What is FourSquare?  This fairly new social network has been popping up on my radar multiple times over the past few months, prompting me to ask, what is this network?  What does it offer, what makes it different than all the other social networks?

FourSquare was founded in part by David Crowley, one of the creators of Dodgeball, a Google location application that died not long after it was implemented.  Launched last spring at the 2009 SXSW Interactive, FourSquare expounds on the platform of other social networks like Facebook and Twitter by adding a location based focus.  Facebook asks “what are you doing?” FourSquare asks “where are you?”

This is the concept: users connect with friends by checking in at locations (coffee shops, venues, retail stores) and by leaving tips and suggestions for each other.  For example, I’m at the Monon Coffee Shop so I check in, either alerting just my friends or the general public.  My friend Joe, sees I am there and sends me a tip, “you’ve got yo try a homemade granola bar” or something.  I have the granola bar and a soy vanilla latte which I think is great, so I leave a tip for others – “best vanilla latte ever.”  A game-like aspect kicks in here.  FourSquare awards points for every check in and tip and collected points turn into badges.  Additional points are awarded for visiting new places, traveling to different parts of the city, completing “to do” lists and getting other users to tryout your tips.  Points are taken away for being less adventurous or only visiting the same places or areas over and over.  On top of this, the person who visits a location the most becomes the “mayor” of that location.  FourSquare encourages businesses to offer rewards and incentives for people to become the mayor.  For example, if I frequent the India Garden twice a week and became the mayor, they would reward me with a free beverage or lunch buffet.  However, I must continue to visit that location if I want to maintain my mayoral position as anyone could unseat me at anytime by overcoming my number of check ins.  A little confusing, yes, but the game-like aspect has the potential to create camaraderie and competition, both of which would positively affect local businesses.

This year, on their one-year anniversary, FourSquare returned to SXSW Interactive boasting 500,000 users and 1.4 million participating locations.  Over the ten day period surrounding SXSW, FourSquare added over 100,000 users, double the amount of their main competition GoWalla, another location based social network with a very similar goal.  GoWalla is just one of the many new social network companies springing up on the web.  Loopt, MyTown and Brightkite are among the other main competitors, but none of these sites offer the same gaming atmosphere as FourSquare.  The best aspect of all of these networks lies in the possibilities they create for business promotion.  Facebook is great as a social base of operations, but FourSquare allows you to become a destination.  A small coffee shop like the Monon can became a local destination on FourSquare and receive free promotion from users all over the city that check in when they visit.  Factor in promotions and incentives for frequent customers and you create vast opportunies for business awareness and advertising.  It’s a win-win situation all around.

The overall concept is interesting, I can learn what my friends are doing and what they like, I can try out their tips and maybe find something new, I can help my friends try new things and at the same time participate in a little friendly competition and reap some real-life rewards.  Not bad.  However, I can’t help but to ask…why? Do we really need another site to update every day?  It’s true that the benefits of becoming a mayor are appealing, but most business offer rewards programs or incentives for returning customers anyway.  FourSquare counters concerns about privacy by asserting that users can limit their notifications to be viewed only by actual friends or by offering “check in” without posting to the site.  While this helps to calm my fears about stalkers and creeps following me around, it doesn’t completely calm my fears about privacy invasion – FourSquare still knows where I am and what I’m doing and catalogs it all in a database about me.  Maybe I’m more skittish than the average user, maybe I’m technology resistant, maybe I just want to keep my business to myself.  But for all those people out there looking for a little friendly competition, maybe some companionship and a chance to earn a virtual badge, FourSquare is the newest, shiniest social network for you.

Oh Apple how could I ever have doubted you.

I’ve been playing with my iPad for a couple weeks now, and must say… I am impressed and slightly surprised at how many uses I have already found for it. Below are a few of my thoughts, theories and opinion on some of it’s “game-changing” qualities and on the amazing apps that are being developed for it.  For those with shorter attention span, I offer this:

MY RATING:   5 out of 5 STARS, A  MUST-HAVE GAME-CHANGER

IPAD APPS YOU SHOULDN’T MISS:

• Sketchbook Pro ($7.99) – painting and drawing app with a highly-intuitive interface and great control
• Memeo Connect Reader (FREE) – this app lets you read, organize, download (for editing) or upload new documents to Google Docs. Why not just use the browser? This is faster and much nicer looking/useful.
• Photogene ($3.99) – This is basically photoshop for iPhone/iPad, lots of great features and totally worth the price
• Penultimate ($2.99) or Sundry Notes (FREE) – For note taking or quick sketching, depending on how organic and/or organized you are.
• Netflix (FREE) –  You will need a Netflix account for this AMAZING app that streams movies directly to the goregous iPad screen, might even be worth getting a Netflix account for if you don’t already have one.
  
