound, a service for collecting neat pics on the web. Maybe you just want a local backup or you like the the features to easily tag and edit posts like it’s done by the fancy more.
For me, it’s simply the reason that I don’t see any mid-term future for the service. The last update was...
December 2010
1 post
4 tags
Zootool, the visual Delicious
Doy you know the feeling when you stumble over a new web service and you classify them immediately in the two categories: Just functional and Well, this is good designed?*
Zootool is a bookmarking service developed by Bastian Allgeier that definetly belongs in the second category. It makes fun to use it, and that’s how all web apps should feel like. (On a sidenote: It’s astounding...
October 2010
1 post
4 tags
Evernote, the next-generation file system
For years there have been an ongoing discussion, especially in the unix community, about what and who the next generation file system should be. Some say XFS, others prefer the Solaris ZFS. (Everybody agrees, that the current used ones are lame.) Of course, this discussion is way to geeky for the mainstream user who only want to store their files securely.
The other day I sat before my...
June 2010
1 post
4 tags
How to be independent from iTunes
I’m a heavy iTunes user. And no, I’m definetly not proud of it. Since I bought my first iPhone I hate Apple every day that they forced my into the relationship with iTunes, the RAM-eating syncing hassle, especially on any Windows system.
But enough with all the whining and enough with all the promises that may be true someday - I need a solution for my daily life, now. Let’s...
April 2010
2 posts
5 tags
iPhone OS 4.0 justifies Jailbreaking
Yeah, you could read the title again. I mean it.
After the unveiling of the new iPhone OS, shipping this summer, tech blogs are pretty amazed at the new features Apple brings to their smartphone. Well, I’m not, because the important parts were already covered years ago by software available through the Jailbreak Store, namely Cydia. Others have written about the “freeing” of...
4 tags
KEXP-FM live performances →
I don’t know how I managed to oversee the YouTube channel from KEXP until now. KEXP Radio is a public radio station based in Seattle, Washington. They’ve got a nice music blog, too. They invite artists and bands in their own studio to perform live, recorded in amazing HD material.
My favourites so far:
We Were Promised Jetpacks - Quiet Little Voices
The Kills - Fried My Little...
February 2010
2 posts
2 tags
4 tags
Watch
A Cross the Universe is a live album and documentary film by Justice […] The DVD portion of this release contains a documentary of Justice’s March 2008 North American tour.
It took me two years to finally watch this docu, but now I can say it’s really worth it (even if you’re not into french electro-house music).
I expected a lot of great live footage, instead the...
January 2010
1 post
5 tags
Hype Machine Podcast mania
Ok, let’s start at the beginning. I love music, I really do. And I love fresh music and to discover new artists.
As for many other things, the web is a perfect place for music discovery. There are lots of cool folks out there who put together blogs with reviews, infos and mp3’s.
The Hype Machine simply aggregates all that stuff. From their about page:
To put it simply, the Hype...
December 2009
2 posts
7 tags
foursquare vs. Gowalla
Since I first heard about foursquare, I’ve been eager to try the service for myself. But as you probably know foursquare has this city concept, so I couldn’t take part from Germany at the beginning.
I found Gowalla, a more or less similiar location based gaming network. Despite some confusion at the beginning (there is no such thing as a newbies tutorial), I grow used to the gaming...
4 tags
Dear Mark Zuckerberg,
glad to hear that Facebook will get new Privacy controls. Because you know, the old ones aren’t so good at all.
Here’s my idea: What about a dynamic filter that excludes everyone that’s 10 years or more older than me? Would be cool with me.
Aah, just kidding, I don’t wanna raise the digital gap between generations.
Yours truly,
Andreas
BTW: It’s impressive that...
November 2009
1 post
2 tags
August 2009
1 post
5 tags
Social Media needs consolidation
So let’s assume for a moment you found that incredibul useful/interesting article on this niche blog.
You want to share it with other people like you; because that’s what makes Social Media so great.
A couple of years ago you would have likely ended up with mailing the link.
But nowadays, in our fancy little Web 2.0-World?
I have to decide if I
share the article on my prefered...
May 2009
1 post
3 tags
Boffin - Last.fm füllt die nächste Lücke
Seit nunmehr drei Wochen benutze ich Boffin anstatt des Last.fm Web Radios. Das Zwischenfazit: Eine faszinierende Applikation, die geschickt die Vorteile des Internets und der eigenen Festplatte vereint. Nun was genau ist nun eigentlich Boffin? Boffin ist ein kleiner Musikplayer, der die Last.fm Funktionalität auf die offline vorgehaltenen Audiodateien überträgt. Auf der entsprechenden...
April 2009
1 post
5 tags
Festivalplaylist 2009
Nach einigen hitzigen Diskussionen (und der Tatsache, dass Rock am Ring seit Sonntag ausverkauft ist) haben wir im Freundeskreis dazu entschieden, uns dieses Jahr in Neuhausen ob Eck beschallen zu lassen.
