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<title>BitDepth2013</title><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/index.html</link><description>Personal technlogy reports from Trinidad and Tobago</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2013 Mark Lyndersay</dc:rights><dc:date>2013-06-17T22:32:35-04:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:49:45 -0400</lastBuildDate><item><title>BitDepth#890 - June 18</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2013</category><dc:date>2013-06-17T22:32:35-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth890.html#unique-entry-id-311</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth890.html#unique-entry-id-311</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The keynote address at this year&rsquo;s Worldwide Developer Conference found Apple in a curious place.   The company is making insane amounts of money, but its share price has dropped over the last few months, and the deadliest word in the world for Apple has been muttered more often lately. 

...In the last three months, Blackberry, along with the development axes of Nokia/Microsoft and Samsung/Google Android have fielded strong contenders in the smartphone market that have begun to make Apple&rsquo;s five-year-old iOS UI start to look, well, dated.


A refreshed operating system for its phones and tablets, iOS version 7 grabbed a lot of time on stage and that&rsquo;s hardly surprising.   WWDC sold out in 71 seconds this year and many of those developers are keen to get a slice of the considerable pie that Apple has been sharing out to the tune of US$10 billion since the App store opened to serve its phones and iPad devices.


Other announcements checked boxes that the company seemed to be ignoring while offering up some juice in the music market segment where it does well.


The arrival of iTunes Radio is more of a preemptive strike than a business initiative for Apple.   It&rsquo;s never been keen about getting into the streaming music business, but it can&rsquo;t ignore the success of Spotify and Rdio, so the new service is really about keeping streaming music fans in the iTunes software ecosystem that underpins its lucrative hardware sales.


It&rsquo;s US only, but the music licensing arrangements that have blocked access to both Spotify and Rdio locally suggest that we won&rsquo;t be streaming any iTunes music anytime soon.


There&rsquo;s a new version of Mac OSX that isn&rsquo;t named after a feline, Airport Express and a refresh of Final Cut Pro X coming, which should offer some hope to professional movie editors who have despaired waiting for Apple to get its act together with the software. 


...The svelte laptop sparked the ultrabook movement and remains a prime choice for users looking for power in a lightweight computing device.   An Air that&rsquo;s faster and offers longer battery life is just logical, with sales growth of 100 per cent year over year.


The biggest surprise of the event was the new Mac Pro, the absolute zenith of the company&rsquo;s computing hardware.   Apple doesn&rsquo;t sell many of these units relative to its tablets and phones, but the people who use these imposing towers are influential creatives who need the most powerful iron. 

...The new Mac Pro isn&rsquo;t an upgrade bone tossed to those power users.   It&rsquo;s a radical rethinking of what a professional tower might look like, as radical in its way as the NeXT Cube was in its day.


What it really looks like is the unholy love child of Darth Vader and R2D2 and it&rsquo;s a continuation of Apple&rsquo;s drive toward minimalism and a purer marriage of form and function in its devices.


The device known as a Mac Pro has shrunk from an imposing box with a menacing cheese grater front face into a polished black aluminium cylinder an eighth of its former size that runs up to 2.5x faster. 


All the hardware is wrapped around a solid aluminium triangle that the company has dubbed a unified thermal core (what George Lucas could have done with a name like that in Star Wars, one wonders) that sucks heat from a 12 core processor and twin video cards up through the top of the computer.


Current Mac Pro users will quickly realise that Apple has flung everything else outside the um, cylinder.   The company is betting on USB 3 (four ports) and Thunderbolt 2 (six ports), now capable of 20GBps transfers to connect all the stuff that was once stuffed into the Mac workstation box.


Expect an explosion in professional devices designed to mate with the new Mac Pro (one reason for Apple&rsquo;s unprecedented curtain raising on a computer it isn&rsquo;t ready to sell), ranging from external PCI card chassis to a greater range of fast external drives and big data connectors for photographers and videographers looking to make use of the faster Thunderbolt ports.


The radical redesign of the Mac Pro was only one of several messages that this WWDC keynote addressed.   It wasn&rsquo;t the first such presentation since the passing of Steve Jobs, but it&rsquo;s the first to address speculation about the company&rsquo;s direction since then.


So yes, Apple has taken note of the concerns about its ageing iOS platform, yes, it is offering cutting edge updates to its popular Macbooks, yes, it intends to meet the needs of its professional users, yes, it will update MacOS for its computer users and on top of that, yes we can return manufacturing to the USA, beginning with the new Mac Pro.


But really, it fell to Phil Schiller, the bear-like, gregarious presenter of many keynotes to sum up Apple&rsquo;s attitude with the words, &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t innovate anymore my ass!&rdquo;


...Fifty billion apps on the iOS store have been downloaded in five years and Apple has paid developers $10 billion, $5 billion just in the last year.


Apple claims that the MacBook is the number one notebook in the US now, outpacing the PC in annual growth 15 percent to 3 percent over the last five years.    Total growth over the last five years: 100 percent versus 18 percent for the PC.


...&ldquo;True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation: It&rsquo;s about bringing order to complexity,&rdquo; Jony Ive on iOS7 which has attracted comparisons to current Android flavours.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#889 - June 11</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2013</category><dc:date>2013-06-10T21:13:21-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth889.html#unique-entry-id-310</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth889.html#unique-entry-id-310</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Behind the blockbusters


Kirk, Spock and Khan in suitably explosive promotional materials for Star Trek: Into Darkness.


This wet season, or summer as our friends up north describe it, cinemas have exploded with action beginning with Iron Man 3 and continuing with Star Trek: Into Darkness.


Both are films that seem riddled with amazingly realised but utterly impossible technology, but neither, ultimately is about science.


Once you get past the beautiful people making pretty on the screen and the convincingly loud and colourful explosions, they are both really about politics and terrorism.


Exploring that is going to mean discussing the stories, which in turn means that there be spoilers here.   If you haven&rsquo;t seen either of these films, cut this column out or bookmark it, depending on your preferred reading medium, and get back to me if you want your cinema surprises intact.


With the unspoken, post 9/11 ten-year moratorium on cinematic destruction of cities apparently up since the coming of the film 2012, it&rsquo;s seems that it&rsquo;s now okay to blow up buildings in heavily populated city centres again, though the imperatives for such plots are much weightier than they used to be.


Tyler Durden might have been able to destroy buildings in the name of casual nihilism in 1999&rsquo;s Fight Club, but such motivations seem flimsy to the producers of today&rsquo;s special effects epics, even if the digital destruction is so much easier than it used to be.


You can&rsquo;t just blow a beach house into the sea or unleash a savagely destructive alien horde or even crash a spaceship into a city anymore without getting your politics right it seems.


In both the third instalment of Iron Man, and the second in JJ Abrams' revamped Star Trek series, the real villainy is to be found in genetic manipulation for profit. 


Seeking human perfection for such petty concerns as racial purity seem pretty lame when weighed against conquering all of known reality.


Yet in both films, the vehicle for planning the triumph of the superior man is old-fashioned terrorism, the blunt instrument of fear through intimidation and uncertainty.


One might think that a more nearly perfect human specimen might be inclined to think beyond using fear as a tool, but screenwriters are all too human, unfortunately, and a plot designed to support the machinations of a superior mind might be something of a non sequitur in a film that&rsquo;s buoyed by people running around jumping off things that are breaking apart.


The engine of evil in Iron Man 3 is a weasel of a corporate scientist (disturbingly well played by Guy Pearce) who conscripts the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) to be the face of his wicked plans. 


The Mandarin of the film abandons his comics origins as an Asian genius with super alien jewelry to become a Bin Laden analogue, the role further distanced from an itchy proximity to real world terrorism by an amusing plot twist.


Star Trek: Into Darkness deftly, if worshipfully resurrects the best film in the original series by rethinking Star Trek&rsquo;s Nazi ubermensch cautionary tale, Khan Noonien Singh, as the perfect Mujahideen, a superweapon who outgrows his trainers and handlers. 


Benedict Cumberbatch displaces Ricardo Montalblan&rsquo;s theatrical flourishes of superiority with an unrelenting ruthlessness and casual manipulativeness that&rsquo;s even scarier than the cold dead eyes and deadly physical precision that anchor his performance.


The new Khan doesn&rsquo;t just see humanity as bugs, they are bugs he can&rsquo;t be bothered to squash when he can just get them to kill each other.


Both of these films have been wildly successful.   Is it because they blow stuff up real good or because they are quietly telling us something about our reality that we might never pay attention to if Charlie Rose or Noam Chomsky laid it out for us?]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#888 - June 04</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - June 2013</category><dc:date>2013-06-03T22:04:01-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth888.html#unique-entry-id-309</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth888.html#unique-entry-id-309</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[At left, my personalised configuration of the Lumia 920, with the apps I use most often right at the top of the scrolling list.   At right, using the keyboard in the text messaging app surprisingly switched to Portugese Spanish and wouldn&rsquo;t switch back to English until I deleted all the non-English language profiles.


For the last two weeks I&rsquo;ve been using a Nokia Lumia 920 as my primary phone.   This is probably the toughest test a device has to go through with me, and a successful phone must prove that it can be configured to work the way I want it to.


Most casual smartphone users will find most of what they want to use on the Lumia.   The software store built into the phone offers clients for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that are well designed and work well. 


...Nokia includes a free image editor, Creative Studio, on its section of the Windows Phone store. 

...Filebox will allow hardcore Dropbox users to access their assets and hardcore Windows users will find a very capable Skydrive client that fits into an Office software workflow well.


Lumia owners also get one unique app; a full version of the Modern UI Office suite that&rsquo;s file compatible with current versions of the software.


For some business focused users, this may well prove to be the killer app of the Lumia line, allowing them to open work files on Skydrive using their smartphone.


Except for Wunderlist, all my hot button, or rather hot tile apps are present and accounted for on Windows Phone 8 and if they weren&rsquo;t, I found software to substitute for the missing apps. 

...Unfortunately, some of the built-in apps have the feel of unfinished software.   Just days after starting to work with the phone, 11 system level updates appeared, at least one of which fixed a bookmark problem I was having with audiobooks on the device.


...On Windows Phone 8, at least for now, text streams along the updates for built in apps, providing a brisk narrative of what&rsquo;s being replaced. ...  On a more positive note, if you don&rsquo;t like some of the included software, you can simply delete it.


Several update cycles later, most of the wonkiness seemed to have been ironed out on the device, but some of the software design decisions seem odd. 


You sweep from left to right to drill down into the file system and then from right to left to get back to where you were.


...I&rsquo;m sure there&rsquo;s some internal logic that I&rsquo;m not getting here, and I still don&rsquo;t understand why a phone call demands first a sweep upward and then a tile press to answer a call.   Surely, one gesture should let the phone know I want to answer the call?


...The People tile, a quite attractive display of images culled from e-mail and social media avatars, doesn&rsquo;t seem to serve any useful purpose, though it livens up a tile display quite nicely.   You can resize tiles from a tiny square to a full screen spanning rectangle, but it isn&rsquo;t always clear which tiles make sense at which size.


The tile for the store displays an &ldquo;updates available&rdquo; count regardless of its size, but the Twitter tile does nothing but display an icon no matter how big you make it.   A Windows Phone 8 user&rsquo;s best bet is to try tiles at different sizes and see what works best for them.


If you squeeze the centre of the volume buttons on the Lumia, a menu drops from the top which controls any currently playing audio.   I found this out by accident, but it&rsquo;s enormously useful.


Despite a quite serious amount of effort, I can&rsquo;t figure out how to create a playlist of songs in the media player (I finally looked it up, it takes five utterly non-intuitive steps to do). 


...The OS doesn&rsquo;t seem to know what to do with files that appear in a Dropbox/Filebox file listing and the Windows Phone app for Mac, which claims to have file transfer capabilities, is useless.


I ended up connecting to the phone in Windows 7 in virtualisation on the Mac, where the device behaved like it had met a long lost friend.


...The Lumia will be a big win with serious-minded users, particularly business people who want an extension of their desktop experience on their smartphones. 


The phone has a great camera, which will be part of a roundup of smartphone imaging in a couple of weeks, but it&rsquo;s hard to see how this collaboration by Nokia and Microsoft will excite a young audience.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#887 - May 28</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2013</category><dc:date>2013-05-27T19:30:22-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth887.html#unique-entry-id-308</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth887.html#unique-entry-id-308</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Here&rsquo;s a recent e-mail that shows how spammers try to subvert digital controls.


