Snowcrashing

The Hottest Apps…Are Now On (Apps)Fire

Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Remember when people used to compare their phones by the tech specs? Pixels for the camera, MP3 player, etc? Luckily that’s not the case anymore: today no one cares of the hardware (sure the hard-core geeks will always do…), what makes the difference is the software: the services and the content. Alas in 2009 lingo: the APPS.

The numbers are impressive: 65,000 apps on the App Store in less than a year. Still something is wrong with the user experience: the discovery process. Once you download an app, it sits there and you might as well forget why you downloaded it. The App Store experience is autistic and often times apps are used for as much as one time…

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The Iphone & Android App Business according to AdMob

Posted on 28. Aug, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

AdMob is out with its latest Mobile Metrics Report, which is based on the usage behavior found on various applications and web sites across its ad network. For the month of July,  AdMob decided to spice up its network data with survey results from 1,117 users of iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices.

The key findings of the survey have had the blogosphere go ah and oh about the potential App Store business.  What are those key findings?

In AdMob words:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month

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You’re Not a Sci-Fi Nerd Anymore…

Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

There’s a fascinating new trend in the mobile application space: Augmented Reality.

The technology, which superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, is not new, but the newest generation of smartphones are about to make it mainstream.

So what is Augmented Reality and what’s the big deal? AR is a graphics-oriented technology that blends sounds, haptics, and even smell to the natural world. So for example picture yourself using your cell phone to view the real world through its camera lens and while doing so, being able to interact with it. How? You could get twitts of the people all around you or the playlists and music streams of your neighborhood or see who built that statue that you’re staring at…

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TRVSDJAM Mixtape And The Fan-Casting Era

Posted on 06. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Last week, TRVSDJAM, the combined force of Travis Barker and DJ-AM, released their newest mixtape via Twitter, offering a free download of their newest mixtape in exchange for a tweet.

By tweeting “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape ‘Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09′ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com/”, tweeters receive a free download via an application built by Culture Jam Labs.

As you can see in the pre-populated tweet, a special hashtag – #trvsdjam – is included in the twit, with the goal of making it a top trending topic on Twitter.

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2009 SanFrancisco MusicTech Summit

Posted on 24. May, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

The annual San Francisco Music Tech Summit collects experts and entrepreneurs dealing with the ways technology is transforming the music industry.

A few highlights from this year’s edition gathered throughout the blogo/twittershepere:

-A RIVER OF (SMARTER) DATA

Digital music is still in its infancy. There’s definitely more than playlists, music in the cloud and artist pages. And a few innovative companies promise to have the answer.

-Say good-bye to editorial picks and dummy collaborative filtering. The future is a gigantic “music brain” that is fed by the massive river of unstructured information that is the Internet in a continuous learning process.

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Artists Against…

Posted on 18. May, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

A BLANK CD

Producer Danger Mouse and rocker Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse have decided to go against EMI legal threats and release their new CD, Dark Night of the Souls, as a blank CD  reading, “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” The CD comes with a book of photos provided by film-maker David Lynch.

The album, which has been one of the most hotly anticipated albums of 2009, features Iggy Pop, Black Francis (of the Pixies), the Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle, James Mercer (of the Shins), and Julian Casablancas (of the Strokes) and others all contributing original material.

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The BlackBerry App World and the mobile music stores new ecosystem

Posted on 04. Apr, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s StoreMania again. This time thanks to RIM.

At CTIA, the new Blackbery App World was announced. The store has hundreds of apps available at launch, and RIM says it expects around a thousand to be available in its first week. Like Apple’s store, RIM’s offers both free and paid apps that download directly to your device.

The Blackbery Store has a nice inteface, but some oddities. The main one is that it is only available for relatively recent BlackBerry models–the ones with trackballs, starting with the Pearl which means that millions of people with older models can’t use the app store.

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