Google Play Music

A bit of background information. I lost my iPod a year ago (I’m still mourning my loss) and have been using my Samsung Galaxy Note as a replacement. However, the tiny memory somewhat hampers how many albums I can have on it (my 80GB iPod had about a decade’s worth of questionable music). Luckily I had backed up most of it on an old hard drive and decided to load it to Google Music.

Using Google Music to upload your tunes couldn’t be easier. Simply download the Google Music Manager, find the folder containing the music and hit upload. I’ve been listening using the web app and smartphone app on Android.

The web app GUI is extremely clean and easy to use. You’re greeted by cover art (which it’s pretty good at finding) from your collection which clicks through to the songs and huge control buttons along the bottom. There’s a search bar along the top (great when you have a large collection of music) and options to filter such as Artists, Albums, Thumbs Up (favourites), playlists etc. Google have also introduced a music store similar to rivals iTunes store (prices are roughly the same).

The Android app is also well laid out, making walking and finding music at the same time easy. What I most like is the Keep On Device option. As the name suggests, you can download albums and playlists to keep on your device. Perfect for anyone like me who runs out of memory on their smartphone, it makes switching music easy and constantly keeps your collection fresh.

My favourite feature has to be the Play Instant Mix function. Clicking the arrow next to any song and hitting this option generates a playlist based on the chosen song. It’s a very similar idea to the radio function on Spotify for example, except the songs are selected from your music collection so you’ll know you like them. Songs are chosen not only based on similar artists but ‘metadata and audio analysis’ so you may find a few odd but relevant choices in there. It’s a wonderful function to have if you’re in a certain mood and need a quick playlist.

What separates Google Music from it’s few competition? It allows you to upload 20,000 songs for free.

Overall, Google Music is something all music fans should look into. Thanks to it, I can revisit old music and take a trip down memory lane. Can I interest anyone in O-Town?…

Have you tried Google Music yet? What do you think of it? Tell us in the comments section below.

Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers.

Graph search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide an answer.

Image via CrunchBase

So through using graph search you will be able to enter a query and then through the application of filters be able to distil an answer that is exactly what you are looking for. For example, I could look to search for friends in New York who are supporters of the New York Yankees should I be looking to find out information about that team. Further than that I would be able to identify anyone who works for the team that is a friend of my friends. This could lead me to being able to get in touch with someone who would be able to answer any questions or queries I may have about the team. It is this linking that could see graph search becoming a useful tool for many different applications.

Examples where graph search would be beneficial would include businesses looking to target people who are involved with their brand and also those looking to get the friends of these brand ambassadors involved too. as people are more likely to participate in an event or buy a product should it be recommended by a friend. Businesses looking to recruit individuals that work in a certain field will be identifiable, and if they are friends with anyone who already works with the business then a link is there that they may be able to approach from.

Photos are also a huge part of graph search. Searching for photos taken in certain places such as National Parks or even certain periods of time will give you exact results from a variety of sources. This again will bring up more privacy issues and who actually owns the images.

There are, of course, many people who are criticising the invention of graph search as it is believed to be a bit creepy. And in many ways it is, now more than ever the way in which we are sharing data and information online is under the microscope. Everything that you post will be stored and will be going into the graph search building a huge profile. There may be privacy settings that you can alter to make Facebook a little bit more private, but through this development people will be having to think a lot more about what information they are sharing and even what pages they are liking and what photos they are being tagged in. Graph search is almost the exact opposite of Snapchat, an app that allows people to share pictures like a text message and then deletes the image after a set amount of time. There is no data build up, it is simply a quick message that will be remembered by people rather than data banks.

Another issue facing graph search is that it can’t tell when you are being serious. You may have liked a page as a joke a long time ago and forgotten all about it. Facebook sadly won’t be able to tell that you weren’t being serious and it won’t forget either. Everything is stored in the data banks. This can also be applied to people saying that they work at joke companies such as Willy Wonkas Chocolate Factory.

Despite claims that graph search is not going to compete with web search engines such as Google Facebook have partnered with Bing which suggests that there may be a real rival to Google. However, Facebook does not feel that people will come to it to search the web (well, not yet anyway). In the future, though, the way in which we search and the way in which businesses will be able to advertise will be very different and graph search could be the way in which people choose to search.

What are your thoughts on Facebook graph search? Do you think that it will be a success? Who do you see benefiting most from the development of search on Facebook? Please let us know in the comments section below.

Most fans would happily settle for a LEGO replica or another plastic lightsaber but not Chris Lee, the (rather crazy) man at the origin of the Full Scale Falcon Project. Fan to the core, this resident of East Nashville started to dream about his own Falcon from the age of 12 after first seeing Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. But how, will you ask, such a massive project can be achieved?

