Good morning! I saw this yesterday and I thought it was too cool not to share being that it combined two things I think are neat (Bob Dylan and typography). Turn up the volume and enjoy!
Happy Monday everyone! I hope that you all had a good weekend. Mine was spent in beautiful Lake Tahoe and I had a lovely time. I am back in full swing with lots happening in the JavaFX world that I am excited to share with all of you soon. I was browsing around this morning looking for a bit of inspiration to blog about and I stumbled upon aTunes.org. aTunes is a full-featured audio player and organizer AND it's developed in the Java programming language. How sweet is that? aTunes supports mp3s, ogg, wma, wav, flack and mp4 files and allows users to edit tags, organize music, rip audio cds and as an added bonus it also offers radio streaming. And..what's even cooler is that it is all built on open source software. For a full list of features and benefits, go here. I will definitely be playing around with this new player this week, so look for me to review more about it soon. I love new toys that involve music. Off to check it out now. Enjoy your day!
Last week while I was on my mini-vacation for my birthday, Chris Melissinos, our Chief Gaming Officer and one of the greatest people I know, launched his new radio show called "SHIFT Radio". The show is all about things that I find way cool like entertainment and the electronic lifestyle. His first show was last week and featured Hal Halpin, President of the Entertainment Consumers Association. You can check out the replay here. I can't wait to see what else and who else Chris brings on his show. I might have to give him my wish list of guests I would like him to talk with... my brain is already going.
Happy Monday everyone! I hope that you had a great weekend and your week is starting off well. I got some interesting statistics about mobile use cases that I thought I would share with you. I found some of the stats very interesting! I am in the process of uploading the video I shot with Heidi, aka sdngal on Friday to Sun Total Access Network, so stay tuned and enjoy your day!!
Mobile Usage Beyond Voice Compared to 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 billion fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, and 1.5 billion TV sets there are now 2.7 billion mobile phones in use. Between January 2001 and December 2010, our global society will have transformed from one where 13% carried a mobile phone, to one where 70% carry one. By the first quarter of 2006, thirty countries had already exceeded 100% per capita cell phone usage (over 100% penetration rate means that some individuals in the population have more than one phone). In that same year, there were about 241 million mobile phone users in the US (roughly 80% per capita mobile phone penetration). The U.S. market is not expected to top 100% per capita penetration until the year 2013, though usage has risen rapidly, according to the Simmons New Media Study.
While 59% of people who have used a cell phone in the past 30 days have text messaged, and 49% have taken photos, less than 2% have shopped by mobile and less than 5% have used mobile GPS – indicating the relative nascency of both mobile shopping and mobile GPS in terms of becoming ingrained consumer habits.
Text Messaging Globally, about two thirds of mobile phone users are active users of SMS text messaging which means roughly 1.8 billion people are actively texting today. Globally, there are twice as many active users of SMS as are active users of email. Interesting to note, out of the 10 bestselling books in Japan in 2007, five were "cellphone novels" -- books that were written on the mobile phone, with the authors tapping out sentence by sentence via text message. In the U.S., roughly 300 billion text messages were sent in 2007. SMS is typically read within an average of 15 minutes after receipt and responded to within 60 minutes. Whereas 65% of e-mail is spam, less than 10% of SMS is spam. The Finnish Prime Minister, for example, has a voicemail greeting saying he doesn't listen to voicemail, and to please send him a text message instead. With increasing usage of SMS in both public and private sectors, text mess! aging seems to be rapidly becoming an integral part of daily life. As text messaging becomes increasingly common, different usage drivers are emerging, according to the recent Simmons New Media Study. Whereas only about 19% of text messagers say they use text messaging as a means of communication between themselves and colleagues, 62% say they use text messaging to communicate with friends, and 55% say they use it to communicate with their significant others. Consumers are also starting to differentiate how they view text messaging. On a 5-point scale, 28% of consumers who use text messaging view text messaging as a very important source of information. 37%view it as a very important source of communication and 21% view it as an important source of entertainment.
