The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App
Posted on Feb 18th, 2009
Dave Dederer, former frontman of nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo, which makes nuTsie, a software application that can stream your iTunes playlists to any web-connected PC, your Blackberry and your Facebook profile.
Dederer has neatly dovetailed his past and present with Melodeo’s release of a $3 app for iPhone and iPod Touch (iTunes link), which contains the four Presidents of the United States of America albums whose rights are owned by the band. The app includes rare, exclusive material that can be updated from the server side.
"IPhone apps are exploding, including for musical artists, but nobody’s done anything like this," stated Dederer. For a mere three bucks, fans and interested parties new to the band will get four albums, "lost" recordings, live tracks, demos, and whatever else the band can think of to put in there.
Read the full article at Wired.
Meebo and Facebook
Posted on Feb 9th, 2009Online instant messaging portal Meebo, which allows users to write once and transmit messages to multiple IM platforms, added an integration allowing messages to be exported to Facebook chat. Meebo users will now be able to conduct instantaneous text chats with their Facebook friends off the social network as well as browse status updates of their Facebook friends.
Full story at NY Times.
Text Messages Are an Even Bigger Ripoff Than You Thought
Posted on Dec 29th, 2008
We all know that text messaging is overpriced, but the NYT has pulled back the technological shroud to find out that the prices aren’t just bad, they’re practically extortionate.
The article goes into depth about how text messages are transmitted. In short, texts are unsurprisingly transmitted between towers over the main, wired network in the same way as cellular data, a portion of the journey that, considering the tiny amount of information in a 160-character text, costs very close to nothing.
Surely then, the carrier incurs costs to transmit the messages from towers to handsets. After all, this is the wireless part of the journey, and wireless costs lotsa $$$, right? No:
Text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.
That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.
You read that right: for carriers, sending a text message from an extant wireless tower to your handset is more or less free. If it’s any consolation, the article also mentions that the Senate Antitrust Committee is kind of looking into the matter, so we may see relief (or even retribution) within the next 10-40 years.
