Rose Cantine

Have you ever tried to remember the title of a song and who sang it? A new application called Midomi says it can help you find music simply by singing a few bars:

Midomi.com makes it fun and easy to find and discover music and people. For the first time, you can use your voice to instantly connect to your favorite music, and to a community of people that share your musical interests. Listen to voices, see pictures, rate singers, send messages, buy music, and more.

You click on the “voice search” button and start singing. It helps to sing for at least 10 seconds unless you are hopelessly out of tune. I admit it feels very strange to be serenading your computer screen.

I tried Midomi by singing “Yesterday” (Beatles) and it worked. Midomi produced an accurate search results page. What’s intriguing is that you can listen to other people’s renditions of various songs. I can see how much fun it could be to put together a “Worst Of Midomi” compilation — atonal people singing butchering their favorite songs, a reverse “Idols”.

But Midomi is not perfect. I decided to test if Midomi can search for non-English language songs. So I sang Dahil Sa ‘Yo, a traditional Filipino love song. The results were ugly: Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Snoop Doggy Dog. Okay, I am not Pilita Corrales but I thought I did a pretty good job.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reviewed Midomi. It did not work for him. For whatever reason, it also produced search results featuring rappers:

New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, launched earlier today. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song. I’ve been testing this all morning. And I cannot come up with a single match. Not one. I think that my voice is to blame, though, as others testing it seem to have good results.

Read Michael’s review here.

These are my notes on the panel “Interface and Design” (Chris Bangle (BMW), Bruce Sterling (SciFi writer), Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal), Tim Brown (IDEO).

Walt Mossberg: people will say less and less “I found it on the Internet last night” or I found this online. Going online — the term is archaic. The iPhone is a good example of a new and important short term trend in user interface and design. We are moving to the triumph of a model that failed in the era of the PC wars. The PC war took place in the 1980s and 1990. There were 2 models:
- end to end model: Apple (hardware cannot be separated from software, need a holistic solution to design an entire solution)
- component model: overall design not important, we will make the operating system, Intel makes processors, and commodity assembly houses like Dell will put together the computers.

The latter model won for business reasons, but it imposes a high cost on users. A Dell user has a harder time than a Mac user.

So what is the iPhone? It is the latest example of what’s going on in 5-6 years of the resurgence of the end-to-end model. The iPod is the poster boy for it. It’s an undesirable closed system in the eyes of open source people and techies, but from the point of view of the consumer because it works very well and is appealing. It’s not totally closed. You can play mp3s on it, same with mp4 videos. But Microsoft has admitted defeat in applying the component PC model in music players. They will have to do the same with cell phones.

Apple is applying the end-to-end model to cell phones but it is overhyped. Walt Mossberg says he used it for 20 minutes in a meeting with Steve Jobs. It’s important because it takes the cell phone to another level. It’s a “wireless iPod” — more computer than cell phone. The screen is brilliant. It’s not just ported over from the iPod. Apple developed new techniques: flicking and pinching. This is one of the hallmarks of Apple’s software design. Most Apple products work with direct manipulation. The simple direct thing works.

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Chris Bangle (BMW designer): we tend to separate cars into “automobiles” (100 years old) and “car” (carros — Roman days). When it comes to physical mobility, auto mobile might be a good term (e.g. an escalator). On the other hand, cars are what you are. A personal extension like a car — automobile might go away, cars are here to stay. If you can describe design with life-like aspects, the more you enjoy it. Cars will get you to the garage, but it won’t get your bike out of the way. The more these type of life like aspects come into it, the more endearing it will be. Sustainability of personal mobility is important. But behind it is the need to see ourselves in another level — car as our avatar.

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Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo: he goes back to Walt’s end-to end principle. US automakers figured out how to make end-to-end automobiles in the 40s, before that it was component manufacturing and users had better experiences.

