o AIG www.aiglondon.com

o Conchango www.conchango.com

o Digit www.digitlondon.com

o Digital Outlook www.digital-outlook.com

o Glue www.gluelondon.com

o Imagination www.imagination.com

o Kin www.kin-design.com

o Lateral www.lateral.net

o Moving Brands www.movingbrands.com

o Poke www.pokelondon.com

o Precendent www.precedent.co.uk

o Smoothe www.smoothe.com

o TribalDDB www.ddblondon.com/tribalddb

o Up the Resolution www.uptheresolution.co.uk

Should be an excellent session. It’s part of the conference package (book now), but you can get into this bit for free. More details here.

I have three invitations to Ffffound, if you like pictures. First come, first served in the comments.

The company also plans to change the name of its plug-in from ‘audioscrobbler’ to ‘scrobbler’. “It will scrobble your music,” says Stiksel, almost maintaining a straight face.

So is this Web 2.0? After all, you don’t even need to visit the site to benefit from its recommendation service, let alone social network with anyone. “Well, yes, I think so,” says Stiksel. “it’s a web application so it’s in line with that part of that trend. Also, it’s combining the knowledge of all of our users in a ‘wisdom of crowds’ way. No music journalist could have the knowledge required to keep making new recommendations to all of our users. All people together know more than one person could ever know.” Last.fm also encourages users to form groups and blog about their favourite music, offering free space to every user. This approach differentiates last.fm from Pandora, a rival internet radio company. Pandora employs a team of editors to categorise and subcategorise music in order to provide music recommendations with qualities in common to a group or song you suggest to it. The jury is out on which provides the better recommendations, but last.fm wins on its Web 2.0 credentials.

Can you make any money from last.fm? I always ask this question, even when I know the answer. “We have advertising on the site. We’re working regularly with 10,000 record labels to supply the music so we have pretty close relationships with many of them. We sometimes have difficulties with some labels, though. Some record companies are very suspicious of any internet music venture. They think we’re all pirates,” he grins. Or I think he is grinning: this is a phone conversation. There’s also money from subsciptions. Users can upgrade their account for a £1 a week to get rid of the adverts and get priority when the server is being heavily used.

“We want to be able to sell music downloads, as well. It seems like a good idea — we introduce people to new music, and then hopefully, we can introduce a mechanism so the users can purchase the track they’re listening to. If we can make it quick, simple and inexpensive, I think that will work. We have some obstacles, though. We really don’t like DRM protected music, but the labels have a hard time accepting that. They think it will lead to piracy.”

I tell Stiksel that I am a regular user of the service. “You want to be careful who you tell that to”, he laughs. “People like to go and look at other people’s pages to see what they’ve been listening to. We call it audiostalking. Like when you go to someone’s house and the first thing you do is look at their bookcase and record collection. You think it gives you an idea of what sort of person they are. We have a lot of funny stories of people trying to defend what’s on their page — ‘Oh it was my little brother’, they’ll say, or ‘oh, that came on by accident’”.

Of course, it won’t happen anytime soon. As Paul Boutin points out in Slate (link below), people want ownership of their own stuff. Having the spreadsheet that tracks your finances in your office on your own PC or your own network space irrationally feels a lot safer than putting it on a website. What’s more, giving the people who run the web services the opportunity to poke through your documents feels very uncomfortable. About five years ago, the ‘next big thing’ was thin client computing, whereby we’d all use cheap consoles to log onto server farms where our applications and documents would live. It never really took off because people wanted proper computers and ownership of their own things.

Also, for all the hype, the mobile internet doesn’t really work yet. Yes, around central London you can easily pop into an internet cafe and obtain access. But try maintaining internet access while you’re in the back of a moving car, on a long train journey or a flight, the times when access to your applications, messages and documents would be really useful. For as long as there isn’t 99% reliability, the sort of reliability that you can expect from your home or office computer, then there is going to be considerable resistance to web applications.

Paul Boutin discusses the Google PC in Slate magazine

It makes sense for Google to develop a Web-based PC. To be clear, a Google PC needn’t involve a new gadget like the “thin client” gear of the 1990s. Every computer in the world is capable of running a Web browser. We might not realize it, but we all already have Google PCs.

You could still run Windows on a Google PC; it just wouldn’t matter if you did or not. Most Google PC rumors imagine a low-priced, Windows-less, entry-level computer for the Wal-Mart set. That could be part of the plan, but it would just be one more option. Instead of trying to convince every consumer on the planet to buy a new machine, it makes a lot more sense for Google to build a super-service that you could log into from any computer, phone, or television, or car and airplane seatback. You would be able to access your files anywhere by logging in, calling up your desktop, and popping into Google’s array of Gmail-like applications for word processing, photo editing, and anything else you can think of.