Tom Conrad

Moving Day: visit me at http://tomconrad.net

2007-05-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'm packing up and moving to WordPress:

A big change at Pandora

2006-05-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Tonight Pandora is making a fundamental change to the way we generate playlists. Up to this point Pandora stations have been driven entirely by the musical characteristics uncovered by the Music Genome Project. While this has provided us with a powerful foundation, we're the first to admit that sometimes we just got it terribly wrong.

Starting tonight we're adding an entirely new dimension to playlist generation: community feedback. Now our listeners' collective feedback has the power to correct for the cases where the "music alone" gets it wrong. When that happens our listeners vote with their thumbs and now - when the evidence is overwhelming that a song just simply doesn't belong on a particular station - that feedback will correct the station, not just for one listener, but for all listeners. In essence all our listeners just became part of the Music Genome Project team. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

Pandora at BayCHI Tonight

2006-04-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

If you live in the bay area and are interested in learning more about Pandora's approach to user experience and playlist creation stop by tonight's 7:30PM BayCHI meeting:

http://www.baychi.org/program/

Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic search paradigm of relevance and flat lists of results, resulting in different user experience challenges. This panel brings together panelists from Netflix, Live365, Pandora, and digg to explore trends in social search.

Rashmi Sinha has put together a great lineup for the panel including Neil Hunt from Netflix, David Porter from Live365, Kevin Rose from Digg, and Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us. I'm really looking forward to meeting all of these people; I'm a big fan of their work. Hope to see you there.

Pandora gets a Progress Bar

2006-03-28T00:03:00.000-08:00

We rolled out a whole bunch of changes at Pandora tonight. Many of them are aimed at making playlists better; I'm pretty excited about those as that's what it's really all about for us. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

We've also added a tiny little progress bar to let you know how much of song is left. I can pretty safely say it's the smallest progress bar every released. It's just tiny. So get your bifocals and head on over to Pandora for a look.

Pandora at the OpenLaszlo Meetup Tonight in SF

2006-03-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

Our good buddies over at Laszlo Systems are having a meetup tonight in San Francisco and I'll be on hand to talk a bit about our use of Laszlo at Pandora. They'll also be doing a demo of their very cool DHTML runtime. Neat stuff. Signup here if you want to learn more about OpenLaszlo or what we've been doing with the Laszlo platform at Pandora.

Pandora Sidebar

2006-03-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

Over at Pandora we've just added a new feed mechanism that makes it easy for you to add Pandora to your blog sidebar. For example, I added these two lines to my blog template:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.pandora.com/styles/feeds/
songs-art-gray.css"/>
<script src="http://www.pandora.com/feeds/people/tconrad/
favorites.js?max=5"><
/script>

This automatically generates the sidebar listing my favorite songs that you see at the right on this page. Similarly, you can add a list of your stations using these two lines:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.pandora.com/styles/feeds/
stations-buttons-gray.css"/>
<script src="http://www.pandora.com/feeds/people/tconrad/
stations.js?max=5"></script>

To generate something similar for your page, click here and follow the instructions.

Update: We released a new version tonight that should make things work better in a wider variety of settings. In particular we're using CSS that is a bit more explicit about what should be displayed and how. We've also updated the mechanism we use for opening new windows that should fix some problems with popup blockers.

Pandora on the Front Page of the LA Times

2006-02-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

A fair bit has been written about Pandora in the traditional media (Rolling Stone, Time, Fast Company to name just a few) but I've never made mention of it here. Frankly as great as all the coverage has been, I've been more invigorated by the over 8,000 posts that have been written about us in the blogosphere. Today though there's a front page feature story in the LA Times about us that does an amazing job of telling our story. You can find it here.

Steve Krause on Pandora and Last.fm

2006-02-02T04:15:00.000-08:00

Steve Krause has written an incredibly articulate and thoughtful piece about Pandora and last.fm.

This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart (of course) and while a number of folks have had interesting things to say about how our service compares with last.fm, I think this is my favorite of the bunch. Highly recommended reading.

We've just pushed out a big Pandora release, so I've been very caught up in all of the logistics around that, and have been kind of on the sidelines of this entire conversation. That's probably for the best; it's been fascinating to watch and learn from the passions that are fueling the discussion.

Suffice to say that while I'm the CTO at Pandora, I'm also a fan of what the gang at last.fm are doing. I'm a paying last.fm subscriber and I maintain a musical profile there. I think it's great stuff and, at least in my case, the two services scratch very different itches.

