Tom Davenport

Redesigned iPhone gamepad coming soon? Watch a Mario Kart demo...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:07:56 +0000

Redesigned iPhone gamepad coming soon? Watch a Mario Kart demo in action.

The FPS need something like this, the current control system for such games have your thumbs all over the screen - in Modern Warfare, the control system is excellent despite working in this manner, but the long awaited Eliminate has serious flaws in it’s control method with the frantic pace and jumping characters.

As for other game genres, it would be helpful to have a controller like this for navigating some menus, but for the most part the touch control systems have been elegantly designed and a controller like this would be overkill.

(via zodttd)

‘The Bash-a-Tron’ sonic manipulator. Mostly...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:38:03 +0000

‘The Bash-a-Tron’ sonic manipulator.

Mostly brilliant because of the name.

(via sonicmanipulator)

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always..."

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:18:01 +0000

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

- Alfred Souza (via tmblg)

3D in your browser, with NO glasses?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:11:43 +0000

3D in your browser, with NO glasses?

The real reason App Store e-book submissions are up

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:23:00 +0000

Am I the first to realise why e-book submissions are up in the Apple App Store? Even above video games, historically the highest catagory in app submissions?

If I were a developer, I’d be anticipating the Apple Tablet/Slate launch. We can only go on the assumption, but it will likely have an App Store, probably the same app store with so much content available on it Almost 100,000 apps now, isn’t it?

So why the sudden e-book frenzy?

Clearly, to compete hard in the page sized handheld market against the obvious likes of Kindle (who also have an iPhone app), Apple will at least in part design the tablet with print reading in mind. To say the news print medium is losing business fast is to say Rupert Murdoch is an old rich bastard.

Devs want a foot in the door to compete in the tablet honeymoon, a period which could last up to four months as the iPhone had, but more likely two, as developers are better prepared for a cocoa touch platform already.

The iPhone honeymoon was the 3-4 month period after the App Store launch in which the pirate bedroom developers had an equal footing with the big league programmers. In fact they were better prepared, many of whom coded for the jailbreak application stores - I remember trying out this great music game called Tap Tap Revenge. You seen how well it’s doing now? It’s one of the biggest games on the official App Store now.

Bedroom developers were making hundreds of thousands of pounds in weeks. The big companies saw this and lept in, and the entreprenurship honeymoon ended. It’s still possible to create your own apps and succeed developing for iPhone, but you’ll need a great, original idea, and frankly, access to great design. But good luck making a splash in that 100k pool.

Which brings us back to why there are so many e-book submissions:

There is the new window for the everyman to jump in before someone else becomes established, and/or the big names take over. Devs are going on the assumption the same App Store will run on the tablet, and be ready for the real sale launch date, whenever it may be in 2010.

There may be a twist in the tale yet, and a prepared, competitive market means there may never be the same pirate opportunity for stratospheric handheld development as the original App Store launch, but the winners and losers in this new battle will only be decided by the buying public.

I predict the most convenient (which usually means affordable, simple to use, or most content) will win.

Let’s remember this could be your opportunity to make a splash in new interfaces. Decent touch screen sequencer? Unique MIDI controller? iMac TV remote? This is your chance.

What do you think about the e-book surge? Will there be another app rennaisance soon? I will continue the discussion in the comments.

Music webstores: Why Gogoyoko were best - and why they've already lost

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:55:00 +0000

In early 2009 the new breed of music web interfaces were beginning to bubble to the surface of twitter feeds.

We saw Soundcloud impress with an embeddable player you could put anywhere - with a smart waveform and commenting interface, the exit from MySpace became clear. But it doesn’t work as a standalone webstore - not it’s mission or purpose, at present, just a fantastic tool. We still needed the future of online music stores to present itself, and we needed them to get a user base big enough to commit to them, knowing their reputation and network would be supported in the long term. It doesn’t matter how good an application or web site is, if there is little for customers to go to, there will be little point in investing time in it for your band or label.

Coming early 2009? ‘Course you are.

