Project X Facebook Apps

Ashe Avenue worked with VICE to develop two Facebook apps to promote the upcoming  film, Project X – the first application allows users to register for movie screenings at various colleges around the country, while the other showcases videos of celebrities like Nick Swardson, Johnny Knoxville, and others sharing their craziest “party moments.” The app will eventually let users upload their own party moments, which will be judged by Project X director Nima Nourizadeh.

Palladium Boots “Sport” Collection Facebook App

We helped Palladium Boots launch their new “Sport” (“Blanc” for any European readers) collection of boots by developing an application for their newly created Facebook page. The app features images of the new boots and drives users to the men’s and women’s shops on the Palladium Boots website.

Noisey Special Engagements presents Woodkid

Last week we provided technical support for the newest Noisey Special Engagement, featuring Woodkid live from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The concert was streamed live from both Noisey.com and the Noisey Facebook page. Facebook users were given the opportunity to vote on the track that Woodkid would debut at the show, and could register their names for a chance to meet the performer after the show.

It should also be noted that Loutallica released the obvious #1 album of the year (decade? century??), but we left it off our lists to make things fair for all of the other musicians out there. God bless you, Lulu.

Emily

1. James Blake – Self-Titled
2. Beyonce – 4
3. David Bowie – Hunky Dory
4. Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
5. Pulp – Different Class
6. Tom Waits – Rain Dogs
7. Brian Eno – Here Come the Warm Jets
8. David Bowie – Lodger
9. Scott Walker – 4
10. Tom Petty – Highway Companion

Heath

1. Com Truise – Galactic Melt
2. Starfucker – Reptilians
3. YACHT – Shangri-la
4. Grails – Deep Politics
5. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Extra Flavor
6. Atlas Sound – Parallax
7. Washed Out – Within and Without
8. SBTRKT – SBTRKT
9. la ZEBRA – After School Special
10. Justice – Audio, Video, Disco

John

1. Deafheaven – Roads to Judah
2. The Body + Braveyoung – Nothing Passes
3. Rotten Sound
4. Grails – Deep Politics
5. Decapitated – Carnival Is Forever
6. This Will Destroy You – Tunnel Blanket
7. Maritime – Human Hearts
8. Wolves in the Throne Room – Celestial Lineage
9. Ed Gein – Bad Luck
10. Hull – Beyond the Lightless Sky

Locke

1. Wolves in the Throne Room – Celestial Lineage
2. Deafheaven – Roads to Judah
3. Junius/Rosetta – Split
4. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
5. Yob – Atma
6. SubRosa – No Help for the Mighty Ones
7. Blut Aus Nord – 777 Sect(s)
8. The Atlas Moth – An Ache for the Distance
9. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
10. Brand New – Your Favorite Weapon (Deluxe Edition Reissue)

Matt

1. KEN Mode – Venerable
2. Junius – Reports from the Threshold of Death
3. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
4. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
5. Exhumed – All Guts, No Glory
6. City of Ships – Minor World
7. WU LYF – Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
8. Real Estate – Days
9. Washed Out – Within and Without
10. Heartsounds – Drifter

Nik

1. Joe Hisaishi – Encore
2. I Am Robot and Proud – Grace Days
3. Magnet – The Tourniquet
4. Prefuse 73 – Reads the Books
5. Final Fantasy X: Piano Collections
6. Death Cab for Cutie – Codes and Keys
7. Deadmau5 – 4×4=12
8. The Appleseed Cast – Two Conversations
9. The White Octave – Style No. 6312
10. Wintersleep – New Inheritors

Rob

1. Mason Jennings – Birds Flying Away
2. Ian Thomas – A Young Man’s Blues
3. Mason Jennings – The Flood
4. RJD2 – Deadringer
5. Blind Pilot – 3 Rounds and a Sound
6. Langhorne Slim – Langhorne Slim
7. Mason Jennings – Use Your Voice
8. Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left
9. Elliott Smith – Either/Or
10. The Dodos – Visiter

Todd

1. Decapitated – Carnival is Forever
2. Destruction – Day of Reckoning
3. Abysmal Dawn – Leveling the Plane of Existence
4. Animals as Leaders – Weightless
5. Deicide – To Hell with God
6. Iced Earth – Dystopia
7. Symphony X – Iconoclast
8. Spearhead – Theomachia
9. Technical Itch – Digitally Ascended vol 2
10. Sasha – Never Say Never

Google is entering the online music market with Google Music in the hopes of converting more people into “Googlers”- consumers who exclusively use Google services and products.