• Korg iElectribe ($7.99) – Virtual version of a best in class, highly sought after drum machine/sequencer
  

Game-Changer #1 – A new life for Print. Just like the iPod revolutionized the music industry, the iPad is a huge step in redefining the consumption of print media. I am not saying that print is dead, but I am saying we are about to witness a complete transformation of “The Newstand”…  Already hundreds of publishers and media outlets have jumped on the bandwagon (digital versions of newspapers and magazines can purchase single copies or subscriptions through a variety of iPad “reader” type of applications — several are even available free of charge, or are “free when streamed”…)

From Interview and GQ to Time and USA Today, to specialty publications like Bass Pro Fisherman and Quilting – publishers are seeing the life raft available to them in the form of this revolutionary, high-quality, direct to consumer delivery medium. Publishers out there take note though: the best transformations from print to digital are the ones not simply repeating their traditional experience in a high-resolution PDF file, but are leveraging the responsive touch-screen and interactive nature of digital media to build NEW experiences for consumers…

For magazine lovers, the most robust of the readers appears to be Zinio… I was even impressed with the breadth of their catalog (they have lots of the traditional titles but also lots of imported and niche publications – like the UK’s NME (New Musical Express) or France’s Le Foot (a pro-football, er soccer, magazine for fans).

Game-Changer #2 – Accessibility. This device is not intended for creators of digital media… it’s intended for CONSUMERS of digital media It definitely feels more like a fun toy than a creative tool. It’s interesting to see how many app developers are building apps that incorporate usability that seems “forced” … like they are trying to make the iPad behave like a laptop. The apps that are useful and intuitive are ones that let go of conventional “menu” and “mouse click” thinking and embrace the gesture controls — its time to tear up the standards and consider that rules no longer apply… time to start engineering  new interface conventions that utilize gesture controls and better compliment the experience Apple is creating for users.

Welcome Side Effect – Face Time. I would like them to succeed though (those business app developers) because as more people adopt iPads in the business realm, I see a welcome side-effect: fewer laptop screens intervening in conversations during meetings!! Whether you like to write by hand or type in your notes, the iPad is an amazing “thought-capturing device” and doubly nice in that it doesn’t obstruct views!

APP THOUGHTS:

My favorite app for hand note-taking has to be PENULTIMATE — mostly for its simplicity and ability to recreate the tactile response of a good ink pen on a fresh Moleskin page. There are several other note/sketching applications, some geared more towards drawing (SketchBook Pro is the by far the best for drawing/painting); while others are more geared toward wireframes, charts and diagrams (OmniGraffle is a popular, especially if you already use their software, though it’s expensive. Another wireframing app, iMockups at $9.99 is a decent alternative if you do lots of wireframing.) If you are want a little bit of everything, Sundry Notes (FREE) is a great option — and shines in that it begins to double as a document layout program as it offers the ability to change text size, color, and font–something other apps are only slowly implementing.

There are (of course) great games (made greater by the screen size and new “virtual” joystick screen controller.) I am not much of a gamer myself, but I was impressed by the graphics/quality of Avatar and Pinball HD) and the more innovative “tilt-to-fly” game Glyder 2.

There are tons of social media apps for displaying and posting to your favorite networks, too many to even list… I haven’t seen anything majorly game changing in that realm yet, but more and larger versions of what has come before for the iPhone.

Of course there are tons of books and kids/educational apps that are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible when you let your mind wander into the land of “what if”… like, what if the book talked back?

In terms of reference/utility types of apps, I was especially impressed by the Wolfram Alpha app, its like having a “Rainman-style” friend ready to hook you up with any statistical or systematic fact-based knowledge you might ever need. Within minutes you can find out the number of people living in Timbuktu (32,460 as of 2004) or the typical weight of a pygmy marmoset (112 – 199 grams). If you can think of it, and if there’s data around it, you can have it at your fingertips within moments. Now THIS could be a great business tool for “fact-checkers”…

A few others that are worth checking out:

For Musicians Using Logic Pro: AC-7 Pro (a controller interface for Logic that runs over Wi-Fi)

For News Junkies Without Patience: Reuters Photo News App

Phew… I feel the need to quote a Jackola tweet (after getting his new iPhone) — if only it could do my laundry.

A brief look at radio and what the Performance Rights Act could mean for musicians.

Radio Background
“Free” radio has been in existence since the late 19th century when Tesla discovered a way to transmit waves from a single source over huge geographic area.  This technology, because of its indiscriminate and omnipresent nature, was necessarily free and available to anyone with a receiver to listen anytime, anywhere.  In the 1920’s, radio programming began to take hold and stations started to broadcast live musical performances, which over time turned from live performances to the broadcast of recordings we have today.

