I love talk radio, but I would like it even more if it had music in it, and even more if I liked the music.

A nice Spotify app would be one that adds music to, let’s say This American Life, or P1 Business med Bjørnestad.

I tried it, but for now the Spotify app platform doesn’t support the audio tag or Flash, which is required in order to play the podcast file and find the silent spots. An alternative could be doing it in the browser instead.

For people making podcasts, playing music is almost never an option. It’s too damn expensive. Music fees are a huge item on a radio station budget, too. Thousands of podcasts, thousands of radio stations have had to close down because the fees were too high. Millions of potential listeners left in silence (ah, ok, left with their own CDs or the mainstream stations or podsafe music, which for obvious reasons never really caught on: It’s not good).

But what if the podcaster or broadcaster could play music from the listener’s own music library and thus not pay the fees? That seems exactly what can be done with streaming services and in particular Spotify apps to make the whole experience just as seamless as normal radio.

I hope we’ll see live radio stations as well as music podcasts and maybe even music blog networks to appear in the Spotify app store when the platform opens up soon.

Tony‘s phone began ringing right in the middle of our sushi. He didn’t pick up, but he told me he might have had he known that what the caller wanted to say was really important.

We began talking about how people in movies from the 80ies could screen their calls and always pick up mid-message. With mobile phones we can’t do that anymore.

Not even with mobile smartphones that have more processing power than the entire NASA fleet of the sixties and seventies combined.

I’m not 50 Cent
Meanwhile, a few years and months back, when mobile phones could suddenly play real music for ring tones, I began wondering why I, Morten Just, should trigger 50 Cent “It’s your birthday” when calling a friend to get directions to a barbecue. If that person was within 20 metres of myself, I thought, I would just say their name a few times. Or the question itself. Never sing any 50 Cent songs, or songs by other artists of any genre.

So, why didn’t Tony’s phone just automatically answer the call, play a short message, a beep, and let the caller justify why Tony should put down that Godzilla maki roll?

I met a friend Friday who is working on a school building. After a brief discussion with Jane yesterday we think we kind of nailed the problem with not having enough teachers and not having enough space for kids. Jane also had an idea of mounting a camera on the teacher’s shoe which I thought was pretty far fetched.

While talking to Claus about strategies for saving words on paper digitally, this idea crossed my mind as a way of indicating what on a page is interesting. It might need a bit of stabilizing or snapping, but then again, your own highlights aren’t always that precise.

I was helping my mum turn her iPad wi-fi on and off. Since remote controlling her iPad is not an option, I was dreaming of an app like this. It could probably work for repairing bikes and choosing the right meat at the supermarket, too.

It works like this: The person who needs help opens an app and connects to the helper person. Once connected, the app turns into a camera preview and streams the video to a client on a desktop, tablet or even a phone at the helper side.

The helper can then speak and point out subjects in the view. In this case, the wifi on/off switch on his mum’s iPad. To make sure the dot doesn’t float around, the app could use simple video processing (like contrast matching) to make it stay in place.

I visit websites of real-life shops from time to time. They can be handy and they can be annoying. When I found this Oatmeal comic (that referred to this excellent xkcd diagram) I was reminded about an old sketch I had lying around.

Shop websites tend to look like this

UPDATE: I’m sorry, shop websites do of course look like this

In 99% of cases what I need is this

In the remaining 1 per cent of cases I want to search their inventory or look up stock status. If I need the address I’ll probably just search Maps on the phone. The phone number is at times an efficient way to do it. It’s a little more cool if you think of it as Siri with a lot better pronunciation.

Nonetheless I sometimes spend minutes looking for opening hours.

A few weeks ago I went to a real bookstore for the first time in a long time. I took a pile of books to a sofa so I could flip through them and see if I wanted them. I did – but not on paper. So as a natural thing I opened the Kindle web store on my mobile. It was hard work typing in a long title only to find out the book is not on Kindle, so I decided to go home and see if I could change that experience.

The prototype uses the zbar open source barcode scanner (the fastest and most robust scanner software I’ve seen) and opens a browser window to display information about the book. It also uses the Goodreads API for reviews.

The field test
I took it to a bookstore to see if I had it right. It turned out to be a lot of fun connecting the real world with the internet, especially the reviews were helpful.

DVDs. I found out I also wanted to scan other items in the store, namely DVDs. So I build in a DVD mode that finds the corresponding trailer on Youtube:

(I know, it should add the item to my Netflix instant queue, I might do that later).

Language. Being a non-German speaker in Switzerland I also noticed that I wanted to scan German books and see the English original or translation. So I built that in.

Log. Then there’s the pile. I still want to collect a number of titles and then sit somewhere and look at them. But it doesn’t have to be the sofa in the bookstore if only I could make the pile digital. So that’s what I did. The app shows a list of all your scanned books at the bottom of the display.

Reviews. The reviews were great, but I wanted to get to know the reviewer to be able to trust them. I added the reviewer’s profile image.

Other items. The low friction made me want to scan everything, including the water bottle in my hand. After a few hours on the AppStore the log data shows that I’m definitely not alone; users are scanning more non-book items than books! This could go in a lot of different directions, but for now I decided to let users write a short message to the other users scanning the same item. It’s easy to begin thinking of a “Foursquare for barcodes”, but several projects are out there doing that, including barcoo and Stickybits.

You can find the app by searching for “Kindlescanner” in the AppStore on your iPhone. It’s free.

When I look for stores in a directory or a specific magazine in a newsstand, I wish I could search instead. I’m not sure which of the two I prefer: 1) Take a photo, then search on that photo, 2) Enter a search term, then point at the list I want to search, AR-style. Here’s how the last one could work:

I just got a new phone number this weekend. Again. 16 times cheaper data, but no mountain coverage (or in the cafeteria at work). So I guess I have to keep the old one – and the international ones because roaming fees are surreal.

I don’t blame those of my friends who have given up in knowing which number I use. I need to find a way to get rid of phone numbers altogether, or at least one place where people can always go to see which number I’m on. No, forget about the number. Just how they can get in touch.

My new phone number is call.mortenjust.com.

This is what it looks like immediately after touching one of the options above:

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I thought I would be stuck in iPhone/iTunes for music for a long time. I had been for five years. Then Spotify’s iPhone app came out, and I moved my music listening habits into the cloud in an afternoon. On my new laptop I have one album as MP3. 1,000 songs are starred and synced in Spotify on my phone.

I thought I would be stuck in Spotify for a long time. I have been for one year. Rdio is a newer cloud music service preparing to launch in Europe so I thought I would take a sneak preview. It looks promising, and almost identical to Spotify. But Rdio looks like a second design iteration of Spotify.

The competition is in the details, it seems. So let’s take a deeper look. Click the images for full Retina Display marvel.

Launch image

Quite against Apple’s guidelines, Rdio chooses to ….

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You’re in your best chair listening to music when your phone rings. You open your hand, hear a friendly sound notification, then close your hand and move it downwards. The music volume follows your hand downwards. Would be awesome, right?

Here’s a sketch on how a gesture recorder for Kinect might look. Click to view in Google Docs.

• Openkinect
• Kinect Hacks blog