In 1, the sender&rsquo;s e-mail address is given an official sounding title, but the e-mail client reveals the actual sender, who is not e-mailing from an official LinkedIn account.   This field, where users will normally put their real names, can be anything, including another e-mail address entirely and some clients will show that and not the underlying e-mail address as seen at left.


The extended e-mail header is revealed in 2, which tells the truth about the e-mail.   A skilled mail server wrangler can read this geek stream and divine a great deal about this e-mail&rsquo;s routing.


For 3, the sender has spent a bit of effort making the body of their e-mail look like an official LinkedIn transmission, albeit with a link that looks nothing like something that the social media service would use. 


Regardless of which side of the political divide you choose to support, it&rsquo;s clear that the discussions about the recent revelation of a thread of e-mail conversations offered in Parliament by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley has provoked strong emotional reactions.


That&rsquo;s understandable when it comes to politics, but such sentiments are wholly out of place when it comes to the technologies underlying even such commonplace services as e-mail transmissions.


...It deals in verifiable bits that either are or are not.   A message either has a proper transmission header or it doesn&rsquo;t.   If it doesn&rsquo;t, it's unverifiable and useless as evidence, regardless of who offers it.   This may be a confusing matter for politicians, who trade in mood, feelings and allegiances, none of which have any impact on bits. 


Information on the web may have mood and feeling, but its existence is trackable and verifiable every step of the way (unless people take the trouble to use anonymizers and other identity obscuring tools). 


E-mails can't just look right or wrong, they are either truly electronic transmissions and can be verified as such with a trackable footprint or they are not.   It really is as simple as that.


If that last bit looks familiar, it&rsquo;s because it&rsquo;s part of an answer to questions put to me by Global Voices on the matter.   I repeat that statement here because it seems worth considering in the heat of opinion on the matter. 


As of this writing, there has been no public revelation by the Opposition Leader of digital copies of these alleged transmissions that might be scrutinised by authorities.


That this simple fact has not occupied a greater profile in the discourse is an illustration of the passions driving the situation and it may point to a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of e-mail, which can&rsquo;t simply be transposed to print while retaining its essential character.


Like much of modern technology, the humble e-mail has come to be dressed in appealing and readable skins of design, whether users choose to read their mail in a dedicated client or using web based e-mail services.


An e-mail is far more than the words we are invited to read because this digital document, like its predecessor postal mail, travels through multiple collection and transfer points before reaching its destination.


Sitting next to the management in our living room, I&rsquo;ll often send an e-mail with a link to something interesting.   To speed things up, I&rsquo;ll usually send it to her business domain using my business domain, since both are hosted by the same company.


That doesn&rsquo;t mean that they will pass through the same server though.   That e-mail will leave my laptop, stop at Flow, get rerouted to the hosting company&rsquo;s servers, get transferred to her e-mail server, then make its way back, stopping off at Flow on the way back. 


Depending on the state of the Internet at the precise moment I send the e-mail off, it may get rerouted halfway around the world before reaching its destination, someone sitting within reach of my outstretched hand.


Every routing that e-mail takes gets logged within the e-mail itself and provides a unique imprint of its specific source, transfer history and destination.   General David Petraeus found out just how detailed that information can be to his considerable misfortune.


Detectives pursuing clues among physical objects look for identifying information, DNA evidence, fingerprints, materials that are out of place.


Digital detectives assigned to review these accusatory e-mails will search for much the same thing, but it will be found in the bits of digital transmission, not in paper facsimiles.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#886 - May 21</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2013</category><dc:date>2013-05-20T20:44:05-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth886.html#unique-entry-id-307</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth886.html#unique-entry-id-307</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[At a casual glance, Nokia&rsquo;s new Lumia looks like a colourful, hip iPhone alternative.   The device is a robust effort at reclaiming Nokia&rsquo;s once robust presence among smartphone manufacturers. 

...Here&rsquo;s the first confusing thing about the Lumia line of phones being offered now in Trinidad and Tobago.   The new phones, introduced almost exactly in sync with updated Lumia devices worldwide, carry the same names as the earlier line of phones, introduced in November 2012.


So the phone that I&rsquo;m currently testing, billed as the Lumia 920 in T&T, is actually the Lumia 928 in the US being sold by Verizon. 

...Correction, May 20, 2103: According to Jarrod Best-Mitchell, Nokia's territory manager for Trindad and Tobago, the Lumia 920 available exclusively from Digicel in T&T is the same model that was introduced in November 2012.   The 928, which I have not personally seen, has a different design.


Anyone curious about the differences between the two models can view GSMArena's comparison here.


The indecision in the Lumia only begins with this curious decision to reuse an old model number on international versions of the phone.


Nokia&rsquo;s Lumia line is a nexus of desperation, bringing together two powerful names in technology, Nokia and Microsoft, to create a phone that both hope will become a strong third alternative to the popular iPhone and the open market assault of phones based on Google&rsquo;s Android operating system. 


The race is on for that coveted third place between Blackberry, who have fielded a credible competitive product in the Z10 and Q10 devices, which finally give the one-time smartphone leader a fighting chance in today&rsquo;s markets and Nokia and Microsoft have partnered to create something equally credible and pleasingly designed.


I&rsquo;ve been seeing phones based on this OS while in development for at least two years now, usually in the hands of Microsoft&rsquo;s PR people and executives and the quick demos I got then of the platform were intriguing and full of promise.


Windows Phone 8, the operating system that Microsoft developed for this refreshed charge to the forefront of the smartphone race, will be immediately familiar to anyone who has worked with Windows 8.


It&rsquo;s a lot like Windows RT scaled down for a phone, except for the fact that it actually isn&rsquo;t.   There&rsquo;s an apps platform based on tiles capable of displaying information as well as launching software.


There&rsquo;s no old Windows code, either developed for the phone or the desktop OS lurking under the slick graphics, and that represents a commitment that Microsoft hasn&rsquo;t demonstrated with its ambivalent Windows 8 desktop and tablet software. 


On phones, as with WinRT, it&rsquo;s all tiled apps all the time and here&rsquo;s where things get seriously odd.   Software developed for the Modern UI, which looks exactly like the tiled software on Windows Phone 8, isn't platform compatible.   Developers must recode and recompile apps developed for the desktop OS to run on the new Windows Phone platform.


This puzzled me enough at last year&rsquo;s launch of the new OS that I cross-examine the point during a Q&A in Mexico (read It&rsquo;s all about the apps here).   Wunderlist, for instance, one of the apps I consider critical to my mobile experience is under development for Windows RT and a phone app will get done after that.


This bit of developer-level clumsiness aside, both Microsoft and Nokia have knocked themselves out to create a strong smartphone contender.   Developers will want to look at this article, which details which bits of code are portable between the platforms and what's not.


...There&rsquo;s an inductive charger available for the phone, which only adds to the general feel of sleekness.


The dual-core Qualcomm Krait processor is snappy, and the devices are generously kitted with flash storage, the 920/928 shipping with 32GB of storage.


This turns out to be crucial, because the Lumia line of phones are sealed boxes.   You can change the SIM, but there&rsquo;s no slot for an SD card, and you can&rsquo;t change the battery.   One puzzling choice in the limited real estate of a smartphone&rsquo;s screen is the inclusion of a hardcoded search icon for Bing right where the back/return button is on Android. 


I can&rsquo;t think of a single time when I&rsquo;ve tapped that button intending to search for anything, but it&rsquo;s come up often through accidental muscle memory presses. ...  design decision, the agreeable handling of the phone suggests that Microsoft and Nokia have managed to come up with a distinctive alternative treatment to the iPhone&rsquo;s design.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#349 -August 2002</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth+</category><dc:date>2013-05-13T22:58:02-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth349.html#unique-entry-id-306</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth349.html#unique-entry-id-306</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[You&rsquo;ve created great music and performing it with energy and enthusiasm, fed the media with a steady stream of free CDs, some of which seem to change weekly. 

...You&rsquo;ve built a serious, committed following that loves your music, will travel to hear you play and talks about your work as if it were the most important thing in their lives.


Now it&rsquo;s time to take the next big step, and all the big rock biographies say that&rsquo;s hooking up with a major label and bringing your music to the world.   Well, I&rsquo;m a fan and I&rsquo;m here to tell you that they are wrong.   Hooking up with a big label will be the death of you and this is why.


In a brilliant dissection of the recording industry as it exists today on the website Salon, Courtney Love, sometime actress, widow of Nirvana&rsquo;s Kurt Cobain and leader of the rock band Hole, explains just where those huge advances that get paid to bands go.


In Love&rsquo;s brutal math (see Courtney&rsquo;s math, below), a new band with a hit record earns nothing.   This is the math that allows record companies to spend US$45m lobbying against online music distribution while simultaneously telling artists that they have no money.


At the height of his popularity, Prince would appear on stage with the word &ldquo;slave&rdquo; written on his cheek.   Acts like Destiny&rsquo;s Child and Toni Braxton, at the peak of their careers, declare bankruptcy. ...  It&rsquo;s because their contracts are draconian and the only escape is the humiliation of acknowledging that they are broke.


...Recently, the RIAA sneaked a clause into a revision of copyright law that essentially makes recorded works produced for a label "works made for hire".   They have also worked to ensure that the copyright in recorded works will not pass on to your heirs.


...It&rsquo;s based on the best elements of the Internet, and it&rsquo;s only going to grow as bands get smarter and the web gets faster.   A website has a one to many ones relationship that is unique in the history of artist-fan interactions.   An Internet presence brings information, value and intimacy to the people who listen to you. 

...You have to decide that you&rsquo;re going to conquer the world one byte at a time and change your thinking from the big deal that makes you famous to the one million little deals that will make you famous and rich.


You&rsquo;ve got to sample your work with web audiences, post clips of your concerts and videos, offer downloadable photos and biographies and sell the hell out of your CDs either on your own or through a retailer that&rsquo;s sympathetic to small shops like PayPal and the Amazon Z-shop system.


You have to do this because the recording industry is Miss Havisham&rsquo;s wedding cake. 

...There is clear evidence that music traded on the Internet gets people interested in new bands, and buying CDs for music they won&rsquo;t normally hear on the radio but big music doesn&rsquo;t want to know about that.   They want every song that gets played to register as a coin in their slot and to protect that river of cash, they will destroy the experience of listening to music to do it with &ldquo;altered CDs&rdquo; that won&rsquo;t play in some players and computer systems.


The recording industry didn&rsquo;t want reel to reel recorders, cassette recorders or DAT tape.   Hell, they objected to listening booths in record stores on the premise that people would listen for free.


...Retire rich and happy, bouncing your grandchildren on your knee, boring them with road stories and let Sony, Warner and BMG find somebody else to cornhole.


...&bull; Band pays $100,000 for manager&rsquo;s 10% commission, $25,000 each for layer and business manager, splits difference for living expenses, less tax.


&bull; Band releases two singles and two videos ($500,000), pays for &ldquo;radio promotion costs&rdquo; ($300,000) and tour ($200,000).


...Record company takes back the money the band owes them ($2m), makes $4m in profit. 

...&bull; A label can refuse an album if they decide, using their own criteria, that the material is &ldquo;commercially or artistically unacceptable&rdquo;.


&bull; The Controlled Composition Clause demands that singer-songwriters agree to be paid 75% of what the US Congress has demanded that labels pay.


...If an album goes out of print, it dies if the label refuses to reissue it.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#885 - May 14</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2013</category><dc:date>2013-05-13T23:17:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth885.html#unique-entry-id-305</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth885.html#unique-entry-id-305</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Kelli Richards speaks at NAPA. 

...On May 07, Kelli Richards, President and CEO of The All Access Group presented the second of several local talks on digital distribution at the UTT Campus at NAPA. 


Richards began working in digital distxribution at Apple in 1987, back when all online distribution of music and video was illegal.


At NAPA, speaking as a guest of COTT and hosted in T&T by the US Embassy of Trinidad and Tobago, her talk was focused on music, but also covered film, e-books and perhaps most usefully, the need for artists to become far more engaged in online marketing as a critical component of their success strategy.


The digital distribution entrepreneur began with Patronet, an early experiment with the direct to fan business model.