Pandora Gets a Refresh

2006-02-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

We've just launched the latest update to Pandora. While we're constantly making little tweaks and improvements here and there, tonight's update was a pretty big one. Click through to read all the details on what we're launching today:

New Favorites and Sharing Features
Pandora RSS Feeds (Beta)
Fit, Finish and Polish
Keyboard Control
Pandora for Your Site

TailRank my new "home"

2006-01-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

Late last week I decided to dust off my trusty PowerBook G4 and make it my main machine again. A new battery and RAM upgrade later and I was in business. I can't begin to describe how much more capable this machine is with a gig of RAM under its belt. The battery life is still poor (2.5 hours); but it used to be abysmal (30 minutes). I figure I'll make this do for another year or so while the native Intel apps are making their way to market and then upgrade to a MacBook Pro (god I hate that name).

As part of the transition, I've switched from Bloglines to NetNewsWire for feed reading. Mostly I'm happy with the change -- it's very cool to be able to read offline and to have good integration with desktop-based blogging editors.

This did, however, create a conundrum for me: what page to use for my browser home page? It's been Bloglines for quite a while now. After a few days spent playing with blogosphere favorite tech.memeorandum, I started to realize that most of what was showing up there was already in my feed reader. Then I remembered that Kevin Burton's TailRank has been evolving a good bit lately.

I first met Kevin back at Barcamp and he immediately struck me as one of those really clever guys you occasionally bump into around Silicon Valley: smart, passionate, full of energy and opinions. When I heard that he'd started working on TailRank I was really intrigued. The idea of using linking behavior in the blogosphere, combined with OPML reading lists as the basis for creating a self-organzing view of current hot discussion topics felt just right to me. Sure Gabe Riviera is doing something similar with memeo; but for the moment, I like the story mix that's turning up on TailRank better. What's working here for me is that TailRank is bringing in interesting topics that I'm not already bumping up against in my normal feed reading.

At any rate, TailRank is my new homepage. So far I'm enjoying the news it brings each time I pull up the browser. Nice work Kevin; looking forward to watching TailRank grow and evolve. You've got a winner here.

Pandora Personal Pages

2005-11-10T06:18:00.000-08:00

One of the things we're doing with the new Pandora is helping people keep track of the best songs they hear while listening. As you mark songs as "favorites" they get added to a public Pandora "personal" page. Here's mine. Just scratching the surface here... so much more to do.

Pandora v2

2005-11-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

Hey! Head on over to www.pandora.com. We've been busy. New features. Listen all you want for free. All the details on the pandora blog:

We've been busy working on the second version of Pandora and we're launching today. We're adding new features and an entirely new way to enjoy Pandora. Original Post

Pandora Meetup: You're Invited

2005-11-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

We're having our first Pandora meeting in SF. Would love to have you there. From the Pandora blog:

Over the course of the last 8 weeks we've been introduced to an incredible group of Pandora listeners from all over the world. Whether it's been here in the Pandora blog comments, via pandora-support@pandora.com, or out there in the blogosphere we've virtually "met" an amazing and passionate group of music lovers.
We think it would be fun to get some of our bay area listeners together to meet face to face. To that end, a bunch of the Pandora gang is going to head to Edingburg Castle -- a great Scottish pub in San Francisco -- on Thursday, November 10th and we'd like for you to join us. We'll be there at 6:30PM. It will be a low key thing; just a bunch of music lovers getting together to hang out.

Hopefully you'll be able to come... we'd certainly love to have you there. Just RSVP with a comment to our blog to give us a sense of how many we can expect.

Details:

When: Thursday, Nov. 10th @ 6:30
Where: Edinburgh Castle, 950 Geary (between Polk & Larkin)
RSVP: Post a comment on the pandora blog

PS: Some of us are planning to go over to the Great American Music Hall afterwords for the Matt Nathanson concert. It turns out that he's a great "Genome match" for a wide range of rock music inputs on Pandora, so we thought we'd head over to check out his live show. You're very welcome to join us for that too if you'd like. Or not. Totally up to you.

Why a web app? Pandora on your blog...

2005-08-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

Good old Robert Scoble raises the question of why Pandora is a web app and not a rich client. This is something we gave a great deal of thought to and I think in the end we have some really great reasons for wanting to be a web app. First, there are a lot of thick client music applications (iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody) so that's pretty well traveled ground. There aren't so many web based applications that have really nailed a listening-centric music application. It's always more interesting to try something new, to go left when everyone else goes right. But it's much more than that. For a little taste, look in the sidebar on my blog (those of you in an aggregator will have to stop by http://tomconrad.blogspot.com) -- see the stations? The little form to create your own station? We think it's really fun that folks will be able to throw this kind of thing onto their blog or homepage, share stations via email and know that the people that encounter the links won't have to install a thing. Just one click and they're listening. That's powerful, and much too appealing an opportunity to pass up.

I'll post again later this week about how to link to Pandora directly; for now feel free to pick apart the meager HTML I slapped together tonight for my sidebar. This stuff is pretty basic right now; stay tuned - you haven't seen anything yet.

