I Keep It Classic (404) 590 IKIC

I Keep It Classsic Presents EDUCATION 1st @ Microsoft Store

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:51:00 +0000

I Keep It Classic Presents Education 1st @ The Microsoft Store @ Lenox Mall; with India Shawn, writing credits include ( Chris Brown, Dirty Money, Keri Hilson), and visual artist Neal Hamilton clients include ( Paul McCartny, Carlos Santana, Vince Gill ) FEB 18TH 4PM-7PM

How Google works

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

David Berlind from TechWebTV gets an inside look at how Google works. It is an engineering driven organization, it is “young” and peopled with graduates of some of the country’s top universities (Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Yale). Its engineers are generalists without pre-conceived notions about how things work and, with its flat organizations, decisions are often made from the bottom up.

The Evolution of Music Online

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:56:00 +0000

VEVO Is Profitable With $150M Revenue, Adding XBox "Within 30 Days"

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:08:00 +0000

"Our strategy was never about scarcity,... but rather ubiquity," VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff told attendees of the D: Dive Into Media conference yesterday. The strategy is working. VEVO is profitable company after just 2 years and generated $150 million in revenue in 2011. In fact, Caraeff envisions $1 billion in revenue within a "short period of time."

Company will be expanding to X-Box in the next 30 days and plans further mobile expansion. Careaff says VEVO is expanding into 6 more countries in 2012.
Vevo is a joint venture of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media with EMI licensing its content to the group without taking an ownership stake. Vevo offers music videos from the same three of the 'big four' major record labels. Warner Music Group was initially reported be negotiating offering content on Vevo, but rather formed an alliance with MTV Networks.
Here's video of the full inteview

Musicmetric: Co-Founder Talks Pro Edition, P2P Data Tour Planning App

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:06:00 +0000

Musicmetric is a web analytics platform that recently launched a Pro edition in Beta. It offers an impressive range of stats on everything from social media activity to mentions in articles on websites. One of the most noted features in recent media coverage is their tracking of file sharing activity. Access to such data also powered a midem Hack Day app called TourrentPlans that helps musicians plan tours based on the location of their filesharing fanbase.

I recently spoke with Musicmetric Co-Founder Marie-Alicia Chang who filled me in on some of the aspects of Musicmetric's new Pro edition that might miss casual inspection.

Lana Del Rey Filesharing for 2 Months Prior to Album Release
When checking out Musicmetric Pro, I decided to take a look at the profile of Lana Del Rey, since this week's album sales are supporting my thesis regarding her crossover from early adopters. Stats tracked include social media activity, from the number of fans on major sites to plays of music and videos to the locations of fans. You can get an extremely limited sense of what Pro offers via the free Fantracker service.
Musicmetric Pro also includes a section that's still in development that will offer info regarding mention on websites, such as blog posts and music news, as well as sentiment tracking. But folks in the press have gotten most worked up by the filesharing stats currently featuring the amount of filesharing and the location of filesharers.
Additional features include the ability to create benchmarks and compare artists to other artists in order to get a context for the data. Even more useful is the ability to highlight specific events, such as tv appearances, in relationship to web activity such as filesharing.
Ms. Chang revealed that accounts representing specific artists also have access to Nielsen data and can integrate additional private data sources. So, though their free Fantracker tool reveals some interesting data about artists, the Pro version offers a powerful ability to integrate public and proprietary sources to track an artist's development.
In addition to marketing firms and labels, Ms. Chang noted Musicmetric has deals with such companies as MTV that have extensive web properties and tracking needs. Though they may extend their services beyond music, their focus is on developing tools for the day to day needs of the music industry
Ms. Chang also affirmed Musicmetric's ongoing involvement with Music Hack Days and their creation of APIs that offer data to developers. One example of the possible uses of such data occurred at midem Hack Day where Musicmetric engineer Ben Fields created TourrentPlans by mashing up MusicMetric filesharing data with Songkick historic concert data.
TourrentPlans combines these information sources to create tour plans based on where an artist has the most fans as identified by filesharing activity. Though this won't settle filesharing debates, it certainly suggests one of the best approaches available for monetizing filesharing.
Musicmetric Pro is definitely a powerful tool for music-related web analytics. It also represents a likely direction for best of breed web services for the music industry as more and more features scattered across disparate services are combined in an accessible form. Music tech has some big years ahead and Musicmetric strikes me as one of the likely winners in the current race.
See Musicmetric's Products page to find out more about the Lite and Pro editions or to sign up for a free 10 day trial.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced its much anticipated $5 billion IPO and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent this carefuly wored yet heartfelt and hopeful letter to potential investors

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:01:00 +0000

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected."

"We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together."

The Creative Team

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:12:00 +0000

What do engineers, product managers, entrepreneurs who started with a few ideas, a few tools, and a few dollars have in common in generating a tremendous amount of value for their companies. Simply said, all of them started by identifying exciting problems, and then relentlessly working to solve them by challenging common assumptions with, in most cases, very scare resources.

Innovation starts first with observation. Business and technology problems are abundant for those willing to investigate them. Defining the right problem to solve is often more difficult than solving it.

Second, innovation grows in places where people can share their thoughts. Creativity requires trading ideas. That is the reason why students at Universities or engineers in Silicon Valley can innovate: there are many venues around them to explore their ideas.

