The Wilderness Downtown – The Arcade Fire

Flash vs. HTML5 – who will win? If the Arcade Fire promotional website (The Wilderness Downtown) is any indication, HTML5 all the way. Ad Age recently included the Creativity’s best ad “Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown Trailer” in their morning newsletter, and the ad is amazing. It’s essentially a trailer for the music video. The whole concept was designed by Chris Milk from @radical.media and Google’s Aaron Koblin from the Google Creative Lab.

Basically, it’s an interactive music video for the song “We Used to Wait” that utilizes Google’s Chrome Browser and HTML5. You type in the address that you grew up in, and it takes you on a journey incorporating Google Maps. It is way cool and the functionality is amazing. You even get… [Read More]

If you logged into your Gmail acount lately you’ve seen the pop-up window that introduces you to the newest Gmail feature– making calls to land and mobile lines from within the application.

From the site:

How does this work?
You can now place calls to landline and mobile phones from within Gmail. Just dial any phone number and you’ll be connected. Learn more.

Rates
Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free in 2010. International calls are billed at our insanely low rates.

You can call Afghanistan for $.27 a minute or Zimbabwe for the premium price of $.46 a minute, and some rates are as low as $.02 a minute. Not bad.

Have you tried it yet? How does it compare to Skype?

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Hello I’m David Beronja a web designer/developer with 15+ years of experience and 8 years in the belly of the music industry beast. I’d like to welcome you to the first post of hopefully many of for the Nashville Feed podcasts on Music City Interactive website.

A little backstory on the Nashville Feed, it was started way back in 2006 as a independent music podcast featuring artists in Tennessee. After a few episodes it became a frustrating experience with confusion of what a podcast was back then, time involved and music licensing. After about 10 episodes I put it on hiatus and started blogging about new media and how the independent artist can take advantage of it.

A few years later I escaped… [Read More]

The Nashville music scene can appear a bit daunting to enter, especially for new artists and bands. While there are plenty of opportunities to put your music out there, the only problem is connecting with fans. People need an incentive to follow a band’s career as it develops, and — although the music itself is important in achieving that goal — it’s not enough in a town where the advantage lies in the hands of those who are well connected. However, indie artists need not worry; UARadio.net, an online community for indie artists, is aiming to help out in a big way. I caught up with Julian Bankston, founder of the website, and discussed the ideas behind UARadio.

Julian started UARadio after following his own affection of music. “It all comes down to what you know and what you love,” he explained. Utilizing… [Read More]

Guest Writer – Katie Butcher

THERE’S STRANGER THINGS TO DO ON THE INTERNET…

We’re lucky at my firm, West End Enterprises, that we enjoy the benefits of an absurdly qualified team of staff and volunteers when we work here in Nashville. Our events are generally populated with people who come from great educational backgrounds and have solid industry experience. However, even through we made our home-base here, occasionally, like everyone else, we have to leave. Working out of town for almost any firm can be scary. (No, I’m not talking about shipping your gear…but that can be scary, too.) No matter how good your connections are or how well you know the area, at some point, you’ll likely exhaust your resources and need to pull in additional workforce. So you turn to the dreaded internet.

My experience has been that even the most tech-savvy… [Read More]