&ldquo;You must see your creative work as a business,&rdquo; she warned the musicians at the COTT event, &ldquo;and you must see yourself as a brand.&rdquo;


Crowdfunding, a growing source of capital, she noted, was just &ldquo;one spoke in the direct to fan wheel.&rdquo;


Artists who chose crowdfunding to access capital for their projects should be careful to choose their outlets and to review their business arrangements.   Kickstarter, for instance, is all or nothing, and takes a two to five per cent cut of the take.   IndieGoGo allows artists to keep all the money that&rsquo;s pledged, but takes nine per cent of a missed goal and four percent if you get all the money you&rsquo;ve asked for.


But crowdfunding isn&rsquo;t just post it and hope, artists need to be willing to keep pitching the project and keeping their marketing ongoing.   One good example of a crowdfunding break out of perks is here: http://ow.ly/kWqyS.


For musicians, Richards suggests a regularly updated presence on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.


&ldquo;Post as much as music as you can,&rdquo; she advised. 


...Share and update as much as possible, as often as possible.&rdquo;


For musicians and audio recording artists, her advice was quite specific.   If you charge, make sure the product is of the highest possible quality.   If it isn&rsquo;t, it might be better to just give it away.


Surprised at the hesitation to engage online in so many of the young artistes coming to the microphone at NAPA, I followed up with Victoria Trestrail, a young folk rock singer who asked some particularly pointed questions at the talk.


Trestrail, who has a presence on Reverbnation where you can hear her work and view her videos (http://ow.ly/kWr3q), has placed three of her songs in five episodes of the quirky web comedy The Louise Log and joined the team to see the results of their nomination The Shorty Awards in Manhattan in April.


Victoria Trestrail first tried working with local musicians, but she says, &ldquo;It didn&rsquo;t work out.   I went international, and I was appreciated.&rdquo;


In 2009, Trinidadian Rishi Ramlagan, aka Snakeman, reached out to her on Facebook after hearing one of her songs and produced three of her more successful works, Johnny&rsquo;s Fool, Steady Now and The Essentials.


Steady Now earned an Honourable Mention in the 2010 Billboard World Song contest and been featured in the Facebook app Hit or Not.


&ldquo;I consider myself a songwriter that sings,&rdquo; Trestrail wrote in response to emailed questions, &ldquo;but I write for other artistes as well&rdquo;


...Invest in the product, make it polished and professional


Sometimes it&rsquo;s wiser to give it away for free.


...Engage with your audience and produce work.


...There&rsquo;s no right path to success.


Related: BitDepth#349, An open letter to Orange Sky.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#884 - May 07</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - May 2013</category><dc:date>2013-05-06T21:39:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth884.html#unique-entry-id-304</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth884.html#unique-entry-id-304</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Sussing out the S4


A comparison of a quick snapshot of Port of Spain taken in standard auto mode (bottom) and in the new and thankfully subtle HDR mode (top) which merges multiple exposures to expand the dynamic range.   Expect more on the advanced photographic features of the S4 in a future column.   Photographs by Mark Lyndersay.


With this new release, the fourth in Samsung&rsquo;s flagship S series phones that I&rsquo;ve tested for this column the new S4 stands out as by far the best version.


Any consideration of this smartphone line is also, necessarily, a referendum on the state of Android development as well, since Samsung tends to dress the version of Google&rsquo;s OS it uses pretty lightly on its phones.


Most of the device unique tweaks are user interface flourishes that don&rsquo;t drift very far from a stock Android release, at version 4.2.2 on release for this new phone.


From its lock screen, Samsung offers its opening salvo of style, replacing the default ripple, already a charming effect on the S3, with a Star Trek style scatter of light that follows your finger as you sweep it across the screen to unlock to your home screen (the ripple is now an option).


What it reveals, though, is pretty standard and in some ways, annoying.


Samsung has ramped up the number of free apps it bundles with the S4, some of which seem useful or at least promising, like SHealth, which uses the phone&rsquo;s internal gyros to count steps and STranslate, which may well prove to be a killer app for occasional travellers, but there are also five games, at least three of which seem designed to occupy children, but nothing genuinely and immediately useful like, say, QuickOffice.


This wouldn&rsquo;t be a problem if the software, far more than it&rsquo;s ever bundled on a phone before, wasn&rsquo;t hardwired to the device and can&rsquo;t be removed by casual user intervention. 


There seems to be no good reason why a user isn&rsquo;t allowed to dump these non-crucial apps and then restore them to the phone via a web reset to prepare the device for resale or interfamily pass-along.


I mention this because it now takes me &ldquo;new computer&rdquo; time to prepare a smartphone for day to day use, downloading, customising and password activating the small blizzard of apps that form part of my mobile computing experience.


It took me five hours to prepare and organise the 27 apps I run on an Android smartphone, down one now that Samsung bundles DropBox with the S4.


For an iPhone user, this is a laughable number of apps.   I&rsquo;ve seen casual users of Apple&rsquo;s smartphones with ten screens worth of software icons, after all.


But this is software that I consider mission critical, without which my phone becomes dramatically less useful.   The Android system of a holding bay for apps which you then promote to the six active screens on the device goes some distance in helping to organise a large collection, but there&rsquo;s a part of me that&rsquo;s just annoyed at seeing so many apps I have no use for and can&rsquo;t get rid of.


The S4 is a sleek little number, slightly thinner and taller than the S3 with a gorgeous screen that seems to run right to the left and right edges of the device, though there&rsquo;s a tiny sliver of border actually there.   Everything pops on it.   Icons, photos, video.   Everything.


The phone is light, and even though Samsung still makes the back cover of this premium phone out of plastic, the new finish is more dignified than the barebones, adamantly plastic feel of the S3&rsquo;s cover.


There&rsquo;s a new software mini dock that slides out from the left where you can access a pool of Google developed apps (no option for third party software here) that you can turn off if you find it annoying (I did).


Problems were minimal.   One widget I use to monitor an analytics package on my website, ballooned graphically on the new pixel rich screen (now 441 pixels per inch) and the mail app has developed a settings quirk which makes it impossible to access my domain&rsquo;s e-mail server (the software won&rsquo;t allow me to add my ISP&rsquo;s username schema).


The S4 is palpably faster at everything.   Software launches fluidly and in a curious turn, some user interface flourishes seem designed to make the interface move just a bit more slowly and gracefully.


The S4 is an incremental improvement over the S3.   Owners of the previous model may want to upgrade if screen quality and processor speed will improve their user experience, and users looking for a new smartphone will find the S4 to be a robust competitor in a suddenly quite crowded local market for handheld computing devices.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#883 - April 30</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - April 2013</category><dc:date>2013-04-29T20:18:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth883.html#unique-entry-id-303</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth883.html#unique-entry-id-303</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Samsung executives demonstrate the S4 to the media at Prime Restaurant after the launch of the new product. 

...This week, two major manufacturers of popular smartphones launched the newest versions of their flagship devices in Trinidad and Tobago.


Blackberry, the company formerly known as RIM, introduced their new touchscreen device, the Z10 on Wednesday, and Samsung offered the fourth iteration of their premium &ldquo;S&rdquo; series smartphones the day before.


Add in the iPhone 5 and Windows Phone and the question that inevitably arises, normally while I&rsquo;m contemplating cornflakes brands at the grocery, is &ldquo;Which phone should I buy?&rdquo;


Normally, I try to weasel out of such direct questions by waffling about personal choices, but the market has matured to the point that there are some questions that every buyer should be asking themselves.


Curiously, what needs to be considered has very little to do with what people normally use phones for, which is making calls.   You can do that for far less with cheaper devices, and the considerations involved in choosing have more to do with computing than with talking and texting.


It will surprise nobody that the current market is a straight fight between the iPhone and Samsung&rsquo;s devices, which is to say it&rsquo;s a choice between iOS and Android, the operating systems underlying these phones.


In the US, iOS grabbed 53 per cent of the market with Android running a strong second with 41.9 per cent of smartphone sales.   In Europe that inverts to 61 per cent for Android and 25 per cent for iOS.


I&rsquo;ve used both for some time and while I&rsquo;ve been using an S3 for the last eight months, I also handle the IT chores on the household management&rsquo;s iPad and iPhone.


Android may be coming on strong as an operating system and developer platform, but it remains in the shadow of iOS, which delivers better looking apps across a wider range of disciplines.   I&rsquo;ve griped long and hard about the difficulties I&rsquo;ve had finding a good word processor and slideshow app for my images on Android, both of which I consider mission critical. 

...For most users, the most important apps are not only available on both platforms, they are almost identical in function.   If you jump between browsing, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, either iOS and Android will serve you equally well.


...Getting apps from Apple is an easy, fluid experience, but even after significant work on improving its interface, Google&rsquo;s Play Store still feels like a frontier town. 

...I visited a free template based app development site (appyet.com), plugged in the information I wanted and had software for a buddy&rsquo;s news site up on the Play store less than an hour after paying the US$25 developer fee. 


You&rsquo;d think that this would mean that iOS is a better option, but some interesting Apple fatigue is setting in lately.   The company&rsquo;s iPhones, which work well and are quite extensible, are now seen by the hip and thrillseeking as dull. 

...Android, in contrast, is seen as exciting, adventurous and innovative, the phones, more feature rich.


...On Tuesday, Samsung executives at Prime were keen to show off all the new features of the S4, but almost everything that was featured was implemented through software developed by the company to distinguish the new device.


...Fast processors, pixel-rich screens and other features tend to be replicate quickly in this competitive environment and it will eventually come down to what a phone can do for its user.


...It&rsquo;s only when users begin to add apps and kit their phone out that it becomes a truly personal computing device.   Just imagine what might happen if Apple discovered that the world doesn&rsquo;t, in fact, end at the Florida Keys.


Casual smartphone users will be pleased by the additional features offered by Samsung&rsquo;s new S4 and Blackberry&rsquo;s Z10, though tech savvy purchasers will be annoyed that they usually can&rsquo;t get rid of these apps if they don&rsquo;t care for them.


There was a word for this type of thing when it got out of control on cheap PCs, and that word is crapware.   With any luck, we&rsquo;ll see less of it in the future on these handheld computers.


Blackberry and Microsoft, once the leaders in smartphones and computing software respectively are the marginal players in this fast growing sector and need to decide fast which model they plan to align with.


At the March 2013 Mobile World Congress, Microsoft VP for Windows Phone Terry Myerson announced that Windows Phone was beating the iPhone in seven markets and Blackberry in 26. 

...Smartphone customers haven&rsquo;t begun to factor this new reality of software customisation into their purchases, but it&rsquo;s going to be the next distinguishing factor in the marketing of devices to increasingly savvy users.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#882 - April 23</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - April 2013</category><dc:date>2013-04-22T22:41:52-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth882.html#unique-entry-id-302</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth882.html#unique-entry-id-302</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Carole Post, foreground, answers questions from the audience At CDX2 along with Scott Kobler, listening on screen via videoconferencing software. 

...According to Carole Post, former chief information officer of New York, the bureaucracy there is still far from where it needs to be.   There are still documents trapped in paper and resistance to the new accessibility enabled by digital technologies.


&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t try to boil the ocean,&rdquo; Post told her audience on the first workshop day at the second edition of Caribbean Digital Expo.   The digitizing of New York&rsquo;s data began with a directive to departments to begin with five datasets of their choice.


Even the forward looking administration couldn&rsquo;t stoke official interest in making better use of social media networks.   There was a presence in online media, but it was, in the former CIO&rsquo;s estimation, perfunctory.


...Soon after announcing an elegant natural disaster reporting system to citizens concerned about a hurricane bearing down on the city, the Internet based project collapsed under the surge in connections.


Officials then turned to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to connect with the city and have continued to do so ever since.


Public service projects and government awareness projects have benefited from this expanded use of the peering power of social media platforms ever since.


The loosening of bureaucratic strings doesn&rsquo;t only apply to the information that governments want to share, the tugging at information strings comes from developers and programmers eager to make use of data gathered in the course of day to day governance.


Public data is supposed to be held in trust for the citizens it is gathered from, but that responsibility tends to get boiled down to the word held, and loosening the grip on the vast datasets that governments generate tends to be a dental endeavour.


Kyle De Frietas, an instructor at UWI&rsquo;s Department of Computing and Information Technology called for wider access to public data.   He called for data unencumbered by the frills of software to keep the enthusiasm raised by a recent Hackathon, designed to put programmers to work on building software that would make use of public datasets.