Word of Gogoyoko came through, and the classy design and clear payment system made it something for the new music business to lust for. Here were the points that made it so appealing:

Artists get get 100% of the sales profit
All power and value to the artists. No middle man. gogoyoko handles all VAT payments and royalties to music collection societies.
Get extra revenue from music streaming
Because getting a fair share from music sales is not fair enough.
You’re the boss
Artists get to set the price and promote and sell directly to their fanbase. Through gogoyoko artists can promote, distribute and sell their releases and soon live shows as well, communicate directly with their fan base and make contact with new listeners all over the world.
Charity
Charity plays a big role in our concept, with 10% of all advertisement revenues going to partnering international charity & environmental organizations. gogoyoko also provides artists with the opportunity to donate 10% of their music sales to charity.
gogoyoko is for everyone
And that means you too. Everyone can sign up for free and sell their music. There’s no filtering, no limits and no one we exclude. gogoyoko is made by artists for artists and we make no exceptions.

Amazing. It really would have been amazing.

Months later, we still don’t have free access to the service, and a new champion in Band Camp has already arrived with the most impressive free stats system and a fast, simple shopping interface for customers.This is before considering the efficient cloud service from Spotify, which suggests we’ll be throwing away money on individual purchases if we can stream anything for a fixed (and in fact, very fair) rate.

Gogoyoko did offer me an invite when I pointed out how they have somewhat missed the ball this year, in the UK at least. During the sign up process, some kind of bug prevented me from completing the registration. Tip for self-destructive developers: this is one way to make a user give up on your service.

The lesson here is to roll out your magic, do anything service ASAP, because the attention of the web is a fickle one. Gogoyoko could still become a leader, but their service will have to live up to expectations and floor the feature set on the rest of the market. Good luck with that. Really.

jonathan-deamer: fascinated: Songkick has a cool app/company...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:49:48 +0000

jonathan-deamer:

fascinated:

Songkick has a cool app/company timeline in their new space. This is great, all small teams should do this to remember just how much they actually accomplish. Easy to forget.

I should do this for my general life too. It’s so easy to let the days pass by without stopping to reflect.

I can definitely see its use for startups/small teams.

How to measure your social media ROI

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:07:32 +0000

We all know how to look at our stats, but how to we figure out exactly how much money we’ve earned from what actions?

This slideshow from Mashable was excellent and taught me a few tricks I will undoubtedly use in the future. If you’re spending money on any of your web presence or business (even just domains) then this slideshow will make the internet start working it off for you.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard

Finance blogger @ramit fluffs another mail out

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Funny accident: @Ramit Sethi, (a finance blogger) just sent mail outs starting with a similar opening line:

I’m not announcing this publicly until tomorrow, but you’re getting this now because you bought my book. Damn right, I play favorites! I can’t wait to do this to my future kids.

I’m not announcing this publicly until tomorrow, but you’re getting this now because you were in the pre-launch community. Damn right, I play favorites! I can’t wait to do this to my future kids.

So, the reason there’s both these intros is because he’s comparing the click-back rate from his different mailing lists - you see, I have two email accounts just by chance on two separate accounts:

One from where I bought his book
One from where I joined his pre launch community

Now, the problem comes from his direct lying of offering something to his ‘favourite’ part of his community (which would be surreal in itself). This guy has done well for experimenting how to be successful online, but has also demonstrated several gaffs like this along the way. The ‘pre-launch’ community was hyped for weeks and ended up not particularly being run, and after his apology for it not kicking off as promised, he later reffers to this group as something on par with a runaway success.

In fairness, the pre-launch community is directly related to the book, but not everyone who bought the book had access to the community, only members who had forwarded proof of pre-order purchase. So why make out that this group gets an exclusive offer when it’s not exclusive?

So the lesson here is not to design your online profile to the point of reality distortion, because some people in your (hopefully) large following are going to pick up on it and lose trust for you. Don’t offend their intelligence - you want them to keep your channel turned on.

His poor future kids!

Lavalamp as MIDI controller… (via hotchk155)

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:15:35 +0000

Lavalamp as MIDI controller… (via hotchk155)

The Secret Identity of the Peep Show Tweeter

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:48:00 +0100

Update: Would love your comments below.

http://twitter.com/peep_show

http://twitter.com/tomdavenport

Buy it, don’t steal it!

—

Sorry if you thought the Peep Show twitter was official - I was careful to never claim so.

If the Peep Show characters show you their thoughts in the series, Twitter was the obvious platform to extend the characters into the 4th dimension. So obvious in fact that I swore someone else would already be thinking about it (the IT crowd would be another obvious one, but doesn’t have that personal dimension of Peep Show).

