I’m an SF-dwelling motorcycle rider, so when I buy furniture on Craigslist, or need to pick up 300 T-shirts in Mountain View, I get a Zipcar.

For those of you not familiar with it, Zipcar is part of the growing car-sharing movement where you pay a membership fee and can rent cars in your neighborhood by the hour or by the day. The fee includes all gas, insurance, maintenance and parking. It’s great. Other car-share organizations include CityCarShare and Flexcar. Rates and terms vary slightly, but the best reason to pick one over the other is proximity to where you’ll want to pick a car up. Zipcar has two locations within 0.5 miles of me, the others are at least 1.5 miles away. For me it was a no-brainer.

I climbed into a Zipcar a few weeks ago and I found a cool DVD set in the glovebox. I figured someone had forgotten it and I would report the loss to lost-and-found later. But then I found one in each of the back seat pockets, and 5 more in the trunk.

What a great idea, I thought. Zipcars have a certain audience, with certain needs, living in a certain neighborhood. If you want those people to know about you, leave it in the car.

Other reasons I love Zipcar:

• A super-friendly, helpful, and playful attitude apparent in everything they do.
• whenever there is a new one, there is a contest to name it (Mini McEvoy, Matrix Miros, Tacoma Tokias, xA Adrian to name a few).
• “Under the Hood” is one of the best email newsletters I receive as far as design, tone, information quality, and entertainment.
• They make you feel like part of a community, and turn their members into advocates (just like me =)
• They ask for help. Whenever they need something, are having an event or have a cool idea, they ask for their members help. It makes all the difference.
• Killer discounts. Check out http://www.zipcar.com/sf/partners for stuff your “zipcard” will get you.
• $50 of free driving on signup.
• XM Radio in every car.

Technorati Tags: advertising, carshare, disruptive, guerilla media, zipcar

Tangerine is a new Mac program from the Potion Factory that will analyze the music in your iTunes library for BPM (beats per minute) and beat intensity. It also has a gorgeous, intuitive interface.

This is great because most music files don’t come with this information, but once you have it, there is all sorts of cool stuff you can do with it

A few things I’ve been playing with is finding the best BPM combo for computer work and for run workouts. You could also use it to find just the right dance music, or the perfect soundtrack with the right flow for your viral video or student film. Once you get going, this is a huge asset in music selection. It also syncs iTunes so you have access to the data there to sort with or to create Smart Playlists which Tangerine does not seem to support.

Another thing it encourages is serendipity. I have 30GB of music in my library, statistically, I rarely listen to most of it, but when I make playlists from beat levels, I hear music I haven’t heard in a while, often juxtaposed perfectly with another song from a completely different genre, something that I would never have thought to put together before.

Here is a sample from my “Working Mix” demonstrating the variety of music that can share the similar characteristics. By matching BPM and intensity, you get a seamless vibe and flow with a variety of music.

Song	Artist	Genre	BPM
Most Of The Time	Bob Dylan	Soundtrack	75
Mr. Jones (Rare Acoustic)	Counting Crows	Alternative	90
Wreck of the old ‘97	Johnny Cash	Country	75
Laura	Scissor Sisters	Pop	91
Young At Heart	Joss Stone	R&B	75
Dnd	Semisonic	Alternative	91
Wilbury Twist	Traveling Wilburys	Folk	75
Slipped Away	Avril Lavigne	Pop	92
Lulu - Act 2 - Scene 1(4)	Alban Berg	Opera	75
The Metal Head	The Sidekicks	Unknown	92
You Keep On Lovin’ Me	Sherrie Austin	Country	75
The Skeleton Song	Mighty Mighty Bosstones	Rock	92
Celtic Fiddle	Enya	New Age	75

Tangerine’s controls allow for you to do alot very easily, and has a cool interface for displaying artwork, and relative BPM.

While I recommend it for current use, there are a few things I’d like to see before it comes out of beta:

• Better Error Messages/Handling: I originally had some problems getting it to load my iTunes library. It loaded it, processed 5000 songs in about 3 minutes and errored on every single one of them. I told it to reanalyze, and after 8 hours on my 2-year-old Powerbook, it had analyzed my whole library with only a few errors. Making this more intuitive or having more informative error messages or logging besides “Error.” would be helpful.
• An “Analyze songs without BPM/Intensity Data” option: Currently if you add more music or have errors, the only option is to reanalyze the whole library. If there is a way to do this already, please let me know.

{Tools, Technology}

Technorati Tags: art, inspiration, music, software, tangerine, technology, Tools