For that project, the Hackathon got access to some of the datasets they requested, including a subset of the 2011 census data, but De Frietas acknowledged the challenges of scrubbing such datasets of personal identifying information.


Analysing datasets, whether they be analytics information or public census data is critical to understanding what William Beckler of Lastminute.com described as &ldquo;the truth of what&rsquo;s actually happening.&rdquo;


This enthusiasm to not just explore but to exploit datasets for the public good is a growing phenomenon.


&ldquo;Pride,&rdquo; explained Scott Kobler of Roadify.com, &ldquo;is a much greater incentive than greed.&rdquo;


Kobler&rsquo;s company was a winner of NYC&rsquo;s Big Apps competition with projects that took city information out of databases and put them to work for commuters,


&ldquo;2007 changed everything,&rdquo; he told the audience at CDX2 on a videoconferencing connection.


&ldquo;The day the iPhone came out; it became possible to put information in the hands of citizens.   There apps on iOS and Android that simply didn&rsquo;t exist before.   What government can do is to enable access to the information that can make these things happen.&rdquo;


Kobler warned, though, that many apps simply don&rsquo;t have a viable business model and exist more out of altruism than profitability.


Asked about the viability of crowdsourcing as a way of acquiring data and making money out of open data repurposing, Kobler simply said &ldquo;Scale.&rdquo;


...With a ratio of 98 per cent consumers to two percent contributors consistent across crowdsourced projects, an entrepreneur needs vast numbers to make projects work on that basis.


Deosaran Bisnath, speaking from the floor, felt that government should be doing more.   He bemoaned the lack of innovation in the private sector, the challenges of layers of bureaucracy, but still called on the public sector to lead in innovation.


According to Peter Mitchell who represented the Ministry of Planning, data at the Trinidad and Tobago government is paper based, but the Exchequer and Audit Act will enable the use of more technology in its bureaucracy.


Even with such formal limitations on technology use in government, Mitchell noted improvements in IT in Inland Revenue and the implementation of the TT BizLink Portal and the Single Electronic Window.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#881 - April 16</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - April 2013</category><dc:date>2013-04-15T20:48:36-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth881.html#unique-entry-id-301</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth881.html#unique-entry-id-301</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A smaller, more focused CDX


Kathryn Friedrich, Head of Video Strategy for YouTube offers advice to CDX2 attendees.   Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.


It&rsquo;s been 18 months since Chike Farrell and Brevard Nelson convened the first Caribbean Digital Expo (CDX) at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Port of Spain.


The two digital entrepreneurs, business leads at Caribbean Ideas, then presented MobiWorld, a smaller, developer-focused conference in October 2012.


CDX2 was a smaller event than its predecessor, but a more ambitious one with several sessions presented on parallel tracks over two days.   It was also a conference that was much less confused about its audience and message. 


This was an event for people in the private and public sector tasked with making sense of fast moving changes in the digital realm.


CDX2 offered less technology handholding and more focus on specific topics and issues relevant to both sectors.


If there was anything to be frustrated about, it was the decision to multitrack so many discussions with clever but fuzzy descriptions of the content.   The first day was set aside for workshops, but those proved to be misnamed presentations and panel discussions followed by Q&A sessions.


The key issues for entrepreneurs were the words that have risen to the fore in today&rsquo;s discussions about corporate use of online media; analytics, return on investment and engagement.


Early on day two of CDX2, the digital conference&rsquo;s big day, Caribbean Ideas parted the curtains on a research project the company has commissioned from Sacoda Services that will tabulate some hard numbers on Internet use in Trinidad and Tobago.


Sacoda&rsquo;s Wendy Rocke described a poll that&rsquo;s focused on the digital habits and practices of young people between the ages of 16 and 45, with a special emphasis on responders in the 16-24 and 25-34 age groups.


Some of the early results aren&rsquo;t surprising.   Rocke revealed that 94 per cent of users in the 16-45 age group were on Facebook, with Twitter and YouTube coming in a distant second with 32 per cent and 30 per cent of users signing up for those services.   Instagram at 9 percent and Pinterest at 1.7 percent trailed the social media hit parade.


More surprising was the finding that among 16-24 year-old respondents, 21 percent spent 11-20 hours online per week, 16 percent reported online activity clocking between 21-30 hours and 28 per cent were online for 31 hours or more.


Even such startling numbers paled next to those offered by YouTube&rsquo;s Kathryn Friedrich who reported that the video aggregation website was clocking four billion views per day.


Friedrich offered very specific advice to advertisers in the audience looking to improve the performance of their online videos.


&ldquo;Orchestrate,&rdquo; urged YouTube&rsquo;s Head of Video Strategy.


&ldquo;Make sure that all your advertising is going to the same place and orchestrate participation.&rdquo;


Friedrich urged advertisers hoping to leverage the popular platform to &ldquo;link videos to the real world&rdquo; demonstrating videos that sparked discussion, sharing and planned participation in events and games, and to tap into the zeitgeist, aligning such video releases with what&rsquo;s currently interesting and popular.


At a break out session, The Fast & The Furious, Miles Abraham of Simply Intense Media a well-known local developer of software for social media platforms, described the current challenge facing local developers as the &ldquo;now what factor.&rdquo;


&ldquo;You have a website, you have a Facebook page,&rdquo; said Abraham, &ldquo;what&rsquo;s next?&rdquo;


&ldquo;The big thing now is getting company ready to act on these platforms.&rdquo;


&ldquo;GPS is also becoming big.   Location based marketing, being able to push a message that&rsquo;s relevant to a space is increasingly important.&rdquo;


For its intended audience, CDX2 offered a revelation of riches, assessments of current digital strategy and tips aplenty for companies keen to make an impact online.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#880 - April 09</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - April 2013</category><dc:date>2013-04-08T21:53:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth880.html#unique-entry-id-300</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth880.html#unique-entry-id-300</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The pervasive notebook


Evernote on Android hides a lot of power behind compact icons, clearing smaller screens for reading and editing.


Anyone who harvests information for reference on a computer quickly runs up against a simple digital problem.   Where the heck will I keep it all?


The answer to such problems is a database.   Such products have tended to be extremely adaptable but ultimately quite geeky solutions.


 Rather like swatting a cockroach with a keyboard.  Setting up a database isn&rsquo;t something the average computer user will rush to handle, and even templates that offer useful starter points for common projects don&rsquo;t solve the problems that arise when changes need to be made to even a well made template solution.


A quiet explosion of database related products, from finance software to personal diary solutions accompanied the arrival of MacOS X, which packs a powerful and increasingly programmer accessible SQL database under its glossy Unix based hood.


For years now I&rsquo;ve been using one such product, Soho Notes, which began by using an open source Unix database as its back engine, though it has since developed its own database backend.


I&rsquo;ve got a couple thousand items stored in that product, all quickly searchable when I need to find entries on a particular topic, but it&rsquo;s still very much a copy and paste solution for retaining information.


Enter Evernote, which not only is built to do very much the same thing, but also adds in a web accessible networked database that runs across most common mobile and computer platforms.


The only major platform that isn&rsquo;t represented is Unix, and the product is accessible there via its web interface.   Not the best solution, but it&rsquo;s available.


There are downloads for Blackberry, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Touch and the expected MacOS and Windows destop operating systems.


Evernote makes its money by encouraging you to use the product until you blow through your initial data limits. 


Evernote allows you 60MB worth of uploads per month and limits the size of each note to 25MB for free.   If your needs exceed that, the premium service costs US$5 per month.


The company has cleverly spent its acquisitions money on add-on products like Skitch, a computer based annotation and markup tool and Evernote Food, an useful tool for foodies gathering ideas and recipes for projects.


The product is deep enough that anyone working with a collection of data they either need to share with colleagues or access on multiple devices will quickly find it indispensable.   I use a Samsung phone, a Windows 8 tablet and a MacBook Pro and Evernote synchronises seamlessly between all three.


The structure of the software is open enough that you can organise it in ways that please you but formal enough that you won&rsquo;t make a mangled mess of it the way you did with those folders of text files...you know what I&rsquo;m talking about.


You&rsquo;ll need to sign up to use the software at all, but on the desktop, it&rsquo;s possible to use Evernote offline, never connecting to the company&rsquo;s servers.   But that would be missing all the connectivity fun you can have with it and the practical utility that&rsquo;s sure to follow.


I&rsquo;ve been using it as a substitute for Instapaper and Read Later, the web clipping products that I&rsquo;ve used to move web pages to mobile devices for access when I&rsquo;m stuck somewhere with time to kill. 


Writers though will find it awesome for moving a work in progress around for review either for their own access or to invite the input of collaborators.   On Easter weekend, I had a wedding speech to give and found myself at the ceremony with not a single word of it written. 


I wrote the main body of it on the Pigeon Point dock, synchronised it with my laptop while waiting for the bride and groom to arrive at the reception pruning and tweaking it further with deeper word processing tools, then moved the changes back to my phone and read the speech off that screen.


The company already has its hands full developing feature parity across all the platforms it supports, but it needs to do some more work on its text processing engine; an unusual oversight in a product so focused on the handling of words.   The rapid evolution of the product since its introduction in June 2008 suggests that it&rsquo;s aware of not only what makes money, but also what pleases its users.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#879 - April 02</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - April 2013</category><dc:date>2013-04-07T00:05:05-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth879.html#unique-entry-id-299</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth879.html#unique-entry-id-299</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The inescapable to-do list


Wunderlist on Macintosh.   This simple and direct interface hides multiple lists and list item details in favour of a screen that urges next steps.


There&rsquo;s a lot of buzz around about the cloud and the seductive promise of seamless data flow that it will bring to devices that are part of our personal Internet mesh.


There&rsquo;s a sting in the tail to all that wonderful data flow though.


Most of it is quietly proprietary.   Apple&rsquo;s devices have a happy relationship with each other via iCloud, but nobody else is invited to that party.   Google users will find that their Chromebooks and Android phones work seamlessly with each other, but support for that data stream, though widespread, tends to either spotty or more fluent in one direction than another.   I can move my contact information from a Mac to GMail easily enough, but getting changes back from that dataset are painfully fussy.


Windows users have a particularly seamless grouping of cloud based tools and data sharing access points, but it all tends to work well in the Windows world and isn&rsquo;t quite so sprightly on other platforms.


Increasingly though, there is an increasing awareness that people want access to their information across multiple platforms in real time.   Just shy of a year ago I wrote about DropBox, as an exceptional example of a company that&rsquo;s committed to maintaining a consistent experience across multiple operating systems.


I&rsquo;ve been using it for more than a year now to keep files synchronised between a Macintosh laptop, a Windows 8 tablet and an Android smart phone.   DropBox is also a good citizen on iOS, Blackberry, Kindle and Linux.


DropBox isn&rsquo;t the only data focused cloud service, and it gets some strong competition from Box.net, but nothing comes close to it for accessibility and ease of comprehension.


Other tools are appearing that are similarly focused on providing useful connectivity across platforms, and many are taking a cue from the simplicity and product focus of DropBox.


Wunderkinder&rsquo;s to-do list software, Wunderlist is a promising new project in the genre.


I&rsquo;ve long been a fan, if not the most consistent user of David Allen&rsquo;s Getting Things Done philosophy, and one of the basic tenets of that method is &ldquo;mind like water.&rdquo;


Set aside your half-empty jokes right now and embrace one practical application of the philosophy, which holds that one of the paths to personal peace and focus is moving stuff out of your head and onto a &ldquo;trusted receptacle.&rdquo;


...Depending on who you are that might be a half-sheet of paper stuffed in a pocket, a Moleskine, a personal diary or maybe, a digital to-do list.


Being prone to overdoing things, I own no less than four different software tools that promise to organise and process stuff I&rsquo;ve got going on.


I&rsquo;ve stuck with Things, by Cultured Code on my MacBook Pro, but with no iPhone, there&rsquo;s no way to move list information to an app in my hands.


Enter Wunderlist, a deceptively simple app with an admirably single minded focus.   Enter information into the software, say a shopping list for the grocery, and it instantly synchronises via the web to every other instance of the software you&rsquo;ve got running.


That means you can start a grocery list at your desk, grab your phone and go check the fridge to see what&rsquo;s missing, get a call from the household management while working and add another item.   In the actual grocery you consult one, neat consolidated listing and proceed to win plaudits for your handling of this chore.


