Its official, we have opened up ChooseFest.com, so go check it out, now, what are you waiting for? Click Here!

ChooseFest is all about festivals, music festivals. In short it takes your music tastes (from facebook, last.fm scrobble history, a list you type) goes through all of the line-ups (kept up to date daily!) and then spits out a convenient, summarised list of all the festivals which have the bands (and singers) you particularly like at. It’s kind of a festival search engine, its kind of a music to festival matching site, but it will be a whole lot more in months to come.

What problem does it solve?

Ever tried to find the festival which has the most bands you like at? It’s a nightmare. Each festival has its own “arty” site, each festival has different dates, prices, availability, not to mention they have their bands and artists in obscure orders over several web pages. All that data collating is not easy or fun. ChooseFest.com Makes it easy (and hopefully fun), you just stick in who you want to see and up pops your best options.

Where’s the project at?

ChooseFest is a StormGate production and you can find it on facebook and have a go with the prototype (alpha app) @ ChooseFest.com. We have a few hundred users and are now soliciting feedback, it would be great to hear what you think, and at such an early stage your comments could really make a difference to us.

Want to help out?

Please help us Spread the word, share us with your friends, give us feedback! – the more people we can tell about ChooseFest the more chance there is we can make this a really, really useful tool for us all.

The post Finding Your Perfect Festival – ChooseFest.com first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

2010 Has been a good year for travel, from the sandy cocktail beach’s and fast paced mountain biking through lychee groves of Thailand across to the lake of Pokhara and the remote Bandipur in Nepal; sidestepping riots in both countries and a ridiculous ash cloud, through grace or luck. From central park and the Guggenheim to the Robert Moses beach and Long Island, New York was epic; and now in 48 hours or so on to Agadir, Marakesh, Casablanca and Fez, Morocco, its been a good year for travel.

While at home I have also picked up climbing, something I wish I had done more of while in Thailand. The Castle near Finsbury park is a fantastic location, especially when visited with a few good friends. I need to do more of that. I also look forward to a time when I have a piano in a house of mine so I can truely take that forward and carry on learning

Through work and exploration this year I have absorbed C#, something I am quite happy with as it bridges the gap in my skillset between open-source and MSFT, between web programming and local app development. In my opinion it is also a good year for Microsoft, despite their mediocre year on NASDAQ; they are releasing much more rounded products and seem to be beginning to see the benefits of what I see as a change in strategy. Either way C# has lead me to refine my rapid application development and brought the brute modern processing power directly into use, I would thoroughly suggest it to supplement your language base if you are leant heavily towards php/LAMP (while I would only use it over php for few of my future web projects.) RAD in C# let me experiment with an arbitrage betting program and write a quick Reddit wallpaper grabber (yes I know it needs fixing); as well as a bunch of other stuff like a Filezilla bulk user import, an SQL->php hardcoded rewrite of a huge site that meant 300% quicker loads, a remote image processing app, tons of little sharepoint integration bits, a full sharepoint 2010 site migration routine and also a true 3rd gen website asset management tool, which I will perhaps post more about.

Near U has had a fairly good year and I have added a few more sites to the portfolio (I still need to diversify though) – mostly bolstering and fulfilling old ideas for domains that have been stagnating, I hope to shift this up a gear to bring it all back into line now I have the freedom to do so; the cold financial climate does seem to have slowed people buying cars, specifically though on-line auctions this past quarter but I have high hopes for the new year. Part of managing this portfolio of now more than 200 sites has been writing up a proper asset management tool geared towards websites (mostly affiliate) as assets of value, csharp has allowed me to write this multi threaded, flexible, detail rich program in a ridiculous short stint of evening programming, perhaps it may even make its way as a sell-able tool, this however is to be seen.

In the last few months I have also been running with Sharepoint 2010 (another example of microsoft getting themselves together) – which although on its preface is limited or “nothing new” in fact has quite sufficient enough depth to hold weight as an intranet solution. I doubt you will find better workflow, versioning, integration and scope in a web-based solution (even if it is £120k for enterprise for 1000+ users) – developers should not be scared of it. To supplement a sharepoint installation I would also advise the familiarisation of developers with WCF, microsofts best answer to web services moving forward.

