Rum Bum, one of our clients, is celebrating the release of KĒVENS' new album, We Are One, by offering a free download of the album's first single, "Freedom for Humanity". Download "Freedom for Humanity" here.

Distributing files for free on websites can have some down sides. If the direct link to the files is shared any additional information, branding, and advertising on the web page will never be seen by the person who downloads it.

To bypass direct downloads we implement a simple mechanism:  Only if the visitor is coming from one of our sites we redirect him to a link valid only for one second. 

This is easily implemented on local servers or on CDN's like Amazon's AWS S3/Cloudfront.

We might not be as cool as we think we are. But we did conceptualize and implement the Miami Fashion Blog (MFb). Sometimes we even qualify as hip.

When Funkshion Fashion Week hit Miami we grabbed those glamouros MFb tees (and a badge to be safe) and headed out to document some of the runway shows. They were at the Bass Museum and the veru exclusive Setai Hotel. Richie Rich, club-kid turned designer, closed the week with his runway show and party.

The 3-day Akamai global-user conference took place in Miami this year, in mid-October. Having a conference in your hometown takes some of the magic out of it — the proximity to the office does not let us leave the day-to day business behind for a few days.

We went for two things:

1) To find out how far the "HD network" live streaming has evolved: they are working on allowing the injection of a single high-quality stream and to encode to various formats on the edge of the network. It will come and it is very exiting, but we believe it will be at least another year.

2) To take a look at what the vendors for online video encoding and management systems have to offer.
It will take us a few weeks to properly evalute the solutions we saw, but here are some of the things we liked at first glance:

• Inlet Spinnaker HD-X 8100 encoder appliance  (Ok, we are tainted on this one. We have been working with the Inlet encoder since August of last year), http://inlethd.com/
• Encoding.com, cloud-based video encoding with a straight-forward API, and yes they are at http://encoding.com
• Ooyala, complete online video platform, http://www.ooyala.com
• Kaltura, online video platform targeting the enterprise market, http://kaltura.com 

And we enjoyed some smart keynotes, among them the one by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

If you couldn't make it down to Miami for this year's Ultra Music Festival, you are in luck. We were streaming for RumBum.com, live from the Meet & Greet at UMF - broadcasting interviews with electronic music's superstars from all over the world.

Highlights included a brief chat with Paul Oakenfold, a boisterous session with The Disco Biscuits, and a talk about the business of electronic music with none other than Carl Cox.

The fest is over, but the videos remain. Check out Rum Bum's recorded interviews from Ultra Fest 2010 on RumBum.com.