Traditionally the operating expenses of broadcasting radio signals has been funded solely by advertising. Record companies that provided the actual recordings of the music played on the radio were compensated not from the radio stations themselves but from radio listeners purchasing copies of the recordings they heard free of charge on the radio. This plan works fine, in concept, but the problems begin to stack up when you start to consider who actually benefits from this model. Monetarily it’s a mess.

How Radio Works
Radio stations make billions of dollars from advertisers who choose to advertise on a station based on it’s popularity.  A station becomes popular based in a large part on the music it plays and how many people listen in.  Over the course of radio’s history, record companies have made billions of dollars from record sales which are a direct result of the exposure gained from play on the radio.  A listener hears a song, likes it, buys the record.  So far, so great.  But who makes the music that record companies give to radio stations to play?  The artists, the musicians, the performers.

In 1941, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) managed to get legislation passed ensuring compensation for artists by requiring radio stations to pay fees for the rights to broadcast a song.  Artists are also compensated by record companies who make “deals” with artists giving them x amount of money for records sold.

So, the radio stations play the song and pays a fee to ASCAP who pays the artist; the consumer buys the record and the record company pays a portion to the artist. This is still a fine plan, but not every artists gets paid.  Currently, by law, the artist or “composer” is defined as the person who writes the lyrics and main melody.

However, on generally every record or song there is more than one person contributing to the making of the song.  For example, a songwriter (or composer) brings in a song and sings it while playing a guitar.  Then someone else plays drums, someone plays keys, maybe someone sings back up vocals or plays something strange like a sitar.  But these musicians/performers are not entitled by law to receive compensation from radio play.  Radio stations pay the “composer” for the right to broadcast, but not all of the performers.  Now, just to make things a little more confusing, it is important to note that both television and internet stations are a different matter and already pay composers and performers alike.

The Performance Rights Act
A bill was introduced in early 2009 called the Performance Rights Act, which would give every contributing musician on a song, not just the composer, the right to compensation directly from each radio play.  The Music First Coalition is running a campaign asking for signers on a petition in support of the bill.  The National Association of Broadcasters (or, “the radio”) is also running a campaign for an opposing bill called the Local Radio Freedom Act.

What About You?
The question is, who is right, which bill should you, the listener, support?  Should radio stations be obligated to pay all performers for the songs they play?  Why should television and internet stations pay performers and not radio?  Should performers be happy with whatever rate they were payed for the initial performance and stop asking for residuals?  I know what I think, but…what do you think?

More Information:

For more information about the Performance Rights Act or to sign the petition, visit musicfirstcoalition.org

For more information about the Local Radio Freedom Act, visit nab.org

Wordpress has become a very popular Content Management System (CMS) the last few years. Although it was original built as a blog publishing platform it has evolved, with some help from third party plugins, to be a relatively full featured Content Management System.

CMS Wire recently issued a report that shows Wordpress having the highest brand recognition and in a close tie with Drupal for second most used CMS. The ever awful Joomla remains in the top spot but probably not for long.

So Wordpress, which is somewhat ironically what we are using to power this blog, is quickly becoming the CMS of choice for web developers. And why not? It’s free, easy to customize and there’s lots of great plug-ins. What’s wrong with that?

I have two problems with Wordpress.

1. Hacker’s Delight- It is becoming the Microsoft Windows of the Web. As we all know too well the dominance of Windows has made it a huge target for hackers. One of Mac’s big selling points is that it doesn’t need virus software, yet. There is truth to the saying “security through obscurity”. As Wordpress becomes a more prevalent CMS on the Web it is becoming a constant target of hackers. This blog was hacked just a couple months ago. I have a good friend who has had his Wordpress blog hacked 3 times this year. It causes downtime and stress for the company affected. We lost a lot of time dealing with it and we are a Web company! We have run into two clients who came to us for help with their search engine results to have us discover that someone had hacked their Wordpress site and posted hidden links to “female viagra”. A mysterious, non-existent product.

2. Kitchen Sink Syndrome- Wordpress is meant for techies. Just like the awful Joomla CMS you can easily end up with kitchen sink syndrome. All kinds of stuff you don’t need or know how to use. Wordpress sites are often not owner friendly. If the goal is to teach a client to fish then I would argue you are going to spend a lot of time and support doing it with Wordpress. If used just for blogging then it’s fairly straightforward, but once you start powering more complex sites you end up with a mess that only a true tech geek can navigate.

So if you are going to use Wordpress as a CMS know that you need to fight clutter and regularly update. Even falling behind a week can mean death by hack for a popular site. There are many great features and benefits to Wordpress, just don’t go in blindly.