The one burning urge of creatives – above and beyond the urge for remuneration – is self determination. The other huge driver is quality. Creatives have no tolerance for poor quality, and musicians are doubly less tolerant of bad quality audio. So, those two creative drivers are colliding with the world of venture capital, copyright law and major distributors. And the resulting sparks, fire, friction and general mayhem is creating some genuinely exciting new music and some genuinely exciting new business models that are beginning to ensure that the artist does not starve to death before recording that vital third album.   more »

The robots are coming, and they are going to be smarter, better, stronger, faster and harder than we are. Not only that, the network is going to know them, and they are going to partly or completely live in the network. The march of innovation is barely going to miss a step because of the Credit Crunch. I’m going to make sure I spread the word on the web that I love the idea of robots and distributed computing sentience. Because real soon now, it is going to want to know who its friends are. You might want stop and think about that. In a world where we have ubiquitous airborne broadband, high powered chips, massive data access, rapid advances in robotics, fantastic advances in embedded OS (Zebor), and new sensors and displays (see Penny AB) then we are on the very near edge of a massive, world changing revolution. It is inevitable, it does not have a keyboard and is not flat.   more »