Review: nowifeel.com, Sony

URL: www.nowifeel.com/

I stumbled across this site while checking out the weekly online award charts. Being a designer this site had great appeal to me as it gives you the opportunity to fill a blank canvas!

The site basically promotes Sony’s idea that their gadgets have a user experience like no other, and that their audio connectivity solutions make it easier to enjoy music anytime and anywhere. In turn Sony ask you to express how you feel about their gadgets by mixing colours, funky images and eclectic sounds. The expression is then uploaded to the public gallery where it can be viewed and voted upon then entered into a competition as a chance to win one of many attractive Sony gadgets.

The site itself has youth appeal, with its funky sounds and a vibrant colour scheme. I especially like the constantly changing background image on the homepage, which is a great example of innovative web design, and a feature that keeps the viewer interested.
A straightforward navigation is in place, also simple search engine and voting functionalities within the gallery section, ensuring the site is easy to use.

My favourite section of course is where you are taken to a blank canvas where you drag and drop text, images and sounds to express yourself. Many variants and adjustments can be made to individual elements, such as size, colour, and orientation. Great way to encourage creativity and uniqueness! Hours of fun!

The site is easy & straight forward to use, incorporates great fun through interactivity. One problem I found was that it runs slow on a low bandwidth Internet connection. I tested it on both fast and slow connections; the slow one took ages and was most frustrating, frustrating enough to want to give up. So all this fancy interactivity is very well if you’ve got the fastest connection going, if not it's very sluggish.

Functionalities used on this site particularly within the expression creation section, such as the drag & drop, I think would work exceptionally well in email marketing, a viral campaign where you could create an artwork and send it to a friend then invite them to create their own would be great to promote and drive traffic to a website.

Amazon may start giving away free MP3s

Today saw the announcement that Amazon has completed a financing deal with up and coming music store amiestreet.com. The deal is significant because amiestreet.com use a demand based pricing model, where music download prices start at $0 and rise as the downloads get more popular.

amiestreet.com with its unique pricing structure is a very interesting acquisition for Amazon. The price model is based upon the simple fact that MP3 download sales enjoy astronomic economies of scale - past the initial outlay for the song in question, the cost per sale is negligible. This is a great step forward for online music pricing and is a much fairer reflection of the real cost of distributing these songs.

The pricing system will be a pure demand driven market and may also cause some interesting side effects. Will you be able to re-sell your MP3 once you have bought it? If so then why not buy low on an unknown new release, gamble on it becoming popular and then sell it on at a much higher price. We may even see an MP3 trading futures market – well maybe…

More likely this new pricing structure will provide another jolt to the ailing music industry to start to embrace online sales instead of fighting it with digital rights management. It may also be a sensible way to encourage users not to steal MP3s, who knows.

Only time will tell, if and when Amazon add this pricing system to their main MP3 business model.

Happy birthday World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is 16 today, born thanks to Tim Berner- Lee's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Doesn't seem that long ago really; a more gentle time before search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click, email marketing, flash multimedia sites, interactive banners and of course Facebook.

Must have been very quiet...

Couple of interesting sites for you

Only just noticed this, but I think it’s very clever. Works on the premise that the white expanse of the Google homepage wastes energy because of the extra power needed by monitors to display it. Hope it works.
It’s a shame it doesn’t have all the features of proper Google though.

http://www.blackle.com/

If you ever thought web 2.0 was all talk and no action, there’s a few hundred sites that will beg to differ. Pretty impressive.

http://www.go2web20.net/