Posts from VC & Technology

XSPF, which when spoken sounds like spiff, is  the XML Shareable Playlist Format.

So what?  Why do you care?

Because services like Rhapsody, Napster, and Y! Unlimited are the future of the music business.

One day, everyone who enoys music will be getting their music like they get a dialtone.

Music will be a subscription service.  It is already but there are lot of technical, implementation, and business model hurdles that need to get worked out before everyone gets their music this way.

But I am absolutely convinced its going to happen.  It has to frankly. Because the current way we get music is ridiculous in a digital world.

But back to spiff, why does it matter?

Because when everyone has access to all the music all the time, sharing music is going to explode.  Everyone will be a DJ, everyone will send music to their friends and family, and it will all be legal.

Spiff is the way that will happen.

Go back to my post on Y! Unlimited.  At the end I said:

Regardless of what Apple does, here is the thing I want Yahoo!, Real,
and Napster to do.  Make your shared playlist links compatible with
each other.  Create a standard for sharing music legally on the
Internet.  That’s what this market needs most of all.

That generated a few comments and emails.  All pointing to XSPF.  When I looked at XSPF, I saw what I have always wanted.  I can blog my Rhapsody playlist of the week but you can’t listen to it unless you have Rhapsody.  What if I could easily publish that as an XPSF file and you could listen to it on Rhapsody, Y! Unlimited, and Napster?  What if Steve Jobs offered an unlimited subscription offer on iTunes and supported XSPF?

That’s my vision.  And it’s going to happen.  Unfortunately, it’s going to take a while.

As I’ve been hinting in this blog for a week or so, we are now podcasting at the Wilson home.

Our show is called Positively 10th Street and was named after the street we live on in NYC and the great Bob Dylan song Positively 4th Street.

The concept is pretty simple.  We sit in our kitchen and talk about music, life in NYC, stuff that’s happening, and we play five songs.  Each family member brings one song to each podcast.

We did our first yesterday and its available here.

You can also subscribe to the podcast via RSS here.

We have a few kinks to work out.  The main one is that we are better at mixing the audio in the software instead of manually on our little $49 mixer.  That means that the two songs the girls played on their iPods that we manually mixed don’t fade in and out very nicely.

There is also a brief hum during one short audio part that I need to figure out.

But all in all, it was a pretty simple thing to do.  I recommend it highly to anyone who likes playing around with audio recording on their computer.

We hope to do one show a week.  There’s no hard and fast schedule so they may come out during the week some weeks and the weekends on others.  Everyone enjoyed it and as long as that is the case, we are going to keep doing it.

If you’d like to auto load this podcast to your iPod, here’s how to do it:

1 – Get a podcasting client. I suggest iPodder because it’s open source, it’s cross platform, and it’s free.  You can download a Windows or Mac version here.

2 – Install iPodder on the computer where you have iTunes and synch your iPod.

3 – Select tools then scheduler to set a time every day when iPodder will go out and check for new Podcasts.

4 – Add Positively 10th Street to your subscriptions by selecting the subscriptions tab and then the + sign to add a feed.  Enter the following into the URL –  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

5 – Then hit one of the two large buttons on the upper left to cause iPodder to go out and download the first Positively 10th Street show.

After you’ve done all that, you will find Postively 10th Street in your iPod under Playlists and all new versions will be automatically loaded into that location.

We hope you enjoy Positively 10th Street!

I have blogged extensively about HD Radio technology.  I am an investor and board member of iBiquity Digital, the developer of HD Radio. So take all of this as me promoting my investment if you want to.

But what I have been saying for the past couple years on this blog and elsewhere is that digital is going to change radio the way digital changed cell phones and set top boxes. It’s going to explode radio.

Yesterday we had the first announcement of many to come that show one important way that radio is going to explode.  Infinity announced that they were splitting their Chicago station, WUSM, into two stations using HD Radio technology.  Here is the WSJ story if you have a subscription.

WUSM is a country station.  The existing channel will continue to be broadcast in analog and primary channel digital.  But they will air a "younger, hipper" country station on a second digital channel at the same frequency.

iBiquity used to call this channel splitting technology supplemental audio.  But nobody liked that term.  So now we call it "multicasting".

HD Radio technology will allow station owners to multicast a lot more than two channels per station.  It depends on a lot of things, but theoretically you could get 5 stations per channel in an all digital mode and with moore’s law working for you, it could get better than that over time.

Satellite radio is popular because you get 100 stations and a ton of high quality niche programming.  Well HD Radio is going to allow traditional broacasters to offer that much audio programming for free in every market in the country.  This is going to empower a lot of innovation and experimentation in the programming area and that is exactly what radio needs to get its mojo back.

I learned a new acronym today.

ESORS.

It stands for Employee Stock Option Reference Securities.

Cisco announced yesterday that it plans to create a limited number of these securities and sell them to a limited number of institutional investors.  ESORS are designed to match as closely as possible the terms of an employee stock option that Cisco issues to its employees.

By creating a parallel security and selling it in a third party transaction, Cisco can determine exactly what its options are worth.  My guess is that Cisco is hoping that the ESORS won’t be worth nearly as much as the accountants are suggesting.  And so by doing this, they can reduce the compensation charge they have to take when they issue the options.