Pandora Launch: 8/29/2005

2005-08-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

We've launched Pandora... we had a great preview release and we've been able to take feedback from the thousands of people that have been listening for the last month and improve the service in some pretty substantial ways. I can't wait for you to see the new Pandora -- I hope you'll stop by to check it out.

PS: I just have to say a word of thanks to the hundreds of people that have blogged about us in the past few weeks. It's incredibly gratifying to be let into your thoughts on what we've created. I've been keeping a feed of it all (good, bad, ugly) on del.icio.us. If you're curious about this Pandora thing, don't listen to me, have a look at what others are saying: http://del.icio.us/tconrad/pandora-music.

Pandora and OpenLaszlo

2005-08-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

Our just-now-launched music discovery service, Pandora, is an OpenLaszlo application. It wouldn't be fair to finish up our launch without a tip of the hat to the amazing Laszlo team and open source community.

Eight months ago when we sat down to figure out how were were going to deliver a compelling zero-install discovery and listening experience across Windows, Mac, and Linux in record time we considered everything you can imagine: plain old HTML, AJAX, Flex, OpenLaszlo to name just a few. In the end, Laszlo was the clear winner on all fronts. Mature, reliable, and the perfect tool for the job. This outcome was only remarkable in that the decision was made by some of the most capable AJAX developers on the planet. I'll have more to say about Laszlo in another post, but for now I just want to publicly say thanks to the great team at Lazslo. Pandora wouldn't be Pandora without you. (Tags: pandora, openlaszlo, ajax)

Post BAR Camp Feedback on Pandora

2005-08-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty incredible weekend for Pandora and for me personally. BAR Camp was an amazing event; lots of really smart, passionate people coming together to share ideas. Fantastic.

Yesterday was my first chance to give a public demonstration of Pandora, and it was more fun than you can know to get to share it with this group of people.

The product was really well received, and there has been some great dialog at the conference (Scoble today called it "the talk of BAR Camp") and around the blogosphere since. Here's some of what's being said:

Michael Arrington: Dig into the Music Long Tail - Pandora
Robert Scoble: Pandora Rocks BAR Camp
Technoogle: Discover New Music with Pandora
Kevin Burton: Pandora: Music for the Long Tail
Craig Randall: Pandora Rocks
Vincent Oberle: Pandora, My New Radio

One of the things that's happened is that folks are starting to compare us to last.fm (for example this post: Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm). I'd like to go on the record as saying that I'm a big fan of what the guys at Last.fm / Audioscrobbler are doing. They uncover & expose people to all the social layers that music is wrapped up in and it's always interesting to know what your friends (and others like them) are listening to. I've certainly found new music this way; anyone that's out there trying to help people discover new music is definitely ok by me.

At Pandora we've just taken a totally different approach. With the Music Genome Project, we've built something that's based entirely on the sound of the music itself. We'll connect together a Metallica ballad with an Indigo girls song if they're a good fit musically. We think that's a unique take on the space, and that is creates really a delightful and totally unexpected listening experience. For my part, I think it compliments the great work going on at Last.fm / Audioscrobbler.

Want to listen? While we're currently in a "preview" mode, we're being very liberal with handing out invitations. If you'd like to listen to the service (for free I might add), drop me an email at tomconrad-at-gmail-dot-com and I'll make sure you get one ASAP.

Pandora Tip: For those of you who are already Pandora listeners, you can invite up to 25 of your friends to the preview without getting us in the loop at all. Just click the little triangle next to one of your stations and select "Share this station with a friend". We'll take care of sending an invite out immediately along with a link to your station.
(Tags: barcamp, pandora)

BAR Camp

2005-08-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

I've decided to make the trek down the peninsula this weekend to hang out at BAR Camp. I'll be there Saturday talking about Pandora, the Music Genome Project, and making sure that everyone that's there can get a invitation to our preview. It might also be fun to talk a bit about how a purely community-driven system (say, via Tags) compares with what we're doing with the Genome and how the two approaches can compliment and enhance one another.

I can also talk a good bit about how we chose between an AJAX front end and one built with OpenLaszlo. Our experience with OpenLaszlo has been incredible; it was the perfect choice for us.

All of these meetups are such a great thing for the tech community - so many great ideas getting passed back and forth. I'm really looking forward to this one. If for whatever reason you've hesitated to attend one of these "open invite" events, I'd encourage you to get over it and stop in. In my experience there's always some great conversation and everyone is made to feel welcome. (Tags: barcamp)

See you @ Henry's?

2005-08-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Niall Kennedy has put together a dinner tonight @ Henry's Hunan in SF. I'll be there. If anyone that's attending would like an invite to the Pandora preview, just drop me an email (tomconrad-at-gmail-dot-com). I'll make sure you get an invite today.

