Come for the Ride…

There’s not a lot of “web 2.0″ sites that get me excited. I’m perfectly happy with my “web 1.0″ forums. Facebook is nice for keeping up with friends and Twitter is a pretty novel idea too. However, this is one site that I believe WILL infact have a long and lasting impact on at least one section of our society and that is Pandora and it’s possible effects on the future of the music business.

Sure, Pandora is great because it’ll match up your “musical DNA” with that of others and uses the information to create a database of artists that you’ll like to listen to. In a way, it’s a Google for music. It’s not about advertising and money in order to get airtime. It’s about a conflagration of the musical likes and dislikes of everyone else who listens to Pandora. It’s “SongRank” (my term, not theirs) database is pleasing to my ears as it not only keeps out the stuff I don’t want to listen to, but more importantly, and more to the point, it introduces me to music that others who like the same stuff I do listen to. So, what does this have to do with “the revolution” you say?

Let’s say you’re a small rock band in Ireland, trying to make your way into the big time. You play at local pubs and have a nice weekend gig, but your dream is playing at Madison Square Garden. Even if you do get “big” in the UK, getting into the US market is still a huge undertaking. Unless you have a huge amount of money to tour and promote yourselves, the odds are you’ll just be another indie rock band. However, you and your 4 band mates signed up for Pandora accounts. You each add yourself to your favorite music and then pick out some similar music from U2, Keane, The Rolling Stones and similar rock bands. You’ve now melded yourself into the Musical DNA of Pandora. It’s not a full proof method of becoming the next Springstein, but it’s yet another tool that will move the power away from large corporate labels and into the hands of the bands themselves and it will surely get people listening to your music who may have otherwise never heard of  you.

Now, getting your music onto Pandora will be a task in and of itself. I don’t know where they extract their music from, but the point is that indie bands have a VERY powerful tool in getting their music to people who might not otherwise hear it. I can’t see Pandora shunning small bands as they would, concievably, want as much music on there as possible. By no means is a search engine marketer going to replace a band manager, but unique and trend-setting tools like Pandora, YouTube and MySpace make being a small, emerging band just a little easier these days.

I’m not usually a fan of chain mail forwards, but it’s the eve of launch day and my brain is fried. Plus my mother in-law sent this to me.

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At the recent computer expo (COMDEX) in Vegas, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

‘If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.’

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash…….. Twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single ‘This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation’ warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You’d have to press the ‘Start’ button to turn the engine off.

As you all know, we are based in Atlanta, GA. As recently as earlier today, we have had multiple tornadoes today touch down in the city and cause some pretty heavy damage. Even my own family saw some damage due to extreme hail and we had quite a weekend of picking up and cleaning up after the storm. Heck, my phone and internet even suffered through the weekend due to this damage. The people downtown were even worse though:

AJC Tornado Damage Pictures

All the images shown are images submitted by readers of the AJC who have sent them into the news paper. I recall a day when you had a staff photographer at news papers that were sent to take all pictures. A majority of all pictures taken still show either the AP logo or some sort of freelance photographer that the newspapers pay for their pictures. However, with the invention of Flickr, Webshots and Google Images Search, it begs the question: why should I pay someone a full-time salary or expensive freelance fees when I can ask for people to send us images with the privilege of having their images show up on the AJC website. For example:

Flickr Atlanta Tornado Damage Pictures

Here’s another example of the recent crane collapse in New York City:

Flickr New York Crane Collapse

Not only are the pictures better than anything I’ve seen on TV or any media website about the accident, they were done immediately after the incident without having to send out a team to get pictures or manage the logistics someone on the payroll.

In my opinion, one of the riskiest tasks to creating an internet startup is the hiring of developers to create and build your website. Especially, for those of you who are web entrepreneurs, but not programmers. So much is riding on this aspect of the business in the beginning. The bottom line is you have got to check these people out! I am so tired of seeing people get ripped off. Why, because it almost happened to me during my first venture and it actually did happen to one of my colleagues. Nobody ever thinks it could happen to them, yet some of the smartest people get taken every day. I like to use the analogy that programmers are like home contractors, they can build you something great or they can take you to the cleaners. You have got to do your homework on these people! I cannot stress this point enough. Don’t just check their portfolio, find the contacts under each website in their portfolio and give them a call. If there aren’t any contacts, be weary. If there are, call these people and get some feedback. Get references, but don’t just ask for two or three. Ask them to supply you with ten and then you decide which ones to call. Anybody can find people to give bogus references. So don’t be surprised if you think your calling the CEO of some company, but it turns out to be his best friend. The bottom line is these guys are good. Very good! They know exactly what it takes to earn your trust and appear legitimate. My dad always told me that the greatest scammers are the best at appearing honest and sincere. Thats how they suck you in! A colleague of mine who spent about a year of his life creating an internet business related to the music industry, fell victim to one of these scum bags. Its really ashame because he had a great idea too. This company appeared so legit that he even flew out to visit their office and did not suspect anything. I would have fallen victim to this company as well, but my gut told me that two things were suspicious. First off, the guy just appeared to be trying to earn my trust a little too much. He sent me a video of the company, he even sent pictures of him and his family. It just didn’t seem right. Always trust your gut, I’ve found that its usually right. Secondly, for a company that was supposed to have over eighty employees, this alleged CEO had just a little bit to much time on his hands to try and convince me to use his services. Even their site looks kosher and I must admit, its actually pretty neat http://www.ispg.co.in/. Do they look legitimate? You be the judge. Happy hunting and tread carefully…

While watching the NBC news tonight, the big discussion was about how Obama copied a small portion of the speech from another governor and how Hilary copied some of Bill’s speech from years prior to help make their points.  While making the point on air, they showed clips of Deval Patrick from YouTube to point out the similarity in the words.  I wasn’t so into the topic as I was with the technology NBC was using, which were clips of very poor quality from YouTube.

Now, as a national broadcasting company with years and years of video in archive, surely they must have the exact same clip in higher quality locked in a vault somewhere.  Why would a nationally praised news program forgo digging up video of higher quality and instead show grainy videos from YouTube and call it a day?  Are we now getting lazy? Could it be because NBC is flat out admitting YouTube’s search and video distribution services are way better and easier than having a staff on board whose job is to dig up old videos?

Now, if everyone wants to play nice then this would be fine… in a perfect world old business would mix with the new and we would all share our toys.  However, NBC is the same company that has repeatedly banned their own videos from appearing on YouTube due to copyright violations.  Awesome clips of SNL (who no one watches anymore except YouTube helped revived it) have been removed repeatedly at the request of NBC.  Bummer for all of us who choose to have a life on Saturday nights but also wanted to check out things like Dick-in-a-Box or the People getting punched video.

So to be fair, I think NBC should be banned from using anything from YouTube on its broadcasts.  If you’re not going to share your toys, I don’t see why you should be allowed to play with everyone else’s.  When you showed the grainy video on your nationally televised news program, did the guy who stood in the crowd and filmed the grainy video get paid for their efforts?  Most likely not… so where do you guys really stand on your own copyright policies?