Disqus - Friends of DavidA

Re: Bug - Under The Hood

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:45:12 -0000

OMG!

Cross this thing with a rapid-prototype machine ("3-D printer") and we're at the beta fabricator!

Really really hip, wish I had the skills to play with the BUGbase...

Definitely the coolest thing I've seen since last night's Wilco show at the Greek ;-)

(I thought Nels was gonna have an aneurysm a couple of times...sheesh!)

(also, not being able to preview your comment on Disqus is awful)

Re: Bug - Under The Hood

Ethan Bauley — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:26:57 -0000

Hi Daniel...great, thanks, I know it is a work in progress, keep up the good work! ;-)

Re: Rick Rubin And The Future Of The Music Business

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:12:48 -0000

Sigh.

Since the obligatory "people want to own" and "vinyl sounds best" comments are here, I'll do my part:

1. Ownership won't matter in [insert number between 3 and 10] years when you're never "off the grid" (that is, you have a near-ubiquitous wireless connection). You'll be able to listen to any track on-demand. Any decent music service in this world will enable you to download a copy for portability's sake. We are in a transition period now, technologically. It sucks. It's probably like being in a "adolescent" startup.

Side benefit: on-demand music is measurable.

2. Convenience drives adoption, not fidelity. Fidelity catches up later. When we're all surfing 100mbps FiOS, MP3 can take a back seat to something better.

Re: Rick Rubin And The Future Of The Music Business

Ethan Bauley — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:55:15 -0000

"...as much as I'd like to see an 'always on the grid' world happen soon, or even in my lifetime for that matter, it just ain't gonna happen. The whole idea is hugely cost prohibitive in every sense of the word."

Am I missing something here? What about 3G? What about the entire country of Japan? What about this:

http://www.readwriteweb.com...

Are you saying there's no way that in the next 20 YEARS a wireless device will be able to reliably sustain a 128kbps connection in Valdosta, GA?

If so, that's REALLY dark.

Re: Biz Stone on Read/Write Talk

Ethan Bauley — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 12:17:27 -0000

Man, I can't imagine working on an entrepreneurial project that isn't ridiculously fun to think about and work on. That makes no sense at all!

Re: Read It In A Blog Post

Ethan Bauley — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:29:16 -0000

Lefsetz:

"There’s never been a better time to be either a player or a businessman. Unfortunately, there’s no book to guide you, you’ll have to write your own.

All of the continents may have been explored, but that doesn’t mean people don’t want to go on journeys, don’t want to be made to feel alive. Music has got this power. It’s your move."

I liked that quote, too.

- Ethan

Re: Doubt

Ethan Bauley — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:57:04 -0000

Context is everything...by being honest about your doubts, it really gives you the freedom to stretch your mind [especially publicly].

I really learned this through parsing all the dogma about the collision of the music and tech industries.

[Especially here on AVC]

Re: Close, But No Cigar

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:15:28 -0000

One underrated driver in some of these decisions is contracts with SAG, etc.

Re: The Best Cross Platform Folder Share Service?

Ethan Bauley — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:47:08 -0000

box.net is great; easy sharing, great UI, and you can send files via email attachment

Re: Hacking Philanthropy

Ethan Bauley — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:11:19 -0000

To me, It really makes a difference that organizations like USV express their identity/caring about things like this [tech apps to public/social goods] openly...

We [meaning both "people" and "entities"] are all part of the same community and I love "entities" that [as a matter of course] carry out actions that help "people" directly...

Humansim in commerce... !

I can't be the only one that cares ;-)

Re: Wow

Ethan Bauley — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:32:40 -0000

Smart boards are amazing tools. My fiance teaches third grade; she changed schools this year, and her new classroom only has a blackboard. Not quite as useful! Or fun!

Also, I think that the forthcoming Yahoo! Teachers service has huge huge huge potential:

http://teachers.yahoo.com/

Thirdly, it's great to see more proof that media outlets [like AVC] with a real community around them can finance a worthy cause direct through the web [wink wink!].

Finally, it pains me when I hear people [Andy Swan, above] equate draining public funding for schools with "reducing government intervention in our lives." Education is the only thing that matters in the world, and our system is desperate for resources on every level. Every dollar you take out of education increases the liklihood of your car getting stolen pretty dramatically. Then, the government will definitely be intervening in your life ;-)

Re: Online Distribution

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:28:36 -0000

Andrew Parker had a related meme going on his blog last week: "What is a software company"?

My attitude is: if you're connecting with your customers [transactionally or socially] on the web, it behooves you to "be a software company"

There are white label services out there but they're pretty dorky...

