On iPhone 2.0, Shazam and the future of music

Shazam!

Like every other Valley Apple fan boy, I’ve been spending lots of time downloading, discussing and evangelizing iPhone apps.

My favorite app right now, bar none, is Shazam. I cannot believe that the list of fawning servile fans of this app is so small, but let me be the first in line. Not only is the app usable and ridiculously useful, IMHO it points to something the music industry should have been working on for a long time.

What is Shazam? its an app that you install on your cellphone and run whenever you come across a track that you can’t recognize (which happens ALL the time to most of us at the gym, the car radio, and if you are a major Kenny G fan, in elevators). Once the app “listens” to a few seconds of the song, it sends the audio fingerprint up to the server and figures out the actual song and sends it down to the device. You can then proceed to purchase the track (at least on the iPhone you can) or watch a YouTube video.

This is great, but it is rendered more powerful by the iTunes model of music. Several commentators smarter than me have commented on how the album - a collection of songs sold as a whole - is still a valid form of music retail.

Based upon my personal behavior over the last 2 years, I call bullshit.

Purchasing music now is like purchasing a stick of gum while standing in line at Safeway. Or the National Enquirer if you want to be trashy about it. In other words, music purchases are starting to be impulse buys. You hear a great track, you WANT TO BUY IT RIGHT THERE. Given the low price point of 99 cents, you don’t think twice about making a purchase RIGHT NOW.

This impulse has been around since iTunes started to take off but its been dormant. I hear a great track on Entourage, I have to do the heavy lifting of remembering the stupid lyric, Googling the lyric (game over right there), finding the track on iTunes and then paying 99 cents for the privilege. Uhh, no thanks.

On the other hand, Shazam greases that impulse better than anything out there on the market right now. Plus, it retails for FREE via the appStore.

What’s not to love??

Things that tick me off: Google KNOL doesn’t syndicate

Google Knol made a ridiculously loud fat-man-diving-into-kiddie-pool splash last week. Why? Three reasons:

a) Google is involved, and anything with our Interwebs overlords in charge should be greeted with deference.

b) Wikipedia might get crushed in the process. Nerdy Wikipedia editors are just so annoying, after all.

c) The content, at least for the seed list of topics, is FANTASTIC.

Most of the articles have been licensed under Creative Commons. So why the hell is it so hard to get to the content via XML? Let’s say I want to syndicate Knol Content on my site? Why can’t I do that? There isn’t even an RSS feed that will let me get to the first 1000 characters of the Knol.

That blows. And Google should really fix it.

A Dirty Job: Book Review

Picked this bad boy up - where else - at the Palo Alto Borders a few months ago and finally got around to knocking it off the pile.

“A Dirty Job” is a very ghoulish, fairly entertaining, at times laugh-out-loud book by local SF author Christopher Moore. It starts off, disturbingly enough, with an inveterate weak-kneed fella whose wife passes away in the emergency room while giving birth to a baby girl. Charlie Asher - the guy - then goes on to discover that he is a “Death Merchant” and is in charge of retrieving the souls of the dying/recently dead.

In other words, buy this book for your children.

No, but really, what makes the book for me is the fact that it is set in SF and written by a local. Lots of descriptions of SF neighborhoods and town arcana that you wouldn’t know about. There are weak patches in the book and the ending isn’t so hot, but overall it rips along very well.

Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Movie Review

I’m not the kinda guy who will willingly walk into a completely artsy movie just for the heck of it. But I do enjoy the occasional flick that is miles away from stuff getting blown up.

I heard about “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” from a coworker and was immediately intrigued with that very unique title. I’m so pleased that I actually watched it.

The movie is about a debonair, flawed and all-too-human French magazine editor who suffers a massive stroke and is basically completely paralyzed except for one eye. As he says, he has his eye, his imagination and his memories.

And what a wonderful imagination it is. The filmmakers take us into the victim’s brain with roving images of glaciers, deserts and gorgeous sights around the globe. They take us to his memories at Lourdes, the French countryside, sex on the beach with a beautiful French woman.

I won’t say much more because I’d hate to ruin it for you, but please do yourself a favor and watch this movie. You won’t regret it.

Diebold, I love you for the new Bank of America ATMs

I have no idea how new these BOFA machines are, but they must be new. There isnt a single one of these at the Mountain View branch in the building where I work but I found one in Menlo Park yesterday.

No envelopes!!! Hallelujah. I cannot believe that I’ve been getting Susan-Rossed for as long as I’ve had an ATM card like a chump while I could have been using this machine all along. Why was it so hard to invent this thus far? If you’ve got a check, you just drop it in.

But the beauty of it is that the box reads the check and the actual dollar amount. It shows you a photocopy-like image of your check as well as its guess of the dollar amount of the check. No need to handwrite jack. No need to worry that the pen hanging off the side was last touched by a homeless man with herpes who has a bad scratching habit.

Technology 1, Primitive Behavior 0. Booya!

On The Count of Monte Cristo

It has been a really long time since I blogged about a book; don’t worry, I haven’t turned into a retard who doesn’t crack a book. I’ve just been lazy is all.

When I was a kid, we didn’t read unabridged literature. We read these abridged “pocket books” with illustrations, and my ultimate absolute favorite was always Dumas’ wonderful work of loss, hope, faith, triumph and pure unadulterated vengeance.

So it was fortunate that I came across a copy of Monte Cristo while walking around Borders Palo Alto and decided to plunge into the unabridged version of the tale.

