The days of the MP3 as the digital record industry’s standard may be numbered. That, at least, is the opinion of the management at Norwegian company Bach Technology Ltd., developers of a new format for storing music that they have given the very high-sounding name of MusicDNA. As opposed to the conventional MP3, this new format allows the storage of artwork, photos, music videos, song lyrics, interviews... additional material that can only be enjoyed by those who acquire these files in the legal way (nothing can stop MusicDNA files circulating freely online, but it seems that, in principle, it won’t be possible to "rip" these extra contents), and which you can update over time. 

For lack of any greater specifications, the underlying concept of MusicDNA doesn’t seem too far removed from "iTunes LP" or "iTunes Pass" (which allows "temporary subscription" to an album and, as well as the traditional collection of songs, users will receive more content spread over a number of years) which Apple launched last spring. It must have some advantage however, because large independent record groups like Tommy Boy and Beggars Group have already signed a contract with Bach Technology to start exploiting the advantages of this new format -perfectly compatible with any MP3 player- with their future releases. 

According to Bach Technology plans, MusicDNA should start "beta test" circulation in the middle of the coming spring, with a view to its launch in the summer.

http://www.bachtechnology.com/

What happens when an artist, a curator, a data processing engineer, a designer who specializes in videogames and a sociologist with expertise in economics all meet up?  No, this isn’t a bad joke that you might hear from a child, but a brief introduction to the team that makes up Derivart, a Spanish artist collective, which has been specializing in the crossover between art, technology and finances since 2004.

And it’s safe to say that, whether in a national or the international context, they’ve had lots of tricky situations to deal with. In 2007 they were already strongly criticizing Spanish property speculation with software projects like Hipotecadora (an application to calculate the age when you’d have just finished paying the mortgage), Burbujómetro (an interactive globe-shaped visual of the price of housing, which could be shot at with a toy gun), or Casas Tristes, where they developed visualization tools for decent housing, in the form of a map highlighting empty houses. 

A couple of years and a global crisis later, last year, 2009, they came firing back, increasing their range of interest: Gamebroker, a series of mini-games for Nintendo Gameboy on the main crises of the last three decades; Inspector or Manager, software tools that question the role of SGAE, by putting themselves in their shoes, as well as those of the poor fool who thinks he can play any song he likes without our very own Sheriff of Nottingham becoming aware and claiming his spoils. The icing on the cake is surely Fuck you Hirst, where instead of paying homage to the extremely wealthy artist who goes by that name, stickers have been designed to determine the real value of a work of art, bearing in mind the effort involved and personal criteria when appraising the work. As long as Derivart keep on holding the economy in check, I think we can breathe easily.

http://tinyurl.com/lhtzl7

A new year begins and with it a renewed desire to create, do more projects and learn, so with this in mind, at the outset of 2010 we’d like to introduce TUTS to those who don’t know it and remind those of you who are already familiar with it.

TUTS is a website with tutorials and resources gathered from different blogs - so far, seven in all, each one focussing on a special area:

PhotoShop and graphics (PSDTuts )

Design and web development with HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMSs, PHP, Ruby and Rails (NetTuts )

Vectors and illustration, focussed above all on Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape (VectorTuts )

Music and sound, to find recording and production techniques, etc.  (AudioTuts )

Flash Tutorial with Flash, ActionScript and Flex (AeTuts )

3D and computer Graphics, with May, 3Ds, Max, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Blender, Mudbox, etc.  (CgTuts )

Photography (PhotoTuts )

The starting point and leitmotiv for Tuts goes as follows: "If you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best". That’s why the web also features interviews with the outstanding professionals from each sector. What’s more, a permanent assembly is open making it possible to send a tutorial that could become part of the web, only after an appraisal to decide if it meets the Tuts + quality demands. 

Each specific page/blog has tutorials, articles, gifts and videos. Most of the information is free, although you can also become a Plus Program member, thus being eligible for more exclusive information. 

For now, we recommend bookmarking Tuts+ as one of your favorite pages and, as usual, keep on learning from it in 2010.

http://tutsplus.com

Have you ever wondered where to go to have a drink when you're out and about? What do people recommend at a particular restaurant? Or whether or not your friends are anywhere nearby so that you can meet up and hang out together? Foursquare is here to help.

Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare, is a veteran of social mobile software. Years ago he co-developed Dodgeball, an SMS based mobile application that was acquired by Google in 2005 and that planted the seed of the now grown up sibling. Dodgeball allowed users to broadcast their location to their contacts and facilitated serendipitous encounters. Google shut down the service in early 2009, but Foursquare took that concept to a next level, by adding elements of gaming, local guide, humor and incentives to use the application, as well as a nice UI.

How does Foursquare work? Download the application for free. There are versions available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones, and for the rest of mobile devices, you can access their mobile site, or use limited functionality via SMS.