Mobile Banking A whole range of new services could become widely available in key markets as early as 2009. The rise of contactless payments made from cell phones are predicted to be commonplace by 2012. The potential for low-income consumers in the U.S. to use mobile banking has already been demonstrated in countries like the Philippines and South Africa, where mobile banking has been successfully commercialized. Interfaces can be made simpler for faster access and ease of use for this consumer segment. The age group most likely to engage in mobile banking are 25-34 year-olds (amongst those consumers who have cell phones and have used them in the past 30 days). U.S. mobile phone users seem to be increasingly comfortable making banking and purchase transactions while on-the-go. Already, 16 percent of mobile phone subscribers use mobile banking services with 60% of those people using this service at least once a week. An additional 35% of non-users described them! selves as being open to checking bank account balances and transferring funds via their mobile devices. A third of those surveyed (33%) said they would like to receive text message alerts from their financial institutions. The survey also found that the biggest barrier affecting consumer acceptance of mobile banking and commerce is security concerns over personal data.
Mobile Search Mobile Search is an evolving branch of information retrieval services that is centered around the convergence of mobile platforms and mobile handsets or other mobile devices. The previous difficulty of operating across mobile handset brands and models, not to mention limited applications, add-ons, software and graphic interface are starting to be addressed in the marketplace. The smartphone market is expected to grow at a 30%+ compound annual growth rate for the next five years globally, exceeding unit sales for laptops. The main driver of this growth has been an improved overall user experience and ease of use with mobile web, fueled by the technological breakthroughs allowing mobile web access to begin to approach the ease and speed of use of computer web access. Amidst a flurry of new mobile web capabilities – the jury is out on who is in the lead. What is clear is the increasing number of players offering an open source mobile OS which s! eems most likely to boost innovation to enable mobile interoperability. Coat-tailing the increased speed and usability of mobile web, mobile video blogging tools are proliferating for early adopters including: Kyte.tv mobile, Floobs, KaZiVu, YouTube Mobile.
Mobile Social Networks Mobile social networking is social networking where one or more individuals of similar interests or commonalities, converse and connect with one another using the mobile phone. About 50 million people, or about 2.3% of the global population of mobile users, use their mobile for social networking (including chat services and multimedia sharing). Penetration rates are forecast to grow by 12.5% over the next five years. Big social media networks all went mobile in 2007 (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Bebo), supported by more flat rate introductions on different markets.
GPS Location-specific mobile services and applications (cell-ID and/or GPS) driven by the open Google Maps API and flickr’s geotagged photo function have potential to increase significantly as new technology makes this easier to use and offers more applications for mobile users to choose from. Geo-tagging is when a picture is taken, the location of the photographer is saved and overlaid onto services like Google Maps to produce a map of where the photographer has been. Mobile GPS usage among mobile phone owners skews decidedly younger, although the 35-44 age group indexes slightly above the market average. There is a severe drop-off for the older groups.
Given the public's growing appetite for connective technology, it's not surprising that mobile phone penetration is on par with Internet access. Approximately 80% of respondents reported owning a mobile phone, while 78% of Americans have Internet access, according to a new study by InsightExpress. Mobile phone penetration is actually spread equally across the generations. Although Gen Y (18-24) leads the pack at 85%, it is followed closely by Gen X (25-44) at 82%, younger Baby Boomers (45-54) at 80% and older Baby Boomers (55-64) at 79%.
Happy Friday everyone! This week has been busy getting in gear for a lot of COOL and exciting things in the software world at Sun. Earlier this week, Mary Smaragdis, sent around a very cool email to all of us bloggers here at Sun and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to let all of my readers know the news! Get Smart featuring the extremely funny Steve Carrell and actress Anne Hathaway hits theaters today and Sun has some pretty prominent product placement in it. This movie is sure to be a big summer blockbuster, so I look forward to seeing it on the big screen sometime this weekend. What a better way to beat this heat that we're having here in Northern California then going to the movies and laughing for a few hours? Oh, and if you are wondering what Sun products are starring in the movie (and in the still below) it is none other than our Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System. Pretty sweet, huh? Also, Heidi aka SDNGal (and my partner in all things social media) and I shot a new video for Sun Total Access Network that I will be putting up shortly. Don't forget to stop by and check it out! Alright, I am off to enjoy the weekend...I hope you have a great one too!