Third, innovators challenge existing assumptions. Innovators will foresee if common solutions can be improved, common solutions are not addressing the right problem, or if the problem is not properly defined.

Fourth, space and time are critical for teams to innovate. Surroundings need to accommodate team interactions. And, deadlines pressure the team to come up with a working plan.

Sixth, with well defined and tight rules, teams work harder to achieve their goals. Teams that have loose working rules, lose over time their senses of purpose. Innovative teams need to balance in their work enjoyment with discipline.

Seventh, innovative teams experiment a lot of options, willing to learn from their mistakes in the process, until they find the only path that will result in the best solution.

But in the end (eighth), the most innovative teams are the ones that always carry the attitude to endlessly overcome any barriers toward a successful outcome. That is very often how you can recognize if you have a creative team or not, and if you should invest or not in that team

The Creative Mind

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:18:00 +0000

Creativity in arts, science and technology is about bringing change. Painters reveal new colors to our eyes, musicians new harmonies to our ears, scientists explain us why, and engineers design new tools. But it is only over time that we will be able to assess how creative or innovative a new art, theory or design will be, what will be its impact, and how valuable it will become to our culture.

The creative mind is unique by his ability to adapt to new situations and to leverage whatever is at hand to reach his goals.

He obviously shares a great amount of wonder and interests to develop what he should work on, and a great amount of openness and sensitivity to feel what could be changed.

In order to create, the creative mind develops a wild imagination with a sense of reality to come up with the next big thing. When working at his art, he generally combines playfulness (because of the enjoyment for his art) with discipline (because of his dedication to his art). And, he is at best performing in an harmonious and helpful surrounding and environment.

The creative mind is generally perceived by society as rebellious and independent. He often exposes himself to pain and suffering because of his deep sensitivity. How not to be devastated if no one cares about a new book or a new formula?

All major creative breakthroughs never come in one day, but after many years of perseverance. It is the enjoyment of producing his arts or discoveries that stimulates the passion and the dedications of the creative mind to pursue his own muse.

The Real Value of Social Networks

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:07:00 +0000

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that he was using LinkedIn instead of scaning people business cards. Keeping business cards of people that we met in business meetings has always been a challenge. And, I know very few people who have ever taken the time to scan business cards that were given to them. LinkedIn for your professional network and Facebook for your social network both solve that problem: keeping the contact information of your network updated. That was probably the initial value of the first generation of social networks which is to keep, update and organize your contacts, and to faciliate your communication, through e-mails, chats and now video calls, with our network.

But the real value of social networks, and what is driving their growths is undoubtly in sharing. No one has probably better describes it than Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine:

“Everything that can be shared will be shared. We are just at the beginning of this movement. Sharing can enhance the value of whatever we share. We are now sharing things, we never thought we would, like information about our friends, locations, investments, health, memories, expectations, and activities. Privacy is a concern, but most people don’t mind sharing this information in the right context.”

Think about it - “sharing can enhance the value of whatever we share” - how many types of social networks we have already and could have, and how many usages from those networks we have already and could have based on the benefits of sharing - we are just at the beginning of that trend:

• Creating a Facebook page to start a revolution: “We are all Khaled Said”
• Buying clothes, according to your lifestyle or your community, through ModCloth instead of going to Macy’s
• Using Facebook and Twitter to find an organ transplant that is most likely to match the donor and save a life - The Dragonfly Effect from Professor Aaker
• Discovering, experiencing and sharing paintings that you love, and new ones that you will love with Artfinder
• Getting local restaurant recommendations from your friends through Foursquare when travelling to a new city or a new country
• Buying technology stocks with other technology investors through StockTwits
• Finding new products and stores that you might want to buy with Svpply
• Sharing your hobbies so that you know what’s going on through Facebook groups or Google + Circles
• Creating a personal brand or marketing a small business with Twitter
• Finding victims of natural disasters, eathquakes or tsunami - with Google’s Person Finder - or finding victimes of wars and genocides - such as the Remember Me Project from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Sharing your private memories and good times with close friends and family using Path
• Using Facebook as the worldwide white pages phone book to reconnect with people from your past
• Using LinkedIn to post a resume and find a new job

The Web is clearly moving from web pages and e-mails to being rebuilt around people. As very well explained by Paul Adams, User Experience Manager at Facebook, we all live in networks of small connected groups, and we are influenced by the people around us, mostly the strong ties in our networks.

While the Facebook, LinkedIn and new Google + of the world are going to compete by providing new applications for their users leveraging their existing massive data or by being the social platform for third-party applications such as Facebook for Zynga social gaming, a large number of social start-ups such as Etsy, Tumblr, Path, Quora, Namesake, StockTwits, Artfinder, Svpply, Foursquare, ModCloth...are emerging.

And between one dominant social platform such as Facebook, and the new social start-ups, users will have to decide if they want to have only one social graph (which is probaly what both Facebook and Google want) or a “portable” social graph, such as a phone number, that they can carry and use over many social apps and services

A Tale Of Two Cities: Silicon Valley And Hollywood

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:02:00 +0000

Silicon Valley and Hollywood: so close geographically, yet so distant digitally and philosophically. You would think we’d understand each other better. In the Valley, we circulate pitch decks. In Hollywood, they shop around scripts. We strive for exits, while they sell distribution rights. They have record labels, we have venture capitalists. They have agents, we have recruiters. People on Sunset Blvd. obsess over the next “hit” that will draw viewers, ears, or butts in seats. On Sand Hill Road, we toast to market disruptions and business model innovations. Ultimately, both are working towards bringing transformative experiences (content and apps) to market.
Yet for all the apparent ecosystem similarities, our two worlds are surprisingly at odds. I know first hand. When I was in college at USC, up-and-coming actors, directors, and musicians were just a dorm room away generating art while I was glued to my laptop building sites. And I’ve found myself at the intersection yet again with my company, Box, as a large number Hollywood studios and labels are now moving their information and collaboration to the cloud.
Hollywood’s creators and the Valley’s innovators could achieve so much together. Instead, we’re clashing, and neither viewpoint is wrong. Of course content creators should be able to get paid for their works, and of course those works should be free to move across any device, platform, or service. When Steve Jobs was here to mediate – or rather monetize – we were somewhat pacified because the experience was so robust for the producers and so great for the consumers. Even then, though, we only got so far: iTunes was continually blocked out of important content deals, and lawsuits came up frequently. But now, within just a few months of Jobs’s passing, we’re back to our early 2000’s ways: a wild west, pre-iPod world, where no one quite knows what equilibrium looks like, and justice is pursued through legislation and lawsuits that only widen the divide.
Where did we go wrong?
In his usual zen-like manner, Jobs explained the dichotomy of the Valley and Hollywood: “…people from technology don’t understand the creative process that these companies go through to make their products, and they don’t appreciate how hard it is. And the creative companies don’t appreciate how creative technology is.”
Hollywood is a special kind of beast: it’s as insular as the Valley, but success relies far more on the connections between individuals than the decisions of markets, making it more complicated, slow, and inflexible. In a world where middle-men have their own middle-men, the Valley’s egalitarian, direct-to-customer, democracy-rules-all ethos does not apply. In Silicon Valley, we don’t think to ask for permission or support before introducing hopefully world-changing products. That simply doesn’t happen in entertainment. You fundamentally need support from others, many others in fact, and paradoxically that collaboration tends to be hard in LA.
These differences have created a digital divide. In the Valley, we demand more from our southern neighbors, wondering why content is priced at uncompetitive rates, why it’s so hard to get a deal done, and why lobbyists are hired to block innovation.
Paul Graham’s answer to Hollywood’s modus operandi and slow pace is just to disrupt the entire business model. How? By usurping the power of ‘entertainment’ from those in 90210 altogether. Basically, what Atari and EA kicked off in the 70’s and 80’s, but modernized: moving far beyond traditional forms of entertainment, where the Valley builds the creation and consumption platforms, and owns the rights to the content. This future state, where people entertain themselves (either through shared status messages, photos, or virtual worlds) is far easier to grok, “simpler” to monetize, and seemingly more in our control.
It’s an aggressive response to Hollywood’s perceived unwillingness to participate in the new environments technology is creating and powering. But as Sarah Lacy points out, “disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s all that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.”
Can we create a better future together?
Can there exist a world in which Hollywood leverages more efficient channels to reach a broader audience? Where they reduce the release windows to reach more consumers, faster? Where the Valley can introduce more seamless monetization platforms, helping artists make more money? Where content quality is enriched through different mediums or interactive experiences, and the creative and cultural influences of LA are amplified by the innovations of SF?
I actually don’t think we’re as far off as we think, or as recent legislation proposals would suggest. In fact, there are plenty of people and examples that have made this work, however painstakingly, in recent years.
On both sides of the fence, Daniel Ek, Steve Jobs, Jason Kilar, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Jeffrey Katzenberg and others have brokered adequate and attractive solutions to these challenges. If you compare the world today to the world of 10 years ago, it’s obvious that we’ve come pretty damn far: I can stream nearly any song instantly from my iPhone; I can watch a growing number of movies and TV shows on demand from my computer or TV; and I can read almost any book from a Kindle or Android device after waiting just a few seconds. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, venture capitalists, and entertainers climbed mountains to make this happen; none of this was possible, or even legal, in the 90’s. Cars, finance, education, healthcare, and even enterprise software have all changed considerably more slowly than the entertainment world in response to this technology revolution known as the internet.
But we want more speed and openness, and without an easy “API” into Hollywood, the rest of the Valley remains dumbfounded. The opaque and murky process of getting things done isn’t in our nature; we don’t like worlds that require connections, contracts, or consent. We like elastic consumables, whether it’s computing resources or maps data, that are easy to understand and priced fairly.
The primary methods the entertainment industry uses to protect its value include locking it behind closed doors or aggressively penalizing those that take it. This is magnified in part by the fact that the digital files holding Hollywood’s value are already so free-flowing, no one knows how much they should be monetizing, and most contracts are so convoluted you wouldn’t even know who to pay if you could. But, just to put this environment in context, Google won’t let you freely build a search engine with unfettered access to its information, nor does Facebook allow data to flow freely out of its service. The Silicon Valley approach is different, but the motivation is the same.
I’m going to choose to believe that Hollywood wants to change, and they’ve clearly shown they can and have. Responding to disruption at the same pace that we cause it is no small feat, and failure to do so does not necessarily signal distrust of technology. Most people simply don’t respond well to their industry turning upside down every five years.
Yes, SOPA sucked. Like, it was a really bad idea. When people think their backs are up against a wall, sometimes they do weird things. But consumers, the Valley, even many in Hollywood took a stance, and the proprietors backed down. In the aftermath of this ‘victory’, we should try harder than ever to fuse these two worlds, particularly before SOPA II is attempted. We need more cooperation, less antagonism.
Perhaps I’m just empathizing with my former film school roommates, or maybe I’ve just read one too many books on the film business. But it could also be that there’s something so powerful – magical, even – about clicking a button and instantly watching The Dark Knight. We need far more of this, not less.
Hollywood needs to understand that every hour Americans spend tending to a virtual farm is an hour they’re not watching Family Guy. Now is the time for reinvention and innovation, on both sides. Some things might be painful at first, some margins will decrease, and powers may shift a little. But the responsibility for creating a viable resolution belongs to both industries.
Oh, and one last thing. Hollywood, Please stop making Jersey Shore. It’s ruining America.

Was Megaupload Targeted Because Of Its Upcoming Megabox Digital Jukebox Service?

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:53:00 +0000

Matt is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail... → Learn More

Last Thursday the US Justice Department came down hard on Megaupload and its mega founder, Kim Dotcom. In the days since, there has been a shake-up of sorts in the digital storage realm. Several smaller sites have drastically changed their business models. Others, like MediaFire, reached out to me after I published this post attempting to distance themselves from Megaupload.
However, yesterday, a new theory surfaced that indicates Megaupload’s demise had less to do with piracy than previously thought. This theory stems from a 2011 article detailing Megaupload’s upcoming Megabox music store and DIY artist distribution service that would have completely disrupted the music industry.
TorrentFreak first reported about the service in early December 2011. Megabox was just in beta at that time with listed partners of 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon. Megaupload was in a heated marketing battle with the RIAA and MPAA who featured Kim Dotcom in an anti-piracy movie (5:10 mark). The site had just sued Universal Music Group for wrongly blocking Megaupload’s recent star-studded YouTube campaign. Things were getting vicious in December but the quiet launch of Megabox might have been the straw that broke the millionaire’s back.
Dotcom described Megabox as Megaupload’s iTunes competitor, which would even eventually offer free premium movies via Megamovie, a site set to launch in 2012. This service would take Megaupload from being just a digital locker site to a full-fledged player in the digital content game.
The kicker was Megabox would cater to unsigned artists and allow anyone to sell their creations while allowing the artist to retain 90% of the earnings. Or, artists could even giveaway their songs and would be paid through a service called Megakey. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works,” Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak in December. Megabox was planning on bypassing the labels, RIAA, and the entire music establishment.
Megaupload was likely large enough to actually find success. Other services have tried what Megabox was set to do, but Megaupload was massive. Prior to its closure last week, the site was estimated to be the 13th most visited site on the Internet, accounting for 4% of all worldwide Internet traffic. It boasted 180 million registered users with over 50 million visiting the site daily. Megaupload was already a seemingly trusted service for artists to distribute their work. Megabox would have a monetized that popularity by passing on the bulk of the earnings back to the artists.
“You can expect several Megabox announcements next year including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models,” said Dotcom late last year. But that’s probably not going to happen. Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload executives are now awaiting trial on various charges including racketeering, money laundering, and various counts of piracy. It seems they flew too close to the sun. High on success and a half a world away in New Zealand and Hong Kong, they attempted to take on the music industry head-on. Now they’re in jail.

The State Of Online Music [Stats & Analysis]

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:43:00 +0000

Next Big Sound, the music analytics website that continuously tracks the number of plays, views, fans, comments, mentions, and other key metrics across the major web properties, yesterday released their 2011 State of Online Music – and the numbers are quite staggering: 64 billion new plays, 16 billion profile views, and 3.5 billion new fan connections.

Metrics include data taken from SoundCloud, Twitter, Vevo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia. Interestingly enough, the largest percentage growth came from SoundCloud at 231% (which might have something to do with their recent funding of $50 million). Also interesting was how the top ranking artists varied between a fan's choice of media consumption. Generally lesser “known” (and even unsigned) artists like The Weeknd, DJ Bl3nd, and The White Panda topped the ranks on SoundCloud, while the majors’ usual suspects (Bieber, Gaga, Rihanna, Perry, and so on) topped the rest of the major properties.Another notable finding from the report is how each network displays its own characteristics around the most popular day of the week and the top artists on the site. From looking at the data, the biggest day for artists on Facebook and Vevo seem to be Thursday, while YouTube’s music activity is highest on Fridays and Saturdays, and SoundCloud on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
NBS’s “Social 50” metrics summarizes the top artists across all social music networks. While Justin Bieber easily claimed the #1 spot (which he held for roughly the entire year), several artists also made the jump from Next Big Sound’s chart for up-and-coming artists to their “Social 50”. Skrillex, for instance, made his debut on the Social 50 on June 16^th but was on the NBS chart November 11^th - a full seven months earlier.
According to Next Big Sound, SoundCloud and Twitter showed triple digit growth compared to 2010 (although they were starting from a much smaller base). Sites like Vevo, Facebook and YouTube all experienced massive music growth and sites like Rdio, Spotify and Pandora were added to their system in the middle of last year.
What’s important to keep in mind when viewing the infographic is that each of these numbers represents a unique interaction between an artist and a single fan. With no shortage of artists across dozens of music sites, and no end site for dwindling music sales, the real challenge for artists and industry personnel lay in gaining attention and rising above all the clutter, in order to generate a genuine “buzz" in which to capitalize upon.

February 1, 2011, 9:17 PM.How Much Does A Facebook Fan Cost? $1.07

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:34:00 +0000

Money can buy you friends on Facebook, if you’re a marketer. But the price is going up.
A whitepaper by social marketing and analytics firm Webtrends, which studied 11,000 Facebook ad campaigns in the U.S., found that the cost of advertising on Facebook that encourages a user to become a “fan” on the brand’s Facebook page is $1.07.
Marketers are increasingly spending money on Facebook fan-acquisition ads. Why? Becoming a fan gives brands permission to market directly to a user, both through (free) messages sent to the user’s homepage news feed and through ads that specifically target fans on Facebook.com. It’s arguably better than the old-fashioned style of permission-based digital marketing, which involves gathering customer emails and then blasting them with messages that they might not ever open.
But the rates at which U.S. users are clicking on Facebook ads designed to generate fans are starting to decline, according to Webtrends. In 2009, the so-called click-through rate on such ads was .063%. In 2010, the rate declined to .051%.
At the same time, ads are getting more expensive, rising from 17 cents per thousand in 2009, to 25 cents in 2010. (By comparison, display ads can range from $2 to $8 per thousand on other sites, depending on the site and the type of advertiser.)
What could be causing Facebook advertisers to get fewer clicks for more money? Justin Kistner, Webtrends’ senior manager of product marketing for social had a few theories. One possibility is that the ads aren’t as effective these days at attracting users, either because the ad creative design is growing boring or because Facebook users are learning to ignore the ads. And ads could be growing more expensive because many of them are sold through an auction system that’s getting increasing competition as more advertisers turn to Facebook.
The lesson, Kistner said, is that the companies that have a head start now, with double-digit millions of fans, are going to end up spending much less money than others. “There is a competitive advantage to starting now,” he said.
Facebook spokesman Brandon McCormick declined to comment on the specific results of the Webtrends study, which the company didn’t participate in.
But he did say that acquiring a fan is “just the beginning” of how marketers can use Facebook. “On Facebook, the magic of marketing happens when brands activate their fans in ways that inspire people to share those messages with their friends,” he said.
Webtrends’ Kistner agreed that the campaigns that actually drive return on investment ads are usually built on top of a good fan base.
“There are a lot of studies trying to say how much is a fan worth,” Kistner said, “but the answer depends on the kinds of campaigns you are driving at that fan base.” His firm is currently working on a study about the effectiveness of different kinds of campaigns directed at a fan base, known as “fan nurturing.”

How Warner Music Turns Social Media Fans Into Customers

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:26:00 +0000

Execs from Warner's Atlantic Records describe at Web 2.0 Summit the strategy and metrics they use to convert music fans into music buyers.

Atlantic Records digital media leader Eric Snowden remembers excitedly promoting the fact that one of the label's artists had just topped 4 million fans and getting a pithy reply from his CEO: "What is this doing for us?"
That was a reminder that getting the fans was only half the battle, said Snowden, who is vice president for digital creative and technology at Atlantic, a division of Warner Music Group. "Over time, we've become really focused on figuring out what do we do all these people we've sort of corralled?"
Snowden and Carmen Sutter, the senior director of data services at Warner, spoke Tuesday about the progress they've made establishing strategies and metrics to answer that question. The two appeared along with Tim Waddell, director of product marketing for Adobe, Web 2.0 Summit, which is produced by Federated Media and O'Reilly Media in partnership with UBM Techweb. Warner uses Adobe Social Analytics, part of Adobe's Omniture Web analytics product line, for social media measurement.

Slideshow: 10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

Waddell said businesses of all sorts are "spending a bunch on social media" and increasingly are under pressure to prove that it delivers real results.
[ Get more news and videos from the Web 2.0 Summit. ]
Sutter said she used the website and social media of Atlantic artist Bruno Mars as the test case for her participation in Adobe's beta program for the product, and it turned out to be a good choice. She was able to see when particular Tweets that he published himself from his phone drove spikes in traffic to his website. An example was his promotion of the Liquor Store Blues video just posted to his site. Even more dramatically, she could see the way his Video Music Awards tribute to Amy Winehouse drove 170,000 social media mentions. Then she could chart how that social media spike was echoed, the following day with 159% increase in visit to the artist's website and a 302% increase in orders, she said.
She can see patterns like that much more easily by having a social media tool that is tightly linked with her website and e-commerce analytics, she said. "If I didn't have that, I'd have to match it all up in Excel somehow."
Snowden said he thinks of fans acquired through a Facebook page or Twitter profile as being at the beginning of the process. Ultimately, he wants to bring those people to the artist's website, get them to join a community there, and become a customer who buys CDs or digital downloads. Sutter's team has created a corresponding set of metrics to track each conversion from one stage to the next. She also tracks things like the number of fans posting comments, divided by the total number of fans, as a measure of engagement, and seeks to separate the more influential fans from the rest.
The promotional strategy is also different for new artists than for established ones, Snowden said. "At the beginning of an artist's career, we want to keep the barrier to entry very low," he said, and that may mean publishing more free content and sharing it more widely. As an artist becomes more popular, "we ask a little bit more from fans and try to drive them to our own wholly owned properties more."
Artists are encouraged to tweet and post on their own, rather than having someone do it for them, Snowden said. "We have to be careful that everything stays in their voice," he said. This presents challenges because recording artists are "imperfect marketers" and don't always understand the impact their posts will have.
Marketing an artist as a brand is also different than marketing a product, Snowden said. "Our brands are people. They get upset, they get angry, they feel neglected. It's different than, you know--Dr. Pepper is not a person."
The emphasis on personal marketing also means matching social media campaigns to the style of the artist, so they publish what comes naturally to them, Snowden said. When his team first sat down to coach Rob Thomas, lead singer for Matchbox 20, he initially rejected all their selections. But once they found out that he did a lot of texting to friends and family, they were able to sell him on Twitter as being like "texting to all your fans." Initially skeptical, Thomas wound up tweeting 70 times the first day and building a huge following (more than 250,000 followers as of today).
Sutter said one of her challenges is that artists won't necessarily cooperate in including the tracking code she would like to see in every post. However, Snowden's team has been clever about getting artists like Bruno Mars to use smartphone apps that include that code automatically. "Bruno doesn't know it's there, but I do," she said.

Tipsheet Email Oct 3, 2011 — The Return of Mixtapes / Rise of Citizen DJs

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:59:00 +0000

Sitting here, just laughing – headlines jumping all over the place about users howling that 1) new Spotify subscribers MUST use their Facebook profile to sign up, and 2) current users want to disable the automatic sharing — while Spotify usage has shot up over 60% in a single week.

Wait, users DON’T want to share their listening habits with their friends? You’re kidding, right? When I was growing up, we DEFINED ourselves by what we listened to. I can understand that seamless sharing can gnaw on the privacy concerns of some folks, and that’s fine – there are a half dozen other streaming solutions out there, and you can turn off autoshare. And for me personally, outside of music, I ain’t sharing nothing seamlessly unless I want to – not my viewing habits, not my reading habits, just music. Besides, 98% of the stuff that posts in the new Facebook ticker flies past without me ever noticing anyway.
I think the biggest challenge with sharing music moving forward is getting that info OFF the ticker and onto the wall – trust me, we’re about to enter a whole new era of mix tapes, where little girls can express their love by playing Justin Bieber nonstop, or guys can show off their deep knowledge of obscure death metal to their friends – especially since there ain’t a commercial radio station on the planet that’s going to turn you on to Carcass, Deicide, or Morbid Angel (or Grant Green, Charlie Parker, Dzihan & Kamien, LTJ Bukem, Japancakes, Edith Piaf, or Juliette Commagere).
Turntable.fm was just the start of the mainstreaming of citizen DJ’ing, what we’re going to need is a better way to highlight / like / promote those superstar curators, now that creating and sharing digital mixtapes just got a lot more seamless. I seriously believe that Fan Pages will soon be enabled to have accounts from Spotify (or some other service) – and when they do, using pages with 25 million followers to promote music will be a healthy boost to artist careers, in light of the challenges (and cost) it takes to get a mainstream hit these days.
And as for Timeline? I know I’m in the minority when I say this, but I don’t think Facebook went audacious enough with it! Go bigger, I say — rather than darting your eyes back & forth to follow events in chronological order, why not blow up pictures and stretch text posts across the entire field, so your own timeline starts to resemble some huge tumblr blog over time, especially as the world migrates towards tablet use. Regardless, congratulations Dather, you just got a proof of concept!

U.S. Shutters Megaupload. Founder Kim Dotcom, Others Arrested In New Zealand

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:55:00 +0000

In what is being described at the largest such case in U.S. history, 7 individuals and 2 corporations have been charged in the United States with "running an international organized criminal enterprise" responsible for massive worldwide piracy of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and related sites. Founder Kim Dotcom and to other Megaupload executives have been detained in New Zealand. The sites were taken offline

The unsealed indictment alleges that the operation generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage to copyright owners, according to the U.S. Justice Department and FBI.More than 20 search warrants were executed today in the U.S. and eight other countries and approximately $50 million in assets siezed. Targeted sites taken offline where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with Megaupload.
Alleged members of the "Mega conspiracy" charged in the indictment include

Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

According to the filing, "by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users."

Megaupload Video Back On YouTube, After UMG Offers 'We Yanked It Because We Could' Defense

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Megaupload's controversial music video is back on YouTube after Universal Music Group lawyers failed to offer a federal court judge justification for its removal. Publicly, Universal had argued that Megaopload had no legal right to include musical endorsements from P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown and other A-list performers, some of whom have contracts with UMG. But in court filings late yesterday, Universal offered a different defense.

“On December 9, UMG utilized YouTube’s CMS system to effect the removal of a posting of the video on YouTube,” Universal attorney Kelly Klaus wrote in yesterday's filing, but did not offer a single argument as to why. Universal never stated that Megaupload was in violation of the DMCA which requires takedowns of unauthorized material, argued the lawyers. Rather, UMG was simply using a removal system that Google provided them:

"What actually transpired was UMG’s use of YouTube’s Content Management System, which UMG is contractually authorized to use pursuant to its written agreement with YouTube. That is a matter of contract between two private companies—UMG and YouTube–not a notice sent pursuant to the DMCA

In other words, Universal's deal with YouTube allows it to pull down - at least for a time - whatever it wants to. In this instance, however, Google eventually sided with Megaupload; and UMG had thrown in the towel even prior to yesterday's court filings. According to Universal :

YouTube advised UMG Recordings, Inc. (“UMG”) that it would restore full access to all instances of the Video on YouTube as of this past Tuesday (as apparently has happened), and UMG has told YouTube that it will take no further action regarding the Video pending the resolution of this litigation.

In addition to making the technical argument that they had just taken advantage of an agreement with YouTube that enables takedowns, Universal also argued that because the video was restored within days, Megaupload has suffered no harm and no damages should be awarded.
“Our legal battle with UMG is ongoing and we are going to reveal the whole truth about this censorship and the illegal take down,” retorted Meaupload CEO Kim Dotcom in a statement. “Lets join together against Internet dictatorship by corporations.”

Is The Future Of Concert Ticketing On Facebook? Ticketfly Thinks So

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:02:00 +0000

Several studies have shown the power of Facebook to promote ticket sales. Friends want to be where their other friends are and fans want to commune with fans. But what about Facebook as a place to actually sell tickets? Existing Facebook ticketing solutions have required users to leave the social network and log in to an external system to complete the transaction. Yesterday, Ticketfly launched app that eliminates that complexity.

Ticketfly's Facebook Purchase enables promoters to sell tickets directly from their Facebook Fan Pages creating a purchasing experience that encourages social discovery and sharing. Key features:

Single sign-on with Facebook Connect allows fans to buy tickets using their Facebook identity, without leaving Facebook
Quick installation process allows promoters to start selling tickets on Facebook within minutes
Integration with Ticketfly's Facebook RSVP and Share features promotes social discovery
Real-time analytics reporting provides integrated Facebook sales performance data
Social graph integration lets Facebook users see what events their friends are attending

Bands Want Facebook Likes, But Should They Be Chasing YouTube Views?

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:01:00 +0000

A recent survey undertaken by Reverb Nation suggests that Facebook likes are by far the most sought after thing on a bands agenda. I wrote about the reach of Facebook posts here suggesting only 10% of people see your facebook post and only 1% like it. It seems that bands are more worried about being seen with a fan base, hence the importance on the visible “like”, than actually building a database of their own with an email list.

When you build you fan base through a third party site, you are at their mercy. If they decide they no longer want to support music, then you just lost everything. We saw this with Myspace - bands with 200,000 fans were left starting again, switching priorities to Facebook and trying to build numbers from the ground up.
Now this is not to dismiss the importance of being able to demonstrate the strength of your fan base. Potential fans, promoters, and what’s left of A&R will certainly take an interest in the capacity of your following. The thing with Facebook is that it is now so integrated with people, that if you are creating a buzz elsewhere it will reflect on your Facebook page.
A More Accurate Barometer
A far more accurate barometer of your engagement, is not how many likes you have, but the number of interactions your posts get. I come across many acts that have invested money into campaigns to acquire likes, and Facebook advertising can be very effective in increasing doing this. However, when you study how many interactions they get with their posts, it demonstrates how little those new followers actually engage. This is why for bands to simply chase likes, doesn’t mean you are actually creating fans.
The trouble with Facebook is that it isn’t primarily a content provider. People don’t go there to necessarily watch or listen. The Internet has made us a very visual society. Ever since the new Facebook has been introduced, those photos with an amusing caption have become extremely popular, but this is pretty benign for bands. However the audio/visual medium of Youtube is ideal. You see and hear the band, and if a band has good product, then the potential reach is endless.
YouTube has a similar advertising platform as facebook. You can pay to have you video featured in much the same manner as ads are featured on Facebook. “Promoted Videos” uses the Googles Adwords system, so you can target your ads to reach a suitable audience.
If you can engage the watcher with your video, you are then exposing them to the possibility of not only subscribing on Youtube, but also following through with a share and a like. More importantly you will increase your plays, and this is something that potential investors will hold in high regard. You are creating fans and strengthening your communication with them through your actual music, this means a lot more than a simple facebook like.
Keeping an email list of your fans is essential. However, if you worry that it doesn’t showcase your fan base enough, then building a sturdy Youtube community instead of a Facebook one, might prove to be a little more beneficial to your career.

Black Keys First-Week Album Sales: 207,086...

