Pandora is one of the most advanced internet radio websites. Instead of duplicating a real world radio station, and adapting it for use online, the have used web 2.0 technologies to put the control in the users hands. The way that the founders have done this is by creating the Music Genome Project®. They have analyzed tens of thousands of songs to identify up to 400 musical elements and characteristics of each song which included everything from “melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.” By doing this, Pandora can accurately recommend a song and artist similar to what you are interested in listening to.
Pandora is simple to use and provides free accounts. With a free account you will be able to create and customize many stations with music from as many artists as you would like. These stations are very simple to set up; all you would need to do is click on the “create a new station” button. Once the text box comes up you enter in the name of the song or artist you are interested in listening to. This will then be your new station where you can start listening to and rating the music selection. These free accounts are supported by the advertisements place on them. There is also a song skip restriction placed on each station.
To remove the song skip restrictions and advertisements you can sign up for a premium Pandora account for $36 per year. The advertisements place on the free accounts and brand sponsored websites provide the funding to keep Pandora available as a free service. This web 2.0 technique is ideal to bring a large number of users to your site in order to increase profits through advertising revenue and premium subscriptions.
Pandora has also recently expanded to include a video series that covers concerts, in studio interviews, and a section entitled Music 101. This enables them to utilize partnerships with youtube to bring new users and funding to the Music Genome Project®. They have also created accounts on other popular social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook to connect with their current and future users.
May 9, 2009 | Categories: Management 190 | Tags: 190, Hot Technologies, management, music, music genome project, pandora, Web 2.0, youtube | Leave A Comment »
Microsoft Silverlight is the revolutionary replacement for Adobe Flash. Similar to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, by Microsoft, is a plug in to allow viewing and interaction with interactive content on websites and web pages. Silverlight is much faster than Flash in loading and continuous streaming of the content being viewed. As seen in the “Hot Technologies”, it is very simple to download this plug in straight from the silverlight.net home page. With the install file being less than 2MB in size, you will have quick downloads no matter the speed of your internet connection, and runs with all popular browsers.
Silverlight is more than just a plug in to enhance the viewing of multimedia content; it is a Rich Internet Application (RIA). A RIA is a web application that has similar characteristics as desktop applications. With tens of thousands of website developers, ranging from large corporations to individuals designing online scrapbooks, Silverlight has become one of the leaders for rich internet application platforms. Not only are these creators of these websites and applications benefitting from the use of Silverlight, the more than one billion collectors, critics, and spectators also benefit from the content the find on these sites.
Silverlight.net has a section on their website called the Showcase which features websites and applications that use the Silverlight technology. The sites have the best application of the technology as rate by the many internet users that visit the site, with new sites added daily. There are many amazing sites that utilize Silverlight such as tv.telerik.com which has many built in streaming videos and other media.
Other key uses for Silverlight include organizations that need to stay in constant contact and need all information to be continuously updated such as doctor’s offices. Schedules for employees and patients can be kept online and updated from any computer in the office. Patients records can also be kept up to date and viewed by any doctor they will be seeing or having surgery with and past surgeries be easily reported.
Libraries also use Silverlight to showcase their rare and historic books and periodicals, so that researchers and students around the world can benefit from the content. This allows the viewing of these content rich books in high resolution graphics, without the possibility of damaging these rare items. With the many capabilities of Silvelight, it is remarkable what you can do with this platform.
May 9, 2009 | Categories: Management 190 | Tags: 190, Adobe Flash, Hot Technologies, management, RIA, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, social networking, Videos, Web 2.0 | Leave A Comment »
The “Hot Technologies” video on yousendit.com was very helpful in explaining what the service offered. Yousendit.com is a web based application that allows you to send large files to multiple email addresses at once. Unlike most email services that only allow 5mb – 10mb attachments, this site allows files as large as 100mb to be sent over email. The way that they are able to accomplish this is that the file is hosted on their website and a link to the file is sent to the email addresses entered. Using this service is also a lot easier and faster to use than an FTP server. To use this service all you have to do is enter http://www.yousendit.com into your web browser and press enter. In the form provided on the left side of the screen of yousendit’s homepage all you have to do is enter your recipients email, your email, choose the file and then press send to send the file. If you want to include a subject and message you need to set up a free trial account. When you send an email using this service you will also receive an email confirmation that it has been sent.