It started as a very conversational feed, with the cast interacting and a plot of it’s own developing (with care not to fall outside of the ‘actual’ plot lines and plausibility. This was while I was working as a volunteer at a studio, though pretty much unemployed. Who else would have the time?

As time went on, people like Nancy were brushed to the sidelines with little depth to their characters even in the series - in fact I realised they’re just plot devices, Peep Show is completely and always will be about Mark and Jez. The greatest characters in the history of comedy, a statement I would fervently defend, and Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong should be awarded daily with grapes and stenna stairlifts for blessing us with such laughter. But their genius was obviously a benchmark by which the tweets would be measured, and I feared being berated for failing them.

Yes, it was hard. Very hard - I’m trained in music production, not writing or comedy. It’s up to you whether or not the twitter feeds worked or not, but in the months I’ve been doing this there were less complaints than I could count on one hand (as much as they tore me) but hundreds of tweets of praise and possibly thousands of retweets. Every click on a funny web linked shared was getting 400+ clicks within a half hour, and not just from the UK where I expected the Peep Show fan base to be.

I knew for a long time that live twitter alongside series 6 would be a brilliant idea. So good that I wished it was just official, and could be done properly. Noticing that Sam Bain was following some characters, I offered him the twitter names for them to integrate but he didn’t reply. There was no way I’d leave the names to go to waste, and followers were adding up fast, so with absolutely no effing idea of the series 6 plot I dived in with the live tweeting.

Ffffaaaaack.

To be honest I don’t remember much about what it was like, other than it was very rushed, and that I had to ‘be’ several different people in quick succession AND know what the context of the program is AND talk to the missus AND enjoy the show like a regular super-fan.

Quite often, the Peep Show characters were just ways of saying things I couldn’t say on my regular twitter account. The super-nerd in me couldn’t talk about how I love the efficiency of my local waste collection service; Mark could. The smoker in me couldn’t talk about running out of rizlas; Jez could.

One one occasion I accidentally became the catalyst for the Michael Jackson moonwalk flashmob you may have seen on the news. You didn’t see that coming, and neither did I. @RobManuel from b3ta had the idea, which I saw on my personal account, and I used the (at the time) 3.5k strong following to go retweet mental. With organisation from a Telegraph writer (I can’t spell his username) there was a flashmob which made the news worldwide. The only thing which ruined the day was missing my train and not making it to the whole thing, though I watched live streams from peoples mobiles with a tear in my eye, it somehow felt like one of my greatest achievements. Though I don’t claim credit for either the idea or the measures the journalist took talking with the police to make it happen, I’m convinced the size of Mark and Jez’s followings gave it the traction to happen.

So the Peep Show twitter has been a lot of fun. Evidently, a lot of other people thought the same. Thanks for all the kind words, every single comment means a lot to me.
Let me tell you what I have l learned.

Don’t start a twitter feed of your favourite series if you want to pay real attention to it and properly enjoy it.
Don’t choose a program that starts the very minute you actually finish your real life work, if you hate running.
Don’t accidentally tweet from your other personal accounts while talking as SuperHans about picking up a shedload of cocaine.
Don’t “break the 4th wall”
Don’t message the actors saying ‘oi you look like me’ or ‘wtf’ which really would up Matt King. Sorry.
Only tweet it if it makes you laugh.
If you fret for a second on a joke, don’t do it. The occasional times I thought ‘meh post it anyway’ were the ones I regret.
I am an absolute whore for attention. I realise now that if I were offered all the money in the world, and all the attention, I would choose the attention, and probably have some problem which has a name and would get me a free laptop at school.
If you want it to continue, don’t tell everyone you’re the one who did it.

And with that, I don’t know if the Peep Show twitter will continue. Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong, and new writer Simon Blackwell (who has been very kind to the real me on twitter, incidentally) can have them if they want, as long as they don’t leave them to go on the wayside. I genuinely believe there has never been a better match for interaction between the web and television, and with a proper marketing team it could be huge. And with the real writers, a lot funnier.

At the very least, I’ve had the joy of being one of a select few who, for one reason or another, got to write with these wonderful characters in Mark and Jez, whose complexity, predictability and charm makes them a lot of fun to write for.

That said… I’ll always have a bunch of bullshit to say. There might be life in them tweets. Don’t call the psychologist on me just yet.

