Competitions, Strategy, Portability & more…

This is just a small update. As you may know I am a graphic designer / communication designer as well as (now) a music producer. While the design side of things is purely commercial I noticed the data portability group got into a little hot water with their logo being too similar to that of Red Hat’s logo (apparently). When I saw they were holding a competition for a new logo i quickly whipped up an entry and I’ve just been informed it’s in the top 15!

You can see the top 15 here:
http://dataportability.techcrunch.com/
(Mine is the first logo). It appears my logo is one of the more favoured logos which is excellent. If you are in a voting mood feel free to vote for my entry

Now on the other side of the coin – Music Production – I take it very seriously but at this stage I’m yet to have any official releases. I prefer to just remix what I like and pick up new techniques along the way. I made an entry into the Foals remix competition and now my remix is live. You can listen (stream & download) here:

http://www.last.fm/music/Foals/_/Electric+Bloom+(Blaze+Tripp+Remix)

The winner is based on the number of plays (scrobbles) to the last.fm system. If you arent registered to last.fm you really should. I personally think it is one of the best social networks around as it brings you closer to the people who like the same music you do. It works better than anything else I have seen anyway.

I dont normally enter competition so I find it funny that I’m in this spot now to try and promote these community based competitions. In any case it will be interesting to see the outcomes.

If you feel like sharing the love your votes will be appreciated very much

Hosting Madness

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

New Mix

Just playing around with testing to record a mix with my new DJ gear. This was done into the mic input of my laptop so im not sure if the sound quality is amazing. Its quite a compressed mp3 too which I didnt realise.

Keep in mind the mixing sorta sucks too. I did the whole thing in my headphones.

Enjoy:

Blaze Mix 9th October 2006 (Right click, Save Target/Link As)

NOTE: I HAVE RECORDED MANY MORE MIXES SINCE THIS POST THAT ARE MUCH BETTER QUALITY & WITH FULL TRACKLISTS ETC. HEAD OVER TO MY LAST.FM JOURNAL FOR ALLTHE LATEST MIXES WITH MP3 LINKS

Tracks Include songs by Quesh, Les Rythmes Digitales, Chromeo, MSTRKRFT & more….

Update: I recorded this mix with my mic input on my laptop and well I have now worked out that the mic really isnt the best option for recording an audio except for… you guessed it… your voice. Honestly though, I thought laptop makers would made an easy way to get a line-in input going. Ah well you can still enjoy the mix, just next time I’ll have to drag my desktop pc into the dj room

Also posted on Last.FM

NetVibes Rocks

I have just switched from Google Home to Netvibes and let me tell you, it's really really good. I like having a custom homepage with all of my favourite feeds and Google Home worked for me quite ok up until now. I had actually tried Netvibes when I made the choice to Google back in the day and it wasnt quite polished enough for my liking. The interface was clunky and hardly worked. Now they really have got it together and the service works great.

I currently have my homepage split up into:

• General (24)
• Blogs / Tech (49)
• Blogs / Business (19)
• Blogs / Music (73)
• Blog / Design (21)

It's working a treat . These guys really know how to put together an easy to use homepage and you have just won some business from a previous google user. Well done.

Free VOIP Phone Calls?

I haven't made a post in a while because I am extremely busy with new business but I thought this warranted a quick post.

In the light of Skype now offering free calls to USA and Canada it had made everyone think about phone calls a little bit differently. Phone calls just got a whole lot cheaper and Skype have set a benchmark. Skype is of course the most popular VOIP provider and actually one of the cheapest. It's not until you dig deeper and look at the companies without such a large front that you actually start to see real VOIP value.

I dont know how they do it but VOIPStunt seem to be pulling a stunt by offering 300 minutes of free calls to a number of destinations around the world.

They offer Free calls to any regular landline in:

Andorra Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Canada Chile China Colombia Denmark Finland France Georgia Germany Gibraltar

Hong Kong Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Japan Latvia Liechtenstein Luxembourg Malaysia Monaco Mongolia Netherlands New Zealand Norway

Panama Peru Portugal Singapore Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Taiwan Thailand United Kingdom United States Venezuela

Looking at the software its just like skype but a little less bloated. I typed in my number and it was calling 2 seconds later. I was amazed.

There truly is such a thing as a free lunch.

Of course there is going to be some fine print but it's nothing too unexpected:

* Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). If limit is exceeded, a minimal rate of 1ct/min will be charged (as shown in the VoipStunt software).

So i's obvious here that they want people to use the service so much that they exceed 300mins and buy some credit. 1c/min is actually cheaper than Skypes global rate anyway so I think we have a real contender here.

Moral of the Story: Just when the big guys release something amazing and great, don't forget the little guys could already have something that kills it