Study of digital music behaviors

Findings from the latest edition of TEMPO, Ipsos Insight’s quarterly study of digital music behaviors since 2002, reveal that nearly one-quarter (23%) of American mobile phone owners have downloaded ringtones to their mobile phones. This translates into approximately 30 million Americans within the current U.S. population, and marks a dramatic increase over the past 12 months, when only 5% of mobile phone owners had downloaded ringtones. In contrast to PC-based music downloading, where file-sharing has siphoned potential users from fee-based services, mobile phone owners are much more likely to have paid for the ringtones they download, despite higher fees relative to buying a full song through a service such as Apple’s iTunes.
In the Spring 2005 wave of TEMPO, 78% of mobile phone owners had paid to download a ringtone, while 50% of PC-based downloaders report having paid. An important component in this emerging content space is the presence of an existing billing relationship with the consumer, thus providing a significant advantage over PC-based content delivery methods, where cumbersome registration and payment processes can discourage impulse purchases.

Fès, les musiques sacrées du Monde

Les informations qui reviennent d’une façon obsédante dans les colonnes de journaux ou sur nos écrans de télévision mettent à mal notre capacité d’espérer. Qu’est ce pourtant que l’éducation, la culture et plus encore la spiritualité sinon cet effort que l’homme accomplit sur lui-même pour faire jaillir sa meilleure part et rendre ainsi par un chemin singulier, à l’humanité, sa dignité essentielle?
Toute la destinée humaine est prise entre ces deux pôles : la tentation de la résignation ou la conviction que par notre engagement personnel, nous pouvons œuvrer à quelque degré que ce soit, à un monde meilleur. C’est la deuxième voie que nous voulons suivre à Fès. D’abord en rendant, par la musique, hommage à la diversité des cultures et de leur beauté intérieure. Ensuite en invitant à travers « les Rencontres de Fès : une âme pour la mondialisation » à une réflexion constructive sur les conditions d’une coexistence à la fois politique et spirituelle des peuples et des cultures, qui serait non seulement pacifique mais aussi fructueuse, porteuse d’espoir.
Mohamed KABBAJ Président du Festival de Musiques Sacrees 2005
Extrait de chants soufis

The new trend in business networking

What if you could cut through the crowd and find what you are looking for? Gone are the days of wading through the masses talking to the wrong people. Create a short Profile consisting of a photo and greeting that you can switch whenever you want. As long as you leave 6th Sense running on the phone, it will alert and display the Profiles of those nearby. Just let 6th Sense know what you are looking for. When someone matching the description is close, 6th Sense will let you know.

Mountains of emails

Email archives are ubiquitous, cumbersome and vastly voluminous. This project attempts to reflect the massive nature of these archives by visualizing them as a growing mountain over time. Mountain visualizes a person's email archive in terms of all the people with whom this person has been in touch over the years. Each layer in the Mountain represents a different person. Layers are ordered by time, with the first people in the email archive at the bottom and the most recent people in the archive at the top right portion of the mountain. The thickness of each layer refers to how recently the person has been in contact with ego (the owner of the email archive). Users can highlight specific layers in the Mountain causing the first words of every email exchanged with this person to appear on the screen. The piece is a commentary on the continuous accumulation of email contacts over time and the large amounts of people we are constantly in touch with over email.
Fernanda Viegas