This free service is available to anyone that needs to send a large file to one or more recipients. The files that are uploaded under the free service are available for 7 days and can be downloaded up to 100 times. By using this web 2.0 technique of offering a free service, they are able to have a larger amount of users who will then subscribe to their premium accounts when they need to use the service for longer periods of time and allow more downloads per file. For example with the $9.99/ month pro subscription n you can send a file up to 2gb with up to 500 downloads per file with no expiration or a expiration date you set yourself. With this plan you can also get a yousendit drop page so others can send you files. In addition to the subscriptions there are pay per use fees, where you can have premium delivery, return receipt, password protected files, and certified delivery with tracking.
YouSendit.com has had over 9 million users and has had many applications developed to make using this site easier. For example they have application plug-ins for Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop CS#, Final Cut Pro, and CorelDRAW X3 just to name a few. In addition to these plug-ins they have YouSendIt Express which allows you to send files directly from your desktop.
“YouSendIt.com comes to the rescue when simple text messages are not enough.” – Hot Technologies Video
May 2, 2009 | Categories: Management 190 | Tags: 190, adobe, attachment, email, free, Hot Technologies, management, photoshop, premium, yousendit | Leave A Comment »
The “Hot Technologies” Video did a good job on showing the features and usability of CatchVideo.net. It was simple, just copy the url from YouTube and paste it in the text box located on the homepage of CatchVideo.net. Click Download, and you are ready to save your video. After viewing the short video I decided to check out the site for myself. First I went to YouTube.com and found a video titled “Play n Skillz Shout out to Majico Entertainment”. This was a fairly short video and had pretty good audio. From the home page of CatchVideo.net I selected to use the CatchVideo classic, which was a simple page to paste the url, select the format and click on the convert button to convert the video into the selected format. There were 12 different formats for the videos with 7 file types. I selected the .mp4 for windows. The convertion of the video took les than a minute and played well on the preview page of the website. After I viewed the video I downloaded it and was ready to watch or send the video as an email attachment. The Download process took the longest which was due to the connection speed of the wireless internet connection I was using. CatchVideo.net is supported in 8 different languages. From what it looks like the companies main source of revenue is from the advertisements featured on the pages. There were many popups that were blocked in addition to the ones embedded onto the page. In addition to being able to Catch and convert video from YouTube, CatchVideo.net is also compatible with DailyMotion, Sevenload, and MetaCafe, with an added feature of converting videos from your hard drive coming soon. I feel that this site will be very useful, rather than using downloadable programs such as Any Video Converter.
April 3, 2009 | Categories: Management 190 | Tags: any video converter, catchvideo, dailymotion, entertainment, Hot Technologies, majico, metacafe, play n skillz, video, youtube | Leave A Comment »
One of the newest and fast growing search engines to emerge is known as Cuil.com. Cuil is an old Irish word that means “knowledge”. At first glance the Cuil.com homepage seems like a duplication of Google’s format. It has a predictive search format similar to that of more popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. For my first test search I used the same example used in the “a guided tour of Hot Technologies” video, Identity Theft. The results were delivered just as fast as the same search on Google, and faster than the image heavy alternative Yahoo. These results look very different than the typical results I was used to, and resembled that of a magazine or news website. At first they were a little confusing, but after further review, I noticed many features that distinguish this site from the other larger search engines. There were tabs that gave you search results for narrower topics related to the original search and a list of similar searches and related topics. I liked this tab feature, although there weren’t as many suggestions as shown in the video. They also had excerpts from the websites they were referencing. A feature that was not mentioned in the video, which is newer to the site, is a timeline. This timeline shows major events that are related to the search and give it a more real world feel. Cuil.com is great for research and will help with narrowing down your topic if you start off too broad. Another awesome feature of Cuil.com is that they focus on the results of your search rather than having a lengthy menu of the many other services they may offer which is found to be very common of their larger competitors such as Google and Yahoo. I will definitely use this website in the future and refer it to friends. As for the “Hot Technologies” video, I wasn’t too drawn in and entertained. The format of the introduction seemed to be outdated and bland.
April 3, 2009 | Categories: Management 190 | Tags: cuil, google, Hot Technologies, research, search engine, yahoo | Leave A Comment »