The debut of iTunes in 2001 inspired Apple to gain its reputation as a digital lifestyle hub.  Apple products, from the iPod to the iMac to the iPad, have been extremely successful because they are all deeply integrated to provide the same functionality and user experience.  Google has been trying to gain this competitive advantage by providing it own integrated platform, but it’s been missing one crucial component- an online music service.

Why You’ll Join It

You already have a huge iTunes music library, so why should you think about using Google Music?  Below are 5 reasons you might want to try it out:

1.  The free service allows you to store up to 20,000 songs on Google’s servers and streams them to compatible devices, like Android phones.
2.  Google + integration allows you to recommend and share tracks you purchase with friends.  Unlike in iTunes, shared songs can be played once for free in their entirety.
3.  The music discovery function allows you to choose songs you might like based on your music library and the tastes of the people in your Google+ circles.
4.  You can “pin” songs and albums from your cloud onto your Android device for offline listening.
5.  If you have a T-Mobile phone, you’ll have access to additional free tracks each week and the ability to bill purchased songs directly to your wireless account.

Why We Love It

Google has declared that “Artists are at the heart” of Google Music because of its innovative Artist Hub.  This feature is one of our favorites because it will expand reach for independent artists by enabling them to build their own pages, upload their original content, and sell their songs.  They will also be able to link their songs to, and sell directly from, their YouTube pages.

Google Music Artist Hub has the potential to revolutionize the music distribution model.  Media-savvy musicians will be able to sell their music directly to fans, removing the middle man who would normally take part of the cut, like the record label or specialized distributors.  Musicians will then be able to spend a lot more resources on producing interesting and catchy viral videos, creating more value for fans like us.

Check out Engadget’s live blog from the Google Music event for more information.

HuffPost Tech Infographic on comparing the online music stores:

Palladium Boots in Tokyo

The Tokyo Rising Facebook tab for Palladium Boots features an exploration video series with Pharrell Williams, following his travels around Tokyo after the tragedy of 3/11.  The video shows how the city’s innovative and resilient creative class is defining the future of Tokyo through music, art, architecture and more.

“Until now, Japanese creativity has centered on repackaging foreign ideas, adding a Japanese twist.  But that type of thinking no longer fits our mindset after these disasters.” -Sebastian Masuda (Founder/Art Director, 6% Dokidoki)

We complimented the video with links to bonus footage from the series and a photo gallery that highlights the cutting edge style of Palladium Boots inTokyo.

Noisey Special Engagements in Beijing

Right now, a new Noisey Special Engagements episode is streaming live online and this time the series has moved to Beijing for an Omnipotent Youth Society concert.  Not only can you find the concert details on the Noisey Special Engagements Facebook page, but we also posted three opportunities for you to participate.  The engagement tabs integrate video content with photos, embedded submission forms and Facebook “Like” buttons.

Engagement #1:  Perform live with the band.  Fans uploaded videos performing their favorite Omnipotent Youth Society song for a chance to do it live on stage with the band today.

Engagement #2:  Send a postcard.  Fans sent personalized digital postcards to the band through the Facebook page.  The band wrote back to selected winners and showed their postcards during the show.

Engagement #3:  Vote on a keychain design.  Omnipotent Youth Society designed 3 keychains and produced the one that received the most votes to give out as a souvenir at the concert.

 <meta property="og:title" content="&quot;Good Jobs Not Giveaways&quot; To Protest Downtown Brooklyn&#039;s Chase Bank" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/activists-to-protest-downtown-brooklyns-chase-bank/" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="The Local - Fort-Greene Blog" />

They give Facebook and other data aggregators extra meta data so that they can better represent, distribute (and profit from) your data.  And though I am sure Google is parsing og tags, they do of course have their own languages which also have all sorts of SEO and info-topology implications (c.f. Food52′s article on the recipe markup and search).  I predict there will be anti-trust suits but for now we have our mercantile Babel. I could go on about disruptive technologies and the inevitable economic repercussions of oft-ensuing regulatory bureaucracy but I’ll spare you,  mainly because I want to talk about the issue at hand.