No one paid attention to user interfaces until the past 20 years. How to make integrated experiences is a new trend. When you think about something new, you can’t think of it as a physical product anymore, it must have a narrative association (it’s about stories), you have to think of the experience itself. It’s not enough to think of form of the device and behavior of the person with the device. But it’s interesting that no one really thinks about the consequences of a particular design. New ways of prototyping experiences have arisen (clay, plastic, drawings in the past). Today there’s computer aided design, film making. There is as much innovation in the design process itself as there is in design.

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Bruce Sterling: what is the follow up of the PC? we do not know what we’re talking about with these machines that people are trying to build at MAKE (self- fabricating).

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Walt Mossberg: In 2 years what will you see? Overhyping will still be there. There is a healthy trend toward more direct interfaces with devices. voice recognition is one of the holy grails that is not done right. Microsoft has done a lot of work with it. Vista does have a very robust voice recognition function, you can run the computer with it. The tablet PC is also a direct input device where you write directly — Microsoft did not do a good job because they did not build it holistically. The iPhone with multi-touch (Apple is not the only company doing something like this) — there’s a lot of juice and life in multi-touch (pop culture, movies have an effect on designers, e.g. Minority Report).

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Tim Brown: What is a design thinker? There is a difference between designers and design thinkers. Designers are very talented but they don’t have a monopoly on the way design gets done. Although designers like to make us think it is magical, they do simple things well. They have some empathy for the user, an understanding of the world and what people in that world might need, imagining life from other people’s perspective. Designers build to think — they make maquettes or prototypes — they don’t figure it all out in their heads first and think it has to be perfect from the beginning. Designers use stories to enact their ideas.

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Chris Bangle: How do you implement new design? Design is an approach to life. Singapore is reassessing design in the role of government, public policy. Design skills are important for everyone to get most out of people’s lives. So in cars, how do you take driving and lifestyle (multitasking) and make it all happen for the non-professionals (driving, talking on the phone, changing CDs, watching out for radar traps)? For pilots this is easy but not for regular people.

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John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends: people are getting tired of the hype of technology. Mossberg said in the panel yesterday that a lot of things promised have not happened. People still do straight line extrapolation. The future is created by a collusion of many forces that interplay and these help shape the other forces. It’s never linear. In 1870 London, there were 50,000 horses producing tons of dung everyday, lots of carriages, the engineers warned Queen Victoria that people would drown in horseshit but then the auto was invented. Now we talk about fumes.

The Global Warming movement has become a religion, a product of linear thinking. People should be more skeptical, ask more questions. Now is the time to attend to lowering our dependence on oil.

So how do we understand the future, if not via linear thinking?

• Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it: they are not interested in 2050, they are interested in what will happen in a few years in relationship to what they know now. Example: EU leaders can’t even get people to understand that economic reform is necessary to sustain the social model, which is what people are concerned about. There is no leadership in the world. But in the absence of top down leadership, bottom up leadership emerges (are we getting mob rule?)
• is Europe in decline? if Europe continues to give lip service to economic reform, then it is on the path to decline in comparison to other parts of the world.
• what methods can we use to predict the future? all the things we expect to happen, happen more slowly (media, politics — e.g. women’s rights). Demand a very high standard from media for reporting.
• China: what is happening in China is extraordinary, but the hype that it will overtake the US is ridiculous. The same with India. China is so far ahead of India (infrastructure is terrible, China is building great airports, etc.). Investment in India is 1/10 of China. But India has terrible Socialist overhang from the Nehru period, with a nanny government. India is a one sector economy (IT) — they outwitted the government, they did things in spite of the government. You cannot build economic growth on one pillar.
• Conventional media is in a survival mode. and in trying to survive, they get outrageous to get the blood running through the system. A visual culture is taking over the world (slow death of the “Culture”). We will have newspapers and TV for a long time, but now there is a scramble to figure out everything. So at the turn of the century, we were trying to figure out the automobile. In those first years, there were 2700 auto companies created. The press at that time were covering “breakthroughs” in automobiles. We are going through a long shakeout period in media technology.
• Visual culture: manifestation of visual culture — the world is a picture puzzle. He gets pieces and he tries to see which fits with which. There are some things that fit together that form a picture. The “word” side is going down (newspapers, magazines), the novel is dead (announced for one hundred years but losing out to other forms of expression). Young people are not reading as much. But there are all these visual images coming out. Architecture today — people building iconic visual buildings — put together with visual media and you see we are moving from paper to film. It’s a faster form of communication but it’s not that the “word” is going away. The mix is changing. We will have fewer newspapers and fewer magazines, and more visual forms.
• Conflict between Islam and the west: is this a big risk as many of us think? No. It’s overhyped. The terrorist thing is important but it’s running the administration so they gave them importance they don’t have. But we need to get some balance in this. We cannot make it the number one thing that makes us run.
• High tech, high touch: when we think of high technology, we need to ask what does this new technology diminish and what does it enhance? What does it replace? What is the human response to that technology?

