We're very excited that Shout Out is now up and running on the IC tomorrow platform. We spent the day at Innovate 11, an annual conference held by the Technology Strategy Board, shouting about it.
ShoutOut.fm is our brand new web service to record messages or 'shout outs' over your favourite music tracks. There are over 10 million music tracks to choose from so it is easy to find the right music to fit the message, whether that is thanking friends for a great night out or promoting a favourite track. Shout outs can be emailed or shared with friends on Facebook.
For the past few months every Thursday morning we've been going along to BetaBreakfast.
Betabreakfast is hosted by Betahaus a 2,000 sqm workspace in Kreuzberg Berlin. Betahaus describes itself as 'a co-working space for creatives'. It is set up to serve a way of working where teams come together and disband according to the project at hand and workspace terms are affordable and flexible. Betahaus has all of the usual facilities required to run a small business including the cafe where we meet for breakfast. The fluid nature of the space means that it is brimming with startup ventures and every thursday morning people meet over breakfast to take turn introducing themselves and their projects.
Betabreakfast is an informal opportunity to first show projects to a group of like minded entrepreneurs. Projects are usually self initiated so these are first steps in a feedback loop with Betabreakfast as a kind of startup school. Discussion is generally relevant to most present if not there is always the fall back of a good german breakfast. Sitting in on breakfast you often find observers from Brussels (EU) here purely out of interest of the startup culture in action.
Betahaus is not without a position feedback tends towards a non elitist social good with OpenSource and OpenData at it's heart and away from an overtly commercial Walled (Garden) approach. Although this position could equally be attributed to the whole of Berlin.
Betabreakfast is part of a wider trend in Berlin that is seriously competing to be the startup capital of Europe. In the field of online audio we find ourselves in impressive company in Berlin SoundCloud HQ is nearby in Mitte and Sourcefabric Airtime literally next door.
Avco is based in Betahaus, Berlin for summer 2011 with our startup project ShoutOut.fm
Our latest web app ShoutOut is one of the winners of the IC tomorrow Digital Innovation Contest. ShoutOut is a tool that combines spoken word and music clips to make audio messages that can be instantly posted and shared. Over the next 6 months we'll be working with IC tomorrow and the music industry to create shout-outs using ShoutOut.fm
IC tomorrow is part of the Technology Strategy Board
How to future proof digital works of art?
Avco has worked on computer editions for artist Michael Craig-Martin since 2002, writing software to control the display of his drawings.
In February 2011 Tate Conservation invited us to attend a symposium on how best to future proof digital works of art. We were consulted with regard to the works in the Tate Collection by Michael Craig-Martin 'Becoming, 2003' and 'Things Change', 2007. Daniel Jackson from Avco wrote the original software and Avco was commissioned in 2010 by the Tate to migrate the sofware as part of the artworks' digital conservation.
Thinking about how digital works of art exist in the world is of real interest to us, we have a great deal to say on the matter if you ever wish to hear our thoughts.
Photo by Daniel Jackson - Michael Craig-Martin, 'Things Change' 2007, installation for Tokyo New Art Centre, Japan
London Sinfonietta's website is 2 years old! It has served them well. So well that we have now extended their digital offering by adding a Listen & Watch section, a great supplement to their concerts.
We've also spruced up their homepage. No small task considering how fond we were of the first version. The grid remains the same with a clearer delineation of section areas, video playback on the homepage and more opportunity for London Sinfonietta to show off their concert programme.
We were very pleased to work with Spiral Productions to build a jukebox audio player for the works of Robert Burns to be on permanent display in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum The new museum opened it's doors on the 30 November 2010 with a permanent exhibition by Spiral.
What's more The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum won the award for Best Permanent Exhibition at this year’s Museums and Heritage Awards 2011 in London. Congratulations to Spiral on a great project!
Photo Credit: Jennifer Nelson of Unmuseum who also wrote a very nice review
Just back from DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010.
Drupal 7 is due for release in October 2010. The Drupal community have their heads down in the final coding sprint before the release. Not the best time for a Drupal conference you might think. But no quite the opposite, in anticipation of this major release and as Drupal approaches 10 years old, the conference looked to the future.