Why I love working on consumer software

2005-08-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

Over the years I've been involved in a mix of things ranging from consumer products (You Don't Know Jack, Apple, Pets.com) to enterprise software (Documentum, Relevance, Kenamea). While my years working on enterprise stuff where interesting, rewarding, and often at the cutting edge (for example, at Kenamea we built an AJAX platform almost 4 years ago), I'm never happier than when I'm working on consumer products. That was even true for one that failed horribly.

14 days ago we launched a preview release of Pandora a music discovery service that helps you create personalized "stations" that will introduce you to all kinds of music that we think you'll love. Ever since we launched we've been getting lots and lots of feedback from our early listeners. Here's a blog post that's consistent with the majority: One Sweet Nothing. What could be better than that?

We created this service because we love music and we really do want to help people out there who struggle to connect with all the great stuff that's out there. So far it seems like it's working and I can't imagine anything more gratifying than that. If you'd like an invitation to join the preview, drop me an email. I'd be happy to get you connected and listening right away.

Why Apple's "Mighty Mouse" Matters

2005-08-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

It's been fun to watch the mac-o-philes dissect the new two-button, scroll-ball sportin' "Mighty Mouse" that Apple released last week. By all accounts it seems to be a nice little mouse. Now taken by itself it's hard for me to get too excited; for some time the Mac would work with just about any mouse you threw at it and if there's one thing the computer world has in abundance it's mice.

There is however, a good reason to be excited about this development when you consider Apple's decision to move to Intel CPU's. One of the dimensions to the Intel story that hasn't received much attention is the possibility that Apple's next generation Macintoshes will be able to run Windows (PC World). I personally think this is a very big deal. While the real magic of the Macintosh may be the whole hardware/software integration, I think there are a lot of Apple devotees out there that buy Apple primarily for the industrial design of the hardware. This is particularly true for their laptops. I think there is an even larger contingency that would buy a Macintosh if they felt like they could drop back to Windows should circumstances require it. I think they're going to sell a lot of hardware to this crowd. Remember, Apple is a hardware company and those market share numbers we hear so much about are really hardware numbers.

How does Mighty Mouse fit into this? It's not so much the mouse that is exciting, but the possibility that they'll build similar "buttonless" two-button technology into their PowerBooks and iBooks. To me, the lack of two-button support on the portables was the last hurdle to making their Intel-powered hardware appeal to the Windows crowd. My money says that we'll see two-button support similar to the mighty mouse implementation in the PowerBook and iBook line just as soon as they switch to Intel. And then things get really interesting.

Savage Beast is now Pandora

2005-07-17T23:21:00.000-07:00

www.savagebeast.com == www.pandora.com

"The name Pandora means 'all gifted' in Greek. In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received many gifts from the Gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. Pandora was also, as you may know, infamously curious. While it might not have turned out so well for her, we celebrate the virtue of curiosity and have made it our mission to reward the musically curious with a truly unique journey of music discovery."

Connecting

2005-07-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

Over at Savage Beast we've been getting a bit of press lately (NPR, Boston Globe, AP). Most recently Slate wrote a great article about us. They do a great job describing the core of our company, the Music Genome Project. Sadly, they haven't been able to talk about what's coming next from us. You see, we've been hard at work on a consumer application that will let you experience the Genome first hand over the web. We're putting the finishing touches on the system and are getting ready to roll out a preview release in the coming weeks.

Thanks to the articles, there's been a fair bit written about us in the blogosphere. Most recently this post from Robert Scoble, which itself was in response to an email from Peter Raymond.

What's most fun about all of this for me is the chance to connect people like Peter who I think are really going to enjoy what we've been up to. Having a forum to "meet" and talk about all of this (what works, what doesn't) is really the best part of the Internet for me. I'm excited about continuing the discussion once you all get a chance to see what we've been up to.

If you're interested in participating in the preview, drop me an email and I'll make sure you get an invitation.

Mindjet

2005-06-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Mindjet MindManager is being presented at the opening session today at Gnomedex. Designed for people who think non-linearly. Designed to support thinking associatively. Think first and then use drag and drop to organize your thoughts. They call it "information mapping." Their customers use it for brainstorming/thinking. Nice pen interface for Tablet PC uses specially designed gestures for quickly entering ideas and organizing them. (Tags: gnomedex)

Microsoft and RSS

2005-06-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that I'm the last gnomedex'r to post about the rss announcement that Microsoft made this morning here in Seattle. They've announced that Longhorn will have a set of system services for synchronizing RSS (and atom and rdf) content to your machine. This is a background service that pulls down the feeds when they're updated and tries to respect other processes that might require bandwidth at the same time. It will use the same background data transfer mechanism as Windows Update.

