Startup Diaries

Independent Music Artist Are All Alone

We saw quite a lot of web sites that specialize in Independent Music artists pop into life in recent months. Music Nation was the latest one to report a $5.5 million investment as reported by Read/Write web.

I'm a huge fan of music. I hear music for most of the hours of the day. I'm subscribed to Yahoo Music Unlimited music service in order to get access to most of the new albums and to be able to find new interesting artists.

I would love to be able to discover new talents around the world through the net, and this is exactly my problem with all those sites.
Yes - They give artists a way to publish their music (I especially like AMIEst model for selling music, it's brilliant), but they do almost nothing to help them promote themselves.

I would really like to see more of the following coming from those sites:

• RSS feed for the most listened too music
• RSS feed for the highest rated music
• Incorporate much more "Web 2.0" features such as RSS, rating and voting, sharing, comments, gadgets and more.
• Make it personal - Learn what music I liked more, and show me more music that fits me.
• Better search - It would be very cool if I could state that I like the Black Eyed Peas for example, and get a list of artists with similar music.
• Partner with Pandora and any other online radio service, and get their data integrated into the site rating system. So if a song was played a lot of times in Pandora, it will get  a higher rating also on the site.
• I would love to see one of those sites partner with young PR firms, allowing artists to get free or low budget PR packages. Those packages can include branding, online consulting, management of fan lists, mailing lists, etc...)
• Allow me to subscribe by RSS to an artists music feed, giving the ability to be updated each time this artists upload new music.
• When I lived in London, I especially liked to go to the Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus. They had a very cool idea - a list of the best 20 albums you probably never heard of. Pay some music critics to filter the hundreds of artists and give me a list of the best of the best.

Software Mutation: Predicting the Missing Link

Nice piece by John Milan on how applications should evolve, incorporating the Internet, mobile and open source phenomena.

I especially liked his metaphor of the Internet to the electricity grid. It took years until every house had electricity, and just than we started to see the things that we consider "every day life" stuff like refrigerators and ovens.

So now, that the Internet is finally common and integrated in most houses, what will be the "refrigerator" of the Internet?
It's true that probably most of these "every day life" web sites and applications are still not here, but I think that some of them are already here.

Amazon is a great example of such an application. Yes, they probably will have some kind of better user interface in the future (just think of Microsoft and Amazon WPF demo a year back) but Amazon is the de facto place you go to when you want to buy something. It's just there and it just works.

That said, there are many fields where there is much more place for new players to come and take he lead. Although its popularity, I don't think iTunes is in the same level. It's probably too early to say what is the official "radio" of the Internet (same goes for TV - sorry YouTube).

Thinking about it some more... Is Flickr and Photobucket the real "refrigerators" of the Internet? Photos instead of food? What about other stuff? What service will rise to be our closet in the Internet? The place where we throw all of our old things, hoping to be able to find them later on...

Talking About Windows Vista

If you want to learn more about Windows Vista or just interested to hear what I have to say in the official Vista launch conference in Tel Aviv, check out the now published VOD of all the conference tracks.

The lectures combine the slides and video of us all on stage.

I highly recommend checking out the conference keynote for the really amazing demo of Exchange 2007 voice services. This was one of the coolest demos I have ever seen.

My presentation on Windows Vista Application Comparability (or what happen on the day after tomorrow).

All the conference videos.

United 93

I've just finished watching the movie United 93 which I highly recommend all of you to watch.

Although as someone who live in Israel, I'm quite used to hear about suicide bombers (just 500 meters from my home, where I write these lined from we had more than four of them just in recent years) it was still a very hard movie to watch.
I just couldn't stop the tears from coming, and even now I'm still having some shivers going through my body.

It's hard to imagine, not to say understand, that there are people out there that can do such evil. People that can truly believe that actions like that can be justified by some greater cause.

We in the Internet community love to talk about a one world, about bridging between cultures, but in reality the world is still very far from being united.
Throughout history, people leveraged other people misery, to get them behind some evil cause. I guess it's in our human nature to need to be special somehow, and when you are poor, without food and decent life, you take whatever hope someone will throw to you.

I'm not sure what to do. I don't have the answer. But in recent years I have this strong inside feeling that I can do more to help. More to spread some good.
I think the Internet can be a good tool for that. It's certainly not enough, but it could be part of a long process.
I think the Internet can be used to harness people power together to help others. To make people see there is hope. To get meaning into their life.
I'm still not sure how to do it.

If any of you have any idea, please contact at shahar at nuconomy dot com. I promise to dedicate time and resources to make such ideas a reality.
It's easy to sit and say the world is going to hell. It's easy to sit and just wait. It's easy to lay it all on governments. But it is our responsibility to stand up. To take actions. It's our world and no one else will take care of it.