Kabul: The Secret American History

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:16:03 +0100

Kabul: The Secret American History:

Captivating historical piece on how America caused the crippled history in Afghanistan

"Topspin has a case study of the band Fanfarlo and offers the band’s four-step process: don’t suck;..."

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:50:33 +0100

“Topspin has a case study of the band Fanfarlo and offers the band’s four-step process: don’t suck; get others to introduce you to their audiences; make those audiences an offer they can’t refuse; and repeat. Briefly, here’s what happened: 35 fan acquisitions per 1,000 impressions; 272,000 impressions on widgets posted at 240 different domains; and 22% of people who saw the offer (album for $1 for a period of one month) made a purchase. More stats are in the post.”

- Business Matters: YouTube, Topspin, Blackberry (via tywhite)

100 Greatest Hits of YouTube (via Hadoukentheband)

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:27:01 +0100

100 Greatest Hits of YouTube (via Hadoukentheband)

100 GREATEST HITS OF YOUTUBE IN 4 MINUTES (via Hadoukentheband)

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:24:53 +0100

100 GREATEST HITS OF YOUTUBE IN 4 MINUTES (via Hadoukentheband)

Listen to this song by The Books: “Enjoy Your Worries, You...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:49:33 +0100

Listen to this song by The Books: “Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again”

The sequencing is so smart, and has a really heavy vibe for music with such clean samples. When you hear it break in again half way you’ll know what I mean.

Their other album is probably my tip as an essential purchase, so listen to some samples. Most inspiring of all, is that their albums are entirely produced themselves, with free plug-ins. Good on ya!

How to make a microphone - the Neumann U87AI

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:22:39 +0100

How to make a microphone - the Neumann U87AI

BIONIC EYE: Augmented Reality on the iPhone

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:40:21 +0100

BIONIC EYE: Augmented Reality on the iPhone:

It was only yesterday that we pined about the lack of augmented reality applications for the iPhone 3GS, a device that definitely has everything such an app would require (camera with…

New Aphex Twin: Download live set from Warp20

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:56:00 +0100

Aphex Twin’s new album has been hotly anticipated for years. On Twitter I just spotted the (equally legendary) @RichardDevine link to a bootleg of a live set from Aphex at Warp20. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t recognise some of this set, and it’s awesome.

You can download this Aphex Twin set from here.

His new album was rumoured to be released this year, so here’s hoping it’s just around the corner.

Walkers French Fries: Serious health hazard

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:48:00 +0100

In 2008 after my cousin was blown up in Afghanistan (he broke his back and more, but somehow walks now) we visited him in Selly Oak, Birmingham.

I bought a pack of Walkers French Fries. Salt & Vinegar, since you ask. This was an unusually unique experience - after years of wishing I had bought a duff product to complain about, and get compensated for, I finally had something.

Here is my letter of complaint to Walker. I took the opportunity to take the piss, of course:

24 July 2008
Consumer Services Department
Walkers Snack Food Ltd.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I purchased my favorite crisps, your salt and vinegar French Fries from the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, at one of their canteens. Most of the French Fries were predictably delicious, but towards the end of the pack there was an incredibly hard one. It quite hurt my teeth, and were I to dare myself to endure it anyway I could have done myself damage. It turned out there were a selection of hard ones, at least a dozen. With restraint I left them, fending off my younger sister who equally wanted to try more due to the salty, acidic taste we both love, but nay. I had to prevent her from damaging her infantile milk teeth. They surely would not have coped.

I have included the packet and it’s contents for your testing. You will come to the conclusion that I have; they are very, very hard. Perhaps somewhat uncooked. Imagine if I had bought a whole chicken from you! Would that also be uncooked? I will stick with Farmer Jerry for my chicken needs. Please may we be generously compensated in crunchy crisp form. Assuming your customer service is excellent, we will continue to buy your crisps until our slender, healthy bodies are brazenly bloated and fat with Walkers delight.

Sincerely yours,
Tom Davenport

Eat that, Robin Cooper!**

I got sent a fiver in vouchers. They never got spent.

——

*I had thought about and achieved other things in my life, but this was particularly awesome. I’m from a Wiltshire village, see.

**Robin Cooper is a character by Robert Popper, creator of the very funny Timewaster Letters books.