So, I finally gave in and bought Spotify Premium for a month. I’ve been largely looking at the iPhone version and have a few quick week one observations:

• 3G is not reliable enough for me to do streaming. I’d typically get half-way through an album and hit stuttering.
• Great for sampling new music.
• Offline mode does exactly what you want it to do, but is completely playlist centric. You build a playlist and can either play it in order or in shuffle. If you happened to a number of artist’s tracks into a playlist out of album order, that’s too bad. You can’t sort it.
• It sorely lacks the ability to search amongst your offline tracks to just play individual albums i.e. if you have a playlist full of Green Day albums, you can’t just pick “Dookie” and go. You need to go through the playlist. Some kind of local search would be invaluable. You can kind of do this if you have signal, but that seems like an unnecessary requirement: the tracks are right there, just index them.
• The flick through artwork to get to the next track is nice. Very much in keeping with the rest of the iPhone.
• Had a few crashes, but nothing major.
• It’s not their fault, but not being able to background the application is a nuisance. I frequently write notes for later use and having to stop the music to do that is a pain.
• Having to sync offline mode via wi-fi is equally painful. A thousand tracks takes HOURS. I’m not an expert but I’m sure the USB cable can be used for this via the connector API.

I’m now into week 2 with more carefully crafted playlists and things are better. I might update again next week.

Several years ago, most people in the UK were issued with new bank cards featuring the now familiar chip-and-pin system (formally specified by the EMV group). The goal was to provide greater protection to transactions by removing easily forged signatures and greatly increasing the state of card cryptography, at least compared to the old magnetic stripes. While the system has its flaws, it has been a success and is now an every day part of life here in Great Britain, as well as most of the Western world.

One problem it doesn’t solve is timeliness for small transactions. If you’re buying a cup of coffee, a sandwich or a similarly low-value set of items, using a card still takes a great deal longer than a cash transaction. If you have a queue of people all paying by card, the time taken really adds up, both for shops and consumers.

There is a solution that has been trialled in various ways over the last few years, called EMV contactless. By embedding a small radio transmitter (tiny, tiny range) into modern credit cards, we can now make use of chip-and-pin free technology. Rather than inserting your card, typing your pin, and awaiting authorisation, you swipe your card over a reader (less than a second) and that’s it. It gets enough of your details to charge you the right amount (which it tends to do in the background) and you get on with your day. You basically have a system that’s much faster than cash.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar if you live in or have visited London in the last 6 years or so: this is exactly how Oyster cards work on London Transport. You swipe, you walk through, and that’s it. It may also be familiar to American readers who are part of the Chase bank. It’s been deployed by them under the name Chase Blink. (I should say I was once employed by another part of Chase’s parent company, but obviously had nothing to do with any of this – I just read about it there first. My opinion is not their opinion, yadda yadda).

Now, obviously, an instant debit card that finishes transactions after you leave is open to fraud: you could charge up a number of small transactions that total a huge amount. They’ve thought of that. There are both per-transaction and daily limits before you have to revert to chip-and-pin. It’ll vary from bank to bank, but I’ve seen sensible limits of £10 per transaction and £50 a day. That should cover the use-cases here i.e. replacing cash and low-value card transactions.

A far more interesting problem is proliferation. I have one of these cards (it got sent out within the last week) but, as far as I know, there are absolutely no places in Glasgow that I can actually use it. I imagine big name, high-volume chains will get it quickly (coffee chains, fast food, etc), but I can’t imagine a quick change for most other vendors. Given the cost in upgrading aging equipment to be chip-and-pin compatible, a real concern for this system is how smaller companies who would really benefit from contactless transactions are actually going to be able to afford it. Sure, the convenience and time-saving probably make it worthwhile in the long term but I imagine the equipment involved is prohibitively costly for many operations.

If this had been incorporated into cards at the same time as chip-and-pin, then I’m sure it would be huge and have a bright future. As it stands, I doubt its going anywhere fast. I would like to be wrong on this one.