There has been a few good books recently which have also left a resounding impression, The Road Less Travelled (by M. Scott Peck) left me thinking more about the sub concious and revealed new angles on understanding people will that I will forever remember. In Nepal I left my copy of The Art of Happiness on a bus, but luckily found another copy in a bookshop in Pokhara; it is a fantastic book that taught me more than anything to see things more clearly and seek contentment truthfully. The Richest Man in Babylon was suggested to me by a friend who is investing in silver, which seems sensible – what a fantastic little book! some basic rules on managing money are told through a Babylonian narrative which is fun and quick to read. If reading like this was more present in our schools we would all be wealthier, at least everyone except producers of instant gratification goods. I also subscribed to Harpers this year, after finding it in Bangkok airport with hours to kill. It has significantly inspired me to proceed with writing my novel, it is always a great read and the harpers index is good:

Percentage of U.S. car owners who keep maps in their glove compartments: 50, Sunglasses: 23, Gloves: 0

Estimated value of Chinese household income that goes unreported: $1,400,000,000,000; Portion of China’s GDP this represents: 1/3

Number of poisonous dead mice the USDA airdropped into Guam this year to eradicate an invasive snake species: 316

Number of times between January and June that google turned over user information to government investigators: 4,287

Might have already posted about this before but Evernote has served me well all year, allowing me to dump my ideas, wacky thoughts or notes into a single searchable repository, wherever I am. I also started backing up to the cloud (cant wait to write new software that takes advantage of the amazon storage cloud) via JungleDisk, which seems to be pretty spot on for me, and backing up iphone contacts to Google contacts was also a helpful find. If you guys are not yet using Chromium (NOT Chrome), that’s another no-brainer. Install it, you’ll see what I mean (sorry Mozilla, you were trumped on speed.) Spotify has continued to be epic, even if the lack of nichey remix’s and the removal of some epic songs is irritating. Finally I have to say that Microsoft dropping their Express versions of visual studio 2010 and SQL Server is both useful, and strategically a good idea. Their IDE is pretty ridiculously good, and providing free (although slightly limited – SQL max db of 5gb for example) versions will bring in the hordes, and if they develop anything decent, chances are they will shell out for licences legitimately.

Best music find of recent months: Emancipator

Looking forwards I now cant wait to finish my novel, write a bunch of new useful softwares and in 2011 start another business, perhaps a software house selling software as a service? I have a pretty devilishly good idea that will leverage the amazon clouds scalability. Perhaps. Either way I fly to Morocco in 48 hours and I haven’t even thought about it yet. Better go.

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Img courtesy of ~necrolz

This I think is a given at this point, but anyway. I wanted to write this post to put down some ideas I have had recently after I started using a few new music services. So this really is just an idea dump more than anything (if you haven’t a lot of time just JUMP TO THE IDEAS and perhaps you can tell me what you think in a comment!) If I had intentions to move into music software perhaps I would write something along these lines, but to be honest I would prefer if Spotify or similar invested some of their first few years profits and did it :p

So the best thing about switching the model up on music? Well it does make piracy less of an issue by charging a fairer rate (e.g. Spotify is £10 a month here) for a better service – it doesn’t eliminate it but it makes a step towards a feeder/reciever relationship which takes back control slightly. But really as long as the music is good the listeners don’t care about that money/buying/business part of the affair, all they (or rather we) want is to have access to listen to the music we want, when we want it, where we want it so we can enjoy it without concern of the business, this is why subscription is the right way if you ask me – although I wouldn’t be surprised if other dynamic/hybrid models pop up.

What else is good? Well it takes the files off of your computer, which on the front of it seems like an instant win because you save some space and don’t have to worry about hardware failure, but really its a lot better than that. It separates that management process from the whole business of collecting music, you can effectively manage and listen too a music collection from your home, phone, work, friends house, web cafe, wherever you can get access.

All this is great and currently available in Spotify, but ultimately the best thing about this new model we are adopting is the data, and that it is all in the cloud. It’s this data that could take the experience of music to a whole new level. CD’s, Tapes and other redundant media allowed for a start at this – Top of the Pops for example provided a weekly countdown of the most sold song’s – but with the music service coming direct from the cloud there is nothing stopping you moving this too a whole new level.

• Top of the NOW
• Top of the Minute, Hour, Day, Week
• Top of the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays
• Top of the Month, Quarter, Year, Decade, Century

This allows people to listen to music in a whole new way. Spotify and some websites do process this data and this kind of breakdown is pretty much all available now.  Breaking down this data can also globally create billions of niche statistics. From Top Rock Track of 27th of February 2010 to Most overall listened too blue grass album this week. Now this is no small amount of data and visually defining a GUI or a system to easily transverse the breadth of options without drowning the user would be a challenge. One I think that can be pieced together using the combination of search technology, social media and a little bit of flair.