You can link the app to Facebook to share lists with your friends, but I can&rsquo;t think of any reason to link a specifically personal collection of information like a to-do list with a social network, but this may appeal to the folks who are into deep sharing.


Wunderkind recently announced a Wunderlist extension for Chrome, Safari and Firefox that takes shopping planning to another level.


Wunderlist does one thing really well and as it turns out, it&rsquo;s a really useful thing.   Being able to do it on multiple platforms (no Unix version yet) for free and with a consistent and task focused interface makes it a no-brainer for anyone who wants to log and reference their next steps on more than one device.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#878 - March 26</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - March 2013</category><dc:date>2013-03-25T21:37:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth878.html#unique-entry-id-298</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth878.html#unique-entry-id-298</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Samsung on the new S4


Elias Kabeche, Samsung&rsquo;s Vice-president of Sales and Marketing for Latin America.   Photograph courtesy Samsung.


In a follow-up phone call after the launch of the Samsung S4, Elias Kabeche, VP Sales and Marketing for Latin America, responded to some questions the company&rsquo;s new smartphone.


Samsung announced two versions of the new smartphone two weeks ago, one featuring an octacore chip, the other a quadcore processor.   T&T will get the octacore version of the Exynos chipset that&rsquo;s already being used in the GSM version of the S3 that&rsquo;s targeted for international customers.


The new Exynos 5 isn&rsquo;t a single massive 8-core chip.   It&rsquo;s designed as two quadcore chips which scale up power to meet user requirements.


Mr Kabeche offered few details on the power consumption profile of the new phone, which increases the battery capacity on the S4 from 2100mah to 2600mah, a concession to the improved processor and the new high definition screen on the new device.


&ldquo;It will probably be a bit better than on the S3, but the new battery will meet the needs of the new screen and processors,&rdquo; he said.


The new phone is being released just nine months after the introduction of the S3, which has sold more than 40 million units, but Kabeche dismissed any suggestion that there had been an speeding up of marketing cycles at Samsung.


&ldquo;It was the appropriate time to launch,&rdquo; Mr Kabeche said.   &ldquo;Everyone was waiting for a new phone, and we had a great profile of new features to introduce.   The S4 is the next generation.   It&rsquo;s leaps and bounds ahead of its competition.&rdquo;


The new smartphone introduces a business-market only feature called Knox, which separates personal data from work-related data, a feature that had been touted at the late January launch of Blackberry&rsquo;s new Z10.   Could this be the start of a business sector focused thrust by Samsung?   A more direct challenge to Blackberry&rsquo;s acceptance by corporate IT?


&ldquo;I don't see this phone as going after anybody,&rdquo; Kabeche said.   &ldquo;We needed to start introducing products that met the needs of customers and there is a big demand for bring your own devices (BYOD) in the workplace.&rdquo;


&ldquo;We believe that Knox will satisfy IT managers who are interested in supporting that movement.&rdquo;


The new phone introduced lifestyle software for health conscious users, specifically new bundled health monitoring software SHealth, SBeat and a calorie calculator, might this represent a new thrust into niche software for the company?


&ldquo;We are not moving into any niche specific software.   We listened to our customers, and we delivered a phone that meets the needs of consumers and brings a wider range of solutions to the customer.   SHealth connects to a range of devices that monitor health and personal performance.&rdquo;


Mr Kabeche is also keen on the possibilities of the new 13 megapixel camera that&rsquo;s built into the S4 which is supported by software that enables many of the effects that are popular with today&rsquo;s cameraphone users.


&ldquo;Being able to put the person taking the picture into the frame of a picture that your taking, the ability to embed sound in a picture, that remarkable camera and the new display make for an experience you won&rsquo;t believe.&rdquo;


According to Samsung&rsquo;s Latin American marketing chief, the new S4 will be released in Trinidad and Tobago &ldquo;early in Q2.&rdquo;


An early second quarter launch puts the possibility of an S4 launch potentially as soon as April.


&ldquo;We know the Trinidad and Tobago market is keen to have the latest devices,&rdquo; Kabeche said, with a tone of foreshadowing that will be welcomed by fans of the company&rsquo;s Android based phones.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#877 - March 19</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - March 2013</category><dc:date>2013-03-18T20:10:38-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth877.html#unique-entry-id-297</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth877.html#unique-entry-id-297</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Samsung polishes its flagship smartphone


Samsung&rsquo;s thinner, taller, faster successor to the S3, the unsurprisingly named S4. 


Photo courtesy Samsung.


Last Thursday evening, Samsung announced the S4, the newest entry in its briskly updated line of smartphones.


Unlike Apple, Samsung brings many communications devices to market, but the S4, like its three predecessors, is designed to be the company&rsquo;s leading edge competition to Apple&rsquo;s market defining iPhone.


The S3, until last week the best that Samsung had to offer, proved to be a robust, well-designed competitor to the iPhone and one that the company has successfully marketed as both an exemplar for the Android operating system and a real alternative to Apple&rsquo;s attractive ecosystem of media, software and hardware.


The company has also sold 40 million S3&lsquo;s worldwide since the product&rsquo;s introduction ine months ago.


Samsung, of course, doesn&rsquo;t control the operating system it&rsquo;s put into the new S4, so its competitive advantage is focused on the software tweaks it can layer on top of the Android OS and the hardware it builds into the soap sliver shape of its phone.


The new smartphone offers a mix of the useful, the puzzling and the anticipated.


Count among the items that were anticipated by S3 customers, the improvements to S Voice.   The software provided functional voice recognition on the S3, but the new version is not only smarter in its responses; it adds useful navigation and voice control capabilities for drivers keen to do more hands-free with their phones.


The new device sports an updated processor.   Depending on the market, the new phone will ship with either a 1.9GHZ quadcore processor (up from a peak of 1.5GHZ in the S3) or a 1.6GHZ octacore processor.


The new screen supports full HD resolution, packing 2.1 million pixels into a screen that&rsquo;s slightly taller and thinner than the one on the S3.


The S4&rsquo;s front facing 13 megapixel camera, supported by smarter, hipper software also can record HD video.


The increase in power and screen density (441 pixels per inch) call for more power and the battery capacity has been increased by 500mah over the S3&rsquo;s 2100mah power source.


Business users in B2B deployments will be pleased to find that Samsung&rsquo;s Knox technology separates data for business from personal data, an idea that was introduced last month by Blackberry at it&rsquo;s launch of the Z10, perhaps heralding a greater focus on business use and data security in future iterations of the Samsung smartphone line.


Other useful innovations include air gestures and air view, which read your hand or finger&rsquo;s position and responds to it before you touch the screen and S Translator, a voice aware translation tool that can hear and respond in nine languages.


Some of the innovations introduced with the S4 are just puzzling though, or perhaps I&rsquo;m just not social enough to appreciate them.


I get impromptu local chat and gaming, but I just can&rsquo;t imagine a situation in which I&rsquo;d want to beam music to eight other phones around me.   I might, however, want to control a television using the built in infrared transmitter and software, just not the ancient tube box I&rsquo;ve got in my living room right now.


But judging the S4 by what Samsung has added to its software suite would be premature.   The hardware innovations provide a capable platform for developers, and it&rsquo;s going to be intriguing to see what they come up with.


Samsung&rsquo;s new S4 is an iterative improvement on its predecessor and an intriguing device in its own right, but it may not be one that lures happy S3 users from their devices.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#876 - March 12</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - March 2013</category><dc:date>2013-03-11T21:21:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth876.html#unique-entry-id-296</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth876.html#unique-entry-id-296</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Bringing the country back together behind Carnival will demand thinking, as well as styling the idea of nationhood as expressed by the festival. 

...Right about now, it seems like we should be getting to the end of talking about Carnival, but really, this is exactly when we need to begin talking about the festival.


The National Carnival Commission (NCC), led by chairman Allison Demas took a first step to beginning a meaningful discussion about the annual event with a consultation on March 02.


On a positive note, the NCC began this series of consultations from first principles, questioning its role in the festival and seeking guidance from its partners on the production of the event.


The NCC, it was announced, has been working from a strategic plan drafted in 1996 and officially implemented in 1998. 


...Minister of Arts and Multiculturalism Lincoln Douglas asked the assembled stakeholders to think about the &ldquo;product&rdquo; as it was often described.


&ldquo;What are we going to export?&rdquo;   Mr Douglas asked, &ldquo;Have we codified it? 

...Economist Indira Sagewan-Ali also challenged the casual description of Carnival as a product.


&ldquo;What is the return on the spending on the festival?&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;What are the barriers to entry that will prevent others from competing with us?   Are we willing to analyse what we have, what we have been doing?&rdquo;


The NCC is now 22 years old, surely old enough to know better, and the tone of the stakeholder assembly was that the Commission should do more, but nobody seemed clear about what &ldquo;more&rdquo; might be and there seemed to be no enthusiasm on anyone&rsquo;s part to cede any of their, personal control.


And it wasn&rsquo;t just the NCBA, TUCO and Pan Trinbago staking their claims, it was the Carnival Entrepreneurs Association and The Bois Academy stepping up to let the NCC know that they weren&rsquo;t happy about the stewardship in place.   They were hardly the most powerful personalities in the room jockeying for a better position.


The suggestions were dizzyingly diverse, and the NCC&rsquo;s challenge will not be accommodating all these perspectives, but in charting an innovative response to the very evident failures that Carnival is experiencing.


It is a brutal truth that to get to a still undefined &lsquo;there&rsquo;from here, eggs aplenty will left shattered.   We are likely to have far more Dimanche Gras 2013 missteps than we are to experience providential miracles like Minshall&rsquo;s dye-spattered River on that sunny Carnival Tuesday afternoon in 1983.


...Nobody in that room at NAPA was willing to argue that Carnival Monday has become anything less than a catastrophe.


But nobody seemed ready to tackle the problem with anything resembling sacrifice, inventiveness or courage.   There was no enthusiasm for Rubadiri Victor&rsquo;s idea for an Acoustic Monday or a call to for some bands to make Monday their big presentation day. 


There was no response at all to the call made by Ms Sagewan-Ali for &ldquo;continuity,&rdquo; and &ldquo;a plan that is bigger than individuals and appropriate to roles.&rdquo;


Every accepted tradition of Carnival is ripe for reinvention. 


Calypso tents are begging to become a digital phenomenon, the potential of J&rsquo;Ouvert, once a cathartic theatre is being diminished by absentee architects into pointless delinquency and the Tuesday parade has turned so determinedly inward that spectators become uncomfortable voyeurs.


We will, ultimately, have to confront the question so pithily posed by King of Carnival Gerard Weekes: &ldquo;What is a competition and what is a show?&rdquo;


There were no easy answers emerging from the first Carnival consultation hosted by Ms Demas&rsquo;NCC.   In the coming weeks, other consultations will be held on other aspects of the event and it doesn&rsquo;t take a seer&rsquo;s insight to foresee greater turbulence ahead.


...Photoblog: Carnival's Axis of Copyright


Photoblog: The Images of Carnival (Video)


Photoblog: Morning Edition on Carnival copyright (Video)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#875 - March 05</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - March 2013</category><dc:date>2013-03-04T19:34:32-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth875.html#unique-entry-id-295</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth875.html#unique-entry-id-295</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[CarnivalTV&rsquo;s Walt Lovelace, Camille Parsons, Paul Charles and Curtis Popplewell. 

...When last we saw the CarnivalTV crew in March 2011, they were riding high on the success of an immaculately streamed, high definition video production of much of Carnival 2011.


Flush with success, the boys were being cagey with the background on the project, how much, what&rsquo;s next, how did you do it.


This time around, Paul Charles, Curtis Popplewell and Walt Lovelace, joined by Advance Dynamics partner Camille Parsons were more open about the advances and setbacks of the last two years of work.


The team invested $1.5 million in making the Carnival event happen in 2011 and the two questions that needed to be answered immediately were what do we do next and how do we make money doing it?


Twenty-two streams of live events later, some things had not changed at all.


Sponsors and advertisers are still gun shy about participating in a live stream of Carnival events.


&ldquo;Nobody is giving us any advertising for these products,&rdquo; says Parsons, &ldquo;but they aren't giving anybody else the ads either.&rdquo;


&ldquo;We've done a study, a quite expensive one,&rdquo; Paul Charles adds, &ldquo;on the top brands targeting the diaspora, but we don't have the audience numbers for the streaming product to go to the top marketers.&rdquo;


CarnivalTV needs to build numbers by improving the product they offer, and that means working with event producers to make their shows more accessible to a viewing audience.