I think its an interesting development.

UPDATE:  Oliver Weiner said it better in his comments to this post, so I am posting them here:

i think that the importance of this development is completely being
understated. forget the ramifications for csco and tech co’s in
particular, but for all companies to be able to utilize a simliar
model. what csco did is brilliant, they said to investors, ok so you
want us to lower valuations b/c of options and make ourselves cheaper
through accounting, instead of guessing, why dont you (the investor
community) tell us what they are worth. its true capitalism through
markets. its a natural extension. however they will need to be
commoditized and tranched (kind of like traded mortgage related
securities). this will not be smooth transistion but is a significant
development to watch in the maturation of the US corporation which in
turn is de facto model global corporation.

I’d love Six Apart to make it simple for me to elevate a comment to a post. So many great comments get wasted behind the front page.

I am not qiute ready to announce anything but there is a lot of podcasting prep work going on in our house these days.

Jason from Insomnia Radio and Paul from Mass Hysteria helped me out with recommendations for software and mics.

Jackson helped me figure out how to use the audio software and mix it down.

Josh helped me do a trial podcast and we had lots of fun doing it.

And Libsyn got the huge mp3 file online (typepad wouldn’t take it – sorry Andrew!).

So I’ve got one last thing to deal with.  We (not saying who yet) are going to play music, rock n roll music, and I want to do it right.  So I went and downloaded an ASCAP license application.  It looks simple enough.  But then I got to the rate schedules and calculations.  WTF am I supposed to do with that?

I suppose I can call ASCAP and I will, but if anyone knows an easier way to podcast licensed music, please post a comment or send me an email.

I’ve posted on this a couple times before.

In November of 2004, 57% of my readers used IE and 28% used Firefox.

In January of 2005, 63% of my readers used IE and 26% used Firefox.

Now, only 38% of my readers use IE and 42% used Firefox.  Firefox has passed IE as the leading browser on my blog.  I am sure IE is still safely ahead on the Internet at large, but not in my world.

Here is the chart:

The other big gainer is Safari.  It’s gone from 5% in November 2004 to 12% today.

I know that there are emerging security issues with Firefox that must please Microsoft at some level, but Firefox is a juggernaut that is really taking share from IE and that is a big deal.

Rags has a great post comparing and contrasting VCs and record labels.

I really cannot argue with any of his observations.  I think he’s nailed the analogy as far as it goes.

Rags goes on to point out that the VC business model is better than the record label business model because the VC is the entrepreneur’s parner in his entire enterprise whereas the record label is not.

That is true on a deal by deal basis, but certainly not true for the life span of the serial entrepreneur.  So maybe the record label/VC relationship is closer than Rags thinks.

I have a friend who built a very successful record label and he made the exact same point to me last year. My friend feels that the future of the record label business will look more like the VC business over time wtih the record label getting into the publishing and artist management functions.  I don’t know if he’s right, but Rags thinks so.  Rags says:

Like others, I believe labels will evolve to be less dependent on
recordings and more holistic in their approach to artists by taking a
smaller piece of all of the revenue streams rather than a huge piece of
the one.  I know EMI is/has tried it with Robbie Williams and am not
sure how successful that has been but, even if it hasn’t, it makes a
lot of sense to me.   In fact, I can see labels horizontally
integrating with artist managers &/or concert promoters (and
publishers).  After all, the label is instrumental in building the
brand of the artist, they should get a piece of more than just the
recorded music.  So should artist managers and other players based on
their relative contribution to the success of the enteprise that is the
artist.

Great post Rags.

Readers of this blog know that I love Rhapsody.

I honestly have never tried the new Napster.

Both of these services let you listen a huge music library over the Internet on demand.

You want to listen to a song or a record, you just type it in, and the music just starts playing.

Both services also allow you to burn music to a CD for just under $1/song.

And recently, they’ve both added "to go" services that let you synch whatever songs and playlists you like to your portable music device.

The two big problems with these services is that they don’t work on the Mac and they don’t work with iPods. That’s not their fault (at least the iPod part).  Steve Jobs wants you to use iTunes if you have an iPod and to date, he hasn’t seen the need to offer unlimited listening.

The other really big deal with these services is the ability to share playlists.  I am posting Rhapsody playlists to my blog and emailing them with my brother.  If you have Rhapsody, all you do is click on the link and you can listen to the playlist.  That’s the way music sharing should work.

The problem is that there just aren’t that many Rhapsody or Napster users.  It’s not a mainstream thing yet.

Enter Yahoo!.  Yesterday they launched Y! Music Unlimited.

Here is the comparison of the three services, according to Yahoo!

Unlimited access to subscription music catalog (when purchased on an annual basis)† $4.99/mo $14.95/mo $13.32/mo Unlimited access to subscription music catalog (when purchased on a monthly basis)† $6.99/mo $14.95/mo $14.99/mo Share music with friends using Yahoo! Messenger Transfer subscription music to portable player Burnable downloads $.79 $.99 $.89 Personalized recommendations for subscription music Pre-programmed commercial- free radio stations 120+ 50+ 80+

At first glance, Y! Music Unlimited looks to be a fantastic deal.  I am going to download this service and give it a try.