Well, Mr. Lee wasn’t completely inexperienced when he decided to take on the challenge. Prior to the Falcon, Lee had also play around a bit in his garage and built his own R2-D2 robot along with a few “disco stormtrooper” outfits with LED panels. And as you’d expect, other  geeks and Star Wars devoted fans have joined the venture thanks to the power of the Internet and are helping as they can by building some parts of the life size interior, exterior, weapons (don’t get too excited, these won’t be firing anything) and more.

The final piece of art should come in at 144-foot long and between 24.9 feet and 30.9 feet high. Sounds quite enough to host a big intergalactic party, no?

Coming together slowly, the vessel is not likely to be ready just yet and certainly not in time for the seventh episode of the Star Wars saga. Cost wise, construction price is already estimated between $200,000 and $800,000. For this price, it’d better have a few iPads built in! But as Chris Lee and the other main contributors to the project mention, “the journey is the reward. The excitement of the build, and of friends and fans working together on a group project is what we are going for.”

Once finished, the Falcon will sit on a 35-hectare plot of land bought by Lee in Tennessee and might be turned into a workshop for students, a museum or who knows, perhaps a set for the Disney Studios, which recently bought over Lucasfilm.

Whatever it becomes, there’s only one thing to wish to all these hard core fans recreating what Luke Skywalker himself once called a ‘piece of junk’…  May the force be with them.

Image by computerjoe

For those of a certain age, (likely born in the mid-80s) who will have spent much of their teenage years enthralled in an obsessive love affair with Microsoft’s instant messaging service MSN messenger, the latest news from Microsoft marks the end of an era.

It has been announced that on March 15th our beloved MSN messenger will be “retired” at the ripe old age of 14 and its services will be merged with that of Skype, Microsoft’s new-ish VoIP service that it acquired in a multi-billion dollar deal.

MSN messenger first appeared in July 1999 and soon became the favoured form of communication for many a teenager, I myself remember many an evening spent conversing with my friends on IM, priding myself at being able have 10+ chat windows open at any one time and still be able to keep up with the conversations.

But with the dawning of social networking so too came the demise of MSN as fickle teens like myself abandoned their much-loved IM service in favour of newer more glamorous offerings such as MySpace and Bebo, later to be replaced by the ever popular Twitter and Facebook of today. Social Networks opened up a whole new world of communication, not only could you chat like on MSN; now you could, share photos with your contacts, play games with each other and even throw sheep at them if you so desired.

All is not lost however, for anyone still using MSN (or those like me who migrated through the various platforms but just couldn’t bring themselves to close their MSN account) all is not lost. As MSN merges with Skype all of its 100 million plus accounts will automatically be transferred to Skype so you will still be able to keep all of your MSN contacts.

All you need to do to begin using Skype with your MSN account is download the latest version of the Skype video chat service and sign in using your MSN log in details, it couldn’t be easier. If you have an existing Skype account you can then merge the two accounts and have all your contacts in the one place.

If like me you were holding on to your MSN account purely for nostalgia this merger is a great opportunity to take a trip down memory lane before you then go through your now merged contacts list and remove all the people you haven’t spoken to since you were 16 years old; saying a final farewell to our dear friend MSN.

Are you sad to be saying Goodbye to MSN? Let us know with a comment below!

Image via Robert Scoble

One of the traditional problems plaguing the tech sector has been the ease with which patents can be acquired for fairly basic ideas, without requiring the same kind of rigour as patents based more in real life products.

Many computer-related patents claims just describe an abstract idea at a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over the Internet. Such barebones claims grant exclusive rights over the abstract idea itself, with no limit on how the idea is implemented. Granting patent protection for such claims would impair, not promote, innovation by conferring exclusive rights on those who have not meaningfully innovated, and thereby penalizing those that do later innovate by blocking or taxing their applications of the abstract idea.

Further, Google stressed that the abstract patents filed by Alice, the defendant in the original case, did not meet the standards for inventiveness as required by Mayo v Prometheus, pointing out that the company’s patents only:

• Add obvious steps
• Add non-specific steps
• Limit ideas to one environment, aka the computer
• Lack details in the patent, such as the machine the process is performed on.

You can read the full brief here.

If the appeal goes through, this could give a massive leg up to smaller players in the tech sector, as well as be great for future online innovation; after all, as the brief points out, “… ideas are much easier to come by than working implementations.” However, that’s a big if since there is already an entire other part of the industry with a vested interested in retaining control of their abstract patents, as well as a lot of money tied up in them. The prognosis is looking good though, since the US Patent Office just invalidated the infamous Steve Jobs patent on multi-touch interfaces on Friday.

Do you think Google and Co. have a winnable case? Share your thoughts below!