Instead, they have come up against either a wall built with bricks of rights demands or people who want to do the project on their own.


In 2011, CarnivalTV won steadily escalating numbers for the online streams, with 69,000 viewers for Panorama finals, 152,000 for Dimanche Gras and 252,000 viewers for Carnival Tuesday.


When they opened discussions with the NCBA to stream of the event in 2012, the organisation demanded $4 million for the rights.   CNMG streamed Carnival Tuesday last year but the NCBA stopped the station&rsquo;s stream this year in favour of their own low-resolution stream.


Last year, CarnivalTV also began to get calls from several event producers looking to put their Carnival events online.   The team took meetings with people in Grenada, Antigua and St Vincent, as well as diaspora Carnivals in Boston, Miami and Brooklyn's Labour Day celebrations.


...Putting up an eight hour Carnival stream with even a minimal camera crew can cost up to US$200,000, with most of that the cost of keeping a broadband feed open for the HD signal.


CarnivalTV found an ally in the festival&rsquo;s fraternity in Pan Trinbago, not a stakeholder noted for its embrace of technology, but apparently one willing to listen and learn.


In 2012, the Panorama Finals stream was a pay per view project.   It did not meet its financial targets, despite drawing the best numbers that CarnivalTV has ever recorded for a paid stream.


This year, Pan Trinbago underwrote the project and won plaudits from overseas fans of the music, including a heartfelt &ldquo;thank you&rdquo; from the unflinching When Steel Talks website, which had pilloried the organisation for failing to broadcast this year&rsquo;s semi-final round online.


Panorama is also the least pirated stream, perhaps because hi-fi pan aficionados are less interested in a free feed from someone&rsquo;s jury rigged camera-in-front-of-the-tv setup than in high quality sound and visuals from a national performance.


The most pirated stream was last year&rsquo;s National Soca Monarch event, which Paul Charles estimates lost roughly US$700,000 in potential income from pirate streams which they worked hard to knock offline.


And the piracy isn&rsquo;t even related to the cost of the stream.   When the soca monarch semi-finals were offered in 2012 at US$0.99, an online furore began over the effrontery of &ldquo;charging for de culture.&rdquo;


&ldquo;We have,&rdquo; Charles notes with a wry smile, &ldquo;a serious social perception problem when it comes to piracy.&rdquo;


...&ldquo;Have you,&rdquo; I asked Paul Charles, &ldquo;ever met with someone with the power to authorise funding who had ever actually seen a CarnivalTV stream?&rdquo;


...&ldquo;I don't think that people here understand the appetite outside for a well-produced Carnival show.&rdquo;


The company prepared a high concept proposal for the Government at the end of 2012, pitching the packaging of Carnival for online streaming as a way to focus interest on other events and attractions during the year.


&ldquo;Carnival is saturated as an event,&rdquo; says Charles, &ldquo;all the hotels are filled during the festival and the bands sell out, but during that time, people in the world are paying attention to us.&rdquo;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#874 - February 26</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - February 2013</category><dc:date>2013-02-25T21:56:45-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth874.html#unique-entry-id-294</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth874.html#unique-entry-id-294</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[There are costumes there, but you&rsquo;ve got to get past a phalanx of security to see it. 

...Who&rsquo;s making it, who&rsquo;s allowing access and where the heck, really, is my cut.


Copyright is a modern invention, an attempt to make it possible for the fruits of the mind to benefit from popular appeal in a world of broadcasting and mass distribution. 


It&rsquo;s one of the great ironies of modern copyright issues that it&rsquo;s the acceleration of modern media distribution, at a rate unimaginable in the era of Gutenberg, that&rsquo;s causing the problems of today. 


Modern copyright isn&rsquo;t a single right, it&rsquo;s now multiple opportunities bundled into a single creation and sometimes a myriad of rights clearances within an existing property. 


A movie is a good example of a creation with multiple authors and many licensing opportunities and challenges.    From the screenplay to the actors&rsquo;likenesses to the blister-packed toys, there are contracts aplenty in every 90 minute action adventure. 


Now it looks as if the event that likes to call itself the greatest show on Earth is aspiring to the legal spiderwebs of the modern blockbuster film even as its actual content struggles to muster the audience of a straight-to-DVD no-budget production.


From the first rumblings of income curiosity among the glittered faithful to the fear, uncertainty and doubt being aggressively sown by Richard Cornwall of the T&T Copyright Collections Organization, Carnival in 2013 collectively demonstrated an admirable yearning to police empty stables.   Perhaps some bandleader, inspired by this year&rsquo;s many pointless rights debacles, will play The Augean Wuk in 2014.


Rights in an intellectual property (IP) can be sliced thinly, but this year we saw blunt three lines in play, not Muramasa swords and let&rsquo;s not say anything about the spastic bladesmanship.


...The level of comprehension of copyright is at an absolute nadir, providing rich fodder for the kind of uninformed and highly opinionated arguments that have migrated so neatly from local rumshops to Facebook. 


Our IP itself is compromised, with our mas and music now in three neat phases, dramatic and aspiring, befeathered and perspiring and traditionalist while expiring.


It&rsquo;s exactly when Carnival needs more informed review of the practice and principles that its built on that the chilling effects of the dubious 1995 era tax on Carnival souvenir magazines is having its most deleterious impact.


That fee urged such publications to a profit-driven, fifteen-year, images-only focus on pretty bands that&rsquo;s marginalised everything that hasn&rsquo;t got a thong or 150 beats per minute.


This is the type of constraining and warping impact that leads people to dismiss copyright as unnecessarily limiting and fundamentally broken.   I make my living licensing photographs for commercial and editorial use while also expending significant effort to make large swaths of my work available on the web free from charge.


I know the copyright model is broken, but I can&rsquo;t take Facebook Likes to HiLo either, so it's necessary to dance between strategically free and commercially licensed until a better business model makes itself evident.


Nothing like this seems to have occurred to Carnival&rsquo;s Axis of Copyright, and the current focus is on up-front payments for perceived value.


...I&rsquo;ve had my intellectual property infringed in the past and reacted poorly as well.   It was only when I began looking at what people were interested in that I began to realise that there really is a fundamental difference between price and value. 


With a surprising consistency, what people are interested in using from my archives, either by asking or outright theft, are rarely the things that cost the most when they were produced, it&rsquo;s those elements of Carnival in which considerable personality and authenticity were invested.


The single most lunatic thing about everything related to copyright in Carnival 2013 was the realization that nothing is actually being licensed in these agreements.   There is no contractual foundation between the person buying "rights" from any of these bodies and the whole lunatic mess is built on a fundamentally absurd business model.   Most photographers and videographers are forced to pay for "commercial" or "personal" rights that have no definitions, in advance of any actual use. 

...This would be buying cat in bag except that there's no actual cat or, apparently, any bag either.   Generic copyright is being sold off the shelf in a big empty yellow box featuring Helvetica Neue Bold type.


...The best thing about the rights invested in IP is that they don&rsquo;t have to be exercised to be retained.   You can with proper wording and a sensible contract allow someone to make use of something, within carefully circumscribed and defined limits, without surrendering your ownership of it.


But doing that means making an investment in the intellect half of IP, and we&rsquo;ve only been willing to argue about the property bits, like maddened children playing a Carnival version of Monopoly.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#873 - February 19</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - February 2013</category><dc:date>2013-02-18T19:36:29-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth873.html#unique-entry-id-293</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth873.html#unique-entry-id-293</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[If you&rsquo;d asked me in November what to do on your first day at the National Carnival Commission, I have to confess that I would have told you, &ldquo;Quit.&rdquo;


You&rsquo;re a smart, qualified and committed young woman and while those are qualities that might seem ideal for the job, the task is so relentlessly Sisyphean and the forces arrayed against you so devoted to a stale, hopelessly out-of-date notion of Carnival that it seemed criminal to spend your productive, youthful years in such a bleak salt mine.


...I don&rsquo;t agree with the vituperative demands that you quit over the abysmal horror that was Dimanche Gras, though somebody needs to get a permanent boot for that.


I like that you&rsquo;ve stepped up and acknowledged the failings of this year&rsquo;s events.   It&rsquo;s absolutely in character, and you need to hold on to that sense of yourself over the coming year, which I can promise will test you thoroughly.


There&rsquo;s no question that you were handed a mess of pottage ten weeks ago, that you were unable to turn it into a flavourful soup is hardly surprising.


With a full year ahead and challenges aplenty, here&rsquo;s what I think you should do.


...It&rsquo;s a term that has many different connotations, but in the case of the National Carnival Commission, which attempts to make one cohesive Carnival event out of the contributions of three key stakeholders, might usefully be read as the guiding leader of the process.


Over time, and I&rsquo;ve had at least one cousin and two people I really liked in the role, it seems that the job has come to mean &ldquo;facilitator-in-chief,&rdquo; and that&rsquo;s simply not good enough anymore.


He who has the gold makes the rules and the river of cash that flows through the NCC to Carnival&rsquo;s stakeholders should confer some kind of leveraging authority over intent and execution in the festival.


...A real one, with clear developmental purpose that will take us from today&rsquo;s aimless meandering and give the future of Carnival a fighting chance.   That&rsquo;s going to mean slapping down many crabs in the lunatic's barrel you&rsquo;re in charge of who remain keen to keep crawling over each other.


Carnival has three stakeholders who aren&rsquo;t represented in discussions about the future of the festival at all, the audience, the masqueraders and the media, all of whom have an important role to play in its future development.


It&rsquo;s the absence of these voices from key Carnival decision making processes that leads to stupid decisions like these.


...Everybody talks about how much money there is to be made in Carnival, but nobody has built a mansion or even bought an SUV off of the resale of imagery captured during the event. 

...It&rsquo;s clear there is less money in Carnival coverage than there is in planting pumpkin and cucumber or even, for that matter, peas in Tobago.


I&rsquo;m a hair&rsquo;s breadth from making a serious proposal to the national media that we create a wide space along the Carnival route for coverage, only allow bandleaders to cross if they agree to reasonable licensing terms on a simple form and only cover the bands that agree to pass there. 


If you thought the Grandstand was empty this Carnival Tuesday, imagine what would happen if all the cameras were removed from it and placed where the media had control over the design of the space.


...There&rsquo;s a type of irony that this section, written in excess of my Guardian column word count, will appear only online here, which will make it essentially invisible to everyone it addresses, except, I hope, you.


To this day, even after being told so two years ago to their collective face, a search on Google turns up page after page of links to steelbands that do not operate out of Trinidad and Tobago. 


Calypsonians have a reluctant presence on local music downloads website TrinidadTunes.com, but it&rsquo;s soca artistes who rule in that space. ...  Why not work with TUCO and Pan Trinbago to create board recordings of tent performances and Panorama presentations and make them available for sale at reasonable prices online?


Four years after I suggested these ideas and both TrinidadTunes and Kenny Phillips opened discussions with Pan Trinbago to make it happen, nothing has been done through a remarkably unproductive blend of ignorance, fear and bullheadedness.   I&rsquo;m planning to have a chat with the folks at CarnivalTV, whose apparently unquenchable love for the festival has brought them head to head with all the forces at play in its organisation that serve with such admirable diligence to keep Carnival in the most primitive state possible.


...Somebody has to have the courage to break it and put it all back together in a way that makes sense. 

...The regulation, co-ordination or conduct of all Carnival activities throughout the country held under the aegis of the Government


...The identification , evaluation and promotion of all Carnival related industries with a view, to the enhancing and marketing of their cultural products and services; and


	the development and implementation of a marketing strategy for Carnival with a view to optimizing the revenue earning potential of the festival and its contribution to the national economy, considering:- 


...To provide the necessary managerial and organisational infrastructure for the efficient and effective presentation and marketing of the cultural products of Carnival


To establish arrangements for ongoing research, the preservation and permanent display of the annual accumulation of Carnival products created each year by the craftsmen, musicians, composers and designers of Carnival.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#872 - February 12</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - February 2013</category><dc:date>2013-02-11T21:25:10-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth872.html#unique-entry-id-292</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth872.html#unique-entry-id-292</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[What moves grown men to wear fur and poke at a papier mache polar bear in the tropics?   Probably an imagination that demands a Grandstand's worth of space. 