Naisbitt reads letter from Darwin:

. . . up to the age of thirty of beyond, poetry gave me pleasure but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My mind seems to become a kind of machine for grinding general laws from large collection of facts and if I had to live my life again, I would have made it a rule to read poetry and listen to music. The loss of these tastes is … injurious to the character… enfeebling the emotional part of our future.

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I love Dailymotion because it has videos such as this one — how to make risotto with cepes (a type of mushroom). I make risotto all the time and am not intimidated by it. People think it’s so difficult to make. The only secret is patience. You have to stand over the stove and keep stirring at low heat, keep adding liquid little by little. It’s tiring but worthwhile. And you have to use good ingredients.

Click here to see the risotto video (in French):
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrgq0_risotto-aux-cepes

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Attendees of the Burda DLD conference in Munich this year got a tour of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, specifically, the Dan Flavin Retrospective. Click here to see my DLD photo set. The curator of the Dan Flavin exhibition led the tour and explained to us how Flavin’s works evolved over time. A theme that surfaces again and again is how art is part of everyday life and how it is part of the viewer. It does not stand apart. That is why he used light. Light reflects and lands upon you. It does not stop at the boundaries of a frame, as a painting, drawing or photograph does. And it draws you in.

One of his light installations used to hang in a bar in New York City in the 1960s where Andy Warhol and his friends used to meet. Flavin did not see his art as sacred, as being only fit to hang in a museum. He plays with the way the wavelengths of light interact with our eyes. So if you look at a red light, then suddenly look at green or yellow light, your eyes have to adjust and the light that is really one color, looks like another.

Read the Wikipedia entry on Dan Flavin here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Flavin

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My excitement over the Apple iPhone has barely died down when this one comes along: the LG Prada phone. I want this one too. At first glance it looks similar to the iPhone but it does not have the revolutionary user interaction with the screen — flicking and pinching.
Read more on Engadget.

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The DLD website has videos of all presentations. My favorites are Hackers Inc., Disruptive Connections and Where are the Editors. You can find the videos here: http://videos.dld-conference.com/

The best moment in Hackers, Inc. is when Pablos Holman shows how he hacked into Jeff Pulver’s voice mail. He had Jeff stand up and identify himself to the audience. Apparently it is quite easy to hack into voice mail and other “secure” services.

The panel on Disruptive Connections was also very compelling: Hjalmar Winbladh (Rebtel), Jeff Pulver (VON), Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk), Alexander Straub (Truphone). The “disruption” consists of the launch of new services (like Truphone and Rebtel) that allow people to make very cheap calls on their mobile phones. Winbladh and Straub called the mobile operators’ roaming charges “highway robbery”. They also touched upon the arrival of ubiquitous Wi-Fi as a way for people to use unlicensed spectrum for voice and data services.

“Where are the Editors” features the outspoken Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post), Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Tariq Krim (Netvibes), Dave Sifry (Technorati) and Jim Spanfeller (Forbes.com). With the rise of blogs and services that aggregate news and feeds like Netvibes and Digg, do editors have a role? Arianna points out how the New York Times’ editorial board allowed the fake weapons of mass destruction article to appear in the Times (giving the Bush Administration a lot of support in starting a war based on false premises). Craig says that you should trust your users. On Craigslist, the users help them flag spam, inappropriate posts and fraud. This is a very interesting session and I did ask one question at the end.

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