While I do like the ringtone, Norweigan house duo Moodcraft (Jonathan Gjertsen and Morten Reinhard) seem to like it quite a bit more.  So much so, in fact, that they’ve sampled the internet call giant’s ringtone and turned it into a funky house track… and it’s actually pretty good.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, then take the collective word of these tweeters:

@moodcraft Where can I download this? It’s reached its limit on @SoundCloud!!! I want to dance to this!

December 6, 2012 3:42 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@vernoneol

Vernon O.

Love this ‘moodcraft SKYPE SONG’ from one of our fans via #soundcloud http://t.co/Kb0xYEzX

December 6, 2012 12:46 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@jenatskype

Jennifer Caukin

Amazing techno techno techno remix of the Skype ringtone RT @OrnyD: @Paul_Austin Jesus, I love it. http://t.co/i3rzQHJt

December 5, 2012 5:03 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@Paul_Austin

Paul McDonnell

This is awesome, instant classic! #moodcraft SKYPE SONG via #soundcloud http://t.co/wbw26LrI

December 5, 2012 12:57 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@JJBaybee

Zohare Haider

LOVE this Skype ringtone remix!! http://t.co/tfiMysXq

December 5, 2012 9:51 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@GriffMyth

Griffmyth

And it seems that it’s not only twitter users and myself who like it. Skype left this comment on the track’s YouTube video

“We love this! Would you be OK with us using an image from this video to post about this on Skype’s social channels?”

The track first appeared on Sound Cloud yesterday and has had over 3,500 listens, 49 likes and 24 comments already. It looks like it’s quickly building up a head of viral steam.

The Moodcraft guys gave us a little insight into how the track came into being:

“We got the idea when someone called Jonathan on Skype while we were working on a different project. We soon noticed there was potential for a house beat in there somewhere, and so we sampled it and used it as a building block for a tech house track.”

The also seemed blown away by the reaction to the track:

“Morten joked about it becoming the next big internet sensation when we realized it had turned out pretty good, but we never actually expected the response we got, with several thousand views, internet articles about it and a message from Skype themselves – we were amazed by the big warm reception just a few hours after uploading.”

This is far from the first time music producers have sampled seriously nerdy pieces of audio and built tracks out of them.

With that in mind we decided to scour Sound Cloud for the best nerdy remixes and bring them together into one playlist. Alongside the Skype Song we’ve got tracks sampling Super Mario, Star Trek and even the Nokia Ringtone. Enjoy…

Will you download the Skype Song if it becomes available on iTunes? Can you think of any other good nerd themed remixes? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Image via frydolin

It’s all part of Facebook’s hopes to expand into developing markets, namely India, Indonesia, Australia, Argentina, Venezuela and South Africa. No ads are involved, but as Peter Deng, Facebook’s director of communications, says: “It could lead to other parts of the Facebook product — post a status message or share an album.” With Facebook accounts in developed markets already reaching their peak, it’s clear that forging new markets will be imperative to keep investors in the now publicly-traded company happy; after all, Facebook’s problems with privacy and the discomfort some internet users have had with its data mining practices are a giant stumbling block to overcome in its traditional markets.

However, it might be time to give an old service a new facelift. As Deng also mentioned during the press conference: “The SMS protocol has been around for 20 years. It’s designed for old phones, and it doesn’t take advantage of location or rich features like picture talking. We want to let people connect to each other.” Blackberry’s home grown messaging service did well for itself in catching the interest of the teenage mobile user category, at least until it became associated with the London Riots as well as its issue with blackouts. For espectially heavy users, the chance to bypass texting charges can be tempting, plus the extra features a Facebook platform would bring might also be tempting in a post-Tumblr reaction-gif kind of landscape. Also, the original Facebook Messenger managed to soundly replace the old IM programmes of the early 2000s despite its many technical issues.

But the main question behind all the hoopla is: will the revamp actually work in driving new accounts? Facebook’s mobile apps have been a bit of a running joke since they were released with their lack of functionality compared to other similar apps. Without the carrot of already having a Facebook account luring the public to use this particular app, it may be somewhat harder to get people to give the program a try. After all, it’s clear that if Facebook want to take on something so engrained in mobile culture as text messaging, the app is going to probably need to be immaculate off the bat. After all, in the tech world, second chances can sometimes be hard to come by.

Are you planning on trying out the revamped Messenger when it’s out?

Use of the humble text message has rocketed, year on year there has been growth of the number of people using text messaging to stay in contact with each other. It has even coined its own language with many abbreviations driving parents up the wall by making their way into everyday use. There is concern that the text message may have seen its glory days and will slowly begin to lose out to its smartphone counterparts such as WhatsApp and the BlackBerry messaging services which are free and do basically the same job.

