Front news - Matoumba

YouTube Goes Classic With Global Collaborative Symphony Program

- 25 minutes ago

YouTube sure has come a long way since launching in 2005 and being acquired by Google within a year for $1.65 billion. The company has today announced a collaborative project with a bunch of classical music institutions and artists in the context of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra program, and I think it’s awesome.

Starting today until January 28, 2009, musicians are invited to submit two videos: a personal interpretation of an original Tan Dun composition, written specifically for this program, and a talent video designed to demonstrate their musical and technical abilities. The semi-finalists will be selected by an impressive panel made up of members from the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and other orchestras from around the globe.

Of course, the YouTube community gets to have their say as well; users will be invited to vote on the semifinalists from February 14, 2009 through February 22, 2009.

In April 2009, YouTube will follow up by co-hosting a three-day classical music summit featuring the finalists and classical music stars and orchestras at Carnegie Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, will be conducting.

I’m particularly looking forward to the mashup video of ‘memorable entrants combined into one ensemble piece’ that will be distributed worldwide after the event.

I think this is a great way to push the boundaries of what has been done to date to marry classical music with modern technology, and give the world’s most talented musicians an opportunity to showcase their skills.

Clive Gillinson, Executive and Artistic Director of Carnegie Hall, put it like this:

For musicians of all ages, nationalities, and instruments, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra provides a unique opportunity not only to perform on the world’s most famous stage â€“ Carnegie Hall â€“ but also on its largest stage — YouTube.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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California 'faces budget crisis'

With Nokia you're not just a consumer

Planet Maemo

- 30 minutes ago

Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

The whole N series of devices seems dedicated for allowing you to take that active part: decent cameras, video recording capability, reasonably good keyboards. Not so with the iPhone.

With Apple, you're given the role of a consumer: browser the web, watch videos, buy music from huge corporations. Just don't think different.

Comparing my current iPhone and previous N95, on the Nokia I uploaded a bit more data than I downloaded, on the iPhone, I've downloaded ten times more than uploaded. With difficult text input and no background applications, the device simply seems to push users into the consumer mindset.

Two years ago we handled the whole Death Monkey Rally experience using three Nseries phones. They took our pictures and video, all blog entries were written and published with them, and they recorded our stories to the YleX radio show. Try doing that on an iPhone!

As a product, N97 looks very promising. It has pretty much all features I want from my universal communicator, except one little detail: it doesn't run Maemo.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, nokia, n97

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Lessons to Be Learned From Pownce’s Demise

Mashable!

- 39 minutes ago

Twitter competitor Pownce is no more. We’ve followed the story yesterday: it was acquired by Six Apart, but not to develop the service further: simply to acquire the talented people that worked on Pownce.

I’d like to quickly revisit the story because I’ve been following Pownce from day one, I’ve actually used it more than Twitter, and I’ve been bullish on the service because I thought it offered a compelling feature set when compared to other services in the space. I was wrong.

First of all, less is sometimes more. We all know that, but it was really obvious in this case: Pownce was the Twitter fan’s dream come true, adding groups, file sharing and several other highly requested features without cluttering the service with too many options. However, sometimes simplicity and lack of options are what differentiates a service and makes it worth your while. Twitter devs may be slow when it comes to adding new features, but they’re slow on purpose, because they understand that Twitter is good, for the most part, as it is.

Secondly, sometimes even being much more reliable than your competitors isn’t enough for success. When you think of it, Pownce was positioned very well: it had the features, it had solid backing (it is, after all, Kevin Rose’s baby), and - although it wasn’t without technical issues itself - it came to the scene at a time when Twitter struggled with frequent downtime. And despite the fact that Twitter’s problems with downtime lasted for month, users did not move over to other services, except perhaps FriendFeed (to a certain extent).

The main lesson is probably this: if you’re not first to the game, but perhaps second or third, you need to do your research very thoroughly; sometimes being bigger, better and faster than the competitors simply won’t do.