Drupal's growth has been in the not-for-profit sector providing social networking CMS based websites. Amongst Drupal developers there has been a strong sense of community and generally a feeling of doing good in the world. If there was a problem they'd solve it. Amongst users the deal was one of give and take, a proportion of what you gain from the use of Drupal you contribute back to the community.
The opening keynote 'State of Drupal' found Drupal's project leader Dries Buytaert considering where Drupal would be in 10 years. Undeniably the continued growth of Drupal would see the CMS as a web service for many, in the same mould as WordPress. Throughout the conference the user experience was given priority above all else. Mark Boulton, design consultant on D7, described it as having been re-designed principally with accessibility and the end user in mind. Drupal is gearing itself up for a much wider and less geeky uptake. Many conference sessions were designed wtih this purpose in mind. I attended sessions where a show of hands generally revealed a high proportion of attendees were people running Drupal projects for clients and also people wanting to publish their own projects.
So here we were at a conference where the core team of Drupal developers, all volunteers, were solving the last remaining critical bugs, an enormous task, necessary for the release of D7. At the same time the attention of the conference was with those who would be using the product and their requirements. There was a sense that developers were no longer principally developing for themselves but for the user. A thankless task comes to mind.
Surely a conflict of interest lay ahead. The Drupal developer is literally the core of the CMS. How will the opensource developer remain motivated when the corporates are creaming off the product? As Dries Buytaert warned there’ll be a "huge influx of barely competent morons who have no interest in Drupal other than making a fast buck". The model of give and take dissolves.
Of course this is part of a much wider discourse around the sustainability of opensource. This is one of the biggest opensource projects being played out right now. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds and which, if any, business models emerge. Dries Buytaert hinted that Drupal Distributions, co-licensed by developers as super 'premium themes' may be a way forward.
We're already looking forward to DrupalCon London 2011.
Photo credit: by Elv on Flickr
NMC lay on a fine party at their headquarters in Somerset House to celebrate the launch of the new website and Music Map AVCO has created for them. Many of the composers featured on the site attended, including composer and Executive Producer of NMC Colin Matthews (pictured) who gets to say a few words.
See more photos on flickr
See our new website for NMC - www.nmcrec.co.uk
A contextual app is a game, data navigation tool, widget, mini-app, flash game, ajax visualization - basically a bit of software that displays information on a website related to your location in the site and the data you are interested in. An audio player is a simple example of a contextual app.
We wanted the Music Map to be useful across the NMC website and accessible from the data it related to. We achieved this by having the map launch from each of the composers homepages, from the features on the front banner and there is a also dedicated launch page. On clicking the map button the app opens fullscreen providing an alternative navigation to the information and audio resources on the site.
Each of the 250 featured composers have a Music Map and each composer is the starting point of their own map.
Using Flash rather than javascript means that the Music Map experience can be more immersive. The map launches full screen, it is graphically rich and animated. For non-flash users (i.e. iPhone users) all the relationships are available as 'Similar Composer' links. The map becomes more of an experience, particularly with the audio player providing a musical atmosphere (playing a track of the Composer you are viewing), and there are many drop-off points back into the website. Being contextual you can navigate from one composer to another, switching back and forth between Music Map and website modes.
It's the same data just another way of seeing it.
We are proud to present a new website for NMC Recordings.
NMC approached us to create a fresh informative website for their organisation promoting and exploring the NMC recordings.
We made plans to show off their music catalogue.
We took a fresh look at their identity and pared it back to the identifying band across their recording covers. This gave breathing space to the website for the very many splendid and varied LP art covers.
Next was the important matter of bringing music to the website. We placed featured audio up front on the homepage banner and each recording page has a 1 minute excerpt for each track.
NMC wanted their visitors to go on a musical exploration so they gave us an open brief to build a 'Music Map'. Our response was to create a dynamic relational map featuring their composers and recordings, weaved into the site and acting as an alternative view of the catalogue.
Go see for yourself at www.nmcrec.co.uk