Tech Wars - Return of the Apple

Like Luke Skywalker, Steve Jobs showed us yesterday that the Jedi has returned and the empire needs to really start to worry.
We all have been hearing about the new upcoming iPhone for more than a year. I've seen tens of sketches and guess work on how it will probably look like and what is feature set will be.
But I think I can talk in the name of all of us when I say - wow! It looks better than the most hot dreams of every apple fan.
If you still haven't seen it in action, you should run and see the VOD event on the apple site. It's one of the most cool gadgets I have ever seen. Suddenly, all the cool mobile phones from Nokia and Erikson just looks old and boring.
I don't know how much the Apple designers gets paid, but whatever it is - it's not enough. For the third time in less than 10 years, they reinvented a all new way to design a product and changed (or going to change) the all market. (and let me reminds you all that I worked for Microsoft in last years and my loyalty still lies there).

So who needs to start worry?
Well... everyone.
First of course is all the phone manufactures, and especially Nokia. if the iPhone will bring with it even average sound quality and service, it has the potential to do to the phones market what the iPod did to the mp3 players market.
More of that, by going with Google, Yahoo and obviously iTunes as partners, Apple can really build a package that no one can beat. I wonder if now Nokia will start to feel sorry for all the years they refused to partner with Microsoft...

Microsoft of course is the next big victim here. Nor just that this could be the end on its own mobile platform, but it could kill all possibility of Zune to try an get into the market.
If you got 8 gig of storage on your phone, how many people will actually buy additional mp3 player?
The fact that the iPhone also has built in support for Google Search and maps, Yahoo mail and Apple iTunes, is bad signs for Microsoft Live services.
Worse is the fact that like we have seen in recent year with the iPod, this phone can drive more people to switch to the new Intel base Mac.

And than pf course there are all the music/movies services out there in the Internet. Just in the last week we read in numerous blogs how iTunes is going to suffer from new services that will deliver music without DRM. But now - Heck I won't bet on any music service out there to be able to grab more than %10 of the market out of iTunes hands.
When your phone can automatically synch, preview and buy all the media straight from the iTunes store, this will be the choice of the people.

I got to admit that even with all the new sales numbers, I was skeptic regarding Apple ability to really hurt Microsoft and come back to the game. But now... For the first time in years, it seems that everything is open. The competition is back.

If you want to read more on the technical details of the iPhone, check out:

Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World
Apple iPhone coverage in Engadget
Apple iPhone coverage in Gizmodo

and of course again - the VOD Webcast of Steve Jobs announcement about the iPhone

Yahoo Gets On the Vista Wagon

Amazing. It seems that Yahoo is going to have a Vista version of their IM client, Yahoo Messenger, even before Microsoft will have a new Messenger version!

This is a big win for Vista, showing that the new capabilities of the operating system attracts so fast even the big competitors. Better, Yahoo developed the new Client using Microsoft new Windows Presentation Foundation, which should fight head to head against Adobe Flash and Apollo platforms.

If you want to see how the new Yahoo Messenger is going to look like, you can check out the introduction video posted by Yahoo.
I especially loved the tabbed feature, allowing you to combine a few IM conversation into one window. The seamless integration to Flickr could also be turned out to be a winner.

As a MS Messenger user, all I have to say is - Microsoft, Wake up and give us a new version of Messenger before we will decide to go to the competition...

Top 50 Loudest Web Sites in 2006

The guys from Information Architects (iA) wrote a cool post describing the 50 top web sites for 2006. The report includes comparison charts of some design and marketing aspects to make a scoring system for those sites.
They even worked to create this very cool map for 2006 trends:

Great work guys!
I also recommend you to subscribe to their RSS feed and enjoy their thoughts into 2007...

I was once very cute

Ahh... The glory days... My father just sent me these photos. Proof of days when I was actually cute (yea, I'm not really objective :))

Communities has a life of its own

Jason wrote an excellent post about why Digg should not try to artificially grow their community outside of its boundaries of young tech savvy males.
After a community gets strong and big enough, it's very hard for people from other demographics to just pop in. The hard core participants will recognized them and push them away immediately.

This is so true.
In a lot of my lectures I always said that the Internet (and technology) are simply try to mimic and improve real life processes. Communities are not different.
I have a lot of experience organizing parties in clubs and bars. It is a known fact that the most important thing when you open a  new bar or a line of parties is to get the right crowd from day one.
The crowed that will come to your place in the first two weeks will also be the one that will come two months after. It won't change. People like to hang out with people like them. It's true for real life communities and it's true for digital ones.

Music Studios Still Doesn't Get It

Just when I thought the music studios are finally starting to get the fact that their fight against the Internet is like Don Quixote fight against the windmill, I saw the latest post by Michael Arrington in Techcrunch.

It appears that Sony removed a user family home video from Grouper claiming that the video soundtrack included a Kenny G song.
What the hell are they thinking???

In order to actually steal this song a user must do:

1. Download an application that can rip/download a flash movie from the web.
2. Find and use some kind of audio/video application (which does not exist in Windows XP installation) to rip the audio track from the video.
3. Hope that the audio track was recorded in high quality and that the video did not have any other sound.

Now – If a user is so desperate to go over all this trouble just to get the song – let’s face it. This user will never buy the CD anyway!

All those home videos are just free viral advertising and instead of treasure them, the studios are trying to kill them. By fighting against them the music studios not just alienating themselves from their market, they are also just hurting themselves.

When will you learn?