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- Ocarina: World's Bestselling Mobile AppNovember 26
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Congrats to the Smule team, whose Ocarina has topped the charts for two weeks now (and especially to CTO Ge Wang who is currently profiled on apple.com/pro).
Anyone can quickly learn to play the Ocarina -- hundreds of song sheets for the Ocarina are now available on Smule.com, thanks to users who have composed and uploaded their scores.
Click on the image to hear my son jamming at the Sonic Mule headquarters...Blogged with Flock - Nov 29: A Capella Holiday ConcertNovember 21
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I discovered last winter that the Bay Area is home to one of the world's premier A Capella choruses. Voices in Harmony sings jazz, pop, contemporary, barbershop, and traditional choral music under the direction of Dr. Greg Lyne, a professor from Arizona State and the St Petersburg Conservatory, and guest conductor for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Oddly, the group isn't well known locally, but they've been collecting international accolades and acclaim -- most recently winning the bronze medal at the BHS World Championship in July (BHS has 34,000 members worldwide).
Next Saturday afternoon at 3pm on Nov. 29 Voices in Harmony (joined by the Late Show quartet and Pride of the Pacific women's chorus) will perform a holiday concert at the California Theatre in San Jose. There are still a few tickets available, and my friends at the chorus have offered to invite the first group of 4+ people who buy tickets through my blog to a pre-concert VIP wine and cheese reception. (Just leave a comment with your email and name if you think you qualify.)
I have no affiliate code or any other financial interest in this event or the group (it's actually non-profit). I'm just sharing my love for their music. You have to hear them to understand, but if you go, you'll thank me.Blogged with - Why I Just Invested in GoodmailNovember 21
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How many letters have you snail mailed lately? I think I send about 10,000 emails for every letter I write. So why do enterprises who communicate with millions of customers continue to cut down trees and pay to print letters and envelopes have them physically carried around the world with hundreds of times the cost and latency of email?
The reason for this financial, environmental and logistical absurdity is that you'd have to be nuts to open an email from Bank of America, since most emails that are purportedly from Bank of America are not from Bank of America. They're actually from The I-Need-A-New-Mercedes Bank of Leningrad (or Budapest, or Tel Aviv, or Shanghai...). Furthermore, the ISP who delivers consumer email has no idea which hyperlinks and images are safe, and so as a policy the ISP strips all links, media and scripts from the email, rendering the medium rather useless to you and Bank of America.
The textbook solution to this problem is nearly impossible. You'd have to set up auditing procedures to authenticate all legitimate senders, and monitor the senders' behavior to ensure that they never engage in bad practices like spreading malware or spam. You'd have to examine every script and media object they wish to transmit. You'd have to set up and operate cryptographic infrastructure to establish the integrity of the message from the sender's computer all the way to the inbox (i.e. no added viruses or such). You'd have to convince the ISP's who - My Halloween Treat: OpenCandyNovember 12
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Despite rumors to the contrary, venture investors are still funding innovative and disruptive startups. My latest Series A investment, announced today, is OpenCandy, which I co-funded with Tim O'Reilly and Reid Hoffman.
Not every (any?) great software application comes from Redmond. Today more than ever individuals and small teams of programmers in every country of the world develop great applications that wither on the vine for lack of visibility and a business model. OpenCandy's technology promises revenue, cheap distribution and free analytics to programmers who may not have their own big marketing departments.
OpenCandy's first product is a recommendations engine that operates in the install wizard of downloaded software. While working for their prior employer DivX, the OpenCandy team discovered that users are far more likely to consider downloading new software while they're in the middle of downloading something else. This observation led them to embed software offers in DivX downloads that now generate $20 million annually for their former employer. - It's a Smule World After AllNovember 6
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Having realized a 30X gain on my 1997 investment in Tumbleweed, I'm delighted to be incubating Jeff Smith's next venture, Sonic Mule. After taking Tumbleweed public, Jeff retreated to Stanford in pursuit of his doctorate in classical music; he then joined Bessemer as an EIR, where he conceived Sonic Mule (aka Smule). Jeff recruited Ge Wang (Stanford) and Perry Cook (Princeton) -- two of the world's the most prominent professors in computer-music integration and the inventors of Chuck, an open source language that processes and renders sound in real time.
When Jeff's team isn't cleaning out Bessemer's kitchen, they're churning out ass-kicking Chuck-on-iPhone (CHiP) apps. Sonic Lighter (now in the Campaign edition), Sonic Vox (read Apple's review), and Sonic Boom all exceeded our sales projections -- check out the Sonic Lighter's adoption curve in the video below (this is the coolest board update I've ever gotten).