...The debate around the state of Carnival tends to boil down to a simple one, whether the traditions of Carnival are more important than its commercial initiatives.


This Hobbesian debate is about whether Trinidad and Tobago was better served by a Carnival that was imagined and staged by a hivemind of individual creators or overseen by a single agency that guides its progress.


...There aren&rsquo;t enough individual creators working in the space to constitute a meaningful constituency and state spending on the festival is so vast and important to Carnival&rsquo;s staging that the wishes of politicians fundamentally guide where the event goes from here.


...Here, the hotmouth kaisoman was called to task by a crowd of calypso fans for appearing to pander to the People&rsquo;s Partnership government.


...Allow the oldest continuously operating calypso tent to collapse through an adversarial relationship with the government agency dispensing critical funds needed to keep it going?


The time to have a reconciliation with the Indo-Trinidadian fans of calypso was a decade ago, after the body calypso rose up to pillory the UNC government with shocking virulence and chased a good half of their audience away.


What was once an option is now a requirement and even though those fans never came back, state money did, with political strings attached, a compromise that&rsquo;s haunted every calypso tent to this day.


...A phenomenon I&rsquo;ve watched evolve in the North Stand as the party there grew more raucous and migrated down the steps to under the stand and the grounds adjoining it.


Now that space has been formalised and, Pan Trinbago believes, contained.   But behind those heavily shielded walls of tarpaulin a party has blossomed that is on the verge of hiving away completely from the Panorama event itself.   It probably serves them right for creating a concert space in which the band by design turns its back on half of its audience.


If ever there was a physical manifestation of the polarisation between tradition and commerce, this was it. 


On one side of the partition, a wild party raged, part Spring Break and part clubbing, it sported booze on hoses, pole dancing and an actual disco with fog and DJ.   These party people may have chosen to say that they were supporting pan, but they didn&rsquo;t need it.


...Armed officers challenged the crowds on the track that were there not just to support their bands, but also to physically haul them along the asphalt to the stage. 


In another concert space, there would have been tracks with cables to pull pan racks which would have long ago been designed to specified sizes.   Here, on the spottily lit track leading to the most important stage in all of steelband&rsquo;s existence, time was frozen stiff. 


...Traditional performance is now a moving mausoleum of old ideas, untroubled by new concepts, new materials and new expression.


Commercial Carnival is equally hidebound, constraining itself shamelessly to what sells with no concern about real design and innovation.   The blur of feathers on Carnival Tuesday is largely matched by high BPM hum of the year&rsquo;s soca output in dozens of parties.


That isn&rsquo;t inspiration, it&rsquo;s repetition and it&rsquo;s killing the event.


Before these conceptual silos were built, there was simply Carnival, when everything was possible.


For at least fifteen full years, the designers, composers and arrangers of Carnival have settled for repeating last year with a variation.   When things have changed, it has been the result of stupidity, not planning.   Destroying the Grandstand, putting the parade on the road and then rebuilding exactly the same Grandstand wasn&rsquo;t evolution; it was pointless irritation.


Until we understand that the spirit of continuous invention was the true magic of Carnival, that pervasive sense of potential waiting to waiting to be realised, we are doomed to continue repeating last year. 


Tradition demands fidelity and commerce must be saleable but creation is risk, it&rsquo;s doing something that hasn&rsquo;t been done before. 


...There needs to be a third space, outside of commerce and tradition for that type of inventive thinking, the conceptual freedom that once fuelled all of Carnival or this party is, finally, over.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#871 - February 05</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - February 2013</category><dc:date>2013-02-04T21:20:56-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth871.html#unique-entry-id-291</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth871.html#unique-entry-id-291</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Blackberry begs a set


The new flagship of the Blackberry product line, the Z10, looks very much like the phone the company needs to chart a course off the rocks.   Photograph courtesy Blackberry.


&ldquo;May I have this dance?&rdquo;


President and CEO of the company formerly known as RIM, Thorstein Heins, did not say those words at any point during his introduction of the new Blackberry Z10 phone at the launch last Wednesday, but he might have summed up vast swaths of his presentation with them.


The company he leads, now renamed simply Blackberry after its flagship product, finally introduced a phone it could legitimately claim to be competitive in the modern smartphone market, and now the company needs to woo people to step out onto a crowded dance floor with them.


The launch event, extensively live blogged and streamed, offered the fan testimonies of staunch fans as a preamble to the new product and operating system launch, testimony to the fact that the company has built strong loyalty to its brand and its devices over the years.


That&rsquo;s hardly surprising.   When data plans were meager, painfully constrained services, Blackberry&rsquo;s backroom server voodoo made it possible to do real things using the Internet.


But the company missed the boat to a startling degree when smartphones evolved after the introduction of the iPhone and telecommunications companies began building out the infrastructure to support more robust data flows.


Bigger data pipes and more elegant usability struck swiftly and fiercely at Blackberry&rsquo;s bottom line, and the company faltered badly in producing a phone that worked the way that users had come to expect.


At the local launch of the first Blackberry touch phone, I played with one for ten minutes and quickly realised that its designers knew what a modern touchscreen phone looked like, but hadn&rsquo;t been able to capture either its elegance, feel or essential functionality.


From the look of the new Z10, that&rsquo;s no longer an issue.   The launch event for the new device and OS emphasise parity with existing platforms, competitiveness in features and some tweaks that Blackberry fans will appreciate.


It&rsquo;s hard to imagine, for instance, a typical iPhone user needing separate profiles for home and work scenarios, but the feature plays off of Blackberry&rsquo;s historical focus on business usability and security while embracing the reality that people use their phones for amusement as well.


There aren&rsquo;t enough examples of this type of thinking in the new phone, and that&rsquo;s not surprising either.   There was a time when the Blackberry legacy was more important than it is today, and the company has wisely decided to place its product in the market that exists, not the one it once owned.


The new BB OS (based on QNX) builds on popular services, adding video chat, with screen sharing no less, to BBM for instance, but the company also made sure to get WhatsApp for its new phones too.


For users hooked on the Blackberry way, there&rsquo;s the Q10 model, expected in April 2013, which has the familiar BB keyboard placed right below a smaller touchscreen.


Blackberry Flow puts a usable face on the new device&rsquo;s multitasking capabilities while Blackberry Hub brings social media and other communications information together in an agreeable looking listing that you can access from anywhere with a simple swipe.


It&rsquo;s arguable that the biggest special effect that Blackberry introduced for the new phone was the company&rsquo;s new Global Creative Director, Alicia Keys who cut a sharp and knowing profile at the launch even as she stumbled through some clumsy banter about being unfaithful to the brand before being romanced back by the new products.


It was a surprisingly awkward moment in a presentation that until then had been the model of soothing reassurance that the Blackberry brand was back.


In photos and in the words of Blackberry executives, there&rsquo;s enough phone here to keep existing BB fans happy and perhaps to woo the undecided who are curious about the phone&rsquo;s mythos. 


But beyond integration with Blackberry&rsquo;s Enterprise Systems (BES) there isn&rsquo;t much here to make an iPhone 5, Galaxy III or Lumia user jump ship.


Related: Archived stream of the BB10 launch


Z10 essentials: High definition screen, 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage.


Pricing comparison: (16GB models compared, unsubsidized price in US$): Z10 - $599, iPhone 5 - $649, Nexus 4 - $349, Lumia 920 - $450, Galaxy III - $599


Among the 70,000 apps available at launch these are most likely to be of interest to T&T users...


Angry Birds Star Wars


...The Guardian]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#870 - January 29</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - January 2013</category><dc:date>2013-01-28T21:13:40-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth870.html#unique-entry-id-290</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth870.html#unique-entry-id-290</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rod Taylor had a solid grip on his 1960 Time Machine.


After last week&rsquo;s deliberation on enterprise scale storage and backup, it might be useful to consider how to replicate some of that automated convenience without having a staff of IT professionals hovering over your computer system like mildly irritated angels.


The simple truth is that backup is a giant PITA.   It is not fun, it is rarely pleasant and it&rsquo;s can be a mauling bear to setup and to maintain.   But it&rsquo;s necessary, like regular exercise is necessary, and the consequences of a digital heart attack can be just as debilitating.


At the core of any consideration of any backup strategy should be the clear understanding that any trust that you place in that brand-new system on your desk is woefully misplaced.


It&rsquo;s hardware, and hardware always fails.   It may fail in ten years or in the next ten minutes, but it&rsquo;s going to fail and that&rsquo;s a bet on a single point of failure is one that you shouldn&rsquo;t take.


Whether it&rsquo;s envy over the technologies that are available in a server appliance like HP&rsquo;s StorageServ systems or naked fear of losing critical work and cherished digital memories, a good, reliable backup system should be as much a part of your technology arsenal as Angry Birds: Star Wars.


I&rsquo;ll confess this much as well.   While I like to return to backup strategy as a column topic as a matter of principle, in the hope that somebody reading the column avoids the tragedy of losing all their data in a single point of failure collapse, I had my own reminder of the fragility of modern storage quite recently.


A month ago, I decided to move from an iMac to a Mac tower system for my desktop server.   This offered an opportunity to upgrade from a single two terabyte drive to a more robust server storage plan.


I promptly stocked the tower with a 240GB SSD for the OS and scratch files with three two terabyte drive in the remaining bays for images, media files and backup respectively.


I had an ornate plan for strategically turning off the incremental backup on that fourth drive occasionally and to set it to save copies of selected folders.   I then promptly forgot to turn it off and was rewarded for that forgetfulness just a few days later when the drive with my photographs disappeared.   A new drive, just days in the system, gone. 


Half an hour later it was all back, restored from the backup drive which had kept an up-to-date copy of all the files courtesy of Apple&rsquo;s Time Machine.


When I&rsquo;ve written about this technology previously, I&rsquo;ve been a bit snobbish about it, preferring to suggest folder level organisation and backup strategies, which I still use for long term archives.


Incremental backup, which Time Machine does so well, should really be part of your digital safety net on any production level computer system (How Time Machine works).


The standard for backup is called the full backup, which makes a copy of all your existing files on a secondary drive every time it&rsquo;s activated.   This is the safest backup scheme of all, because it keeps a full copy of your data with every backup, but in today&rsquo;s era of multi-gigabyte projects, it demands insane storage capacities.


Incremental backup looks at your data, references what it&rsquo;s already backed up and only copies data which has been changed since the last backup.   This makes for smaller backup data sets, but the software doing the backup must be able to restore a current folder without confusing multiple versions of files.


Time Machine does this well, and hides its complexity convincingly from its users.   Built in solutions on Windows aren&rsquo;t as elegant, unfortunately.   You might begin your exploration of incremental backup with Cobian, which does incremental, differential and full backups.   Many other solutions exist as do resources offering advice.


A folder level, assignment focused system of backup is still the cornerstone of my archival methodology, but when I&rsquo;m busy making other plans, an automated incremental system kicks in and weaves a data safety net I can forget about.


...Chris Laird and I talk Time Machine]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#869 - January 22</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - January 2013</category><dc:date>2013-01-21T22:45:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth869.html#unique-entry-id-289</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth869.html#unique-entry-id-289</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Deep storage


Alexander Charry, HP Storage Product manager, Latin America and Caribbean Region (left) and Marcio Curvo, HP Storage Specialist, Caribbean Region explain the complicated technologies of the company&rsquo;s new server level Storage Area Network with a witty roadshow style presentation.   Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.


I&rsquo;m sitting at the table here at the Hyatt, taking notes, many of them with huge question marks next to them.   Even as I&rsquo;m scribbling, I&rsquo;m wondering, who will this column be for?


Sometimes, it&rsquo;s easy to do a column, there&rsquo;s a reasonable certainty that someone will have a problem that&rsquo;s solved by its subject, that it may offer an answer to a question that&rsquo;s gone unaddressed or even provoke curiosity about a new development in technology.


Occasionally it&rsquo;s a topic that&rsquo;s so clearly a topic with a business focus that it falls quite naturally in the Business Guardian.


So when HP presented its new server class storage systems from its 3PAR division, it seemed as if the room at the Hyatt, with a crowd of serious looking tech people was already talking to everybody who would need to know about the new product, the StoreServ 7000.   Read the Guardian&rsquo;s story with all the official message points here.


This is a range of server room storage products that&rsquo;s designed to bring a new level of efficiency to companies working with massive datasets.