Invite friends! This application is all about sharing your experiences with them: let your peers know where you go and what you enjoyed there, and ask them to do the same.

When you are on the go, check in at the places that you visit, so that your location is broadcasted to your contacts. Add tips or recommended todos so that they know what to order or what not to miss. Your activity will earn you badges that you'll be able to show proudly to your friends, as well as points. In some venues, Foursquare is partnering with the owners to offer discounts to you, mobile socialites, so do not forget to check in. The more you become a regular of a place, the more chances you'll have to become the mayor of that venue. What will that get you? Free drinks, free coffees or even free stays at hotels.

Foursquare was born in New York City, but its user base is now international. Go to the site to check out the information that has already been entered for a given venue, or see who is using the application already. Go head and give it a try.

http://www.foursquare.com

A project like this is open to all kinds of interpretation: is it a common space? How the hell one can live without money? Surely this blogger is using some kind of barter system? But what Suelo (the author) describes are fragments of the life of someone who turned his back on the money-based reality in which most people live. 

From one day to the next he rejected those pieces of paper, known as bills, and the little metal discs we call coins. He also gave up storing energy, only eating when he was really hungry. And, as if this wasn’t enough, he got rid of his possessions, even those that only had sentimental value, because he believed that those are precisely the ones that tied us most to the past, in a comparable way to how future credit lives off the debtor. 
 
Suelo’s life is not unlike that of a homeless person’s, or someone from a beatnik novel, describing his movements from his native Colorado to the states of California, Oregon, and beyond.  But we shouldn’t forget that this blog is written by a Christian hippy, made of flesh and blood, who lives the life of an activist.  Suelo lives in a cave and has renounced the use of money for 9 years now. He writes his blog from public libraries.  A very honest exercise that’s well worth continuing, even if it’s only updated from time to time.

http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com

Millions of street artists have been working for years now in exchange for whatever passing spectators wish to give them for a decent show. This model has now been taken on by anjuno, which has proclaimed itself to be the first ‘pick your price’ digital media community (everything from songs to books). 

Bands like Radiohead have made this model popular and verified its viability as a promotional tool. The plan obviously works for well-known artists and authors but a question mark arises when it comes to applying it to anonymous or up-and-coming individuals. 

Nevertheless, anjuno.com is now offering the consumer an alternative to piracy, top-quality content and a more honest model than rewards the creator, since 85% of what a user pays for a song or book goes straight to the artist. Anjuno only keeps 15%, reversing the model of the music companies who give a smaller slice of the cake to the artists. It’s even providing an alternative to iTunes which gives 5 cents to the artist for a song that is sold for 99 cents. 

Anjuno went online in August 2009 and already has artists from Canada, Russia and the United States. It was started up by Neal Vasilak, an aerospace engineer who’s quite the fan of marketing and trade in so-called digital goods through the Internet. A daring initiative that redefines the future of digital media distribution.

http://www.anjuno.com

The following is neither a joke nor a wisecrack dressed up in appropriationist clothing.  It’s an example of something that I had already started to name genuine blogging culture in this section, although I’m aware that the expression is slightly clumsy. GBC is like porn: extremely difficult to define but recognizable at first sight. As you can see, GBC is fragmentary, metanarrative, disorientating and amazingly fruitful. So much so, that it’s already started to mutate in other fields, including that dandruff-ridden, old-school undertaking of essay-writing. To follow, we have a (sampled) extract from the last Eloy Fernández Carries book, "Homo Sampler. Time and consumption in the post-pop era", which goes: 

"Discovered in Atapuerca the oldest remaining fossil of a blogger. 

REUTERS/RORSCHACH.  A bone found in Atapuerca on June 27th, and unveiled to the public today by the co-directors of the site, confirms the oldest presence of bloggers in Europe, dating back over 1,200,000 years. This find exceeds by some 400,000 years the remains which, up to now, were the oldest in Europe, belonging to the Homo Amstrad species, also located in Atapuerca (...). 

As opposed to other more active members of their community, who confronted wild bison in their bare chests or asked hominids of the opposite sex for a light or invested in Treasury Bonds, the blogger only left his cave to visit the Mac settlement or to pick up four cheese flavoured Cheetos.  Although by that stage of the Lower Neolithic the quadruped style was already out of date, and the biped fashion was all the rage, the blogger had adopted a nerdy bent-over position. For that reason the bony remainders caused confusion among scholars.  "It seemed impossible", clarifies Childish, "that a hominid with a constitution so similar to a monkey’s could be a contemporary of the Homo Surfer and of a rugby central defender. Up to now we imagined him to be an ancestor of theirs, according to some hypothesis, the symptom of a regrettable decline" (...).