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Pownce To Launch Public API
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Book Review - Outliers

Challies Dot Com

- 47 minutes ago

pimg alt="Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell" src="http://www.challies.com/media/28578324.JPG" width="185" height="279" class="mt-image-none" style="float:left;margin-right:8px" /I am an unabashed fan of Malcolm Gladwell's books. I enjoy his style of writing and admire his ability to not only dig up fascinating stories and statistics, but to weave them together into a cohesive whole. ema href="http://www.challies.com/archives/book-reviews/book-review-bli-1.php"Blink/a/em and ema href="http://www.challies.com/archives/book-reviews/book-review-the-27.php"The Tipping Point/a/em were both excellent books that, even if not particularly deep, offered popular-level introductions into topics all of us experience but few of us think about. It is little wonder, really, that Gladwell's books are perennial bestsellers. At the moment I write this review, all three of his titles are firmly fixed on the emNew York Times/em list of Bestsellers./p pGladwell's third book, released just a couple of weeks ago, is emOutliers: The Story of Success/em. Here he attempts to shed fresh light on success, asking why some people succeed while others never reach their potential. He takes the view that--our love of the "self made man" notwithstanding--success is rarely only a product of ability and motivation. Instead, he says, success comes to those who are "invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." In other words, we are all products of hidden forces, advantages and disadvantages, culture, upbringing and even plain dumb luck. He points to "practical intelligence," (known also as "emotional intelligence") as a force that often separates two people who otherwise may appear equal in every way. And, of course, there is the value of hard work--just as your mother told you, practice really does make perfect. Pardon my laziness as I quote from a story at the ema href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html?ref=books" target="_blank"New York Times/a/em. "Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn't say so). That's why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don't really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child's success -- or their own -- they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual. Devastatingly, if cheerfully, Gladwell exposes the flaws in these success stories we tell ourselves."/p pIn all of Gladwell's books, I've been drawn to the stories and trivia he relies on to illustrate his points. I enjoyed these elements in emOutliers/em as much as in his previous two titles. However, where I felt that in the other books the illustrations served to further his point, here I often felt that they actually emwere/em his point. If you are like me, you will enjoy reading about the great advantage hockey players have if they are born on the first few months of the year and will enjoy finding out why Korean pilots are historically the worst in the world (especially if, as I do, you have Korean friends to share this information with). But you may also find yourself a little bit disappointed that Gladwell never really comes to any great and grand conclusions. Neither does he offer any substantial answers to many of the questions raised by the book. Then again, maybe that is precisely the point. Maybe this is not a self-help book, trying to release us from the simple fact that success is more than motivation and ability. Perhaps it simply teaches us what is inevitable, what is just one of life's realities--that we are more than our desires and more than our innate talents and abilities. There is always more to a success story than what comes immediately to the eye, but these factors are not easily reproduced, even if we can understand them./p pemOutliers/em struck me as being a bit more derived from other books than his previous titles. I am not convinced that there is a whole lot here that hasn't already been said by others (though I'll grant that these others did not write books that sold in the millions of copies). I guess this just proves Gladwell's point, though. It is not always the most original or most talented or most motivated who see success. This is illustrated well in the review of emOutliers/em printed in the emNew York Times/em. Gladwell, like anyone who has tasted success, is the product of all kinds of forces and factors that have combined to make him what he is. "It is not the brightest who succeed...nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities -- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."/p pI greatly enjoyed emOutliers/em and have no trouble recommending it alongside Gladwell's other titles. It is good for us, I think, to examine success and to understand that things are not always as they seem on the surface. By digging a little deeper than the myth of the self-made man, we are better equipped to understand the forces that, combined together, lead some people to great success while leaving others in obscurity./p pemOutliers/em is a good, light read. I can't imagine that it will change too many lives, but neither does it need to. It is a fun and harmless diversion that offers enough "A-ha!" moments to be worth reading, but not so many that it is difficult to plow through. I think it makes for perfect holiday reading./p piframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=dietofbookwor-20amp;o=1amp;p=8amp;l=as1amp;asins=0316017922amp;fc1=000000amp;=1amp;lc1=0000ffamp;bc1=000000amp;lt1=_blankamp;IS2=1amp;bg1=ffffffamp;f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"/iframe/pbr /strongSponsor:/strongbr /a href="http://www.rpmissions.com"img src="http://www.adgrab.org/www/images/RPMissions.jpg" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=iaTDO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=iaTDO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=yQwqo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=yQwqo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=zcQBo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=zcQBo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/challies/XhEt/~4/472348669" height="1" width="1"/

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