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

GMail Web Clips are SO useful!

Take a look at this picture:

Google has made its millions upon millions upon millions of dollars providing relevant content. Why is it then when you click on "Spam" in GMail, that you get an array of recipies to make spam sandwiches, spam bakes and spam tortilla sandwiches (among other things).

Congrats Google, that is not only incredibly relevant but also amazingly useful!

Finally trying out Last.fm Radio

Note: Disregard the following links and just try and use the links on my profile. WordPress can't seem to sort out the linking issue to last.fm.
Well I seem to have been upgraded to a last.fm subscriber (my profile) for now which is great. I get access to a few more feature which are good. Features that have always been free though are listening to radio. I fancy myself as a bit of a DJ or "good music chooser" might be the better choice for now, so why don't you sign up and then click some of the following links to fire up a 128kbits mp3 stream from last.fm of some good tracks.

• Blaze's Personal Radio plays a lot of the music I do, so check that one for some good tracks. It's quite a good match they have there of the stuff I get into, well done lastfm.
• Here's a radio station I made up combining a bunch of my favourite artists at the moment. Quite a disco house style, some french touch and a bit of electro in there too. This seems to play a lot of semi older tracks (80s and 90s style) but it's fantastic.
• I have a bunch of neighbours that like similar music to them, so why not listen to some of Blaze's Neighbours? They surely have some interesting stuff.

I normally wouldn't make a post about something like this but last.fm suprised me with the kind of tracks they were playing. Admittedly I dont listen to very much commercial music but they seem to be getting a lot of it down well.

If you're not on lastfm yet, sign up now and start saving your music history, you never know what you will find in the future. It is truly an exciting place to be.

The New Flash

I was just reading up on Alexoid’s blog, courtesy of one of his posts on UXmag (great read) and came across news that the new Flash will be called Blaze. Naturally I found this interesting as my first name is actually Blaze and I am a web designer and I do a lot of flash (increasingly so recently).

Nonetheless it’s always intersting to see what they will bring out with the new Flash. I think theyre just building up still and by version 10 we really will have a complete web platform. It currently is a platform but I just think it will be a lot easier.

We can’t comment on the timeframe for the release of BLAZE but it will be a full cycle so don’t expect anything to be coming any time soon. That said, you’ve probably already heard about the upcoming release of Flash Player 8.5 with an alpha available in a few weeks and a ship date next spring. Flash Player 8.5 will add a new virtual machine, AVM2, and a new programming language, ActionScript 3.0. This player release will coincide with the release of FlexBuilder 2, the new Eclipse-based developer tool for creating rich Flash-based applications.

Your Beta Better Be Brilliant

This is a letter to all companies creating new and innovative software and releasing it to the public. I just have to make this clear.

I happen to be very interested in new and innovative technology and in particular, software. Although I think the whole “Web2.0″ bandwagon is a lot of hot air, it is still pushing a lot of people to create better applications for users in more ways than we knew possible. This in turn creates a greater user experience for users and the web a better place for people to be.

The Web2.0 Bubble has only really started but look at the competition

It is just getting ridiculous the amount of Web2.0 companies out there and even worse is the fact that 99% of them are in “Beta” phase or even less. Now fair enough if being in Beta is one of the traits of Web2.0 due to the fact you can change your application at any time and adapt and move and evolve.

This however, can be your downfall if you don’t play it right.

So what are all of these companies doing wrong?

To put it simply; it’s one thing to gather input from users and model your application based on their feedback, it’s another thing to do this at the users expense by exposing them to something that’s just not quite right.

That dont impressa me much.

The real reason why I am writing this is because – on numerous occasions recently – I have come back to re-download or re-signup to a service that I have used before in Beta stage. The reason I came back is because I know I have used it and I know it can get the job done the quickest way possible. Upon first use of these products they really didnt impress me much. But wait! All of a sudden I am using them again and I rediscover how great they are plus they are stable and are just generally impressive.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. People don’t want to do what they have to do or use what they have to use… they want to be amazed by something, they want to be engaged by something. For those who disagree with me, you just don’t know it yet.

Developers, you need to ask yourself…

By letting people in on our beta is there a chance of destroying initial interest in our product?

Is it better to do demos and screencasts etc until the date when we can release something substatial and impressive.?

What can we do (marketing wise) to innovate and keep people interested instead of exposing some buggy software.

The Bottom Line

If someone sees something impressive, they will use it, they will continue using it and they will rave about it. People are getting smarter on the internet and if you disappoint them with your initial offerings, it is definately a bad marketing move on your part. Even in such a fast paced world you still need to sit back and work out the best way to do these things.

New Digg Commenting System

Would you believe how complicated the new digg commenting system is. I have never been a fan of digg, but it seems this is just going to complicate things even further. I can’t even work out what is going on or what conversation is happening within the comments.

Maybe they did this to appease the tech users (which admittedly, would be most of their userbase) but this doesnt get me any more excited to sign up at all.

I think, at the end of the day, It all comes back to K.I.S.S.

File Hosting… Advanced

I had a look around today for a place to host my files and ended up coming back to a place I had seen before, box.net. So what’s the big deal here? Well let me tell you:

• These guys have really competitive plans for hosting files.
• They also have a free account one you can sign up for right now with 1gb of space.
• They have a load of more nifty features.

The features:

• Public Sharing:
  For example click here and see a bunch of files I quickly uploaded.
• RSS Integration:
  When you share things it provides RSS feeds for everything. Imaging integrating that into a website etc, it would be so simple, just a matter of uploading the files.
• Photo Slideshows:
  Not the strongest feature but you can quickly get a photo slideshow going with minimal fuss.
• And a whole bunch of other stuff like:

• Desktop Sync
• Private Sharing
• Work Groups
• Remote Access
• Mobile Access
• etc etc etc

Go Sign up for the free one today and tell me it’s not good, please I dare you. I’m going to be using this service a lot more now.