They've also updated IE (in the form of IE7 which was publicly demo'd for the first time today) to facilitate subscription. Apparently they've been paying attention to what Apple is doing with SafariRSS in Tiger because the UI is, quite literally, identical. In fact the whole UI for IE7 looks more like Safari than I'd have ever imagined. The version demo'd had a brushed metal skin, a very simple toolbar, a flexible search box to the right of the URL entry box. Very similar.

A good bit of time was devoted to the power of RSS with enclosers. They demo'd Outlook calendar population driven by RSS with iCalendar enclosures and a photo slide show powered by an RSS feed with jpg enclosures. So, pretty much it's the whole "embrace" thing... they were very clearly saying "we love RSS" and it will be everywhere in Longhorn.

Now... for the inevitable "extend" bit. They've also published today an extension to RSS 2.0 to make it capable of delivering ordered lists. This new tag makes it possible to use RSS to describe, well, lists. For example: Playlists, Events, Wish lists, To Do lists, Top 10 lists. Unlike publication feeds, lists need different semantics - in particular the ability to reorder or delete items. The tag makes that possible. They're also adding an extension for describing how item metadata (via namespace extension) should be interpreted in the context of a list. For example, which attributes should be used for filtering.? Which should be used for sorting? What is the datatype of each item? All of these extensions have been released under a Creative Commons license. It's not clear to me what exactly the value of that bit is, other than the PR benefit. (Tags: gnomedex)

Gnomedex Starts

2005-06-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Gnomedex is underway... Dave Winer just finished his keynote on his new GPL-licensed open souce OPML editor. Good discussion with the audience; no drama. The Microsoft guys are on stage now getting ready to talk about "Longhorn Browsing and RSS." This is going to be the big one for the show.

Dave Winer on Microsft and RSS

2005-06-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well look at this. That has me very curious about just what's going on at Microsoft right now. I'm very much looking forward to hearing about it first hand on Friday.

Connecting at Gnomedex

2005-06-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

Hey Scott, hey Robert, hey Dave, hey Marc: let's connect at Gnomedex. I'd love to let you in on what we've been up to at Savage Beast... we've got a great new way for folks to discover music they'll love and it would be cool to give you an early peak. (Tags: gnomedex)

Treo 650 Finally Comes Into Its Own

2005-06-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

This week palmOne finally released a firmware upgrade that make the Treo 650 feel like a solid little performer. The first two firmware revisions all had their issues, in particular a sluggishness that made the entire experience vary between frustrating and downright painful. It's not a good thing when your phone takes 20 seconds to dial a number. As a bonus DUN works with Sprint now. I'm happy. If the phone had worked this well when I bought it I certainly would have been a huge evangelist. As it is, the whole thing has left me feeling like it's a pretty fragile device. Oh well.

Why so quiet?

2005-06-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've been really heads-down the last few months hard at work with my team here at Savage Beast on a brand new product. So, even if it's not cool to be in stealth, I've been staying quite on a whole bunch of things while we toil away on our own product. We're getting really close to telling the world about it, so I'm sort of coming out of my seclusion. As part of that I'm going to be up at Gnomedex starting tomorrow. Who knows maybe I'll even give a demo or two... (Tags: gnomedex)

Wow, that's pretentious...

2005-06-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

If you're going to take a 5 month break from posting, my advice is to make sure your last post has some really pretentious title like "Isomorphism & canonical Form." That way the people who do stop by get a really accurate picture of just what a twit you can be. :-)

Isomorphism & Canonical Form

2005-02-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated by the trials and tribulations associated with the creation of inter-operable distributed systems. We cared a lot about this at Kenamea; it's deep, complex stuff. Our industry has come back to this subject again and again. CORBA, DCOM, RMI, XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, and Indigo are just a few of the recent entries in the parade. This can be a very religious topic.

I came upon this article from Steve Maine this afternoon. This is good stuff.

Even if you're not interested in distributed system, this article does an amazing job of describing the ideas of canonical form and isomorphic representations. Make sure you don't miss the footnote (labeled, "[1] A brief philosophical interlude").

Often I've watched smart people debate the merits of two approaches that are isomorphic. It's just as common to debate which of the isomorphic approaches should be considered canonical. As we work together, the better we are at identifying these moments - the "my isomorphic solution is better than your isomorphic solution" - the faster we'll move toward interesting interoperable systems.

Savage Beast: Music Recommendation

2005-01-19T11:39:00.000-08:00

Since Thomas Hawk mentioned this blog and my company [Savage Beast] in a recent post, I thought I'd tell you a bit about what we're doing here.