Happy Thursday everyone! Its that time of the week again. I have a long list of artists that I am going to be introducing you to, but I figured I would stay on tradition from last week and introduce you to a band that I will be seeing this weekend. On Saturday, I am hitting up the Greek Theater in Berkeley (such a great outdoor venue..smaller, intimate, perfect) and we are going to see Death Cab For Cutie. Its been a few years since I have been able to catch them live and while they were at the Fillmore back in April on their way to Coachella, the show sold out in 2 minutes and people were asking for a ridiculous amount of money per ticket, so I sadly, couldn't make it. But I knew they would be back soon as they were releasing their latest studio album this year and before I knew it, I got the ticketmaster alert that they were coming back in June.
I am sure you are wondering how the band figured out what to name themselves. I know I asked myself that when I first heard their name so to end any confusion any of you may have, the boys picked the name "Death Cab For Cutie" from a British band named The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band who had a song by the very same name on their 1967 album, 'Gorilla'. Ben Gibbard, lead singer for DCFC, took the name from The Beatles 1967 TV movie and album, "The Magical Mystery Tour", where the song was prominently featured.
Death Cab For Cutie is comprised of lead singer Ben Gibbard, lead guitarist Chris Walla, bassist Nick Harmer and Nathan Good on drums. Death Cab for Cutie's music has been described as "a literate, whispery style, the kind of stuff that normall sounds better in headphones thank in large venues" and Ben's high tenor voice has been described as "remarkable, vunerable and Zen-like." I remember the first time I heard DCFC and I wondered, who is this band, because it was a sound I hadn't heard before. Shortly after that, I got my RollingStone in the mail and while flipping through the pages, saw their review of 'Transatlanticism'. They commented that the album was "melodic, melancholy songs about feeling both smart and confused, hopelessly romantic but wary of love." Having read the description and already heard a few of the songs, I quickly went down to the local record store (ahhhh...remember those days?) and picked up a copy. A few years later, 'Plans' would grace our ears with such amazing songs as "Brothers on a Hotel Bed", "Soul Meets Body" and "Crooked Teeth". Entertainment Weekly commented on the music on 'Plans' say "The lush arrangements are long on hothouse organs and pianos, but short on the squirmy guitars and squirrelly beats that, on Gibbard's best work, offset his sweet voice and boarderline maudlin poetics with a sense of emotional danger."
Their latest studio release, 'Narrow Stairs' has been described by Chris Walla as "weird, spectacular and creepy". It was released on May 13, 2008 and has been met with plaudits from new and old fans. In an album review, MTV writer, James Montegomery said that he believes that this album could make "an early contender for the best album of 2008." The new album is their first to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Below you will find the official video from their first single off of 'Narrow Stairs' called "I Will Possess Your Heart". The intro is a bit long, but the song soars once it gets going. Enjoy the music and as always, enjoy your day!
Happy Friday everyone! Bill Sheppard, Chief Digital Media Officer, forwarded on some momentum in the Blu-ray space that I thought I would share with all of you:
Blu-ray Disc hardware and software are making huge gains in the home entertainment market. Although hardware supplies are limited at retail,
demand is extremely high. Here are some interesting facts about Blu-ray:
According to a study released by the NPD GROUP on June 3:
Almost 4 million HDTV owners plan to buy a BD-capable player in the next six months. Consumers who purchased a BD set-top player cited "leading-edge
technology" and a "superior viewing experience" as primary reasons for making the purchase. And they indicated a clear preference for BD content.
In a survey conducted in the first half of May 2008 of almost 3,000 PS3 owners, Sony Computer Entertainment America gathered the following information:
Approximately 52% plan to purchase 6+ BD titles in the next 12 months
Approximately 50% prefer to exclusively purchase or rent movies in BD format, even if they have to wait longer for the title release.
Over 40% report increased movie viewing since the purchase of PS3.