Why not have a “stream” automatically created based on something like this – simple selectors that will tailor to you
(background image courtesy of jelski)

My idea’s for a new way to listen to music? Granted a few of the below ideas are amalgamations of current systems but nethertheless they would still improve my experience as a music consumer. (Broken up in no particular order just to make them more readable!!!)

• Simpler listening – playlists are good, as is the capacity to play a specific song, but 75% of the time you just want a mood of music (see below)
• Switch playlists with streams – playlists serve a purpose but we are now superceding limits, jumping boundaries – we should be listening to streams of songs not finite lists
• With all that data music providers should be doing more – Top of the NOW for example
• A more linked architecture – Elements such as bands, band members, albums, tracks, tempos, instruments, dates, geo-location data could all be better linked and presented
• With a better architecture you could have things such as “Awards” for “Best indy band of the week” etc. awarded to each band

• Music will progress socially – and this should be addressed by the software we use to listen to it, not “facebook” for music fyi
• Social listening – capacity for relational data, friendship links, follows/subscriptions, groups and fans
• Friend stream following – listen in realtime to the same stream of music
• Global digital DJ’ing – allow for digital concerts and DJ sets, democratisation of music selection presentation
• Shared streams – communities could vote on songs to create streams of genre or other element specific music
• Rivers via Stream merging – 10 friends could merge their party streams to create a river of music, perfect for a house party and not complicated or time consuming

• Song UX – band, artist management – A better system to allow artists/bands/label’s to manage the user experience of a listener when they are listening to their track
• WikiMusic – band/artist tributes, photo’s, fan art, tributes etc. could be cooperatively uploaded by the supporting community
• VOIP karaoke – integration of audio back up the stream could produce some interesting options such as remote karaoke sessions
• New and Hot – catch up service – see whats hot with your friends that you have never listened to before
• MixTapes – A classic gift perhaps for the lazy or late thinker, either way the idea could be sound – create a time specific stream of music and save it forever/share/send it
• Streamchat – while listening to certain artists, songs, streams, rivers a chat room could enhance the experience

• Intermission management – I saw this as an idea for a software on dragons den years ago – I still cant believe no music player can mix between songs automatically and well

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Spotify may not have visualisations, but visualisations may find spotify

The post Full HD Visualisations & Spotify Visualizations first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

The reason this post really sparked was this post on pico projectors and what pico projectors might be like in 2015. I think pico projector’s (tiny projectors that will fit in your hand but produce a projection pretty much the quality of your old tv, anywhere @ 50 inchs) will get huge. I don’t doubt for one minute that MVIS stock will be the first sign of this in the coming months (the microvision showWX is going to be the worlds first mainstream big selling pico – prediction) and this will be only the start for developing display technology. Over the next 5 years visually representative technology will blossom. We will see embedded pico-projector’s slot into city planning, home design, products such as laptops (netbooks), mobile phones, games systems, camera’s. Within lcd little growth will happen but we will likely see some sort of “ultra hd” – probably double current full hd (1080p), while embedded pico’s will feature a whole host of new resolutions, by 2015 we will definitely see full hd pico’s. This development of display technology will usher in a new age of advertisements, coupled with Augmented Reality and revolution amongst the Operating Systems.

Which brings me nicely to Augmented Reality. AR. Currently there is much buzz around Augmented reality, which I believe really is the sudden sci-fi geek realisation that technically the technology to fully provide AR is out, its been out for more than a year. Smart phones with knowledge of where they are and decent digital cameras have been around longer than the iPhone. It seems once this dawned on people everyone made a mad rush to make something AR, regardless of what it is. As a result magazines, advertisers and marketing companies largely came first (presumably they had the quickest fluid funds to pay for AR.) This marrs the technology a bit if you ask me but perhaps as AR becomes more meaning based this will change. My jury is out on AR but I think it won’t be as big a deal as everyone is making out it will be.