Savage Beast got its start 5 years ago with a mission to create software to help people discover music they will love. Have you ever spent enough time in a record store that the personnel started to develop a sense of your taste and started to make recommendations? Maybe you've even been lucky enough to have someone stash stuff behind the counter for the next time you visit the store? At Savage Beast, we're working on systems that will give users that same experience, but in the digital domain. We're particularly passionate about helping you discover artists out on the "long tail" (blog).

How do we do this? We believe that your musical preferences are first and foremost derived from the way music sounds. So, to help you find music that sounds like the music you like, we've spent the last 5 years working on something we call the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome is a detailed analysis of a century of popular music. We employee a large team of professional musicians who spend their days listening to music one song at a time and "analyzing" the detailed musical characteristics of the song. This includes obvious stuff like tempo and key, but more importantly it covers a lot of subtle nuance: how much tremolo in the voice, what kid of harmony, guitar picking style, how much cowbell, etc. In total we listen for hundreds of different qualities and painstakingly record the results for each some. After 5 years, we've built up an incredible asset that allows us predict music you will like based on simple input (for example, the name of an album, artist, or song that you love).

While we've been building this database we've been working with various partners and customers to deliver recommendations and music discovery experiences to end users. For example, we've built a complete retail kiosk solution for Music Discovery that have been deployed for pilot by Best Buy and Borders. AOL is also a customer and uses Savage Beast technology to power recommendations within their music properties. You'll see us branching out into new opportunities as 2005 goes on.

If you have a passion for music and are an exceptional software engineer, I'd love to talk to you about a job on our engineering team. Feel free to write to me directly at tomconrad-at-gmail.com.

iPod shuffle

2005-01-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

Apple also announced the iPod shuffle today. $99 for the 512M version (about 12 albums) and $149 for the 1G version (about 25 albums). Flash based, no display.

Mac mini

2005-01-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

Apple is in the process right now of announcing the Mac mini. A system they're calling "The most important Mac ever." It's has a very tiny footprint (half the height of the iPod mini, about the size of a salad plate. Available in 1.25 & 1.4 Mhz varieties with both digital and analog video out. $499 - $599. Comes with iLife '05 (new) and Panther. It appears to be a straight-up Mac, not something designed particularly to connect to your television or stereo.

Microsoft TV - IPTV Edition

2005-01-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

Microsoft was showing off a future version of their Microsoft TV product at CES. Here in the US, the closest thing we have to this at the moment is Microsoft TV - Foundation Edition which Comcast has deployed in some cities. This version has been covered elsewhere quite a bit, and strikes me as a pretty basic system. Basic PVR, basic program guide, and so on.

The version on display at the show was the new MSTV - IPTV Edition designed to allow folks like SBC and BellSouth to enter the television market over their IP networks. The idea is to deliver HD-quality streams at 3-6Mbps into the home in both unicast (video on demand) and multicast variants. The system has a much sexier user interface than its Foundation Edition cousin. It looks almost exactly like the Media Center UI (alpha-channel transparency effects and all). I was pretty impressed. The system apparently puts most of the smarts in the network and is designed to work within a very small footprint on the client device.

An early version of Microsoft TV - IPTV Edition has already been deployed in pilots in Canada and Europe. SBC and BellSouth will start trials in the US later this year.

Pentax Optio WP

2005-01-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Pentax used CES to show off a prototype of their new Optio WP. This tiny camera, which will ship in April, features a 5MP CCD, 3X optical zoom, a big display (2"), and is waterproof to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. This looks to be a great small camera. No price has been announced.

Where's Sony?

2005-01-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

I was pretty surprised that Sony didn't have a booth on the main show floor. It seems they decided to show their wares behind closed doors; I was really hoping to get a chance to play with the PSP at the show. Happily there was a company called Marvel in the South Hall that makes embedded technology. Their Wi-Fi chip is in the PSP and they had a few PSP's on hand in their booth.

I was very impressed with the device; if they're able to launch these in the US for $199 there is no question that they're going to sell millions of them. It's a great design, with lots of beautiful details. Sure it will scratch easily; yes it shows fingerprints like glass, but you will want one. It's gorgeous. Oh yeah, the games look pretty impressive too. This isn't an iPod killer -- it's way too big for that, but it's not going to be pretty for Nintendo. As with the N64 and Gamecube (two great products), I'm sure there will continue to be an appetite for Nintendo's unique spin on gaming, but the PSP is going to be the 1,000 lb gorilla.

Samsung Portable Media Player

2005-01-09T15:00:00.000-08:00

There's nothing terribly new about the Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center. It was released late last year. It's not terribly distinguished on the features (20G drive, USB 2.0, 3 hour battery life for video, etc.) but I was really surprised at how much I liked the form factor. It's a pretty thin unit and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. The other units, which are more the shape of the Sony PSP, are much more cumbersome to hold onto. Samsung did a nice job with this one.

Shuttle: Stereo-style XPC Prototype?

