Blackberry Music - Slacker vs. Pandora

If you have a compatible Blackberry, you're going to want to try out the free streaming music services from Slacker and BlackBerry.

Slacker's app has been out for a little while (and just got a version update), Pandora's is just out.

My take?

Slacker: the "now playing" screen has the album art for the cut that's playing, plus images in the background of the last 2 items that played, and the cover art of what's coming up:








Pandora: just the album art for what's playing:








Slacker: Shows you the name of the next artist that's coming up, Pandora does not.

Plus Slacker will show you the artist bio and an album review too (an option when you hit the button to the left of the track ball).

Both services allow you to give input on what you like and don't like, but Slacker's controls have a bit more finesse.

Pandora seems to load a touch faster.

There are graphical ads on Pandora, and audio ads every few songs on Slacker.

The audio coming from Pandora seems to play a bit louder at max volume?

Both do a great job of streaming surprisingly great sounding music on your BlackBerry. Slacker for BlackBerry just seems more polished.

Both are FREE - so how can you lose? -TT

Turning the iPod Touch into a phone | Apple - CNET News

Turn the iPod Touch into a phone!

It's Mini-PC!

Okay, it's probably a bit clunky, and most Smart Phones do as much, but I'd love one, wouldn't you!?

Wimax comes to Baltimore

Now you can get wireless access anywhere in Baltimore (at least that's the spin). A promo video from Intel:



The word from USA Today is it's fast, but not free.

"Fence Off" your wireless access area

What if you could "wall off" an area of Wi-Fi, where anyone outside a set perimeter couldn't access your signal? Check out the video:



I first saw this on the Seattle PI's new Seattle Tech Report site.

Attention! And then some $$ to go with it, please

We're drowning in choices - music, tv channels, web sites. Why does so little truly excite us? And why are so few people making any real money from all that's being put forth?

I think Kevin Kelly is really on top of it, with so many nuggets here:

Where ever attention flows, money will follow.

Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow.

...the fact that something does work or is helpful is no longer sufficient for success. Good, useful stuff is now the minimum standard. I might even make the argument that great stuff is the minimum.

Now anything that lasts has to also maintain our attention.

Getting a quick blitz of attention is a no-brainer. The challenge is maintaining a flow of attention in an environment where you are surrounded by millions of similar things that are good and useful.

The problem for a band is not being "discovered" but remaining interesting.

Time (does) not equal attention. I spend a lot of time in my car but I don’t give it much attention..

- all from Kevin Kelly

and

The challenge for everyone is that we are getting better and better at creating “interesting stuff” but there is a finite supply of attention. Our dynamic range of “interesting” is lessening, as everything in the technium is more perfectly designed to grab attention.

- from Stan James (www.wanderingstan.com) in the comments

Again, here's the piece.

Word clouds - easy to make at wordle.net

I've seen word clouds around for awhile, but wordle.net sure makes them easy to create. To get a grasp of what Barack Obama said in his Democratic Convention acceptance speech, I made one of his prepared text. "Promise" looms large, but it looks like if "America" and "American" were combined, that would have been the most used word. Click on the image to see it better (wordle.net lets you use their images in about any way as long as you give their site attribution).

In-car Wi-Fi. It's here.

Well that didn't take long.

Information Week says: "will deliver download speeds from 400 to 800 Kbps and average upload speeds of 400 Kbps."

Combining this with the voice recognition features of Microsoft's Sync is when I think it's all going to get very interesting.

Thoughts about how this competes with satellite radio here from Motley Fool.

Have you seen the new Micheal Jordan commercial?

Wow, so compelling. We'll pay attention when something is done this well:

More is not better when it comes to text on a web page

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says you better not have much text on a web page if you want to communicate with your readers.

"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely."

Google says a "watershed moment" for mobile Internet use

Google knows a whole lot of stuff from all the data it sees daily, and is revealing "We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating."

Google says their new phone search app has increased mobile searches by 20%.

Google's Android platform for mobile phones is coming later this year, and perhaps mobile phones are just the beginning...

Live video coming to YouTube in 2008?

Sure sounds like it from this scoop from Sarah Meyers as reported by CNET's tech news blog. Don't you think live video will explode then?

There are sites where you can do live streaming video now, but none with the reach and brand name of YouTube.

Seems like a real game changer. And will the Internet be able to take the surge in bandwidth demand?

Speaking Tips from an M.I.T. Professor

Looks like a lot of great speaking info in these online videos. Check out Prof. Patrick Winston's "Big 4" if you want a quick handy lesson on how present your ideas more effectively. I like his references to probability and psychology in explaining the need for cycling, repeating your point three times to insure that your audience has the chance to "get it." (I found this from Boing Boing, but the video referenced there was gone when I checked it).

A 12-min version of Prof. Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture"

This version of Prof. Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" (from Oprah) is short enough to watch for quick inspiration any time. One of my favorite lines of his (from the longer version of his speech): "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." Info on Dr. Pausch and links to the full-length original lecture video here.

magicJack lets you make unlimited calls for $40 a year thru your PC

magicJack sure looks like a bargain. And you can plug any regular phone in to it.

Apple files a patent for Customized Podcasts

So what if you could grab the parts of different Podcasts you like and have them mashed in to one Podcast? Intriguing.

Are you on LinkedIn?

This book looks interesting, no? I read about it here, where there's also an interesting tip to use LinkedIn Answers as a resource. I haven't signed up yet for LinkedIn. Not sure I could keep up with it enough for it to be beneficial.