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I didn’t notice this last week, but when the latest version of iTunes was released, Apple also finally released a 64bit compatible version for Windows. So now you can install iTunes 7.6 for 64bit and be able to sync your iPhone or iPod Touch which wasn’t possible until now.
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In a move which is by the far the most credible threat to Apple’s dominance of the online music scene, Amazon will start rolling out it’s online music store to countries outside of the USA over the course of 2008.
From the press release:
Amazon to Begin International Rollout of Amazon MP3 in 2008
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 27, 2008–Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including the PC, Mac(R), iPod(R), Zune(R), Zen(R), iPhone(TM), RAZR(TM), and BlackBerry(R). Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels.
The music tracks available for download are unencrypted MP3 files encoded at 256kbps and work on all MP3 players. This is big news and I can’t wait for the service to arrive in NZ.
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Been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently as we just spent a week up in Cooks Beach in the Coromandel. The weather wasn’t too good due to the effects of a tropical cyclone that drifted towards us from Fiji. But overall it was a good break and I managed to catch the monster Snapper pictured below while fishing off a kayak with a soft bait setup.
Now I’m back in the swing of things and looking to get stuck into those new years resolutions. I also plan on posting some more technical articles on some of the stuff I’ve been doing recently so sorry if that bores the non-technical readers.
I’ve finally ordered my first batch of business cards through Digital Breeze so will be dishing these out soon. I need to get the Amanzi website cleaned up too, especially now that we’ve been featured in a case study on the Xero website. Over the next few months I’ll be looking to take on a couple more customers and probably hiring my first fulltime employee. So if you know of any small businesses (even single employee setups) that could use consultancy and services on Internet, Infrastructure, or Information technologies please let me know.
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Iced coffee seems to be the big thing at the moment and it’s perfect for a steaming hot day like today. So I just tried my first one, bought from Fuel, and am enjoying the refreshing taste while basking in the sun in Midland Park. Beautiful.
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Steve Jobs no doubt delivered a fine keynote this morning at Macworld – I haven’t seen it yet, but read Engadget’s live blog this morning with huge anticipation. Here’s my summary of the announcement and how it relates to us in NZ.
This is more-or-less useless to people outside the USA as the biggest new feature is the ability to rent movies from iTunes and watch them as they are streaming down to your Apple TV. You can’t even buy movies from NZ let alone rent them, and the same goes for TV shows. The new interface looks a lot better though, and is available as a free upgrade so it’s worth upgrading anyway. The price has also dropped to $229 (USD) which is equivalent to roughly $299 (NZD) but the Apple Store still has it listed for $498 (NZD) so you’re paying a $200 (NZD) premium over the US price.
Also irrelevant to NZ as the iPhone is still not available here, and if you hack it to get it working here then you don’t need the updated software anyway.
This was the first announcement that I was genuinely excited about! At last we get the rest of the apps which are available on the iPhone on our iPod Touches! I’ve been hanging out for the Mail and Maps applications but am not too fussed on the others. BUT… The “upgrade” will cost $19.99 (USD)! What..? These are the same apps that are already on the iPhone, it’s just a case of including them in the next firmware update so why do we need to pay for them? I guess this is just another of Apple’s “Early Adopter Tax” that has to be paid if you want to be considered an Apple fan. All new iPod Touches include the updated software and also cost $30 (NZD) less than the original iPod Touch. From the coverage I’ve read so far about this, people are pissed – me too.
This is a strange one – it’s an AirPort Extreme wireless router with a built in hard drive, that works with Leopard’s Time Machine feature to backup your Macs over the network. The reason why this is strange is that the current AirPort Extremes have a USB port that allows you to connect a hard drive to, giving you the same setup as the Time Capsule. But you can’t use Time Machine with a hard drive connected to an AirPort Extreme, but you can use it to back up to the hard drive inside the Time Capsule. My only assumption is that Apple wants to sell as many Time Capsules as possible before enabling wireless backups to Airport Extremes.
This was the big announcement that had all the rumour sites buzzing leading up to the event. Apple have now added a new MacBook to their lineup called the MacBook Air. This device is probably as light as air and is the thinnest notebook available today and still gets 5 hours battery life. On the surface, it definitely looks like an impressive device but I still feel it’s a bit lacking… I especially think that it’s lacking one huge feature which would have made it a killer device – built-in wireless broadband. But it does have Bluetooth 2.1 which means if you have a 3G phone with and HSDPA modem, you should be fine. Also, they decided to ship the standard model with a 4200rpm PATA hard drive, which is surely going to limit the performance of this machine. You can upgrade it to include a 64GB solid state drive (SSD), but in NZ prices this pushes the price up from an already steep $2,999 (NZD) to a prohibitive $5,139 (NZD). Only a fortunate few would be able to afford that, so this will definitely be a status symbol for the rich and famous. Other notable features is that it only has a single USB port, has no optical drive, and has a mini-DV port with a DVI adapter which can drive a 23inch Apple screen.
So for us plebs in NZ, it’s a pretty disappointing keynote. No movie rentals/downloads, still no iPhone, MacBook Air is too expensive, and we need to pay a tax to get the iPod Touch updates. Not impressed.
I’ll post links here from NZ-based bloggers as I see them…
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The Consumer Electronics Show was a bit of a letdown to tell the truth. Not that I was there of course, but keeping an eye on sites like Engadget makes you feel like you’re there. Lots of products that won’t be launched for 5 years (if at all) and lots of thinner, larger TVs that will cost too much and also won’t ship for a few years.
