If you’re a musician more than you’re a sound engineer and you regularly play live gigs the Line 6 MD20 is probably going to have some appeal to you. The MD20 has been touted as the world’s first smart sound mixer. Essentially it’s a plugin-and-play system aimed at taking all the faders, knobs and number crunching from mixing audio. There’s one feature in particular however that really stood out to me.

The Tweak Pad is a pretty smart interface the helps non-sound engineer types tweak their sounds without breaking a sweat. When doing mixes at a gig the large majority of musicians don’t think and speak terms like “add 3dB at 5kHz” or “faster attack”, they’re more likely to use terms like “make it brighter” or “punchier”. These however are the parameters found on the Line 6 MD20.

The Tweak Pad is a great example of user research leading to understanding customers and designing the user experience around people and not hardware. The quality of the sound remains to be seen but whether you’re an analogue purist or a long time DAW operator you have to hand it to these guys for some forward thinking.

This Paymo site caught my eye recently while I was looking into emerging mobile tech. The Paymo scheme sneakily attempts to replace your credit card with your mobile as a method of online payment claiming that the main point of difference is payment security.

When making a payment on supported sites you enter your phone number and an SMS is sent to you asking for authorisation. Once you authorise the the transaction it’s processed and charged to your mobile phone bill.

The danger I see here is that kids don’t have credit cards, plenty of them have phones though which to me is a bit worrying. Even more so is the type of places being advertised as supported platforms, it starts to kind of look like Paymo’s actually targeting the younger audience. See Below:

I’m guessing that most parents who give their children mobile phones supply them with pre-paid credit, so maybe for those kids this could be a nice lesson in budgeting. I can see things going pear shaped though if there are kids out there who’ve been given phones on plans.

When you’re ready to launch your website, you’ll want to give visitors the best user experience possible. There’s fierce competition for people’s attention in the online space, particularly with ecommerce sites and Clue helps you test out your webpages to find out what’s making an impact and sticking in people’s minds.

From the Clue site:

What’s your attention span the first time you see a webpage? Test yourself: click on a page you’ve never visited before. Count to 5 in your head. Seems like a long time, doesn’t it? If nothing grabbed you in that first 5½ seconds (or even the first 2 or 3 seconds!) you probably would have been out of there. The extra second might seem odd, but we’ve found it proves to be the most effective possible timespan.

There’s been a lot of chatter going around about when the next set of camera’s from RED are going to be released. Apparently the system bugs have been sorted and they’ve begun ordering the parts.

This was posted from James Jannard near the start of November:

EPIC was officially declared ready for production today. We have prototypes that pass all the requirements we set out the past few months. That means we will finish the Tattoo program and put Tattoos on special jobs and begin ordering all the parts and pieces (over 18,000) to begin production. It will take a bit of time to set up the line and gather all we need, but the end is in sight.

RED Gong has also posted that they’re gearing up for the new RED EPIC hardwear.

You can grab it from Fountain Fonts.

While doing some of my regular R&D recently, I came across an article by Clay Shirky about Social Surplus and how the modern person spends their spare time.

Excerpt:

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

After browsing around a little more I came across the visualisation above from Information Is Beautiful which puts into perspective the potential of our unharnessed minds.

This story isn’t exactly new anymore but I thought it deserved a mention as a great example of new thinking applied to an old problem.

You can find an explanation of how it works from the Gyrobike website:

Gyrowheel essentially has a gyroscope inside. Gyroscopes are spinning wheels that exhibit a special property called precession. When a force is put at the top of a spinning wheel (such as a rider falling on a bicycle), rather than falling, the gyroscope simply turns, or precesses, in the direction of the fall. This occurs on normal bike wheels when the bike is traveling at higher speeds. Hence, it is easier to ride a bicycle once you “get going.” Gyrowheel takes advantage of this property even when the bike is moving slowly.

source: Gyrobike

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

An impressive short documentary on old-skool outdoor advertising (probably also a clever advertisement in itself) that made the rounds in the office this morning.

I’ve haven’t upgraded to the iPhone 4 yet primarily because I’ve been waiting for a stable Jailbreak solution to be released. That is until now thanks to JailbreakMe 2.0, a full (very simple) tutorial can be found at CrispyTech.

To save you questioning my motives, let me make it clear that the only reason I decided to Jailbreak in the first place is because of Optus’ ridiculous tethering charges. Jailbreaking enables a workaround solution to this issue, and wouldn’t you know it, the Optus customer service rep was incorrect when he said that tethering would lead to excessive data charges.

It’s also worth noting that speculation over the DMCA ruling can now be put to rest as it’s been revealed that iPhone Jailbreaking has been declared “fair use”.

Steve Jobs image source