The blogger’s favorite tools were a stone flint with a crayon tip and a tube of instant glue, extracted from the roots of the Sacred Tree. With this stone he worked upon the walls of his cave, which he decorated with laborious inscriptions, called postum. In most cases the times the postum took up just a few lines, but on inspired days the blogger would often devote an entire day to a single inscription, which would take up an entire wall, much to the consternation of their cave-mates, who would scream abuse at him and give him a vicious thrashing that left him rather the worse for wear. In those occasions the blogger consoled himself by carrying out his second favourite activity: collecting leaves, flora and other vegetables and hitting them against the wall, in an effort to decorate or illustrate other texts. Aesthetic historians have called this pseudo-artistic practice " Anal Preschool Era", and believe that it represents a mystical, rather cheesy mentality, the consequence of a diet that was low in sodium and rich in Cheetos (...).

A very striking aspect of the blogger mentality was its eschatology, both in the sense of the "spiritual and religious use of our remains" and also of "what you are thinking". The routine of the hominid, who to our eyes may appear quite absurd, was maintained by a superstitious belief in the magical properties of glue. In fact, the blogger was convinced that a mysterious force, at the very core of the glue itself, put him in touch with the caves of all the remaining bloggers. This was called "virtual cohesion". Interpreters tell us that this hazy concept makes up the underlying theme of the majority of the preserved postum (...).

Certain archaeologists maintain that the worship of glue made some believe that their inscriptions could be read, decoded and discussed by other bloggers, in neighbouring or even very distant caves, thus creating a kind of universal landscape where cavemen shared one single cause (...).

These bloggers (...) were well aware of their destiny: busying themselves with a unrewarding and deceptive business, thrown to the cold corners of the cave, in the darkest of times, all in the hope that some archaeologist, carrying out an academic study would take notice of them (...). This scene illustrates the phenomenon which cyber-critics of holoculture call "media implosion" and which can be defined as the tendency to read the lines of a newspaper with the same willingness as those who scrutinize the Palaeolithic sky looking for emblems, or clouds arranged in allegory, or forecasts at the start of the second sales, along with a clear and terrible certainty: the Rain Gods speak through the mouth of Paco Montesdeoca.”

Eloy Fernández Porta, “Homo Sampler. Tiempo y consumo en la era after-pop”

When environmental forces are pressing, you have to stop and analyze your own life and be willing to change some habits. Making a thorough list, for two or three months, of what we spend our money on (including the coffee we drink in the bar or chewing gum for the train!) is effective but exhausting, and let’s not fool ourselves, very few of us are capable of doing it.  

For some time now, the Internet has been demonstrating the ability of collective minds to solve problems, needs or everyday issues. It wasn’t long before we saw the appearance of Yunait, a social network that shares information on ways of saving.  

Yunait aims to filter the avalanche of money-saving tips that have flooded the Internet over the past year. As a social network, it’s the consumers themselves who rate the information, publish and evaluate offers and warn us about those that are fraudulent. They also share their experiences on where they shop, how much they save, how prices compare, etc.
 
The network allows advertising of sales, offers, discounts and promotions that can be trusted or which are considered really interesting, which are duly organized in the Offers section. Business is where users compare websites or favourite shops in terms of value for money, while in Advice and Tricks any useful data on savings and finances is accepted. It’s possible to register on Yunait directly from any Facebook account, and activate a system that informs us of new entries that may be of interest to us.  

The platform is a new digital initiative that aims to change the existing relationship between brands and consumers, who have more and more to say. A section is envisaged that will allow brands to advertise their offers. We hope they also know how to make the most of this common knowledge and adapt their marketing strategies to the real needs of society.  

The network was presented at the 2nd Edition of the Open Talent enterprise awards and they’re waiting for your vote if you think the project deserves it.

http://www.yunait.com

Anyone who lived through personal computing’s prehistoric phase will remember Lode runner.  This mythical platform game made its name not only for of its brilliant strategic element but also because it could be extended with scenarios developed by the players themselves; it was one of the first games to feature a level editor. In this way, an interesting and complex theme was brought to the table: the mutability of the area of play. 

Just imagine a chess game in which the rooks could be reorganized. Modifying the spatial element of a game generally subverts its system of rules and allows us to work out a series of possibilities that many, throughout the history of videogames, have had no hesitation in taking advantage of. 

That is the road taken, to a certain extent, by this month’s title: Continuity.  With an established plataform and highly synthetic, it’s reminiscent of little contemporary jewels like N. Nevertheless, two major differences stand out. First, its space. In Continity, rather than moving about, the idea is to organize the place where you’re supposed to move. Secondly, its extraordinary simplicity, far removed from other spatial experiments like Levelhead, by Julian Oliver (whose technical gadgets undoubtedly deserve a separate article) or the groundbreaking Echochrome and its dazzling muji-style look. 

Continuity, simple and slow, without any points system or clocks that force us to rush through it, but with enough complexity to make us want to reach the end NOW, is such a fresh proposal that it’ll make us waste the whole afternoon. You’ve been warned!

http://www.continuitygame.com