The filter

Posted by bordalix Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:26:00 GMT

I've spent the morning listening to music from my iTunes, but selected via The Filter. It's a great tool (free download here), which mixes the taste of thousands (like last.fm) but with a huge difference: it does it with my own music.

At the heart of The Filter is a music recommendation engine that is continually learning the listening tastes and choices of tens of thousands of music lovers. This huge collection of information is combined with your own likes and dislikes to create a personal understanding of what songs from your collection you will like to listen to and when.

It can be also used to create fresh playlists for your iPod, and to get a lot information about the music you are listening. It's great, for free, and with versions for Windows, Mac and Nokia phones.

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Tangerine, iTunes best friend

Posted by bordalix Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:19:00 GMT

Via pfig, iTunes best friend: Tangerine lets you easily create playlists based on the BPM and beat intensity of the songs in your iTunes library. It allows to save the playlist on the iTunes (which is great for my iPod playists), is free, and with a lovely design (click the image below for a bigger picture):

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Trend watching

Posted by bordalix Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:18:00 GMT

Today's bloglines reading gave me a lot of interesting stories about possible technical, social and political trends. Here are a few, rescued from my last browser crash:
  • Yahoo seems to be experimenting a new way of online ads: in Yahoo Movies, search for a movie (I used Vatel), go to the bottom of the page, and in the Sponsored Links box notice the links for different ad types. Click one and you will see ads only about the tag you just selected. Nice move, gives you less visibility, but targeted ads with higher levels of attention;
  • Still in the advertising market, it looks like the marketing guys are getting there: The New York Times as a story about marketers getting really excited with three second messages in phone displays, all powered up by GPS positioning and location target adverstising;
  • An interesting post on why Yahoo Music is better than iTunes for home entertainment. I admit I will think about this, really;
  • A beautiful idea, sharing broadband to increase speed, is becoming a business case: two companies, Mushroom Networks and WiBoost Inc., are about to launch their new products. It looks like good sense is prevailing, take a peak at the article;
  • Lawrence Lessig wrote an interesting post about the need for regulation on the "net neutrality" issue. If you want to know more on this subject, try the Wikipedia definition.

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2005 2.0

Posted by bordalix Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:06:00 GMT

Everybody is trying to make a list of important things for 2005. Well, I was to, but decided to simply label it the "2.0 year". New business models are building from the peer-to-peer social model found in the net, and from the ability to explore the long tail of the market. In the first, digg became bigger then Slashdot, del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo, and wikipedia and folksonomy became part of our lexical.

On the second, iTunes Music Store proved to be a huge business success, eBay paid several billions to have Skype, and everyone is trying to take a piece of the AdSense pie. Maybe the best presentation summarizing all this, was made by Brandon Schauer, check is sources (in the PDF) for further reading.

But this year was also the year of Ajax, JavaScript frameworks and mashups. The web is now easier to use, easier to develop, and the API business model is growing rapidly, as stated by the growth of the mashup matrix. For an excellent example of a mashup, take a look at BlockRocker (GoogleMaps + Amazon + Craigslist).

Well, 2005 was a good year, hope 2006 be even better to everyone.

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