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Financial Times explains Beyond Oblivion business model:

The company had hoped to win a following among consumers in the increasingly crowded digital media market with a service that did not charge fees for downloading or monthly subscriptions and did not carry advertising. Instead, it planned to make money with a flat fee on new consumer electronic devices and computers that would let customers listen to all the music they wanted for the life of the device.

This is an interesting idea. A flat fee to listen and to download music is very appealing. Bundling this fee in the hardware’s price was a good idea too.

However, the whole product relies on too many agreements with other companies to be functional. It needs majors’ and also consumer electronic manufacturers’ approval. The majors have to take the risk, which they seem not to be willing to. And the manufacturers have to agree to collect the fee on behalf of Beyond Oblivion, which means more work, more money spent and a bet on the return on investment. On top of that, buying a new smartphone, tablet or computer would have forced the consumer to pay the fee another time discouraging him to buy new products.

Too big of a downside for both the majors and manufacturers, apparently.

I hope Beyond Oblivion’s idea will lead to another viable model though.

(via TheNextWeb, which resumes FT’s article protected beyond their paywall)

I love the Internet. It is what I like to talk about and what I am curious about, but it stopped me from doing something very important: doing things.

When I was a kid, the Internet was already there, but just became accessible to the mainstream. We had a 56 kbps connection. Browsing the Web meant using the phone line. Nobody was able to join us during browsing time, which caused me a lot of trouble. Overall, browsing was slow and coupled with the hourly-caped plan my parents subscribed to, I used the Internet on very limited and short occasions.

Since then, the Internet has taken a huge part of my free time. For whatever reason, it has become the go-to thing against boredom and the best solution to feed my curiosity. I now go on the Internet for everything: to read very interesting articles, to listen to unusual music, watch incredible videos, etc. I cannot deny that it is deeply part of my everyday life.

However, it has become the filter of anything I am wondering about. Instead of trying by myself to figure things out - as I was doing when a kid - looking up online has become the easiest, quickest and most effortless way to get an answer. Younger, I remember experimenting with wooden planks to build a ramp to jump with my bike. Today, I’ve lost this thinking process. I would first look on the Internet for ‘how to build a bike ramp’. Then, if I find the plans I need, I’ll get distracted and finally never build my ramp. No effort whatsoever has been put into thinking and building.

Doing so, I ask the Internet to think for me and therefore I leave other people think for myself.

I’m tired of this. Tired of reading what others have done and thought before me. I want to figure things out by myself without delegating to others.

I want 2012 to be different.

Fuck. This guy is surreal.

Look at this jump at 3:06. Incredible.

That’s an hour well spent, if you ask me.

There is nothing really new for the nerds, but the angle taken by the BBC is interesting. The documentary is focused on Apple’s successes seen through Steve Jobs’ hippy past.

We read a lot about his childhood these days and how feeling he had been chosen by his adoptive parents rather than given had a decisive impact on him. I guess it’s true, but I don’t think it’s sufficient to explain his success. It shaped his personality for sure and how he was with people, but it did not give him a vision. What did was his hippy experiences and everything that goes with it.

That is so cool!

Launch the app and sit back, here’s an awesome 8-bit fire that you can leave in the background during your Christmas parties.

Simple and cool idea.

Drew Olanoff reports on The Next Web:

According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account. The day before wasn’t a good one for the company either, with 15,000 people taking their domains elsewhere. That means that even though Go Daddy changed its stance, people have had enough.

Perfect follow-up to my previous article.

I’m glad people are deciding to sanction companies who take bad decisions for the users. All the domains lost are a strong punishment for GoDaddy and a good example of Internet reactivity.

Update: Smart move from Namecheap, which is using Twitter’s promoted tweets to push SOPA opponents to switch to its domain registration and web hosting services. Please remark the witty coupon code: ‘BYEBYEGD’.

We're very much against SOPA. If you'd like to move to Namecheap, use transfer coupon code BYEBYEGD today (expires 12/31).

— Namecheap.com (@namecheap) December 23, 2011

As I wrote on Twitter last night, I am very surprised to see GoDaddy supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Let’s remember. This bill aims to give to entertainment companies the rights to censor websites that according to them are encouraging infringement. Using a shortcut, forget remixes, guitar covers and bootlegs, forget movie parodies, forget using your favorite song for your YouTube holiday movie and so on because these use rights the entertaining companies own.

