Another one bites the dust: MediaMaster
03.02.09Filed Under: Misc with 0 Comments
MediaMaster was one of the direct competitors of the music service Ezmo which I helped build. It was with sadness I read today that they too had to close down the service due to lack of funding. I know all to well how difficult it is to fund such a service and given the current global financial crisis it’s not a huge surprise.
Out of the closest competitors to Ezmo I guess it was Anywhere.FM who really made it, they got swallowed by Imeem just a few months after launching.
It seems like subscription based services like Spotify are catching on, but to me those services are more about music consumtion than music collection. In my opinnion there is still room for services which provide a way for music collectors to enjoy music digitally whereever they may reside. Maybe it’s me being an old fart, but I like to have some piece of music I can call my own in the sense that it’s my collection…
I wish my Swedish friends in Spotify all the best and I hope they can sit at Steve Jobs’s table and turn down a 30 billion dollar offer 
UPDATE!
Not even the record industry themselves are capabel of creating music services which last over time. This week Sony BMG and Universal Music’s joint venture TotalMusic had to shut down. Aparently they had some of the same problems as the other services mentioned here and this makes you wonder if this really is an industry that’s worth saving or if they should just die as a result of their own incompetence.
Pattern Jerk Off 2.0
30.01.09Filed Under: Misc with 0 Comments
It’s always funny when you see the results of software architects having jerked off extensively while drawing diagrams on how to write applications. The Patterns&Practices site by Microsoft is one of the best places to see this in the wild.
One such jerk off session resulted in what they have called Three-Tier RIA Application Scenario. It has more patterns than Paris Hilton has bags. I guess this is what happens when someone with an engineering degree tries to explain in simple words what goes arround in their head.
Holy cow, Spring ActionScript?
10.12.08Filed Under: Flex with 0 Comments
Yesterday I was excited about SpringSource helping out with building an improved version of BlazeDS which works even better with the Spring Framework. Today I read on InfoQ that SpringSource is indeed doing even more exciting stuff, they’re helping take Christophe Herreman’s Prana Framework to the next level. Spring ActionScript is the new name and this is really great news and everyone should get excited, right now!
Most of the current Flex/ActionScript frameworks tend to have the same problem, that they don’t focus upon developer productivity. They guys and girls at SpringSource have a great track record when it comes to creating developer friendly frameworks, so this is great news for those of us who’s batteled with Cairngorm and other MVC frameworks for some time.
Spring + Flex = true
09.12.08Filed Under: Flex with 0 Comments
Yesterday Adobe and SpringSource announced they are working together to make the Java and Flex platforms work together even better than they are today. Christophe Coenrates reports that SpringSource is working on a new project called Spring Data Services which is supposed to integrate BlazeDS even close with the Spring framework.
This is great news as the people of SpringSource tend to have a much better focus than Adobe on developer productivity and easy of use. You can say alot of good things about BlazeDS, but it’s very much an outdated piece of software and it really needs to take the next step.
Read the press release from SpringSource
Enter….MTV!
28.10.08Filed Under: Misc with 0 Comments
You thought that MTV was to surrender to all mighty YouTube and substitute even more of their music videos with reality shows? Well, you thought wrong. With the re-launch of their new website, http://www.mtvmusic.com/, they go after YouTube and their illegal use of music videos by allowing users to watch, rate and share all videos in the library.
The recording industry is no big fan of YouTube and how they loose control of distribution of their artists music videos. Perhaps they trust MTV instead of Google to be their distribution channel of choice in the “new” world of the Internet. We have all seen crappy versions of classic music videos on YouTube and we’ve gotten used to watching videos in poor quality in tiny boxes. This is great news for those who have invested a lot of money in expensive hardware for listening to music from their computer, they can now enjoy good qulity video.
I love that I can now watch classics like the one below in good quality in the comfort of my own computer. I still love my MTV!
BDoc helps you keep documentation and code in synch
22.10.08Filed Under: work with 0 Comments
My friend Per Otto Bergum Christensen has created a great too for agile software developers called BDoc. The purpose of the tool is to generate documentation from your unit test code which is linked to requirements in your user stories. This is one of the reoccurring problems I have experienced in agile projects and BDoc is a step in the right direction.
BDoc generates documentation from the test code in a natural language which anyone can read, with a link to the user story. This enables the customer or other non-technical personnel to see whether the requirements in the user stories are fulfilled or whether there are still some pieces missing. This solves one of the issues frequently encountered in agile software projects with user stories becoming outdated and out of sync with what developers are creating.
There is a great article up on The Server Side which gives a great overview of how BDoc works. If you understand Norwegian you can see his talk about BDoc at the agile conference Smidig 2008 in Oslo, Norway.