Colin Charles Agenda

It seems clear that Spotify won the music streaming battle:

Spotify accounts for 86% of the on-demand music-streaming market in the U.S., according to data shared with music publishers. Its share of the international market is believed to be similar.

I’m an ardent Rdio user. However, they’ve lost songs that I want to listen to (in my playlists). And I just noticed that they’ve also killed Amazon Payments as a method of payment. They’re taking much less than 14% of the market, and were costing me USD$9.99/month.

It looks like I’m moving to Spotify. But I’ll hang in there to see what Apple launches in the meantime (you see, sometimes I might want to listen to some Taylor Swift). My major beef is with playlists – I’ve invested time in curating that experience, and I need to find an easy way out.

I visited an Assouline bookstore in Seoul, S. Korea. After you make a purchase, you get the opportunity to have a drink at their attached cafe.

Recently we were in London, and Sara & I got to visit the Maison Assouline, nearby Picadilly Circus. It is a very beautiful store, with cafe to boot. Go upstairs, and you’ll end up seeing a professional bookbinder – he does everything by hand. Takes at least a week, average cost starts at £500. Same deal as above – purchase, have a drink.

When my family left London, I walked to the Monocle shop at George St, wanting to buy their new travel guides. I was told to go to their offices as they were going to have an event there. Fair enough, it was just a few blocks away. After making a purchase? They again said, visit their cafe, a few blocks away, to have a coffee or beer. I noticed this was happening at the shop at George St too (they don’t have an attached cafe). This again, is very smart cross-promotion of your retail adventures.

Is print luxury? Do you then expand the experience by ensuring people get to slow down, and consume more with a coffee?

I remember when Malaysia first got the LRT back in the mid-90s. There were four stations where you would never get any cellphone coverage – Ampang Park, KLCC, Kampung Baru and Dang Wangi. These were the underground stations. 

Then by ’98 or ’99, Celcom got execlusive rights to implement mobile base stations for the underground. This was great for Celcom customers (which I was back then – before switching to Maxis, and finally landing with DiGi). It was exclusive, and it meant you were sending SMS messages or speaking while others were out of reach. 

By now, everyone has coverage underground I’m sure. 

I’m in London and it wasn’t too long ago that Virgin Media brought WiFi to the underground. You have to pay for it nowadays. It still doesn’t mean your cellphone works for calls, etc (unless this is done over WiFi).

I appreciate that this is the oldest rapid transit system in the world. I just wish we would be better connected. 

Circumstances here make people read books, newspapers, magazines, Kindle or listen to audiobooks. I did notice people also playing games. 

May is quickly shaping up to be a month filled with activity in the MySQL/MariaDB space. Just a quick note to talk about where I’ll be; looking forward to meet folk to talk shop. 

1. The London MySQL Meetup Group – May 13 2015 – organized by former colleague & friend Ivan Zoratti, we will be doing a wrap up of recent announcements at Percona Live Santa Clara, and I’ll be showing off some of the spiffy new features we are building into MariaDB 10. 
2. MariaDB Roadshow London – May 19 2015 – I’m going to give an overview of our roadmap, and there will be many excellent talks by colleagues there. I believe MariaDB Corporation CEO Patrik Sallner and Stu Schmidt, President at Zend will also be there. Should be a fun filled day. 
3. Internet Society (ISOC) Hong Kong World Internet Developer Summit – May 21-22 2015 – I’ll be giving a keynote about MariaDB and how we are trying to make it important Internet infrastructure as well as making it developer friendly. 
4. O’Reilly Velocity 2015 – May 27-29 2015 – I will in 90 minutes attempt to give a tutorial to attendees (over a 100 have already pre-registered) an overview of MySQL High Availability options and what their choices are in 2015. Expect a lot of talk on replication improvements from both MySQL & MariaDB, Galera Cluster, as well as tools around the ecosystem. 

Saw lots of this in the access logs:

17.142.151.101 - - [08/May/2015:10:37:27 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/2015/02/03/here-and-defending-your-trademarks HTTP/1.1" 200 12324 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"

So its real – there is an Applebot, and it’s written in Go. Apple also has documentation about it now. And of course, you can read Gruber’s piece. Would be nice to find out ways to feed more info to Siri (I mean, it doesn’t work as well as when its in the USA…).

I’ve not gotten my hands on any Xiaomi kit (yet; I’ve wanted to grab a Mi4 for quite some time now, and the Mi3 before that), but this piece in the WSJ about the Mi4i (india edition) being available caught my eye (China’s Xiaomi Unveils Mi 4i Smartphone in India):

…its automatic photo-retouching setting for selfies, called beautify, does not enlarge eyes the way it does for the Chinese market, where that feature is popular. The beautify feature will smooth wrinkles and lighten skin tone, as it does in other markets

For one, I had no idea that all Chinese selfies from a Xiaomi phone have enlarged eyes. Or elsewhere, wrinkles are smoothened out and the skin tones are lightened. So you’re not capturing the image as is, but some sort of automatic software edited version. Hmm. Read more on beautify at their page (guesses age, gender, then applies one of 36 beauty profiles – smoothens skin, brightens eyes, slims the jaw and more). Apparently, photography was optimised for lightened skin tones.

I’m glad the Mi4i is tailored to have a really long battery life as well. It’s 1/4 the price of a 16GB iPhone in that market (and most; good luck Samsung).