While the book in and of itself is nothing short of fantastic, it is set in France in the early nineteenth century. Consequently, there are some cultural artifacts that I simply dont understand:

• Why the hell would you challenge a dude to a duel, then bow to him respectfully before taking his leave? When you threaten to kill someone, shouldn’t you spare the social niceties? I mean, if modern culture tells us anything, it tells us that the French ain’t the most polite people in the world to begin with!
• Why do husbands and wives sleep in different rooms? There are several instances in the book when the husband says to the wife something to the order of,  “Let me meet you in your room in ten minutes” or “I am retiring to my room since you are being a querulous bitch”.
• I haven’t read up on the tradition of the duel, but why would you throw a glove at someone to challenge them? Is it me, or is that the most effeminate method of trash talk of all time?

All in all, well worth the 500+ pages!

Sehbali Cafe - Wireless for People. In Palo Alto. Nuff Said

Update: It’s all over, kids. This place is shutting down, soon to be replaced, I’m sure by one of the following:

• trendy furniture store that charges 400 dollars for a chair that looks like it was built in Sweden in the 70s.
• restaurant that charges 15 bucks for an entree

Despite Palo Alto’s vaunted claims to tech supremacy in Silicon Valley, anyone who has walked down University Ave with a laptop knows that finding wireless access is a *huge* pain in the ass.

Starbucks, in all their wisdom, still charges thirty bucks a month for shitty T-Mobile access. Coupa Cafe is so overrun with Macbook-toting yuppies like myself that they unplug their router over the weekend! Then there’s Peets Coffee - crappy coffee combined with no wireless. Yay! Finally, don’t forget about Neotte tea bar - one of those pretentious places that would go out of business anywhere except for in Palo Alto. In good ol’ Palo Alto, however, people flock to the New Age nonsense joint and sip six dollar teas that are supposedly from China but taste distinctively like they were plucked in Bakersfield, CA. Nice. Oh yeah, and the wireless is spotty as all hell.

It was a great pleasure, then, to discover Sehbali Cafe today on the corner of Ramona and University Ave. This is the best-kept secret on this street; plentiful seating, a quiet atmosphere ideal for work and blazing-fast WiFi. Woohoo! Score, baby.

The obvious reason no one knows about this place is because the same parcel of land is used for a coffee shop, a hookah shop AND a florist. I’m sure the guy who runs it has a Harvard MBA; what else could explain such synergistic endeavors and such diverse core competencies!?

Anyhow, check Sehbali out; you wont be disappointed.

Bourne Ultimatum Is A SnowBlower’s Movie

Or something to that effect. Watching The Bourne Ultimatum is like snorting a pound of cocaine while just sitting around. The movie is so thrillingly quick and just so much goddamn fun. Most reviews have supplicated themselves at the throne of the King of Jerky-Camera-Land Paul Greengrass (the movie director who also did the ultra-wrenching United 93); that being said, there isn’t much of a point in me telling you the same things that everybody else has already reiterated.

What I will say is this; watch out for the background score. I’m no audiophile, but the action wouldn’t be half as fun (and even half would be awesome) without John Williams’ fantastic musical touch.

If you haven’t been to Europe yet, the movie will serve as a voyeur’s dream; you’ll feel you are right there with Bourne. The locations are nothing short of amazing - Moscow, Turin, London and of all places Tangiers, Morocco. The sequence in Tangiers is my personal favorite since that’s not a city you see frequently in American cinema; Greengrass uses that fact with amazing effect as Bourne jumps Crouching-Tiger-style from roof to roof. The sequence reaches its crescendo when Bourne and another CIA assassin go at it mano-a-mano in a dingy Tangiers apartment. Watch out also for the kick-ass shot in which Bourne jumps off a roof and flies right through a glass window - nothing short of exhilarating.

The end is a little bit weak since the rug that the moviemakers are trying to pull out from under us ends up being totally threadbare; the suspense is totally overstated. But it’s Bourne’s journey home to NYC that makes the movie a massive adrenaline surge.

Now you just have to hope that someone can convince Dick Cheney to watch it.

Ratatouille - Movie Review

When I first saw the preview for Ratatouille, I wasn’t so impressed - a movie about rats? No thanks, I’ll pass, I said to myself.

Then I saw the Metacritic reviews with all these critics lining up to drool over Brad Bird’s new oeuvre. It might be worth it after all, I thought to myself.

But this didn’t prepare me for the wonder and glory that Ratatouille brings to the silver screen. I don’t remember the last time I sat in a movie theater so mesmerized, so enveloped by what Fake Steve would call “a sense of childlike wonder”. The story holds its own against the fantastic animation work throughout the movie - no small task, since Pixar has done a fantastic job of imagining Paris in Pixar-land. Cobblestone streets, little European cars, lovely fountains and rude Frenchies - they’ve got it down to the last little detail, as is their wont.

For those who are joining us late - the movie is basically one rat’s quest to go from scavenger to culinary master, from a French countryside cottage to a chic restaurant in Paris. In order to make it happen, the rat must use a young garbage boy who can’t cook worth a damn but has, ahem, a nice heart.

Sound cliched and disgusting? Don’t worry, that’s only because I don’t know how to write. Go watch this one.

SiCKO Is Part Powerful Tearjerker, Part Bullshit - Movie Review

This is the movie review for SiCKO, Michael Moore’s new “documentary” about the U.S health care system and its relative spot against the rest of the world.

The first half of the movie is powerful stuff - primarily because Moore stays behind camera (unlike his other films) and lets the treatment denial horror stories of insured Americans and their tears do all the talking.