Currently, Spotify is only available in Europe but they are examining ways to have the site in the United States. The biggest issue for having the site in the U.S. is licensing (well, yeah).
Ek gave an overview of the site and discussed using mobile technology with Spotify. He said phones come equipped with Spotify in Sweden, his home country. Ek said the first few months free to access the site are free and they continue to expand partnerships with mobile carriers in Europe.
Revenue for the site is generated in various ways according to Ek. People pay with time by watching targeted advertising, which Spotify can charge more for.
Van Buskirk asked what was in the future for Spotify in the next five years. Watch Ek’s response.
Ek said the music industry and technology are on the same page for first time ever.
“Music is one of the most social objects we have,” he said. “If you can access it anywhere, manufacturers will find value in that.”
Overall, I enjoyed this keynote quite a bit. They even did a question and answer (gasp!) at the end of Ek’s remarks. I’m not sure when or if we will Spotify in the U.S., but it would be great to see a little friendly competition with iTunes.
Though I only spent half the day at Interactive Monday, I still managed to take in a few interesting panels and the day’s keynote with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Keynote
A lot of critcism was lobbed toward Williams and his interviewer, Umair Haque, who is the director of the Havas Media Lab at Harvard and writes a blog for the Harvard Business Review. The Wall Street Journal has a good piece wrapping up the keynote and why it was unsuccessful at capturing people’s attention.
No backchannel was needed to gauge the public’s tepid response to the event, in which Williams announced the launch of Twitter’s @anywhere function and was subsequently lobbed softball questions by interviewer Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review. (Haque, ironically, is the author of a book entitled “The Awesomeness Manifesto.”)
Williams talked about @anywhere at the start of his keynote ad after that things started to go downhill. There were a few audio problems that interrupted the start of the keynote and Haque’s questions became more like monologues where he talked about some blog post he had written or a random experience using Twitter.
Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how @anywhere develops. According to the blog post released minutes after Williams announcement, @anywhere will allow sites to embed links to Twitter profiles on their page and users can start following, tweet the link or peek their profile them without ever leaving the site.
Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning.
This solo panel featured Dave Stanton of the Poynter Institute, who discussed simplify web and game design in order to provide a better user experience. He gave examples of his three-year-old daughter Lucy and demonstrated how she interacted with various games. Stanton advocated the use of schema theory, which tells us that the brain structures things into categories. We, as designers, need to appeal to those categories in order to make designs more user friendly.
Jonathan Stark, who develops mobile applications for a living, gave some great tips, tools and tricks for building mobile apps using just HTML, CSS and javascript. He provided a link to his slideshow presentation on his site in addition to links to downloads to start building apps.
Basically, Stark utilizes the PhoneGap framework and jQTouch to create apps and tap into built in features like the accelerometer, GPS, vibration and sound. Definitely give this a look if you want to get around learning Objective C and dive straight into app development.
Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, is giving the keynote for Day 3 of SXSW Interactive. He is being interviewed by Umair Haque, who is director of the Havas Media Lab. I found @waynesutton doing a Ustream live stream from the keynote hall.
Maira Garcia 