Blu-ray Disc software sales in the U.S. have exceeded the 11 million mark. Blu-ray Disc software sold for the first four months of 2008 are more than 4.5 times the amount sold in the same time period in 2007. In the first quarter of 2007, Blu-ray Disc sales for day-and-date titles represented 1.7% of total sales for the top 10 selling titles in comparison to the DVD version of the same title. In the first quarter of 2008, that percentage has been raised to 14.3%.
It's that time of week everyone! I haven't featured a new artist of the week in awhile, so I couldn't go this week without introducing you the amazing talent that is Joseph Arthur. Prior to making it in the music world, Josephwas recording home demos, playing local Atlanta clubs and working at Clark Music Store. As luck should have it, Peter Gabriel's A&R associate Harvey Schwartz was presenting him with some new artists at his apartment in New York City around that very same time. One of the demo tapes belonged to Joseph's first EP 'Cut and Blind'. Once Gabriel heard the lyrics to "History", he repeated the line "your history acts as your gravity" over and over, realizing the talented songwriter was a great fit for his label Real World Records. Both he and Schwartz arranged a live audition in NYC, where Arthur flew up from Atlanta. The night was clearly a success as Gabriel had enlisted friend Lou Reedto record the show. Within a few months Arthur was signed, and recording for his debut album began at Gabriel's Real World Studios with producer Marcus Dravs (experimental Bjorkengineer). The debut album 'Big City Secrets'was released worldwide in March 1997. Two years later, Joseph recorded an EP called 'Vacany', which earned him a Grammynomination for best artistic packaging. One of my favorite albums by Arthur is his 2002 release of 'Redemption Son'. The song "Honey and the Moon" entangled me from the first few guitar riffs and I have been entranced with Arthur since. I couldn't find the actual video for the song, but here is a tribute to one of my favorite actresses and fashion icons, Audrey Hepburn, set to the song that started it all for me. Enjoy the tribute, enjoy the song, enjoy Joseph Arthur, and of course, enjoy the day!
Bill Sheppard, Chief Digital Media Officer here at Sun passed this article on about Java TV momentum and I wanted to share it with all of you!
Sony, who had been leading a group lobbying the FCC to mandate an alternate to OCAP, has signed an MoU with the six largest cable operators to begin producing tru2way (OCAP) products. The binding MoU also obligates the cable operators to deploy a minimum of 10 million tru2way settop boxes in addition to the retail devices which will be available from Sony, Panasonic, and others. This essentially puts to rest any possibility that a non-Java technology will be established as an alternate platform to tru2way, increases the likelihood that the FCC will formally mandate OCAP for CE devices, and clears a path for DirecTV, Dish, Verizon, and AT&T to migrate to Java-based settop boxes.
Java TV momentum continues! Rock on! Enjoy your day!
This week I have been a happy blogger again. I have to admit I had somewhat of a bout with writer's block after JavaOne and it took the flip cam to inspire me again. My team is currently going through all the super cool videos we shot during JavaOne and the ones we have edited, etc. are steadily getting uploaded to Sun Total Access Network. Stop by when you get a chance. I had the awesome opportunity to chat with Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems during the SDN Rocks party and our latest video is of our chat...check out what we have to say, the SDN Rocks party going on behind us and the guests rocking out on Rock Band! Thanks again Chris for being so awesome...you are the best! Enjoy your day!
I have been holding this information as a secret for the last few weeks and I am totally excited that I can finally share it with you!
At this year's JavaOne, music legend and pioneer Neil Young will join Sun Microsystems' executives during the opening keynote session on May 6 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Come hear and see what Java means to Neil Young. Neil's appearance will include a special demo of a new music project.
About 15,000 people are expected to attend this year's JavaOne conference from May 6-9, and thousands will join Sun Microsystems for the second annual CommunityOne event the day prior -- on May 5. The Java platform has attracted over 6 million software developers worldwide, and powers more than 5.5 billion devices including mobile phones, smart cards, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, PCs, car navigations systems and more.
How HOT is that?! I can't wait until everyone hears what Neil and us here at Sun have been working on. Its super cool. :)
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