Another month, another bunch of films…

The Hurt Locker is fairly well in keeping with the cinematic vision of modern warfare. Unlike World War II films and their heroic stands against evil, films set in modern conflicts need to have troubled characters who do the things that they do for less idealistic reasons. In The Hurt Locker, we get the men of an explosive ordinance disposal team in Iraq doing their work in difficult conditions. The characters are broadly stereotyped (the risk-taker, the strategist etc), but it’s interesting to see their perspectives. While there are some fairly tense scenes, the film moves too slowly and doesn’t provide enough genuine insight into their work to justify it. It’s slow but decent, and just decent.  (See my The Hurt Locker Twitter review).

Neil Blomkampf has followed up his interesting sci-fi short, Alive in Johannesburg, with a full-length, studio-backed effort, District 9. It’s an interesting take on racial divide, with the arrival of an alien craft full of under-nourished aliens causing the South Africans to segregate them into camps and treat them pretty poorly. Despite the sci-fi elements, the film is shot in a largely natural style, lending an air of authenticity to both the aliens and their technology. With some striking visuals, great action sequences, and an interesting take on the theme, District 9 stands head and shoulders above typical sci-fi fare. It’s very well-done. (See my District 9 Twitter review).

Finally, Adventureland looks to be a teen comedy about working at a theme park, but is actually much more of a teen romance. Following a newcomer to the park and his pursuit of one girl, the story doesn’t really take us on a ride that surpasses our expectations. A relatively average movie, that really isn’t my thing. If you like teen romance, then maybe it’s for you, but it’s not for me. (See my Adventureland Twitter review).

The winner is District 9, for it’s fantastic pace, visuals and story. Well done.

When new music comes out, we tend to see it on Spotify on release day. That’s not universally true, but for the labels that have signed up for the service already it tends to be the case (purely observationally). I do wonder what the best approach is:

• Releasing on Spotify early to build hype for the album and getting income for a (slightly) longer period, but risking casual fans being done with the album come release day.
• Putting it on Spotify on release date so that everyone gets it at the same time, both casual and hardcore fan.
• Putting it on Spotify a period of time after release date so that the majority of buyers will have it already (assuming a typical album release and not a “classic” that will sell for a long time) and Spotify is an additional revenue stream. The risk here is that people who want to preview before buying will simply download illegally and never buy the album.

I genuinely don’t know which option is best, but I suspect it’s not the middle-one.

August was a particularly good month for cinema, with three films that all brought something different to their audiences…

Antichrist is, too put it mildly, a difficult film. It’s beautifully shot, with some incredible looking scenes and imagery, and the artistry throughout is of the highest quality. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg both live their parts near flawlessly, even when the film becomes surreal around them. All of that said, this is not a film for the faint-hearted. The themes at its core are adult (dealing with the death of a child and the guilt around that, self-mutilation, original sin), and the exploration is extremely graphic. It’s not what you might consider “entertainment”, which is obviously not the only purpose of cinema, it is a hard-hitting work of art and worthy of its critical acclaim. (See my Antichrist Twitter review).

Jacques Mesrine, we learn very early on in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, is a self-involved but charismatic risk-taker. Vincent Cassel is well cast as the brutal gangster in this biopic (the first of two parts), showing his incredibly ugly side as a womanising, evil criminal as well as his enthralling take-on-the-world attitude. The pacing is good, moving relatively quickly, and the film as a whole, from the acting to the directing, is well-observed. A good film. (See my Mesrine: Killer Instinct Twitter review).

Finally, Inglourious Basterds is probably the best movie Tarantino has made since Pulp Fiction. Set in an alternate World War II, you’d be forgiven for presuming that the movie follows the titular Basterds as they perform their special brand of guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines in Nazi-controlled France. Instead it splits the time evenly between their exploits, a Parisian-cinema owner (the sole survivor of a family wiped out by the Germans a few years earlier) and the absolutely fantastic Hans Landa (played by Christopher Waltz), an SS officer whose actions guide the course of the movie. It’s a great mix of over-the-top styling, excessive comic book violence and extremely tense moments. Often you know that something is going to go wrong in a scene, but Tarantino expertly draws the scene out more and more so that you’re never quite sure of the when. Absolutely top notch. (See my Inglourious Basterds Twitter review).

They’re all good movies in their own right, but I think it has to be Inglourious Basterds for it’s incredible dialogue and performances.