Introducing mflow: It's going to be huge...

The music industry is changing. We know that. What with the digital economy bill being pushed through parliament last week (boo), and a general shift from buying physical music, to buying digital downloads, and now, with spotify, not even owning music anymore, things are moving pretty fast.

The latest music tool to hit t'internet is mflow - billed as 'spotify with twitter', it's a new way of sharing music (yep, sharing music, legally!) and discovering new music in return:

"We believe that music's better shared...

We don't want to be told what we 'might like' by a software program.
We don't want to stare at an empty search bar... "a whole world of music at my fingertips, and I can't think of anything to look for..."
We don't want to have to subscribe to anything.
We don't want adverts.
We just want a way for our mates to send us music they think rocks."

It's quite simple really - you download the software, register, then start following people (as you would in twitter) - they 'flow' songs that they like, and you get to listen to 1 full preview, then after that, (any) 30 seconds of the sog . You can flow songs that you like to your followers, write a little comment about why you like it, and so on. The great thing is that if any of your followers buys a track after you've flowed it to them, you get 20% of the price! Which is nice. The downloaded songs can be moved to your itunes folder and played on any mp3 player and ipod.

They haven't got the extensive library that itunes does yet - but they're getting there. And if you're going to buy a track off itunes - check if it's been flowed to you already, and you may as well buy it off mflow instead - then you give someone 20%! Sharing is caring, folks.

It works best if all your mates/network are on there; I'm always saying 'have you heard this song?' to people and they're like 'eh'... now you can just send it to them. It's great. If you're already someone who uses twitter a lot, then you've got the right frame of mind to use mflow - that desire to share something new and fresh that you've discovered with the world. It's my favourite part of it.

I think the only downfall is that you only get 1 full preview - sometimes you need to listen to a song a few more times than that. Spotify, while it has adverts, obviously lets you listen as many times as you like. I wouldn't mind mflow having adverts if I could have unlimited plays.

Unfortunately, I was lazy and never got round to downloading spotify... now you can only get it through invitation only! And you can only give invites out if you pay for it. Well gutting. So if any of you have an invite, wang one over my way, cos I am silly.

Mflow is currently in beta - which means you can only try it at the moment if you have an invite code. Luckily, I have three left! If you want to try out mflow, the first 3 people to leave a comment on this post get a code off me! Don't say I'm not generous.

When it comes out of beta then anyone will be able to download it I'd imagine. But by then everyone will know about it and you won't be one of the cool trendsetters. You have been warned.

If you already have mflow and want to follow me on there, search People for 'Rachillustrates' - then you can start receiving my awesome taste in music.

Check out mflow's blog.

Grazia Does Augmented Reality

This time last year, Augmented Reality was this hip new buzz word I'd just heard about and it seemed that everyone was whispering 'Is this the future??' in sci-fi voices. It's a groundbreaking piece of technology but a lot of people didn't quite know how to apply it, and brands weren't really sure what it could do for them. Cool for cool's sake, were a lot of people's first thoughts.

Now though, it's really beginning to pick up momentum, and perhaps it's now burst onto the mainstream with this week's Grazia Magazine doing a '3D' (term applied loosely...) issue.

I wrote about Augmented Reality and it's uses in a post I wrote a while back about my Ted Baker project. I (regrettably) never did submit that project to YCN because I got a full time job and that's against the rules :( My idea was great, as well. Yep, genius almost.

Anyway, the example that still stands out is Hugo Boss's augmented reality shop windows:


I liked how the technology takes the image of what you show to it, and manipulates it, moves it around etc, so that it looks like what you are holding is moving in front of you.

When I saw that Grazia were using AR, I assumed it would be a similar thing - hold the page up with all the fashion pieces and the page would come to life in your hands. It's almost that, but not quite. Instead of something like the Lego AR...


...Where the 3D image of the product seems to appear in your hands, instead the webcam/iphone app is activated by the little black and white logo, but then just reverts to a pre-made video which displays the content, with no interaction with your individual copy of the magazine. For example, on the cover, I thought that when you held it up, lovely Florence would dance about within the confines of the cover, weaving through the 150pt type and knocking silly subheadlines away with her mega-voice. But... not really. This is what happens when you hold your cover up:


Not what I was expecting. It's still cool and fun, but not as interactive as I thought.

Also, I don't have an iphone so had to use my imac's camera. The online content delivery bit at graziadaily.com/3D is a bit flaky, I've found. I don't know if the app is better, but my cover didn't want to work at all, and when I went to activate the tutorial on creating smokey eyes, it activated the fashion editorial instead =/ Not cool. So perhaps needing a bit of work.

That said, the idea behind it is great and definitely a step forward in bridging the gap between physical fashion magazines and online content - after all, these days you can find out about new trends in an instant - weekly mags seem old within days. I'd like to see this being a permanent feature within the magazine. Get rid of the cover shoot bit- it's nice but flashy and doesn't actually do anything except give models/singers/whoever a platform to prance around on. But the fashion editorial section could really benefit from this.

If they changed the format to be more like the Lego example above, it would be brilliant. I'd love to be able to hold my iphone (future iphone) over any garment/accessory/whatever in the magazine, and it would come into 3D life on my iphone screen - I could rotate it, see what it looks like at all angles - this is especially good for bags. Then there could be a link to buy it straight away online - done. All through the app. This is a solid way of ensuring fashion magazine's relevance in a digital age. Or even simple things like, you've read a really great, interesting article in the magazine, and want to tweet about it straight away - hold the app up to the title, or photo say, and it will automatically tweet a link to the digital article online. Or an extract of it. Things like that would be so great if they were incorporated into Grazia as a normal, weekly thing, instead of a special one-off 'collector's "3D" edition. Cos it's not exactly 3D is it... no yet. Things aren't jumping off the page at me.

I don't even know if AR has the technology to do all this yet; although I'm pretty sure it can; especially with games such as The Hidden Park around. So it's a step in the right direction, and props to Grazia for having the balls to showcase technology like this, it just shows they're a forward-thinking mag. I just hope they expand on it in the future.

Meanwhile, next issue they're doing a big 'Culture Special' focusing on what's cool this spring. Trend hunters, keep an eye out...