I’ve been using the music streaming service Spotify for a while now, I wrote about it last summer when we tested the service at our office. Or actually it’s my girlfriend that’s been using it the most, since I haven’t gotten it to work on my Linux system. I know it suppose to work under Wine, and I haven’t added that much time to fix it since Linda play the music from here Windows machine instead.
Spotify is the shit when it comes to stream music, but for people like me that don’t know that much music I’ve used recommending engines on Last.fm and latelly in iTunes to find good music. But it hasn’t been satisfying because I don’t really know that many songs or artists.
Today I found a great service, Listiply, that fans of Spotify can use to share their playlists. When I looked around I found another service (Spotify friends) for it as well, but that one wasn’t as great as the first. Don’t know why, I guess it’s a mather of design that I like. The two services ofter the same functionality. So now I can continue to listen to great music without learning the actual songs or artists name. (I can focus on other things in my head)
Yesterday I first heard news about the new Google browser called Chrome. This morning I downloaded it for testing and after about one hour of testing I’m convinced, I will no longer need Firefox. The only problem so far is that I have a lot of great plugins for Firefox, and I hope these will show up for Chrome as soon as possible.Â
The first thing I noticed is speed, both in rendering webpages and in handling the browser. Sites that normally is slow, is much faster in the new browser. And sites that alreday are super fast is even more faster. I also tested some secure locations, and there’s no problem with any thing.Â
It seems that Chrome will be a big threath against Mozillas Firefox that for long have been an outstanding and great choose if you don’t want to use Microsofts browser. And I guess that the link Google have put on there first page, will give them a lot of new users of Chrome since people get it servered on a plate rather then have to seek for it.Â
Perhaps this it’s time to buy Google stocks once again. Because Google is really everywhere, and will probably continue to dominate the web for years to come.
I’ve been testing the Magento plattform for a while and I must say it’s good – but complicated. I don’t find there menu very logical. But the system is great for an e-commerce entreprenur that can have one CMS for several stores.
I’ve tried to modified the layout of the store and it’s both easy and not easy. If you know your CSS you can basically have one design for each product page. But that also makes it difficult. I find if very hard to make a good overall design, but then again I’m no designer.
Unfortently I don’t have that much time at nights to work on these small projects but I will give you a more detailed report furter on.
Hi, don’t know how many of you that listen to this podcast, TWIT (This week in tech). I’ve followed the podcast for more then 18 month, and I can only say – it’s the best! It gives you a great view of what’s happening in the techworld online.
Sure I follow a lot of others blogs on the subjects as well, but I think Leo Laporte have a long history online and he seems to be very updated on what happends online. The site twit.tv also have live broadcasting with webcam shows for about 40h /week.
Finally it has been revealed, I’ve been waiting so long for this cell-phone. I was planing to buy the first version of the Iphone but since it didn’t support 3G I skipped it, instead I bought a Sony Ericsson K850i. I haven’t been that satisfied with that phone, I wanted to take good pictures and have it syncing with my Outlook. I can’t say that it does any of these things very well, so I really hoping that the Iphone 3G will be the new next thing.
One of the new cool things are the built in GPS that’s beutifully integrated with Google maps. I also read that it will support syncing with Outlook, both calender and mails. I wonder if I should prebok it right now, or wait and see what the first customers things about it.
Today I took a new step in the working model we have at Testfreaks. As I’ve written before we have a lot of our staff sitting in countries and time zones all over the world. Lately I’ve had too much work to do, and I’ve wanted an assistant for quite some time. Until two weeks ago I’ve been thinking of hiring an assistant here at the office. But that wouldn’t suite our need for availability 24/7, and since most of our programmers are situated in other time zones it would be great with an assistant in another time zone then me that could bridge my work when I’m home sleeping.
I’ve been thinking and drawing a lot on paper on an outsourced way to clone my self, and now I got found the solutions. Some of my programmers have been working with me for more then one year. And today I made the best one team manager of the rest of the team. Our team has grown a lot and is now more then 20 people in 9 different time zones.
It’s an odd feeling of knowing that you could scale your organisation a lot more, but you – yourself are the bottle neck. That’s basically how my work situation have looked like the last couple of month, but from now I will have a lot more time to improve Testfreaks and work more strategic. The business model we have chosen for this project is very interesting and I don’t know of any other big online company that work like us, but please give me a comment if you know of any companies working like this.
I don’t really watch that much tv online, but I like the thought. So far I’ve just seen Revision3 shows, but today I looked at Natali del Conte’s new show on Cnet. I liked the concept – quick, informatively and good looking host. Normally it’s not that important how the host of the show looks, but this one I liked I hope that the tv blends more with internet so we soon can see these shows in front of the tv instead of the computer.
Natali del conte, went from TechCrunch to hosting the podshow Textra and then to Cnet. Quite a good career leap. Anyway I hope to see more of her shows, and that they are in the same way as this.
Here is actually an old version of her previous show Textra
Since I’m in the business of so called Web2.0 projects I can’t stop wondering on where all the money goes. All these new named (often stupid names) companies that have great ideas (most of them do), they get a lot of venture capital lives a few month or up to a year and then they spent all there money. The trend looks like it did in the end of 2001, but this time Internet companies actually make money, and there are income models that works online. I stumbled over this really fun video about this problem.
This weekend there was an interesting conference, around the web and mobile applications, held in Stockholm. I missed the registration to the event, so I thought I had missed it entirely. But when I surfed around on Hubbub’s homepage I found the back channels on Jaiku and Onelinr, so the first hour I tried to follow the conference from them. But it didn’t workout that good since I missed sound and video from the people that talked on stage. I then discovered that I had a colleague from Testfreaks sitting in the audience, and he phoned me up on Skype. This way I could listen to the entire conference through his built-in microphone. This was an interesting and new (for me) way to attend a conference. I even got the chance, through the back channels at Jaiku, to ask Hjalmar Winbladh from Rebtel a question I had about the Android.
Next time I hope the people behind Hubbub set up a proper Skypeconference that many people can login to and listen. Since the entire event is held in English there must be a big potential audience for this kind of events.
I hope that the tv blends more with internet so we soon can see these shows in front of the tv instead of the computer.