Camera. Phone. (Photo credit: tompagenet)

When text messages were first released they were free as companies had not figured out how to charge for them. Sadly this did not last for long as the number of people texting rapidly grew and companies began charging for texts. By 2001 the UK was sending around one billion texts a month, which would bring in around £100 million a month. When put into perspective this seems like a ludicrous amount of money, the amount of data in a text message is tiny, 128 bytes, if you were to charge the same amount for a 650MB music CD you would be looking at around £60,000 per CD. Text messages were an obvious money maker for the phone companies.

Throughout the years text messages have been in the news for good and bad reasons. In some cases text messages have saved lives and allowed people to communicate in difficult political situations. There have also been many a scandal picked up by tabloids due to text messages being exchanged, with many professional footballer sweating about texting kiss and tell girls. In addition many politicians have been caught out through simple text messages.

Although text messaging may be in decline it will not be dying out any time soon. It is still expected to bring in huge amounts of money and as people move towards much more data based services many of the phone companies will simply adjust there prices for data transfer making text a viable option. So there may be a decline but in developing countries like those in Africa, text messaging will remain as the main way in which people stay in touch and also conduct business and banking.

So here is to another twenty years of simple messages getting people in trouble, making phone companies lots of money and keeping the rest of us highly amused.

Using information taken from a global routing table, Renesys state that at 10:26 UTC on Thursday, 29th November ”all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.”

An update from the agency at 1.00 GMT today stated that the last 5 networks in Syria that were routed, a group of smaller netblocks previously advertised by global communications conglomerate Tata Communications, have also gone down.

An article on Syria’s blackout from the BBC has said that the Syrian government are blaming the attack on “terrorists”, with Syria’s minister of information telling a pro-government television station that ”The terrorists targeted the internet lines, resulting in some regions being cut off.”

Exactly how Syria’s Internet connection is being cut off is currently unknown, however Rik Ferguson, vice president of security research at Trend Micro has suggested that the attackers are “using the same approach as Libya did.”

“Requests for Syrian addresses are simply timing out – so it’s likely to be ‘blackholing’ or even breaking connections physically by cutting cables or switching things off.”

With 22 million people in Syria currently unable to get online and experiencing intermittent telephone connections, it makes you wonder just how you’d react if you woke up one day to find that all online access had just gone.

How do you think you’d deal with no access to the Internet? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit. Absolutely nothing can go faster than it, according to the understanding of physics that we currently have. Even travelling at a fraction of light speed it would take a very long time to reach another star – though such a mission  has been proposed.

In 1994 physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a paper called ‘The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity’. The title inspired by the ‘Warp Drives’ of Star Trek that allow interstellar travel.

If a lot of the cosmological maths is correct there is a certain odd thing to the way that the universe works. It is possible to ‘expand’ and ‘contract’ space-time. A so-called Alcubierre drive would work by creating a bubble around a craft by creating space behind. The ship would experience motion but not acceleration. It would travel faster than light without having to travel faster than light.

According to the calculations made back in 1994 a mindblowing amount of energy would be needed to bend space-time sufficiently for such a thing to work. This was worked out to be somewhere in the order of magnitude of the mass energy of Jupiter. A more recent re-jigging of the plans indicates it may be much more practical.

By changing the shape of the space time ‘bubble’ the drive would create from a sphere to a ring there is a dramatic drop in the amount of energy required. The mass energy required could be as little as a couple of thousand pounds.

Work is now under way at NASA to create an experimental device to prove (or potentially disprove if it fails) that this  approach could work. A device known as a Michelson-Morley interferometer is able to measure disturbances to space-time. Lasers will be fired in order to wobble space time by a tiny amount – the legs of the device should seem to be different lengths when this happens.

According to speculation from Harold White, the scientist leading the NASA team, a space ship boasting a warp drive of this type could potentially reach the nearest stars in a mere matter of weeks. Things are at a very early stage, but technology can advance at a fast pace once proof of concept has been established.

Star Trek Technology We Already Have

It is difficult to overstate the impact that Star Trek has had on the development of technology. By inspiring a generation it has had a big role in shaping the world that we now live in.

Automatic doors that open with a swooshing sound? First seen on the USS Enterprise automatic doors are now found everywhere from supermarkets and convenience stores to your local library.

The communicators on Star Trek were definitely an influence on the development of mobile phones. The clam shell design that was popular before smart phones was seen decades before in the hands of Kirk and the others. Of course tablet style phones are now fairly ubiquitous – and where else did tablet technology first emerge other than Star Trek.

‘Replicators’ are now partially a reality, thanks to 3D printers. Recent developments involving printing electronics show that these have a great deal of potential.