Author: Steve

Amuse Fast Forward Charges Artists 12% Interest on Their “Advances” / Loans

Amuse announced the other day that they were expanding their Fast Forward program – which allows artists to have an advance on their royalties of between $250 and $300,000 (MA).

However, all these “news outlets” forgot to mention that Amuse will be charging artists 12% interest on the loans they provide as advances on their royalties.

12%!

I’m struggling to understand why any artist in the world would consider this a good idea!

This also goes against the artist first idea of Amuse. It’s not artist first in any way!

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Announces They Are Currently Changing Their Offices to Adapt to a Hybrid Model in Future

Google seems to think the future of work lies in between the office and working remotely.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google were currently making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future. He didn’t specific state what those changes were.

“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was an honoree on this year’s list of the most influential people in the world. 

“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new. So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something,” he said. 

Pichai said that Google is “reconfiguring” its office spaces to accommodate what he called “on-sites” — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office. 

Substack Stealing Writers from Major National US Publications to Write Newsletters to Subscribers

It seems as though Substack has been approaching writers at top national publications in the USA and offering them the ability to create and obtain subscribers on Substack. It also sounds like they are offering these writers minimum guarantees to move, which allows the writers to have a very minimal downside on moving.

Amuse.io Music – Release Financial Figures for 2019 – $9.5m Revenue – $10.9m Loss!

Amuse.io is a new music upstart that has been getting a lot of press of late. Amuse.io has just released their official 2019 financials and it’s very interesting reading.

Revenues = $9.5 million USD

Profit / Loss = $10.9 million USD Loss

Staff = 49 staff

Cash Liquidity = 208%

This basically means that Amuse will need to raise another round of Venture Capital within the remainder of 2020 or start of 2021 to be able to survive.

Source – https://www.merinfo.se/foretag/Amuseio-AB-5590367016/2kgcyso-1hslk

Tesla Shares See Their Biggest Ever Single Day Decline!

Tesla shares have finished the day at 21.06% down. This is the biggest single day share decline for the company in its history.

Why this matters: Tesla is a company going after a big dream. However, it also seems to be the company that is riding a very high valuation based on very little fundamental numbers being it. Revenues have increase 14% in the past 12 months, but the share price has increased 573%.

My views: I love the company and I love what they are trying to achieve, but it seems like they have become the poster child for a heavily overpriced stock market based on poor fundamentals.

26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About

I wrote this article over 10 years ago. I thought it would be very interesting to post again to see how many of these services are still alive and going over 10 years later.

Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.

While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.

Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.

So, without further ado…

TinyChat

tinychat

With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.

KeepHD

keephd

With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.

Prezi

prezi

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Wix

wix

With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.

Nice Translator

nice-translator

NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!

Task Five

task-five

A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view

Pizap

pizap

Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.

whspr!

whspr

Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

WobZip

wobzip

WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z,  Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…

Anyvite

anyvite

Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.

Fliggo

fliggo

Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.

Yidio

yidio

Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.

SlideRocket

sliderocket

SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more

Ziddu

ziddu

Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.

Mufin

mufin

Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!

YouTube Reloaded

youtube-reloaded

YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.

FriendPaste

friendpaste

FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.

Survs

survs

Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.

SendPhotos

sendphotos

With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.

BackupURL

backup-url

BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page  stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.

RapidStack

rapidstack

Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.

CC:Betty

ccbetty

CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!

Sigpad

sigpad

Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.

FeedWeaver

feedweaver

Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!

Twe2

twe2

Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.

Markkit

markkit

Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.

So which ones are your favorites?

Warren Buffett: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Has Changed The World

Warren Buffett’s views on Jeff Bezos and how he has changed the world. 

Why this matters: Warren Buffett for a long time has been watching Jeff Bezos and commenting on how amazing the run of Amazon has been. It would have been very interesting if Warren Buffett understood the technology industry at the beginning of the internet as it would have provided a lot of great investment opportunities.

Where do lofi YouTube music channels download their music from?

Most of the Lofi channels on YouTube work with or talk to Lofi artists on a daily basis and they ask if they can use their music in their videos.

If the channel is large they normally ask the artist to sign an agreement which states the channel can use the audio in their videos and keep the money from the videos.

Uber and Yandex Spin Out Russian self-driving car subsidiary into its own entity

Uber and Yandex will be spinning off their self-driving car subsidiary into its own entity – MLU BV.

MLU BV will have $150 million in new capital from Yandex, including $100 million in equity and $50 million as a convertible loan.

In connection with the deal, Yandex will hold 61.7% of MLU and Uber will own 33.5%. Bloomberg reported in June that Yandex had been looking to buy all of Uber’s initial 38% stake as an alternative to taking the taxi business public. Uber merged its Russian operations with Moscow-based Yandex in 2017.

What is the Difference Between Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A and BRK.B Shares?

There is very little difference between Berkshire Hathaway’s BRK.A and BRK.B shares.

BRK.B shares were created because Warren Buffett noticed that the BRK.A shares were growing considerable high is cost per share and that these shares were less obtainable by the average retail investor and could only be purchased by either very wealth individuals, unit trusts or mutual funds.

Thus, Warren decided to create BRK.B shares to provide the average investor with the opportunity to purchase shares in Berkshire Hathaway without the huge cost associated with BRK.A.

There are other very small differences, but the above is the only one that really counts.

How has Xiaomi grown so quickly?

Xiaomi is a very interesting company with a very interesting business model.

The vast majority of phone manufacturers around the world create a smartphone with a cost of around $100 and then they spend a huge amount of money on marketing and branding. The company then believes that the smartphone has a much higher percieved value – so they sell it for $400 or above.

Xiaomi doesn’t do this!

Xiaomi is aiming to sell all of its products as close as possible to their costs – as they want to have as many products available in the world as possible.

Once out in the world and being use – Xiaomi then looks to drive revenues from providing software and services around these products, which has a much higher margin that the hardware itself. Thus, driving higher demand, more product adoption and thus more revenues from services.