2005-01-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Shuttle had a nice booth with all their latest offerings. I thought this new model (SB86i) was quite stunning; great simple lines. Sitting off in a corner in their booth was an XPC with a stereo component form factor. It appeared to be a prototype. Here's a picture.

1080p HDTV

2005-01-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

One of the really big (both literally and figuratively) items at CES this year were 1080p televisions. Every major manufacturer was featuring these in their booth. They're pretty impressive. With 1080p you get a progressive scan (non-interlaced) display with a full 1080 lines of resolution. A side-by-side comparison against either 1080i or 780p shows very clearly that 1080p is the winner. These displays are beautiful.

Epson was showing off a technology called 3LCD that is designed to compete with DLP in the projection HDTV market. A 1080p 3LCD TV is shown at left. In a side by side demonstration, the 3LCD products were dramatically clearer with much better color fidelity. Of course, this was all in the Epson booth with products supposedly set to "out of the box" settings, so your mileage may vary. I was pretty impressed with how much progress has been made on the viewing angle problem with these rear-projection systems. Still, it's just not cool to have a TV that's 12 inches deep these days, so the market will probably continue to skew towards plasmas and LCD's.

Speaking of LCD, great progress has been made this year with respect to size and response time. Many manufactures where showing displays in excess of 50 inches with 8ms response times. Given the burn in and brightness problems with plasma, it is great to see LCD technology advancing. I'm hoping for a sub-$2000 HD unit by years end.

On the plasma front, Samsung (who gets the award for the most ginormous booth at the show) was showing off a stunning 102" model. This thing is really huge and was constantly surrounded by a sizeable crowd of admirers.

Motorola Ojo

2005-01-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

Shades of 1964: it's been 40 years since the first video phone was shown at the World's Fair in New York City. At CES this week Motorola became the most recent company to try to make this idea work. The Ojo is a "Personal Video Phone" designed to connect to both your home LAN and your telephone line. The former is used for video and the latter for voice. A built-in portrait monitor shows the video while a wireless handset is used for voice. It's a pretty great industrial design (if a little large) and the video quality is quite impressive. It will retail for $799 and is being targeted at home users. That's a lot of money for a solution that I'm not sure most consumers are clamoring for.

TMIO Networked Oven

2005-01-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is a network-connected oven. Because, you know, you want to be able to spontaneously decide it's time to clean your oven from anywhere in the world that is serviced by an internet connection. The future is now. If nothing else, this is a nice way for Martha Stewart to still cook the turkey at Thanksgiving from the comfort of the prison library.

DirectTV DVR vs. TiVo

2005-01-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting things I saw at the show was the new DirectTV DVR's. I think TiVo is going to have a pretty hard time fighting these. Right now over half of the TiVo subscribers are DirectTiVo users. DirectTV looks poised to release a family of DVR's that don't use the TiVo platform. I've owned both a ReplayTV and a TiVo over the years and have come to expect a fair bit of polish from these kind of products. To this point everything I'd seen from the satellite and cable folks was a pretty terrible approximation of the name-brand solutions. I can't say that's the case any longer. These DirectTV DVR's seem every bit as polished as the TiVo solution. DirectTV is even offering a version ("Home Media Center") with four tuners, HD support, and seamless in-home content sharing.

It's a shame to see a future where a great company like TiVo -- who, along with ReplayTV, defined this product space -- might not be able to survive, let along thrive. Timing is everything in technology; you just can't afford to have the market give your competitors time to build a copy of your product before mass adoption begins.

BenQ P50 vs. Treo 650

2005-01-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

The product I went to the show most excited to see has to be the BenQ P50. This PocketPC 2003 phone looks to be the industry's best bet at a direct compete for the Treo 650 (which I own and like a lot, but is a bit rough around the edges).

I was really hoping that the P50 would be a home run. It's not.

On the plus side, the phone is very solid. It feels really great in your hand. Nice heft... it feels like a much more durable device than the 650. Beyond that, I was pretty disappointed. This is a phone that will ship in February or March in Taiwan, but the units on display were routinely locking up. The "one hand" navigation is terrible on the phone; you're going to be using the stylus a lot. The keyboard is decent, but is not as good as the revised keyboard on the 650.

Marcus Adolphsson from TreoCentral has written up a much more detailed side by side comparison. If you're interested in such things, I recommend taking a look. On a related note, one of the cool things that happened at the show was that Marcus walked right up me to in the DirectTV booth and said "Hey I see you've got a Treo, you should stop by my site TreoCentral.com." He seems like a very nice guy and it was cool to bump into him at the show.