Some of our Open Graph tags were getting kicked out of the <pre><head></pre> of our pages by a 3rd party analytics script that was ever so naively rewriting the end of our head within itself.  And as important as I’m sure their analytics service is, we have like 5 others on that site and not all of them can be at the bottom, know what I’m saying? So  I used Facebook’s debugging utility to see which og tags it’s scraper was grabbing from our site and sure enough the image tag and a few others were getting skipped.

I did a quick search for a bookmarklet that would deliver whatever website I am viewing to Facebook’s debugger but one did not exist … until now:

DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS -> OG Debug

Here’s the code:

javascript:void(location.href='http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q='+escape(location.href));

A WordPress developer made a pretty nice little bookmarklet for viewing the og tags of a page without having to view source (n.b. this one will only work on pages that have jQuery):

Pretty nifty.   Please let me know if you have any trouble with either of those.  As of this writing, this page doesn’t have og tags (the default scrape of the meta title and description suits us fine) but feel free to test it out.  And if you care, maybe I’ll share some of my other favorite bookmarklets.

Chris

Noisey Special Engagements.

Noisey Special Engagements is a unique series of musical performances featuring the coolest new acts in music at the most unexpected venues around the globe. From Austin, Texas, to London, England, Special Engagements events are streamed live online, giving fans a chance to control the action through online participation.

We created the platform for this online participation through the Noisey Special Engagements Facebook tab. The tab integrates videos, soundtracks and photos from the events with social media updates and discussions. Geotargeted to create a uniform global experience, the content appears in a different language depending on each visitor’s country.

Right now, visitors can contribute to the upcoming Holy Ghost! concert by submitting photos for their next music video, designing a new neon light for their stage set and voting on the electric piano they take on tour.

In the words of one Facebook fan, “This is going to be awesome ladies and gentlemen of the world who love live music.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Noisey College Tour.

This fall, indie band Neon Indian and rapper Kreayshawn will bring the Noisey concert experience to ten different campuses on the first-ever Noisey College Tour. All of the tour concerts will be free to students who RSVP and some will be open to the public.

We designed the Noisey College Tour Facebook tab to feature tour videos, an interactive tour map with show information for each concert and live Twitter feeds from @noisey_us and #DellUMusic. Also, you can listen to Neon Indian music through the embedded playlist while drooling over all of the exciting tour info.

Icing on top of the cake: Students can enter the Noisey(est) School competition on the Facebook page to win a free weekend trip to NYC, complete with tickets to live music and a tour of VICE’s headquarters.

Pinterest, A Social Sorting and Sharing Service
Facebook Alternative

To anyone that didn’t have a chance to speak with us or drop off a resume, please do not hesitate to email us at jobs[at]asheavenue.com, call 919-945-0545, or fill out the contact form on our website. We’re here to answer your questions about Ashe Avenue, offer employment/ internship advice, or even shoot the shit about the latest frameworks we’re enamored with this week. It also never hurts to keep up with us via Facebook and Twitter. Best of luck to everyone at N.C. State – I’m sure we’ll be talking to many of you soon.

Silk splits the workload between the tablet’s internal hardware and the Amazon Web Services Cloud. What does that mean for you? That means that every time you go online, the browser will decide which actions to run on the Kindle or in the cloud based on what web processing tasks the tablet can handle well. Internet speed connection and the pages you’re viewing may also affect the processing tasks.

According to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the dual processing capabilities will “take out a lot of the delays in loading a website”.

Silk will also pre-fetch web pages by predicting what sites you will visit based on your past browsing behavior. If you often read your email and Twitter feed before opening CNN.com, Silk will preload the page so that it is ready when you want to make the move. Delivering optimal speed and minimal bandwidth usage, it compresses objects such as images and videos.

In the past, progressive programming has been defined by the amount of processing power available. Amazon Silk changes that. Even though the iPad has 16 GB of space, the Kindle Fire tablet’s 8 GB, in conjunction with its cloud services, provides users with plenty of processing power.

Still confused? Try reading the Amazon Silk FAQ or watching the video below: