The Spotify Event Was Great

Image via WikipediaThe Spotify CTO Talk

Spotify is in the same building as Google. I show up and there is Melissa. She is with Barnes & Noble. They are also in the same building. I did not know. I met her at a NY Tech MeetUp after party a few months back.

Free pizza is a great start to an event, I think. Good thing I don't drink beer. Otherwise they had plenty of those too.

The CTO Oskar Stal - who I got to talk to at great length after the formal event was over - started the talks. It was amazing to me how he was obsessed with company culture. He wanted Spotify's engineers to feel like there were many small team startups inside of Spotify. That seemed to be his number one concern.

Later I asked during the question answer session: "Should you not have the Chief Culture Officer title instead?" He said he did culture and many other things.

Henrik Landren gave a great talk - replete with great slides - on all the immense data Spotify collects. I got to see a side of Spotify I had not seen before. Artists get to see where their fans are. That would really help them plan their tours. Magic. Hadoop came in handy.

That made me think. Otherwise I told Oskar, I feel like Spotify is a finished product. What is there to add except more songs and more countries? He is like, oh no no no. There is so much to do.

The Spotify CTO Talk

Image via WikipediaSpotify USA, 76 9th Ave., Suite 1110, 11th Floor, New York, NY
Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 6:30 PM

Have you been wondering where Spotify's going both technically and as a tech organization? How do we get the music tracks to play so quickly? What's up with Spotify's data analytics and the data processing stack? What are Spotify's general architectural principles?

Come and hear about the 'big picture' of Spotify from the guys running the show. It's not often that they're all in town from Stockholm!

Speakers:

Oskar Staal - Chief Technology Officer
Mikael Krantz - Chief Architect
Henrik Landren - Head of Analytics
Wouter de Bie - Team Lead, Analytics Infrastructure

Agenda

6:30pm Mix and Mingle
7:00pm Presentations
8:00pm Q&A

GigaOm: Pandora: Spotify is our friend, not a competitor
Vimeo: Spotify – the story
The Register: Spotify looks for local spin guru: They really must be launching downunder
ZDNet: Spotify tops the charts for multi-platform support
TechNewsDaily: Spotify Hands-on: Worth the Hype?
Global Post: Swedish tech has its ABBA moment
Time: Today in Least Necessary Purchases: ‘Spotify For Dummies’
TechCrunch: Spotify Lands Major Studio Deals, Prepares To Launch Movie Service
Forbes: Facebook To Launch Music Service With Spotify
AllThingsD: Spotify’s U.S. Score So Far: 1.4 Million Users, 175,000 Paying Customers
Mashable: Spotify Eyes European Expansion [REPORT]
The Next Web: Spotify Opens for Business in Belgium and Switzerland
Mashable: Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]
LifeHacker: Spotify Is the Best Desktop Music Player We’ve Ever Used
New York Times: Spotify Loss Widens Despite Higher Revenue Its subscriptions, which cost about $10 to $15 a month, brought in $71 million, and the company also had $28 million in advertising. But its losses for the year totaled $42 million, up from $26 million 2009...... pays labels each time a listener streams a particular song. That system brings in lower royalties per song than downloads, but with a large enough listener base could in theory bring in substantial amounts ..... The company was believed to have more than 10 million total users.
TechCrunch: Welcome To Belgium, Spotify. (And To Austria And Switzerland)
Reuters: Spotify now has 250,000 paying U.S. users: sources
Forbes: Spotify Tries To Soothe Angry Users Over Facebook Conditions
AllThingsD: When Will Spotify Finally Come to the U.S.?
CNN: What's this Spotify thing all about?
ReadWriteWeb: Here's What Spotify's New Facebook Integration Looks Like
BusinessWeek: Record Sales Rise as Lady Gaga, Adele Find a Future With Spotify Music lovers are doing something they haven’t done in years: They’re buying more albums...... The number of albums sold this year has increased for the first time since 2004 .... Industry wide, sales of record albums, which include digital downloads, compact discs, some vinyl LPs and cassettes, are up 3 percent ...... Consumers who over the last several years rejected album prices of $14 to $15, and purchased singles instead, are now coming back to albums at lower prices. ..... “There is a significant market for the download of a total album for $9.99” ...... Levy and other industry executives see the pricing strategy as an investment. By making it easier for customers to buy albums they hope to gain market share and generate more interest in the music, eventually allowing them to profit from sources such as digital music platforms, merchandise, and concerts. ...... Adele’s “21,” for example, has so far sold 4.3 million copies in the U.S. this year, more than any other artist. ...... “An album like Adele’s is a concept album, enjoyed when the songs are not disaggregated,” Donio said. “She is doing well selling individual songs, but in cases like hers, the album is a work of art.” ...... Single track sales are up 10 percent to 1.055 billion so far for the year ..... When Lady Gaga released her second album, “Born This Way,” in May, Amazon.com held a one-day 99 cents sale that was so popular it overwhelmed the company’s Web servers. ....... Consumers also discover music through the growing popularity of services such as Rdio and Spotify. Though consumers can get music for free from these platforms, the services engage consumers and encourage them to make purchases, making them less likely to take part in illegal downloading ...... The Spotify service, Parks said, is helping to turn one- time music pirates into paying consumers. ....... “What Spotify has done is re-energized the base of music lovers,” Parks said in an interview. “Data shows that in all of the markets where Spotify operates, digital music sales have grown. We’re generating a lot of revenue for the industry from a generation that wasn’t buying music.”
NPR: How Spotify Works: Pay The Majors, Use P2P Technology
LA Times: Spotify's plan: get users hooked, then ask them to pay for music
Spotify - Wikipedia
Chicago Tribune: Spotify killed the radio star?
GigaOm: Indie labels stage another Spotify walkout

Shanti Mantra By Ravi Shankar

The Onion And Serious

Baratunde Thurston: The Brain Behind The Onion

My Take On AirTime (3)

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeMy Take On AirTime (2)
My Take On AirTime
Sean Parker's AirTime Could Net Him Tens Of Billions

AirTime will stand at the intersection between software/internet and group dynamics in the raw. That is an exciting proposition to me.

My Web Diagram

Also the timing will be right. As broadband's speeds get faster we will increasingly feel as casually about videos as we do about photos today. I am predicting an Instagram for short videos, for one.

AirTime's launch will open a whole new era of web innovation. This will be new territory. It will be almost as fundamental as Google's search and Facebook's social, if it is done right. AirTime's social will be of a vaster scope than Facebook's social.

But it has to be done right, and I am angling for a formal advisory role. I have been "advising" all sorts of startups for free here at my blog. But now I seek an advisory role, something formal. It is because when it comes to group dynamics, I am as good as they come. I know group dynamics like Bill Gates knew software. Or, rather, I know group dynamics like Sean Parker knows music and software. I am that good.

Bits And Pieces
White Male Conspiracy To Drive Me Homeless

Jack Dorsey With Om

gigaomroadmap on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Source: GigaOm

Sadda Haq

Click To Touch To Gesture And 3D

Image via WikipediaA two dimensional screen is not what the world really looks like. The smartphone's small screen is unreal, if you think about it. But the real story there is the mobility. The screen moves as you move. The real appeal of the smartphone is actually 3D.

Touch was a big move beyond the click of the mouse. Gesture is the next step up. How smart could that gesture get? Could you pinch the air and make things happen? Could the air around you get smart?

You bet.

The screen will still come into play. A really smart screen will read you as you pinch the air.

What beyond the gesture? A squint? Things get wild at that point. The old adage about your body language speaking volumes might literally become true. And there might be unintended consequences. Typing is a conscious decision. There are flame wars and all that. But flame wars based on gestures and squints could really get out of hand.

Seven Screens

Hot Dog

Super Amit, Super Swabbed
Mike Bloomberg, Amit Gupta
Robert Scoble Now Following Me On FoodSpotting
My FoodSpotting Photos Are Being Viewed

Events: Week Of November 7

Tuesday, November 8
7:00 PM NYC.rb: Building RESTful APIs w/ Grape
Pivotal Labs, 841 Broadway, Union Square

Wednesday, November 9
6:00 PM How Sailthru.com uses AWS + Cloudsizer + Yipit
Aol HQ, 770 Broadway, 6th Floor

7:00 PM NYC Spotify Tech Group
Spotify HQ, 76 9th Ave Suite 1110, 11th Floor

Thursday, November 10
6:30 PM ERA Giving Thanks to NY Startup Community Party with Goodwin Procter
Goodwin Procter, 620 Eighth Avenue

7:30 PM Steve Blank talk at Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures, 915 Broadway, 14th Floor

Networked Society 'On the Brink'

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