The above is why so many protesters fight against the bill, many Internet companies such as Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter and others are opponent. But what is GoDaddy doing supporting SOPA? What a poor decision from a company so close to Internet users and not the least engaged. Buying a domain name is more engaging than creating a YouTube account and it shows a sense of involvement. These people care about the Internet and do not want entertaining companies to control it.

My guess would be that GoDaddy saw a big financial opportunity in supporting SOPA. There is a lot of big buckets of money at stake in this story as well as a shift in the Internet’s control. That’s therefore the moment for GoDaddy to join the ones it thinks will win.

I’m glad the Internet has been able to pressure GoDaddy to withdraw from the supporting list, but the idea is still there. GoDaddy’s CEO did not change his mind.

Rob Siltanen, creative director and managing partner at TBWA/Chiat/Day recalls Steve Jobs’ words at their first meeting, the one that would lead to the creation of the ‘Think Different’ campaign:

He said, “I’m thinking no TV ads, just some print ads in the computer magazines until we get things figured out.” Clow [Rob's partner] remained his cool, reserved self at this point, while I found Jobs to be far more bossy and arrogant than I imagined. I got the impression he felt we were just another company lucky to be in his presence. I also didn’t agree at all with his gameplan. I chimed in and told him, “Half the world thinks Apple is going to die. A few print ads in the computer magazines aren’t going to do anything for you. You need to show the world that Apple is as strong as a lion. Nobody stands around the water cooler talking about print ads. You need to do something bigger and bolder. You need to do TV and other things that are going to give you true momentum.”

Steve Jobs hasn’t done everything all by himself. He had talented people around him who contributed a lot to Apple’s success. This a great read diving into the creation of the ‘Think Different’ campaign.

(via @simonallain)

Marissa Fessenden writes:

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

Funny enough. I have been talking a lot lately with a woman abusing the vocal fry and she is a young adult woman from, guess what, New York. I’m glad to finally have a term for this guttural vibration I now can’t stand.

To me, it sounds like a desperate way to tell the world that you’d like to be part of a very differentiated social group. My guess would be part of the media or communication industry, to look like a sort of high-class speaker or communicant. It is very obscure to me.

However, I hope this will not join the list of the new language fads. Above all, this is tiring for the listener and irritating. I do not see any interesting way of using it. It doesn’t even sound seductive, sophisticated or cultured at all.

Please leave it to the New Yorkers.

There is a good example of the vocal fry at 1 minute in this video.

(via kottke.org)

I am not a big fan of Persols. I always find them very attractive when displayed in the shop. The front view is very simple and appealing to me, but once I look at the arms I always get disappointed. Persol’s metal signature on the arms is too bright and shiny. I would feel too tacky wearing them. I would love to find a simple pair of glasses, no metal on the arms, no logo on the lenses and no pattern or shiny stuff anywhere. Maybe I should create my own brand.

Anyway, this is a very good video of demonstrating how Persol is manufacturing its glasses. It belongs to the great crafting videos flourishing on the Internet and it is a very good communication exercise for Persol.

This is pretty cool and the fact that I have close to no idea how it works makes it even cooler.

I could not resist linking to this. This is brilliant.

Let’s make Siri beatbox now.

I managed to keep myself busy today by going on Cookatoo Island for what’s called ‘Outpost’. I spent the whole afternoon feeding my curiosity between Sydney’s blue sky and dusty old factories.

The island, where abandoned factories are still standing, welcomes for a bit more than one month a huge street art exhibition. It is dozens of artists and probably hundreds of artworks that you will be able to see. You will find yourself walking around without no aim from factory to factory while breathing the inside air of those old buildings, both fresh and rusty.

I would recommend NEXT in the ‘Heavy Machine Shop’ where spending one hour wouldn’t be enough to check the whole collection of over 1,500 printed tees. It very inspiring and if it does not give you the envy to create your own T-shirts, there is something wrong with you.

