"Dear friends,

We have good news: STEIM is safe for now and will be able to continue doing her work.

The Dutch Council for Culture has reversed their initially negative decision. They were without a doubt impressed by the well over 1000 insightful, eloquent, personal letters of support from all over the world, which we received in just under two weeks. This, as well as some other factors, played a large role in opening their perception of STEIM's importance and contribution to our community and field.

We cannot thank you enough. You helped us realize again how extensive and faithful the network around us is. We are excited and thrilled that we can keep working with you and continue to build collaborations, connections and exchanges.

STEIM is bound for change, but we will fight to keep its spirit intact. Michel Waisvisz has left us, but along with his legacy of inventions and a very human 'touch', he has left a dynamic team behind. Under the guidance of our new director, Dick Rijken, our task is now to create a new structure that will honour both our history as an institution and look forward into the future. STEIM is what STEIM does: supporting a wide community of artists and composers, musicians and other performers in their search for great art, on stage, in the studio, in gallery spaces and on the streets. We will continue to be a safe house for an international community, bringing people together in our guesthouse and studio's.

Together with you, we aim to remain both the oldest and the youngest electronic institute in the Netherlands and are thrilled to continue working with you.

STEIM"

Designer From The Ukraine Profile on Odesk.com

I talk about the global economy a lot. And the reason I do is because I'm fascinated by the business reach and earning potential of this new economy, BUT... I recently did a survey, which I will reveal the results once I've analyzed the data, but from that survey I'm under the impression that there are mainly four (4) services employers use to find designers and to fill open positions.

1) Job boards - like Style Careers, Coroflot , Monster, etc
2) Referrals - Getting referred by a friend or colleague
3) Temp agencies - like 24 Seven, Project Solvers and the likes
4) Freelance Projects Auction Sites - like Elance and Odesk.

Now 3 out of 4 of these options, the designer has somewhat of a local control more or less over the competition with which he or she can bid for the design project. But freelance auction sites like elance.com and odesk.com tend to be truly a global effort. Where you are competing with designers all over the world for a local project. Conventional thinking says that the broader your business reach the better, but is that always the case? With websites like Elance and Odesk one would suggest that an obvious flaw or lopsidedness of this type of system is perhaps the dynamic relationship between the project price and designer location.

Same Designer from the Ukraine Hourly Rate $12.22/Hr

What do I mean by this? Well let's say a company in New York decides to use odesk.com for a design project. Using current rates for local designers in New York, this project can be easily quoted at $70/hr and up. Whereas on Odesk.com that same project can be bid down to $15-$20 an hour. Therein lies the million dollar question.

Even though we are now working in a global economy, designers still live in their respective local economies with local bills to pay. How does a designer from New York, Austria or the UK compete with designers living in Africa or India. This is obviously not a new question I'm proposing., but I would really like to get your feedback on whether or not designers find this kind of service useful when looking for new design work?

Sometime ago I blogged about Onsugar, a new platform for blogging with fantastic features to actually compete in the market. Well adding on to the number of platforms available for blogging, here comes Kontain.

Kontain is very rich in UI but low in functionality to power bloggers and  is more appropriate for beginners in the field. But one thing should be said, it supports HD videos; something which not every other blogging engine does. One thing I noticed that it was powered by internet content delivery leader Akamai, that made me think that Kontain is not here for short term but is heavily funded to leave a mark.

Apart from offering easy organizing and viewing media files you’ve uploaded. However the only thing lacking was the absence of templates and customization.

For who of you who are reading and are new to blogging, Kontain is good start to enter this dynamic world of expression.

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Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source.

Features:
- Play Anything
- Multi-Language Support
- Pick Feathers
- Build Custom Mixes
- Cross-Platform
- Control the Flow
- Make Smart Mixes
- Songbird Extensions
- Multi-Task
- Dynamic Mixes
- Organize Your Library
- Scan Your Computer for Music
- Super Slim Mini-Mode
- Set Music Watch Folders