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Last.fm Hack Day 2008

Earlier this month Last.fm held their first annual Hack Day where the pubic was invited to come show off their programing skillz in a room with other geeks and the Last.fm API. Winners are now listed in a shout out on Last.fm’s Blog.

My fave is the Perceptron’s Where To Live mashup that tells you where the best place to live is based on the current tour routing of your favorite artists.

 

Last.fm Hackday 2008 recap

2008 In Review: Data Portability

Things blew wide open on the data portability front this year. Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace all launched major platform revisions allowing for exchange of information and authentication across their properties. Data Mashups are more abundant and popular as ever. Young companies understand that not having a data exchange play built into your platform now represents a loss of potential value and monetization opportunity. We are at an important inflection point.

Chris Saad gives a great end of the year overview as to where things currently stand in the world of data portability.

 

Other Links:

Twitter and Google’s Friend Connect

CitySearch welcomes logins with your Facebook credentials

Schwartz Wordle

Hypebot’s Music 2.0 By The Numbers

Sometimes there’s nothing like a nice compact list of lists. “Best-of” lists of lists are even better. Hypebot’s Bruce Houghton has collected a very nice survey of Music 2.0 tools, best practices, tools and deals that have appeared on his blog in 2008.

Highlights:

• 5 Lies Indie Musicians Tell Themselves
• Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0 - This was written back in May and almost nothing has changed.
• A list of 5 Unlikely Music Industry Heroes
• 100 Free & Affordable High A Low Tech Music Promotion Tips - It’s ready for an update, but this post remains one of Hypebot’s all time most popular.
• Top 10 Indie Music Marketing Tools.  There are too many new sites and services. These are where you need to spend most of your time.
• 5 Free Music Business eBooks. Not bad at a time when cash is tight.
• Top 10 Reasons Radio Stations Are Bleeding Money. A new post from our resident music philosopher Kyle Bylin.
• 5 Selfish Reasons Every Musician Should Rejoice That Barack Obama Is Our Next President
• The 10 Biggest Deals In Mobile & Digital Music and these are just the beginning…

Trends for 2009: GeoData for fun and profit.

Sean Gorman first blipped the world’s radar in 2003 when his “tedious and unimportant” graduate thesis for George Mason University caught the eye of the Federal government as a potential national security threat. Gorman had married public data about business locations with the layouts of major internet backbones.

This being the post Mitnick era the Feds decided rather than shutting down the research they’d help fund it. The CIA’s incubator In-Q-Tel bought into Gorman’s FortusOne for $5.45M in 2007 which helped fund the open source wonder GeoCommons. The site allows you to quickly search, filter and overlay a wide variety of Geographically mapped data sets. Also allows users to upload their own sets too - either privately or sharable by the public.

The GeoCommons system opens up whole new areas of dimensionality to novice users - and shines as the model for the next generation data federation systems cropping up this year on the web.

Gorman gave a great overview at the 2008 Web 2.0 Conference. Turns out FortusOne isn’t particularly revenue driven at the moment (surprise surprise). It’s good to have Big Brother onboard as an equity partner.

• GeoCommons Finder - data browser
• GeoCommons Maker - map data mashup tool
• FortusOne Profile
• Mapufacture / FortusOne merger announcements

Record Labels - Brand or Die

As an employee of a major label, I’ve had the label branding argument a few times.

My position is: Label branding doesn’t matter to the consumer - until it does. Meaning - if you conduct yourself right, market well, understand your audiences and messaging, attend to the sonic and visual quality of your product, consumers will start to pay attention to your mark. It matters. People do need filters.

Attention label folk: If you can’t market yourselves, how on earth are you able to effectively market your artists? A record label is a promise. It defines an aesthetic standard - a set of assumptions. If you keep your promises your brand builds equity. If you don’t, no one cares about what you have to say - everyone loses (label, artist and consumer).

Ray Kurzweil - By Sheer Force of Will

Look at Bill Gates’ face. He’s clearly humbled in Ray’s presence… as well he should be.

Ray Kurzweil is one of the great minds of our era - and may make breathroughs that could profoundly change our evolutionary biology. Appartenly a documentary is being made about him, so we’ll all get a better look into Ray’s world.

- Wikipedia
- Documentary Info
- Business Week
- Wired

Obama cares about your data structure

Yet another reason to tilt towards Obama… he’s promising to wrest all governmental data into universally accepted formats. That’s your data people. If all goes well, this could usher in a new era of accountability and clarity.

Jeffrey Veen has a great post about Barak’s talk about it with the kids at Google . The visit was also covered by Wired Magazine.

Thoughts on Total Music

Eh… this feels like a half-baked solution to me.

Why rely so heavily on the hardware manufacturers? Isn’t it better to just fully license on behalf of the consumer through a PRO-like entity that takes payments from the network operators? Seems to me by involving hardware companies we’re inserting unnecessary friction into the process of consuming our licenses/products.

Why not let people listen in the formats and contexts they prefer - regardless of device? Do we really still think of localized on-demand libraries as stolen goods? We need to start thinking of them as unlicensed consumption. Involving the hardware layer for blanket licenses doesn’t address this legacy issue. Will Doug’s new gadget prevent me from playing songs I’ve already downloaded by P2P?

What’s my incentive for acquiring one of these new gadgets anyway, even if paid for by a hardware manufacturer? I already have an iPod - an iPhone in fact. The guy from Apple told me they expect to sell two million by the end of 2008. He was quickly proven wrong - turns out it’s probably going to be closer to four million - perhaps even more. Introducing a new gated piece of hardware is asking for failure. The tide is clearly moving away from such an approach.

As Gerd Leonhard says in his thoughtful and provocative new book, no one is going to make money inserting friction in the music consumption process. While we’re at it, here’s a full on plug for Gerd’s book:

The End of Conrol by Gerd Leonhard.

Listen to the podcast here.

Did You Ever See a VC Cry?

“I’m afraid it will be too late”, intones uber VC John Doerr. He’s referring to correcting course in regards to green technologies and gobal warming. When Doerr speaks you should listen. As one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, he’s directed the funding of Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com and many others.

He gave a presentation in March at the TED 2007 conference outlining his vision for the so called Green Tech movement. He predicts that the next decade will bring an unprecedented wave of economic boom throughout the world as we fashion new technologies to conserve or eliminate our use of hydro-carbon based energy sources. It will make the dotcom boom seem paltry in comparison. He gave a more detailed overview on The Charlie Rose show last year.

He believes in this idea with all his heart. This has become his life’s crusade. You can get a sense of this when, at the end of his TED talk, he starts crying at the prospect of having to face his daughter in twenty years and explain how we finally started turning things around and saved the world… or explain how we didn’t.

He’s spot on or course. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We’ve been lead down a path of pernicious complacency by greedy corporations and dim-whitted politicians who have made a concerted effort to deride and negate the evidence so clearly before us. Containing and reducing the production of greenhouse gases will not only preserve our world, it will also save a lot of people lots of money. Doerr focuses on the Walmart example. They’re one of the leaders in this effort. Do you really think Walmart cares about people? Clearly not. But they do care about longevity and their bottom line.

Watch the TED presentation here.
Watch the Charlie Rose interview here.