Und weil wir es können, gibt es hier - quasi als digitale Dividende von mir - eine inoffizielle Southside-Playlist für Spotify zum Vorbereiten auf das Wochenende. Hymns of Southside 2009
March 2009
1 post
4 tags
Blogpausenwart
Wie manch einer vielleicht bemerkt haben wird, bin ich in letzter Zeit nicht wirklich zum Bloggen gekommen. Erst die Spezialisierungsphase im Betrieb, dann die Studienfahrt nach Hamburg mit anschließendem CeBit-Besuch und schließlich noch ein nicht ganz stressfreies Projekt in dem unser Kurs eine komplette Onlinebanking-Lösung erzeugen sollte. Immerhin habe ich die Zwischenzeit genutzt und meine...
January 2009
1 post
5 tags
Spotify ftw!
Selten war ich von Beginn an von einer Applikation so begeistert wie von Spotify. Quasi Musik Streaming par excellence. Ehrlich! Eigentlich kann ich damit meine mit viel Sorgfalt und Liebe gepflegte Musiksammlung ad acta legen. Die Interpreten-Seiten sind besser organisiert und mit Meta-Tags angereichert, als ich es je könnte.
Der Musikkatalog hat auf der deutschen Seite zwar ein paar kleinere...
December 2008
1 post
4 tags
heise Volltext Kapitel III
Ich muss jetzt doch noch einmal auf diese Geschichte zurückkommen. (Kurzform: Ich hatte einen Volltext-RSS-Feed für den heise Newsticker gebaut und auch veröffentlicht. Daraufhin hat heise kurzerhand den Zugang auf die Seite blockiert.)
Warum also noch ein Kapitel hinzufügen?
Nun vor kurzem bin ich beim Stöbern in der Google App Engine Application Gallery über zwei Dienste gestolpert, die...
November 2008
1 post
4 tags
The Holy Grail of Synchronization (Dropbox vs...
At the moment I have to work on different computer’s with the same docs and spreadsheets. Everybody could imagine what a data chaos this could be. USB-Sticks would be a suitable solution but one PC does’t allow the plugging in external devices.
So I decided to try these new web 2.0 hosters with syncing and backup functionalities.
General
The “wow-factor” after the first...
September 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Last.fm Activity Feed RSS
I know it’s a while ago that last.fm changed their User Interface but it’s never to late to contribute something! The biggest change was the introduction of the so called “Last activities” box in the right sidebar. This feed lists the songs you loved, the groups you joined, the playlists you edited and so on. Information that would extremly well fit in lifestream concepts...
2 tags
Empfehlungen aus der Edutainment-Ecke
Mal ein kleiner (wegen des Umfanges an Zeichen) Buchtipp:
Nachdem ich in 3 Tagen die 750 Seiten des aktuellen Bestsellers von Andreas Eschbach gelesen habe kann ich jedem der sich nur einen Funken für Stichwörter wie Energiekrise oder Peak oil interessiert, nur empfehlen dasselbe zu tun. Zum Ende werden ein paar Fragen für meinen Geschmack nicht ausreichend beantwortet aber der erste Teil macht...
June 2008
2 posts
4 tags
Rock am Ring 2008 Review
Jop ich bin back vom Ring 08 und um das Fazit gleichmal vorneweg zu nehmen: Rage alleine war es wert! Und wer was andres behauptet bekommt von mir höchstpersönlich eine Bullet in your head. Aber der Reihe nach.
Donnerstag
Anreise, Aufbau (und traditionell der einzige Tag an dem man sich betrinken kann).
Freitag
Die erste Bands am Freitag waren Bedouin Soundclash und Tokyo Police Club im...
4 tags
Geschäftsmodelle
Der
Herr
Göldi hat angefangen,
die
Reaktionen kamen prompt und jetzt mein Beitrag zur Diskussion
“Geschäftsmodelle im Web 2.0”.
Erst einmal ein großes Lob an das doch recht neu zusammengewürfelte Team von
netzwertig.com. Hier wird gerade ein Pendant zu US-Bloggrößen wie Techcrunch
oder ReadWriteWeb geschaffen. Sehr schön.
Aus dem Artikel wollte ich mir eine Teilaussage herauspicken:...
May 2008
4 posts
3 tags
Wie das Künstlertum die Medienrevolution...
Vor kurzem waren mein Bruder und ich zwecks Silberhochzeitsgeschenk der Eltern im Fotostudio. Die werte Mama möchte wohl die doch etwas älteren Fotos von meiner Kommunion endlich ersetzen.
Ausgesucht hatten wir dann den einzigen Laden in unserer Umgebung der überhaupt eine Internetseite mit Öffnungszeiten zu bieten hatte.
Warum ich diesen Schwank aus meinem Privatleben erzähle?
Es lässt sich...
4 tags
Contentverschiebungen
Falls sich jemand wundert, dass hier in letzter Zeit so wenig Links eingetrudeln:
Ich habe mich (mal wieder) dazu durchgerungen ein paar Änderungen an der Struktur meines Agierens im Web vorzunehmen. (Hochtrabend formuliert ist halb gewonnen).
Es spuken mir halt andauernd die gleichen Fragen im Kopf herum.
Wie sieht meine Rolle in der sog. Blogosphäre aus und trage ich überhaupt konstruktiv zu...