How big?   The base model starts you off with bays for 24 drives.   You&rsquo;ll be using two unit bays in your rackmounts for this beast, and you can scale it up to 480 drives which you can fill with 3TB Serial Attached SCSI drives.


This is serious server metal, with the kind of features that large enterprise demands and HP has blessed DigiData with partner status for this rollout.   If you don&rsquo;t need Application Specific Integrated Circuits, support for VMWare, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and SQL and thin persistence, if you don&rsquo;t even know what I&rsquo;m going on about here, then you&rsquo;re probably not the customers that HP was looking for last week.


Everybody&rsquo;s looking for more storage for their systems these days and nobody more so than visual content creators, well them and collectors of, let&rsquo;s call it, &ldquo;online media resources.&rdquo;


Enterprise may have begun to grapple with the challenges of big data, but that just foreshadows a future that&rsquo;s coming soon in which we are all going to be dealing with the challenges of huge data sets with an accompanying need for data mining and effective metadata tagging.


If you aren&rsquo;t Photoshelter, you probably don&rsquo;t need this level of storage and serverside application abstraction.   After all, HP calls a Storage Area Network (SAN) device capable of managing 72TB of managed data resources an economy solution.


You won&rsquo;t find this type of storage on the typical desktop, but it doesn&rsquo;t mean that you shouldn&rsquo;t be thinking about where your data is going to live.


Photographers and videographers already know about the challenges of keeping massive projects available in near-line storage and effectively duplicated across multiple media, and they&rsquo;re on the cutting edge of a problem that eventually will trickle down to everyone capturing photographs and video today.


Decades ago, a shoebox under the bed held the prints that didn&rsquo;t make it into an album and tapes ended up on a shelf in the cupboard.


Those analog solutions, as irritating as they were, were a mercy compared to the challenges that will be along in just a few years as folders of photos and gigabytes of video clips merge into a mammoth data monster that won&rsquo;t easily fit into bedroom nooks and crannies.


Expect at least some of the principles in today&rsquo;s extremely technical HP StoreServ to become more accessible as the data demands among the hoi polloi blossom out of control.


We aren&rsquo;t likely to make the jump to sophisticated SAN devices like the StoreServ 7000 as a first step, but expect data servers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices to become simpler and more accessible as more users hit the limits of drive boxes hooked up to computers.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#868 - January 15</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - January 2013</category><dc:date>2013-01-14T22:31:18-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth868.html#unique-entry-id-288</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth868.html#unique-entry-id-288</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The CS2 suite is free?


Like this?   Cast your mind back to 2005 and read on.


The graphics and photography world was abuzz last week about news that Adobe was offering all of the software once sold as the Creative Suite, version two for free.


To be sure, there&rsquo;s a web page on which you can find downloads of all the products that Adobe was selling for thousands of US dollars just seven years ago, each with an accompanying serial number (your original serial won&rsquo;t work anymore if you try to reinstall).


It&rsquo;s possible that this link won&rsquo;t work by the time you read this, but if you do, then it probably means that Adobe has made some decisions about what to do with a version of its products that nobody is likely to buy anymore.


According to Adobe, this page exists because they have decided to shut down the activation servers that this software needs to run after a new installation.   You can read the company&rsquo;s full statement on the issue here.


Activation first reared its ugly head around nine years ago as a way to complicate piracy of software.


What it actually amounted to was an annoyance for legitimate owners of such software.   Popular products like Microsoft&rsquo;s Office, Adobe&rsquo;s suite and Filemaker Pro forced users of their products contact the software mothership to turn them on.


Mostly, it was a process that just worked.   You installed the software, allowed it to connect to the activation servers and proceeded happily along.


But problems also arose.   Cloned software installations often woke up on new computers and demanded to reconnect to verify their legitimacy. 


Many products set limits on the number of activations that were allowed, so users who upgraded hardware frequently and forgot to deactivate before migrating their data, would have to make costly toll-free but not toll-free (as local phone companies put it) calls to sort everything out.


The only people who weren&rsquo;t troubled by any of this were the committed pirates that the companies were trying so hard to lock out, who had long cracked the software and skipped the whole activation song and dance.


As time goes by, things fall apart (that&rsquo;s my quota of clich&eacute;s for this column), and instead of paying to keep old software and hardware running for obsolete products, Adobe issued versions that didn&rsquo;t need to connect online.


According to the company, you should only be able to access and download these alternate versions of these products if you have an official Adobe ID and a license for the product you are replacing.


The whole process was poorly handled.   If you own one product, you have access to (and accompanying serial numbers for) all of them.


This is all ancient software though, and some products may not work at all on current hardware.   Mac users in particular won&rsquo;t be able to use these apps, which are all written in Power PC native code, on any recent computers. 


So what&rsquo;s likely to be the result of all this?   Adobe&rsquo;s online gaffe will, I suspect, work in their favour.   Anyone who has been curious about any of these products now has a chance to try an earlier, but still capable version if their system can run it.


If the company is smart, they will simply acknowledge that they have released CS2 into the wild and seek to build a relationship with all the people who have grabbed this digital bounty.


Adobe has a chance to turn a mistake into a marketing masterstroke, but it isn&rsquo;t clear that the company has the new age savvy or the corporate will to ride the tidal wave of interest that it&rsquo;s inadvertently started.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#867 - January 08</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - January 2013</category><dc:date>2013-01-07T22:30:32-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth867.html#unique-entry-id-287</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth867.html#unique-entry-id-287</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Portabee 3D printer looks more like a lunatic&rsquo;s woodworking bench than a device that hooks up to a computer, but it does something that was simply impossible just a few years ago.


During a turbulent year for technology, we learned a few things about the way business is done in that world.


...Even though he doesn&rsquo;t look like one.   In fact, Apple&rsquo;s boss looks like the straight-man character actor from a sitcom, sort of like Ryan Stiles, but he isn&rsquo;t.   He may be the calm after the Steve Jobs storm, but he&rsquo;s made Apple even more profitable, maintained the heat on Samsung and Android, fired senior executives and went to China to sort out exactly what was going wrong with the factories and workers who made the company&rsquo;s products.


Then he capped the year by running against the profit-driven tide on manufacturing, announcing that a sliver of Apple's factory business would come back to the United States.


It&rsquo;s all about the money.


If the weird machinations of technology companies utterly confused you, you weren&rsquo;t alone.   One minute Apple was in court fighting against Android, the next, they were partnering with Google and other companies to buy patents from Kodak and other companies.


Most recently, Apple was planning to move the manufacture of its inhouse line of chips from Samsung&rsquo;s Semco to Taipei-based Unimicron Technology Corporation.


...They are in business, and it&rsquo;s all about the benjamins.   Follow the trail on any court case or business partnership and you&rsquo;ll quickly realise that strange bedfellows are curled up on mattresses made of money.   That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s a waste of time forming romantic allegiances with products and brands, because really, while they may say the love you and want your business, they actually just want your money and would like to separate you from it with a smile.


If you want to run with sharks, you need to keep moving.


It&rsquo;s surprising that Research in Motion forgot this basic business principle.   They were fast out of the gate with unique smartphone technology that worked on public data networks but used proprietary technologies to make the best use of the constrained bandwidth that was the norm ten years ago.


While Palm and Microsoft tried to make the nascent tech of the time do things it simply couldn&rsquo;t handle, RIM&rsquo;s Blackberry used the thin data pipelines with remarkable efficiency and grabbed a large share of the market with satisfied customers, oh hell, let&rsquo;s call them fans, because people loved their Blackberry devices.


Fast forward to three years ago and we found RIM railing against the new fangled devices with their touchscreen keyboards and their expensive mobile broadband plans.   When everyone else was surging forward, forcing telephony companies to build out their networks to accommodate the new demand that smartphones were creating, RIM was still pushing old technology and doing so with success only in markets where mobile broadband had poor penetration.


In just a few weeks, the company will be releasing the device they needed to bring to market two years ago. 


Blackberry developers are bullish on the new product, claiming it will be a game changer for the company.   It needs to be, because the game they are playing now isn&rsquo;t winning them many cheers among the punters.


...Nowhere was this more evident than in the growth of consumer grade 3D printers.   When last we wrote about the technology in 2005, the device was the size of an industrial freezer.


Don&rsquo;t entertain any fantasies about an inkjet sized printer spitting out fully realised models from your word documents though. 


Three dimensional printing is still a pretty geeky enterprise, requiring familiarity with computer modelling technologies and a willingness to handle a printer that looks more like an addled robot than your HP Deskjet.   At US$520, though, there are people who would jump to try out the Portabee 3D printer, and the technology has been used to create finished modern art pieces and objects, not just models of things someone would like to see built one day.   Look for interesting things to come from companies like Makerbot.


The Internet is its users, not its policymakers


When the US Congress began to consider the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), activists globally went to work letting Internet users know about the potential impact of the legislation, blacking out home pages as a way of illustrating just how easily the freedoms we take for granted on the Internet could simply go away.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BitDepth#866 - January 01</title><dc:creator>Mark Lyndersay</dc:creator><category>BitDepth - January 2013</category><dc:date>2012-12-31T21:42:48-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth866.html#unique-entry-id-286</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lyndersaydigital.com/bd/files/BitDepth866.html#unique-entry-id-286</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[People sometimes get smart and walk into a store and buy the most expensive version of whatever it is you like to use.   Most folks can&rsquo;t possibly do that though, and muddle around in the middle ground, trying to find something that combines utility and affordability.


Such things exist, but they demand significant savvy to pull off, and this is the column that will help late gift givers or those who have noted the rictus of a smile you managed after opening your gift this morning.


...Everything runs on batteries and while most devices these days have a specially designed one, there&rsquo;s always need for a few AA batteries.


... Now someone getting this far might think that buying one of those rechargeable battery, charger and flashlight combos would be a terribly smart thing to do, but it&rsquo;s not.   They may look impressive in their blister packs, but they really should be taped together with big wads of packing tape and sold out of a big wire basket.


...If the chargers from LaCrosse look like they demand a degree in engineering to master, that&rsquo;s because they do.   Or at least some knowledge of how rechargeable batteries work and how they should be maintained.   The batteries that ship with the device work well, but a rechargeable system architect will go for Sanyo Eneloop batteries, which hold a charge like alkaline batteries but can be recharged more than a thousand times.   I&rsquo;ve been running a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse off this system for more than two years now.


I wish that I could point to a multiple power output charger for USB devices that serves all needs, but for these reasons, such an animal has proved quite difficult to create.   Devices exist, but the lack of a consistent standard on power draw makes end user experiences difficult to predict.   It all comes down to which devices you own and how they draw current for charging.


...Nobody ever thinks about buying a case and that&rsquo;s just as well, because it&rsquo;s such a personal choice, like underwear, only more important.


Like boxers and briefs, the choices in a smartphone case come down to protection and style.   You can get a stylish case that reflects the sleekness and design of your lovely new smartphone but won&rsquo;t protect it from extreme impact. 

...You won&rsquo;t need any help looking for a stylish case, but protection cases come down to Lifeproof and Otterbox.   Lifeproof promises more protection, including actual submersion if you fit the case correctly, but won&rsquo;t warrant against any damage to your device, liquid or otherwise (nobody does), and currently only offers cases for Apple tablets and phones.


Otterbox has a wider range, covering most current mobile devices and is designed for more casual abuse. 

...Mercifully, today&rsquo;s cases come in colour choices, though that acid yellow/orange colour is still available on several case choices if you really want it.


You may have been lucky enough to get yourself a good point and shoot camera under the tree. 


Almost nobody thinks to get a good bag to go along with a camera, and usually get conned into buying bargain &ldquo;packages&rdquo; that will normally include a bag that nobody would ever actually buy.


...Buy one that doesn&rsquo;t look like a camera bag, and more specifically, doesn&rsquo;t have a camera manufacturer&rsquo;s brand stitched or glued onto it.   Thieves have enough fun targeting your stuff, there&rsquo;s no need to paint a neon sign on your gear.


That said, I use the medium pouch from National Geographic for my walk-around camera, the Canon G1X, because I love the canvas feel of it.


Almost nobody thinks to get a photographer some education to go along with their gear. ...  Instead of a new lens why not get some learning to help you manage the equipment you already have?


Any keen photographer at any level of experience will find something useful at Kelby Training and Creative Live.


With luck, late gifters will get a clue from these notes or learn their lesson before your birthday comes around.   Failing both options, you might just want to get yourself one of these just for cussedness.]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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