What Radiohead wants is the Amazon Music API...waaaaaaaay white label.

Re: Leslie Feist with friends

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:42:25 -0000

Yeah, that was good...the BSS performance of "7/4 Shoreline" (w/ Feist) on Conan is great...

Check out the Yeah Yeah Yeah's RIP IT on Letterman (July 2007):

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Karen O...you can't deny her. She knows how to work...it...out.

That riff is monstrous. Letterman loves it, too ;-)

Re: Online Distribution

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:04:15 -0000

YES! That was an incredible magazine...I only got 8 or 10 issues before it was cancelled.

Re: Online Distribution

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:21:30 -0000

Anyone could make this using S3 and EC2 for individual bands, because *the bands already own all their IP*.

Bands still need another service to syndicate their music to all the other outlets, but you can swing that with IODA or Tunecore and Koch or Redeye.

Re: Online Distribution

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:22:48 -0000

Didn't Amazon buy one of those "Choose Your Own Price" music startups?

The answer is yes...Fred, anyone, remember what it's called?

Re: The New Hype Machine

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:56:09 -0000

Great point, but the fact is that the Hype Machine is still creating huge value for users in isolation [by crawling all those music blogs]. That's pretty important.

Along the same lines, Twitter is more analogous to the "who else has a fax machine" issue.

I think the threshold that we have crossed is that normal people are *expressing themselves* through interactions with software.

Re: The New Hype Machine

Ethan Bauley — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:19:44 -0000

Well, they've just "launched," the service is in demand/some scaling issues, Fred is a user...should the countdown to HypeM's appearance on the USV blog begin?

Seriously though, HypeM is in a good spot to leverage the record labels' desire to transition to pure digital promotion. That could be a huge revenue stream w/o legal issues.

Re: The New Outside.in

Ethan Bauley — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:53:30 -0000

Steven's post is brilliant.

Have you guys seen EveryBlock.com?

[created by a grant from the Knight Foundation to The Django Guy Adrain Holovaty]

Re: The New Outside.in

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:37:50 -0000

Considering they haven't finished building anything yet, that seems to be expected.

Holovaty has written some brilliant essays on reformatting news stories in XML. They're posted on his home page:

http://www.holovaty.com/

EveryBlock is intriguing because the Knight Foundation requires that the projects it funds be open-source. My theory on EveryBlock is that they are making an open-source web app that will scrape local government websites and organize the data. That data is will then be made freely available online.

Anyone in any geography would be able to apply the open-source framework to their locality.

In theory, EveryBlock would amass useful government info [like the construction permits outlined in Steven's post] and make it accessible...

Paging Tim O'Reilly...

Re: Freeloading In Rainbows

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:35:30 -0000

jackson nails this one.

1. Most tours never even get off the ground; it takes money to make money [or to reach "break even"].

In fact, the phrase "break even" is instructive here, because it implies some kind of sunk cost that the artist tries to recoup through ticket sales, etc. Most artists [even moderately successful ones with a real fan base] don't have the funds to finance *any* type of "sunk cost."

2. Publishing is huge.

Re: Freeloading In Rainbows

Ethan Bauley — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:40:52 -0000

The same thing [strike, etc] is going to happen next year with SAG:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

I called it ;-)

http://avc.disqus.com/close...

Re: Guitar Queer-O

Ethan Bauley — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:54:25 -0000

I was especially geeked by this because I had written a pretty long meditation on Guitar Hero's "dorkification of our culture" on my blog a few weeks before this episode came out:

Rock Band, ne Guitar Hero"

There are many sides of the issue, including the fact that Guitar Hero does make musical *collaboration* easier, which is a good thing.

(You know, Trey Parker et al don't shoot the episodes until the preceding week...I'm sure they're biting.)

I also followed that post up, after playing some more Guitar Hero, here.

They could have said, "stop hating on Guitar Hero/taking music so seriously", but they didn't...

I was most happy at the end of the episode, when they definitively came down on my side, politically: practicing Guitar Hero is just insanely lame.

;-)

Re: Guitar Queer-O

Ethan Bauley — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:42:46 -0000

This 17 year old needs to find a milieu where his chops are getting pushed by players *better than he is*...that's the best way to progress musically.

Or, keep shooting for "superstar power"...we all know what happens when you reach one million points ;-)

Re: Fear and Loathing Is Not A Great Brand Image

Ethan Bauley — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:30:26 -0000

Agreed.

The "jilted lover" comment was genius.

Using their products is like dating an insanely hot, intelligent woman...that is a true narcissist.

My loathing hasn't reached parity with my appetite but it may.