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:53:00 +0000

by paul

These are the first-week sales numbers for El Camino, according to Nielsen Soundscan stats. The preliminary figures were shared with Digital Music News on Wednesday morning by a label executive. The album was first released on December 6th.
Total sales, US: 207,086
Total Album Downloads: 113,780
Total LP (vinyl): 8,841
The total is nearly triple the first-week performance of the band's previous release, Brothers, which sold roughly 73,000 in its debut period. That album, released in March of 2010, is the most successful for the band to date. It has since gone gold in the US (500,000 units) and is currently approaching 900,000 cumulative sales.
On El Camino, both downloads and vinyl sales are subsets of the broader 207,086 grand total. Downloads were available on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and the band's website.

Facebook By The Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Facebook By The Numbers

It is no secret that Facebook is a social media juggernaut. But not until you spend a little time with the stats like how many people use Facebook, who they are and how often they use it, do you get an idea of its reach and potential to change almost everything - marketing, media and yes, music. Facebook By The Numbers:


Add caption

Big Dog Robot Amazing!!!

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:25:00 +0000

Check this out!!!!!!

LinkedIn raises $88 million in stock sale

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:58:00 +0000

LinkedIn has raised $88 million in a stock sale of 1.27 million shares.
Investors and insiders also cashed out 7.5 million shares in an offering completed late Wednesday.
This marked the first time since the company's blockbuster initial public offering in May that insiders were permitted to sell shares. The shares were sold at $71 each.
LinkedIn shares rose 5% to $74.92 Thursday even after the professional networking company added some 8 million shares to the market, showing that investors still have a strong appetite for social media.
Roughly 9 million shares were sold in the IPO, so the secondary offering nearly doubled the volume of shares available on the market.
The amount raised -- $88 million after more than $2 million in fees -- fell short of the $100 million the company was targeting.
LinkedIn said it planned to use the money to fuel expansion of its offerings around the globe. The company had a loss in the third quarter, its first as a public company, even as its revenue doubled, raising concerns that it's spending too heavily on growth.
LinkedIn went public in May in the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Google's in 2004. The stock more than doubled on its first day of trading.
The IPO market is coming to life after months of economic turmoil and market volatility have shelved plans at many companies. Today, Angie's List made its public debut and Yelp filed for an IPO.

Scientists invent lightest material on Earth. What now?

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:56:00 +0000

Scientists have invented a new material that is so lightweight it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds.
It's so lightweight, styrofoam is 100 times heavier.
It is so lightweight, in fact, that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth, and no one has asked them to run a correction yet.
That's light!
The material has been dubbed "ultralight metallic microlattice," and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its "microlattice" cellular architecture.
"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release.
To understand the structure of the material, think of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- which are both light and weight efficient -- but on a nano-scale.
The material in the picture above is made out of 90% nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said it can be made out of other materials as well -- the nickel version was just the easiest to make.
As for the uses of such a material? That's still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI's principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.
In the meantime, we asked Bill Carter what would happen if we threw this material in the air and waited for it to fall to the ground.
"It’s sort of like a feather -- it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density," he said. "It takes more than 10 seconds, for instance, for the lightest material we’ve made to fall if you drop it from shoulder height."

Google Just Dropped Two Gigantic Bombs on the Music Industry...

noreply@blogger.com (I.L) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:28:00 +0000

Here's the snapshot of what Google presented in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

There's a download store. But who really cares if Warner Music Group wasn't on board? Paid downloads have always been a sideshow for consumers, anyway (though perhaps this means slower WMG uploads, let's see).
There's a social component. But who knows whether we'll be sharing purchased tracks on Google+ a year from now? I'm still trying to 'get' Plus; friend me on Facebook in the meantime. Sure, Google is excited about the ability to share full-length songs to your Plus circles. Sounds interesting, but let's see how that evolves... it's an experiment.

These, by contrast, aren't experimental - they're real game-changers . And Google Music is now shocking the industry with two giant prods:
(1) Google's music cloud is free for up to 20,000 songs; and
(2) their 'Artist Hub' allows anyone to directly upload, manage, and sell music, without the need for a DIY middleman.
These are not only game-changers, they could quickly provoke responses from Apple, Amazon, and others, while also potentially creating disastrous ripples for the entire DIY middleman space.
Meanwhile, the big-boy clouds are just launching, yet the game's already changing overnight! While Apple is limiting iTunes Match to 25,000 uploads - and making you pay for the privilege - Google is giving it to you for free. And, forcing Apple to revisit its strategy - tonight.

Then there's the DIY play, which has the potential to aggravate a long-silent faultline. If you had told me on Tuesday that Google was getting into DIY, I would have yawned. It's such an overcrowded space! But this is totally different, especially from someone as hefty as Google.

Their just-launched 'Artist Hub' is all about direct-uploading, with one upfront cost. And you don't need Tunecore or CD Baby, you just hop on board. "This is a bit of a new experience for a digital retailer," said Google's Chris Yerga.

The action is happening at music.google.com/artists, where Google is asking for a one-time, $25 startup fee. That sounds modest, though we've been impressed with how disastrously broke - and reluctant to pay - many artists can be.

The bigger question is whether another giant - ie, Apple or Amazon - now decides to do exactly the same thing. After all, why not create something equally artist-friendly, and create greater affinity to your ecosystem in the process? It's a threat that's been dangling for years, and a huge consideration given the lopsidedness enjoyed by the iTunes Store.

Let's see if Google just caused a DIY earthquake