Life Is Rich

So, Pandora will live another day [in the U.S.]

Head in the sand, dying technology, idiot comment of the day by National Association of Broadcasters guy:

“This is good for music,” said Dennis Wharton, the executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters. “It sets a rate where artists will receive royalities for the music they produce.”

Wharton said although these “pureplay” Webcasts are popular, he doesn’t see this decision affecting local radio stations. He said the 235,000,000 people who listen to the radio every day will probably stick with it. “It’s hard to beat a free and local option,” he said.

Last year at WWDC I had a near out of body experience. I related most of that here. To recap, I used some software that I work with at my day job (Landmark Digital Services) that I had shoehorned into an iPhone to identify a number of songs at an event at the Apple WWDC conference. To this day, I still consider it my 15 seconds of fame. I even have the audio someone in the audience captured of the event. A few months later, everyone with an iPhone would have access to this technology via the Shazam iPhone application (Shazam is a licensee of the Landmark Digital BlueArrow technology).

This year at WWDC, I was once again looking forward to Stump the Experts – the event that gave me my 15 seconds. I wasn’t planning on trying to identify any music this year. Everyone has the technology now, and I knew that if Fred Huxham and Mark “The Red” Harlan – the masterminds of this event were going to continue with the music identification tradition, it wouldn’t be recognizable by any published methods. I had my time in the sun. I was looking forward to meeting Mark again after his comments on this blog about the event last year. He even promised me a copy of his book on Texas Hold’em (which I’ll be reading on the plane ride back home).

I was a bit taken aback when at the beginning of Stump this year, I was invited onto the stage to sit with Apple Experts in front of a couple thousand people where the previous years events were retold and I was congratulated for “breaking” a part of the Stump. It was an amazing honor, and I thank Fred and Mark for extending my 15 seconds for a few more.

It amazes me how many times I’ve overheard people at the conference this year retelling the story of “that guy at the Stump”. Now that I spend more of my time managing developers and working with finance and business development, I have little opportunity to extend my geek cred with programming projects. Sure glad that I spent some of my spare time on that little skunkworks development project – it has definitely paid back in spades. It also reminds me why I started programming computers back on an Atari 800XL some thirty odd years ago – the thrill of creation and seeing a piece of code deliver its magic…

NOTE: If you happen to have any photos of the beginning of Stump this year, please let me know. I really would like to have a photograph of myself up on the stage!

Haven’t had much to blog about lately, so it was good to find this excellent article to provide fodder for discussion while also dovetailing deeply with my own life and some of my recent commentary. I no longer watch TV. I watch a few shows, which I would just as well download or watch over the Internet than through a broadcast medium at the time I desire rather than some predetermined schedule to force me to watch the news or some other tied in show. Most of my entertainment now is interactive – be it Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or online games. My favorite new “shows” are 5-10 minutes shorts on YouTube or one of the other social video sites – often made by a ragtag group of folks on a shoestring budget – and completely divorced from TV as we currently know it.

Once again, the people in-between the content and the consumers are facing extinction and are doing everything they can to stop it. They are no longer necessary – like the appendix – a vestigial artifact of a past age. The Internet has made them irrelevant. Like any cornered animal fighting for its life, its willing to do about anything to survive… be it nasty DRM or attempts to past protective and draconian legislation – usually at the expense of both the consumer and the content provider. Fortunately, these attempts generally only prolong the inevitable death and rarely disrupt it completely.