When we initally started working on this project, we were on wrong track. We started coming up with weird ideas like, there will be music when we strum the air, there wouldn’t be a need for musical instruments, soundwaves will be travelling in the air. . . I know. Have a good laugh.

But after much thought and research, we realised that we were on the wrong track. Such ‘amazing’ things would not happen just 3 to 5 years down the road. It had to relate to what was going on now. Hence we analysed..

In the beginning years, sheet music was being introduced, followed by music records. But right now, everyone is downloading music online from file sharing applications such as Ares, Limewire, Kazaa and more. These are illegal!  But on the contrary…

Recently, a new software has been launched called ‘Spotify’ which is legal. Through this software, one can listen to free streaming of songs. However, there will be advertisements that will be played in the midst. This software is now available in a few phones from Nokia, Samsung and Sony ericsson. Enjoy!

There was more that I learnt while working for this project. There is a website called MySpace where junior artists like you and me can create albums and upload them online for the public to hear. The famous singer Colbie Caillat had record companies knocking on her door only after she showcased her talent on MySpace! Who knows, tomorrow it might be me. =)

So in future, relating back to the problem about people downloading songs online rather than buying cds, probably there might not be any record production. Instead, all tracks might just be uploaded online for downloading. You may still have to pay though due to the digital and legal downloading of tracks. You can digitally download tracks from iTunes.

The music trend sure is evolving from time to time.

Sheet music to Records to Online music downloads.. What comes next? We’ll wait and see..

Well that brings us to the presentation done by Jovis, Aileen and Lee Yan about Google! Their topic: Google today, Google Tomorrow…

They shared with us about Bing, Google, Wolfram Alpha and semantic web. From what they presented, I remember a few key points. Bing is a good search engine for images. For my assignments within this few weeks, I have been using Bing for images and I do think it is very good.. better than google and yahoo.

As for Wolfram Alpha, it is a computational knowledge engine. While seach engines give you search results, this engine computes answers. Its amazing! When I type in my birthdate, it gives me birth and death anniversaries of famous people, the time in 1990, the time difference from today and so on. It’s very interesting and useful, I feel. If you know how to make efficient use of it, you can make the best out of it. You should know when to use a knowledge engine as compared to a search engine.

As for Google, so far Ive learnt that there are Google reader, Google search and more… Everyone should have known Google search by now. Google readers searches for you favourite sites and blogs for new content. It updates itself very frequently so that you will not miss out on any news. It organizes for you the news content so that you can easily search and read news that have been stored. Now, Google reader is also on the mobile phone browser you can read your news on the go! =)

As for semantic webs, they search according to the meaning of the keywords, not just the keywords blindly.

Thats alot of stuff I learnt.. NCT is really making me knowledgeable. Especially Twitter, its an awesome thing. =) Nights people..

Back then more importance was given to functions rather than style of phones.  But now its more to style as teenagers prefer more trendy and fashionable stuff. However, functions still do matter.

We also played a game called ‘Treasure hunt’. We had 3 teams. They had to find treasures on 3 levels, one team to one level. There were 5 treasures altogether. These treasures are all models of mobile phones. The interesting part about this is that, the treasure hunters had to communicate via SMS, calls and video calls with their other team members who were in the class waiting. This linked back to the mobile revolution. Lastly, when they’ve found all treasures, they had to tweet using their handphones. Hope they had fun with our mini game! =D

I learnt quite a handful out of this tutorial. Oh yes, thanks Kevin, for that presentation on Podcasts and vodcasts too. That was like an introduction to RSS feeds. Appreciate it!

Okay, I’m off! Zzz…

zzz till next entry. ciao!

The current topic is social media. It’s about how companies these days are tapping on social media such as blogs, facebook and twitter to get in touch and built more relationships with people.  This was where I was first introduced to twitter. Not that I don’t know anything about it, I have heard about it but I did not bother creating one. But now I do, thanks to this module =)

Last week Friday, Miss Kwa played a few clips from the movie ‘Minority Report’. I have watched that movie before, quite some time back. But I did not pay much attention to the technologies used. But this time as she played the movie and explained, I noticed them and found them very fascinating. The movie was about three genetically altered human beings which can foresee the future crimes, particularly murders.  Images and short clips of what was going to happen in the future will then be stored in disks. The lead actor, Tom Cruise will also travel in a special gadget to the locations where these murders were about to happen. In the movie, humans were identified by their eyes. There was this scene where Tom Cruise will be walking in a building. There will be moving images on the wall, more like advertisements. His eyes will be scanned by special devices and then the characters in these advertisements will call out to Tom Cruise’s name as they advertise the product. on the wall will call out to his name as they advertise the product. I know its quite confusing but you should watch the movie to know what I mean. The most special and interesting technology was the spiders. These spiders will detect the identity of humans by scanning their eyes. I just liked the way the spiders were, moved, and how it reacted to human reactions (e.g. voice, breath etc).

It is indeed a very good movie, a good choice to demonstrate current and future technologies. It’s probably an insight of what the world may become many years down the road. Who knows! Anyways, Kudos to Ms Kwa =)

Alright, I think I’m getting tired typing. See you in the next entry!

Zzzz…