Second, you have to see the ‘Oi You! Collection’. George Show and his wife have gathered dozens of high-quality artworks from street artists, among them there is the ‘famous’ Banksy. If the rest of the exhibition is really cool, this is the icing on the cake. The rest will look graphically beautiful, but meaningless to you after that. The artworks here have been created to say something, you can tell. You will likely find yourself stopping in front of some trying to figure out what the message is, something I haven’t done for the rest.

The exhibition is open until 11 Dec. Make sure you go to check it out. You will not regret it and if you don’t like it, Cookatoo Island is still a perfect place to chill on a sunny weekend.

This is a very interesting article by an independent developer from Shifty Jelly. It dismisses all the false ideas we have on indie developers and how easy this situation may be. There are way too many passages worth quoting. You need to check it out yourself.

The only sentences I will put here are the ones we should keep in mind in any circumstances before judging a piece of software.

You put an enormous amount of effort (and yourself) into every product you make. Sometimes you find people deriding it, or dismissing it after spending 13.2 seconds using it. People tell you not to take that personally. Good luck with that. When you invest 6 months of your life, day and night, creating a product there’s no way in hell you can’t take other people’s comments personally.

Shifty Jelly’s team and the other indies need support for the great work they do.

You don’t need to like surfing to love this.

A reef has never looked so beautiful.

This is a beautiful website by Harry Harrison that you need to visit.

He is definitely a very creative guy. He is the one who brought us these minimal pixel characters. A shame that he never got the credit he deserved.

Javascript is powerful, baby.

It’s impossible for me to select one of them. They are all worth reading and worth remembering.

By curiosity, I took this Myers-Briggs test again today, which will give a good idea of what kind of introvert or extrovert you are. The result is still introvert for me (INTJ) even if I would say that I changed a bit since the last time I took it.

I don’t value this conclusion too much, but reading about introverts is helpful. Things that I find abnormal about me, especially when it comes to relationships with people, look a bit less unordinary.

(via @boldaslove)

Interesting thing is how his voiced is used for Siri:

“I did a set of recordings with Scansoft five or six years ago, for text-to-speech services,” says Briggs. “Five thousand sentences over three weeks, spoken in a very particular way and only reading flat and even. Then they go away and take all the phonics apart, because I have to be able to read anything you want, even if I’ve never actually recorded all those words.”

The guy is also the voice of satnavs for Garmin, TomTom, Jaguar, Land Rover, Audi and Porsche.

Greg Leppert, who works at Svpply, created this little service called Reading and it is awesome.

The tagline says it all:

What you're reading. Not what you like. Not what you find interesting. Just what you're reading.

The design is beautifully simple. Only text, no images, no clutter, just the essential elements: the bookmarks.

The first impression has been very good for me. Registering via Twitter or Facebook is a great choice. It got me signing up without thinking twice at all. Great choice.

Second impression came when I actually used the service. It is dead simple. No friction, no thinking, only reading. Just click the bookmarklet you previously dragged to your browser’s bookmark bar and the page you are currently on is added to your list.

I have to tell you that I have never used any other bookmarking service before, not even delicious. They look too complicated to me, sorting my articles into folders is too much of a hassle. Sharing links with followers makes me always think twice and I often end up sharing nothing, coming to the conclusion that this has no interest at all. Here, Reading tells you to share the link before reading the article and it makes a huge difference for me.

I am seduced because you do not tell the world what you just liked, but what you are actually reading at the moment. This then gives another dimension to the service, it has a huge discovery potential. Browsing everybody’s feed will definitely make you click on other articles.

Finally, it is a great way for me to track what I have been reading.

Enough said, this service is great and if you have only one thing to do now is to sign up: reading.am

Jenna Wortham writes for the New-York Times:

Professor Keshav estimates it costs the carriers about a third of a penny to send text messages. Considering that the major carriers charge 10 to 20 cents to send and receive them, “it’s something like a 4,090 percent markup,” he said. At 20 cents and 160 characters per message, wireless customers are paying roughly $1,500 to send a megabyte of text traffic over the cell network. By comparison, the cost to send that same amount of data using a $25-a-month, two-gigabyte data plan works out to 1.25 cents.

With services such as Blackberry Messenger, iMessage, etc., the number of texts sent will decrease so as real phone calls in the future. Full data plans for mobile phones make definitely sense to me.