One of the big drawcards to CES, sums up how irrelevant the whole event is: Panasonic’s 150 inch TV. Sure it’s impressive that they’ve managed to build one – but who cares? It’s not like you can rush down to Harvey Normans and put it on interest free credit for two years. Surely people must be aware that TVs will get larger while remaining as thin (or thinner) than they currently are. It really just becomes a pissing match between the big LCD manufacturers and we just lap it up with glee.
Then there was the Gizmodogate – where a couple of idiot bloggers ran round the showroom floor turning off TVs with a hacked remote control which only does one function – and that’s to turn off TVs. Just like laser pointers a few years ago, no doubt these TV-B-Gone devices will sell like hotcakes and will become the next major annoyances that we have to put up with.
I guess that CES, is just a huge over-indulgence of technology and is becoming more and more irrelevant as consumers become more picky with the gadgets they buy.
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For the second year in a row I’ve made a big effort to watch Bill Gates’s keynote speech at CES, and for the second year in a row I’ve been disappointed. Granted, the video about his last day at Microsoft showed the lighter side to him, but there were no other highlights.
Surface computing is something that demos well but will probably never eventuate to anything. There may be Surface computers that provide interactive displays, but these will just be like touch-screen panels today. I can’t see it happening that you place your cellphone on the Surface and it automagically transfers images or music onto my device easily and seamlessly.
The same goes for the demo of Microsoft’s Sync technology which integrates your MP3 player or phone into your car’s entertainment system. It demos well but can you imagine a mother with screaming kids in the car, talking at her phone and saying, “Play Cars” and the song Cars magically starts playing? It will be more like, “Sorry your device was not recognised, please re-enter your car.” Or, “I’m sorry, did you say, ‘Play Fart?’”
The demo of Live services was the same – what a wonderful world it would be if all of my contacts were on Windows Live, and had Windows Mobile phones, and had a Live Space, and used Live Messenger, and kept their Live Calendar up to date? Then planning an event would be so easy…
I’m interested to see who does the main CES keynote next year – will it even be someone from Microsoft? Imagine if Steve Jobs opened CES – that would be interesting.
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I first heard about this a while back but haven’t needed to use it yet. If you type a flight number into Google, the first result is the departure/arrival times with a link to track the flight using a service from www.flightstats.com
I thought that this would only work for the big airlines in countries like America, or the UK, but even an Air NZ flight from Tauranga to Wellington is correctly found:
Very impressive – beats trying to navigate the Air NZ site.
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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has certainly been generating lots of news over the last few days. I’ve got a couple of posts lined with my opinions on some of the more interesting items, starting with the news that Sony have released news that they will be joining the rest of the "Big Four" record companies in selling music tracks without the crippling DRM that all consumers loathe.
David Farrar’s Kiwiblog, and Ben Kepes both posted about this when the news broke declaring that Sony now gets it, and that DRM is finally dead.
Well, that was before the real details came out about Sony’s strategy in the non-DRM playing world…
Turns out, that to obtain these DRM-free tracks, you need to: visit a physical retail store; purchase a special card; go back to your computer at home; scratch off the back of the card revealing a code; log in to the Sony MusicPass website; enter the code; then download the glorious, DRM-free MP3 tracks.
And if that’s not bad enough, there are currently only 37 titles available to choose from. No, that’s not a typo.
I’ve had a quick glance over the titles available and I can see several Celine Dion albums, Barry Manilow, Tony Bennett, and several compilation albums (with imaginative titles like, "70’s Pop Hits", "80’s Pop HIts", "Sensational 60’s", "Rock of the 70’s", "Country Gold The 90’s", you get the idea…) There are also a couple of recent albums from the likes of Avril Lavigne, Alicia Keys, Sean Kingston, and Pink – but those make up the minority.
The best description of how the service works comes from writer, John Scalzi’s blog "Whatever", titled: "Why it won’t work" – including this excerpt:
Kid #2: So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.
Sony BMG dude: Er.
Kid #1: Why don’t you just sell non-DRM’d MP3s off Amazon, like every other major music corporation?
Sony BMG dude: Well.
Kid #2: You don’t actually want to sell unprotected MP3s, do you? You want to be able to say you’re doing it, but really, you want to make it so ridiculously inconvenient that people keep just keep buying CDs and DRM’d tracks off iTunes. Just admit it, bro.
Sony – you still don’t get it.
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Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years break.
So we’re already a few days into the new year and I’m just finalising my new years resolutions. I’m doing them a bit differently this year in that I’ll be documenting them and setting target dates with achievable milestones and measurables. In other words, I’ll be able to track and report on my progress through the year. I’ll be posting those soon…
I’ve got a good feeling about 2008. Last year was a bit of a transition year for me career-wise. I took the plunge and quit my permanent job with the aim of going contracting, while building my own consultancy business on the sidelines. I achieved that goal and now have several customers that depend on me for their I.T. needs, all while I have juggled three, different, full-time contracts. So in 2008, I plan to grow the consultancy side of the business to the point where I don’t need to rely on full-time contract roles to supplement my income. (I’ll also be buying a house, raising a daughter, and losing weight/getting fit…)
But I’ll be blogging more on that shortly, and getting back to the title of this post – I’ve brought back my old hairstyle to see in the new year. No more needing to use product, or worrying about hat-hair, or needing to find a good barber/hairdresser. Just a touch-up shave every few weeks and I’m good to go.
A little less tolerant every day