Motorola Cell Phones

2005-01-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

Motorola was showing off the MPx in both the Microsoft booth and in their booth. It's pretty amazing to switch the orientation from one direction to the other. Here's a picture of it in the vertical orientation. Very, very clean design. The keys have a nice responsiveness. The unit feels very solid. On the other hand it's bigger than would be ideal and the keyboard layout is a bit of a compromise. None-the-less I think we'll be seeing a lot of these around come spring.

On a semi-related note, the Razr was everywhere at the show. I just couldn't believe how many of the attendees were already carrying one. This is going to be a huge hit for Moto.

2005 CES

2005-01-09T13:10:00.000-08:00

I spent Thursday and Friday at CES in Las Vegas. I snapped a few photos from the show floor and thought I share them along with my thoughts on the most interesting stuff I saw.

It certainly won't come close to what Engadget or Gizmodo have done, but maybe I'll have a picture or comment that you haven't seen elsewhere.

Wired on BitTorrent

2005-01-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

Wired has a great interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent. I've seen this stat a few times in the last month, and it's pretty staggering:

Analysts at CacheLogic,an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet.

The stuff that's being traded via this protocol is in large part video. These are files that take hours or days to transfer (350M for an hour of HDTV). Sites like tvtorrents.tv make it easy to find just about any television program that has aired in the last year. The BitTorrent client makes moving these sorts of files around possible.

One interesting thing about Bram's BitTorrent client, is that it's just a file transfer agent. Unlike Napster or any of its kin, the software Bram wrote is entirely about file transfer. No searching, no music playback, no library management. As such, it's a lot more like an FTP client than it is like Napster. It doesn't have any predisposition about the types of data you should be transferring. In my book this shines a bright light on the issue of culpability of the programmers creating this kind of software. All they've done is extend the state of the art for file transfer; it's hard to imagine how anyone could criminalize that.

Lost & Found

2005-01-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Look at this neat thing that Jeffrey found:

Ephemera Forever: I was randomly searching for some stuff for a little personal project I've been working on when I ran across 'I Remain,' an archive of digitized documents at Lehigh University. At first glance it looks like this dry historical repository - and it is - but the things the curators chose to include is pretty interesting. It's all ephemera, condolence notes, thank-you cards, and so forth.

It's like a real-world Nick Bantock book!

Leveraging the "Client Side" in a Rich Client World

2005-01-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

Oliver Steele some weeks ago wrote an amazing essay about the right presentation model for rich client applications:

I've been watching server-side developers try to figure out how to serve client-side web applications for a few years now. Different developers, that is it doesn't take years for any individual developer to figure it out. There's often an initial stumble, which is caused by a mismatch between the obvious way to deploy a client-side web application, and the right way. The right way is simpler, but elusive.

This is something I saw first hand at Kenamea where we built a platform for rich client applications and worked with clients who were building applications. Oliver has done an amazing job describing the right approach. As the world moves to systems like gmail, oddpost, and laszlo this kind of stuff should be required reading for UI developers. It's the future.

Mitch Kapor on Web Applications

2005-01-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

Mitch Kapor has written an interesting post on web application interfaces. He focuses particularly on the gmail interface. Pushing the state of the art with respect to what can be done in a browser is pretty exciting I think. It was at the core of what we were doing at Kenamea. It's pretty encouraging to hear him saying:

for any new application project I get involved in starting, my strong predisposition is to think in terms of a web interface as primary.

Not just some applications, but any application. Even applications where the user sits in front of the app for many hours a day. Being able to delivery the kind of productivity required for those sorts of applications using a web development model will be a fantastic thing.

We've had this technology for some time - heck we were building "rich client" browser applications at Relevance in 1997, but only now is it really becoming ubiquitous. One great thing about the ascendancy of Firefox is that we finally have a good cross-platform base upon which to build interesting dynamic web applications.

The final frontier does look to be offline use. We had some of this working at Kenamea some years ago; web applications that you could run regardless of whether or not the network was connected to your device. Then for a while there it looked like Adam Bosworth was going to make it happen at BEA. I'm sure someone will step in and solve this...

Robert Scoble Visit

2005-01-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

Robert Scoble dropped by the Savage Beast offices the other day. It was great fun to get to show him our product. The amazing thing about Robert is what a great job he does with folks he's never met face-to-face. I suppose there are quite a few out there that feel like they know him even though they've never actually met him. Watching him at the geek dinners is pretty cool; he's great at putting everyone at ease.

Tom Conrad: Favorite Albums of 2004

2005-01-02T16:07:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to kick things off. I've been thinking about the year in music and decided I'd post a few of my favorites for the year...

Bark Psychosis - Codename Dustsucker
The Blue Nile - High
Carina Round - The Disconnection
Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
Jay Farrar - Stone, Steel & Bright Lights
Modest Mouse - Good News for People...
The Mountain Goats - We Shall All Be Healed
Preston School of Industry - Monsoon
Wilco - A Ghost is Born