Possibly the biggest thing about Yahoo!’s entrance is that they’ve integrated this service with a new music search engine that not only searches their music service, but also the rest of the music on the Internet.  Vertical search for music.  Cool.

But Yahoo! hasn’t addressed the two big issues I outlined.  There is no Mac client and there’s no iPod compatibility.

Probably the best thing that can come of Yahoo!’s entrance into this market is lowering the price for Rhapsody and Napster, which certainly should happen, and hopefully pressure for Apple to offer unlimited listening and a "to go" service, which may not happen because it may negatively impact Apple’s iTunes margins.

Regardless of what Apple does, here is the thing I want Yahoo!, Real, and Napster to do.  Make your shared playlist links compatible with each other.  Create a standard for sharing music legally on the Internet.  That’s what this market needs most of all.

Here are some del.icio.us links to the Y! Music Unlimited story.

UPDATE:  Here is the blog post from the guy who built the Y! Music Unlimited service.  I found this link via del.icio.us.

There’s a guy named Matt who reads my blog regularly and lives on the other side of Washington Square Park from me.  We’ve never met, but we’ve exchanged a bunch of emails lately.

Today, we were having an email conversation about Google and he said that they’d become the "Starbucks of the Internet".  I replied "How So?"  He replied:

…just that they’re on every corner.  It’s like the quote from the
movie Best in Show:  "We met at Starbucks.  Not the same one. They
were kitty corner from one another.  We just noticed each other from
across the street."  😉

Later on in the day, I was talking to my friend Mark and he called Google "The McDonalds of Internet Advertising – Billions Served".

When two people who’ve never met express similar ideas in the same afternoon, I generally take notice.

And it really crystalized what I had been thinking and trying to write about for the past couple days.  I spent a half hour on the train down to Baltimore this morning trying to write a post about Google and didn’t like what I wrote.  Mark and Matt helped me articulate what I too had been feeling lately.

I think Google has become so mainstream and so ubiquitous in our everday Internet lives that its lost its mojo in some ways. That doesn’t mean it won’t continue to be hugely relevant, hugely profitable, and hugely important.  But it does mean that there’s a vacuum that can get filled by others who are small, innovative, new, and exciting.

My partner Brad used to go to Starbucks twice a day every day.  Once in the morning on the way to work and once after lunch.  It was his routine no matter where we were.  Recently a new coffee shop opened near our office called Joe.  They also have a store in the village.

Joe is twice as far from our office as the nearest Starbucks. It doesn’t have wifi.  It doesn’t sell music.  It doesn’t have four stores in walking distance from our office. But Brad visits Joe twice a day and hasn’t been going to Starbucks at all recently. Because Joe makes a damn good cup of coffee.

If you invest in the Internet, you must watch Google and understand them. And so I do that a fair amount.

What I see today is a big company (yes, they are big now) trying to extend its reach beyond search and into every nook and cranny of opportunity on the Internet.  And without a lot of rhyme or reason.

Google has recently launched some very attractive web services like Google Local and Google Maps. Their SMS service is a killer app for cell phones. It seems like they are launching a new web service every week. It’s so fast and furious that it is making my head spin.

But I don’t understand how all of these new web services have anything to do with their core business of targeting advertising via search and contextual advertising.  Do these services create more inventory for them to sell?  Do they generate more data that allows Google to increase the relevance of the advertising?  In some cases, like Local and Maps, I see the logic. In many other cases, it just seems like a laboratory turning out cool stuff and seeing what sticks.

And while they crank out more and more new stuff, their two core products, Search and Adsense, seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation.

Adsense doesn’t perform very well for publishers. So much so that many publishers are turning back to banners. And Google is also turning to banners. It’s back to the future.  That’s not innovation.

Google could acknowledge the limitations of its current contextual ad system and improve it. Or they could invest in new targeting systems like behavioral and beyond. But they are turning to serving bannners like Doubleclick did almost ten years ago.  Why?  I don’t know.

And what about search?  Has Google improved its search product
recently? Not from what I can tell. I still get a tremendous amount of
noise in the results. It’s still better than Yahoo!, but not by much.

And finally, Google is acting like AOL all of a sudden. You can’t do a deal with them without paying respect to their market position. That’s fine and is always the case with a market leader, but it will come back to bite them because the deals they won’t do will get done with others. And some of those deals are going to be important ones that will create new participants in the market who will grow and become more powerful over time.

Then there is the issue of caching the Intneret with the Accelerator. That is not web friendly behavior.  It’s another AOL move. It’s a walled garden approach to the Internet. Google is supposed to be the most net saavy company going. If so, why would they do something like that?

Some people are going to read this post and think that I am trashing Google. I am not.  Google has an enormous franchise and is better positioned than any Internet company I can think of.

But size is the enemy of efficiency and innovation.  And Google has become a very big company very quickly.  They are in Starbucks and McDonalds company now.  That’s great for them but its also great news for the little guy like Joe who can make a better cup of coffee or a better web service.