Business will change, or rather some business’s will change the way they use technology. You always get early adopters but I believe a good proportion of companies that operate around creative, co-operative ideology will gear up more technologically as the younger generation come into professionalism. We will see different technological assistance of work in the workplace. Board meetings will not only be worldwide (like now via Cisco tele-conferencing) but they will be assisted by interactive technology, touch and display will play large parts in this technology, beyond the Microsoft surface table and towards the science fiction of minority report. Data will be housed, represented and communicated differently. A few years ago usb sticks and solid state drives didn’t offer an easy solution to copying files, network speeds were a 100th of what they largely are today, there was no cloud. As data management and storage develop as too will the way we use it. We will probably have identifiers rather than storage in 2015. e.g. rather than copying a file to a usb stick you will simply instruct your interface to relate that data to a physical object, a soundwave (a word/phrase perhaps?) or a time of day or place, provided you can prove who you are you could then recieve it. You could carry a 200gb file with you in your wallet or on your fingernail, as the likelihood is that 200gb file will be stored centrally in what people now call the “cloud” (but will probably be a server in london or a main city) and you will simply use a relation to prompt whatever interface into providing you with this file.

There will be hurdles in achieving universal centralised data but by 2015 there will be a huge proportion less of personal computing power stored in the home. The google OS is perhaps a sign of a branching of operating systems, but I don’t see google dominating the operating system market. Microsoft have become a lot stronger over the last 18 months but the real truth of it is that neither of these developers seem to be truely embracing all of the technology developments happening. Perhaps this lag in uptake is natural, Microsoft does show some promising signs but is held back by business concerns, google seems to throw itself into the ideas without checking they are in the right direction, linux, well linux is linux. By 2015 I predict there will be at least another major world provider of what we currently refer to as operating systems. The whole concept needs re-exploring from the ground up, even starting again beyond the google os. Touch for example, AR and improved options for display are all completely ignored by all of the aforementioned operating systems, Microsoft is the only developer that even references these things but is yet to truly develop a commercial option.

Search will change too. The last few years has seen a huge uptake worldwide in searching for things which in turn has pushed marketing, sales and online business into a whole new age. It’s also cemented new business models such as affiliate marketing, search based advertising and more grey area web production. The long tail has well and truly become a reality, many successful business people spend their days driving traffic from long tail search into successful sales. This will continue but it wont settle in a single routine for long. Affiliate marketing will take to interactive media more as this becomes more integral in everyday life, search will some how adapt to a new more astute audience that is used to getting good search results fast and who quickly picks up trends and becomes integral members of up and coming online phenomena such as reddit, twitter etc. Beyond real-time, search will need to integrate much more with outside sources, new operating systems and the work out the best way to catalogue and express the ever expanding online data and how it is created and used.

HTML 5 is on its way too, this will be a major improvement but it wont be the last the web sees pre 2015. By 2015 I believe that the “internet” as we know it, a vast linked store of webpages will be a very different beast. Microsoft (XBOX), Apple (iPhone), Sony (Ps3) – these are all well known, global brands and they are all investing / operating in the new world of applications. Pioneered by Apple and the iphone the idea of segmented approved tools that are properly ordered was a (very apple) genius idea. Bringing a (standard) apple simplicity to what was previously a confusing and avoided world of software for a lot of people. Microsoft, Sky, Sony and other huge technology developers did not miss this success. In the coming years slowly these companies will target specific software/hardware at every possible market audience. By 2015 every member of your family will be buying something digital. Expanding on the segmented digitally providable media of the iphone app, television programs, games, music, films and books will all be available at the click of a button, tap of a screen or utterance of a command (and payment systems such as xbox subscriptions and ps3 accounts will remove the actual money part of the transaction further accelerating digital sales.) This new availability of media will be supported by webpages, but the web-pages are much more likely to be totally interactive, 3d integration is already in browsers but we will see more of this as well as individualised experiences. Imagine every web-page you accessed could (based on rules of privacy) know your name, interests etc – the web could be a much more interactive environment. By 2015 though I think the web could be on its way to new pastures, gone with the current ideal of “pages” accessed by address. An OS with search integrally built in could remove the requirement for a browser, content could be constructed on the fly and applications/services/movies/experiences could replace pages as we know them, with the situation that web pages changing from a square, box of a screen to a multi surface vivid world that we live in, there is no doubt in my mind that the OS and the web “page” as we know it will adapt to a new medium.

We are living in a time which is the true beginning of technology adoption, 2015 might bring a few or all of my predictions into reality, it could just as likely bring thousands more. Social adoption will drive these things forward and in return the technology will hopefully create a more co-operative, fair and equal world society.

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