Apple’s Music iCloud Is Nice, Not Revolutionary

After months of anticipation about Apple iCloud, Steve Jobs finally unveiled the service to developers (and viewers of unofficial live streams) at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, with one major new feature for music fans: the ability to store up to 20,000 songs on Apple’s cloud and download them to any authorized device (iOS, Mac or PC) for $25 per year.

But wait — Music Beta by Google offers to store and stream the identical number of songs, for free. (Amazon Cloud Drive, on the other hand, offers 5GB for free, or about 5,000 songs for $20 per year.) How can Apple justify charging $25 for something similar to what Google offers for free?

Read the complete article from Wired.

New Media and You

Given the current state of technology (which just changed three times since you started reading this), new media and new creative opportunities are constantly arising. New social media networks, such as www.cinefile.com, are bringing together creatively minded people all over the globe. Smart TVs and smart phones are getting smarter with more democratic content. The opportunities for the ambitious at heart are mushroom clouding. So how are you to sift through the options and make a break into any of the dozens of creative fields around? If you want to make movies, you could begin with our Final Cut Pro class or an After Effects bootcamp. Want to learn how to make interactive mobile and web sites? Web Development Bootcamp, Dreamweaver, and an Android app class should give you a start. What if you just want to tell a good story? That depends on your chosen medium. Whether you are a writer, a director, a photographer, an art director, or a programmer, you eventually have to embrace the software. Give us a call and we can enroll you in one of the many “good places to start.” And don’t forget, the 20.11% January sale is still in effect. Call Sam at (312) 245-2900.

The Future Is Yours

As long as the electricity stays on, the future is all yours. In the past, amateurs of all stripes needed to be versed in bibliography, scientific method, the ins-and-outs of various technological apparatuses, and good old fashioned dedication. But new technologies are keeping the sweat off the amateur’s brow. There’s the iPad, with its surprising, in-depth astronomy app Star Walk or The Elements: A Visual Exploration, whose sheer depth and beauty could turn anyone into a fanatic of atomic intricacy. Google’s Christmas wish is that all information should be free to anybody, not to mention fast. People can hardly remember a time before Google’s Instant Results feature was added, a service which made the search engine amusing and effective. More recently, Google teamed up with the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics to explore the “cultural genome” via the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a tool which lets interested users discover how words and phrases have changed over time. And Christmas keeps on coming. Google will soon release the 3D Body Browser, which lets you not only peel away the layers of your anatomy (okay, not yours), but also gives you the names of all those little parts you never thought about before. Information is becoming more ubiquitous. Your task is to learn how to deploy it, lest life become one long game of Trivial Pursuit. And that’s where the fun begins. Learn deeper.