Berklee Today cover story about my career in the digital music industry — Berklee College of Music’s quarterly magazine.
Download the PDF of the article
Status Board “InfoWall”
Like many, I thought Panic’s status board was a great idea. Sony Music’s D2C group produces countless artist web sites, runs over 70 90 artist stores, and has lots of data, sites, and screenshots to share with staff and visitors.
Inspired by Panic’s single display view, our execution of the status board is comprised of this hardware:
- 3 47” Sony FWDS47H1 pro displays with a super thin bezel and DVI input, rotated 90 degrees
- 1 Mac Mini
- A USB to DVI converter to add 1 more DVI out to the Mac Mini’s existing 2 video ports
Software: I wrote a rails app that our staff has access to which enables posting of new “slides”. Each slide is comprised of the individual 3 screens. Each screen can have:
- An uploaded image (of a full resolution of 1080 x 1920)
- HTML, to load URLs via an iframe — such as live feed RSS pages, stats, charts, web sites, etc.
- Or provide a URL that takes an automatic screenshot at the full resolution. This feature is powered by a separate screenshot web service we have for other reasons.
The server-side app lets you create new slides, edit existing slides, move slides to the playlist, re-order the playlist, specify how long each slide displays for, etc. The Mac Mini runs a main Chrome window that loads a JS app which loads the JSON data for the playlist, checks if the playlist updated or not, opens 3 new browser windows, and manages the slide transitions and timers. To hide the mouse pointer, we use Doomlaser’s Cursorcerer.
This execution is a hybrid slide show app as well as a live data dash board for stats, a map for where our last sale occurred in real-time, our most recent artist web sites (live), etc.
Here are some screenshots for the RoR app.
Sony Make.Believe Contest
I was one of 10 contest winners in Sony’s Make.Believe branding campaign. Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s email below.
TO: Sony Employees
FROM: Howard Stringer
DATE: November 12, 2009
Dear colleagues,
Thank you for the remarkable enthusiasm you have shown for the internal make.believe kick-off and employee contest across the U.S. and Canada. As you may know, we received nearly 1,000 entries from every corner of the company and from employees at every level. I am incredibly proud of all those who contributed, because your amazing personal experiences tell our Sony make.believe story best.
Last week, I announced our three Grand Prize contest winners. They are: Dave Chaimson from Sony Creative Software in Madison, Wisconsin; Erika Kato from Sony Computer Entertainment America in San Diego, California; and Lauren Rivera from Sony Pictures Television in New York. Each of them will have his or her story turned into a professionally directed make.believe videography to debut publicly at CES in January. I know they’ll be terrific. In addition, each Grand Prize winner will receive a trip for two to Las Vegas for their video debut, along with a grand Sony product prize package.
Today, it is my great pleasure to announce the 10 contest runners-up, whose stories are equally inspiring. The winning stories of all of our winners and runners-up, which have been minimally edited, can be found below. Each runner-up will receive the Sony product prize package. They are:
- Erwin Coumans, Simulation Team Lead, Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Wende Crowley, Senior Director, Film & TV Music, Sony ATV/Music Publishing
- Marc Mackin, Senior Artist, Sony Online Entertainment
- Jeff Merghart, Senior Artist Animator, Sony Online Entertainment
- Christopher Nelson, QA Supervisor, Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Tim Nilson, SVP Technology & Operations/Direct to Consumer, Sony Music Entertainment
- Brian Orr, Principal Software Engineer, Sony Media Software & Services, Sony Corporation of America
- Cecil Prado, Assistant Director, Sony Pictures Entertainment
- Adam Visnovec, Customer Information Center Representative, Sony of Canada Ltd.
- Ling Wong, Associate Software Engineer, Sony Electronics Inc.
Congratulations to all of you!
Thank you, again, for proving that the passion behind make.believe is inside all of us, and for helping us share it with consumers around the world.
Sincerely,
Howard
AC/DC Backtracks: Global fulfillment via our M2 Platform
The new AC/DC rarities collectors edition box set AC/DC Backtracks is sold direct to consumer via Sony Music’s M2 commerce platform. The store is fully localized in 6 languages and fulfills the product to 43 countries via quick UPS delivery.
Flight of the Conchords- Business Time
Powered by a new technology start-up called Kicklight. Kicks are images that are synched to the YouTube video content. Another way to display ads for video programming — not overlay, not pre or post roll, but ‘roll along’.
New skype app for the iPhone is out. Will it change mobile calling forever?
A friend just told me about the new Skype iPhone app that launched recently. I just took it for a spin and it works great. No video yet as the iPhone is still not equipped with the hardware/software to capture video, but audio calling works great and provides the usual mute, pause, and speaker buttons available during regular phone calls on the iPhone. A great feature is the fact that the app pulls in all your Skype contacts and provides you an integrated address book including search and user thumbnail pictures. The call quality is good — in my test I was not able to tell a difference to regular cell calls. The app also shows if your contacts are logged in and available on Skype. The biggest drawback of the application is the fact that it does not show you as being online unless the app runs. I am not sure if the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS solves this issues, but currently, apps can’t run in the background. So you can only receive Skype calls on your iPhone if you actively and purposefully run the app. Not good. Anyone know of a workaround?
Generally, this is a development that was inevitable and finally makes wifi calling on a data equipped cellphone a breeze to set up and use. In the world of the not too distant future in which free public wifi will be everywhere, apps like this have the potential to change mobile calling forever.
Imagine free, global calls (skype to skype) from your cell phone: from any country to any country — something that mobile carriers still charge you as much as $8 a minute for (depending on country, distance, plan, and so on).
Wifi based video calls from your cell is the next step which is still a novelty today — I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of my tech savvy friends do a video chat on their european, video call equipped 3G (or faster) mobile phones via cell or wifi data channels. Somehow it always seems that something is not quite working — either the connectivity is not there, or the network settings are not set up, or the plan not enabled, or the person being called is not equipped properly… whatever.
Earlier tonight I had a skype video call in my office on my mac with my colleage Mike. I was at my office desk and he was on the bus on his way home — with his 3G data modem providing the bandwidth to his MacBook. It worked great. Now, replace the MacBooks with iPhones, add video, and use public wifi or wimax instead of expensive 3G connectivity, and the world of mobile communication just met the equivalent of what the CD ripper and MP3 format did to the music industry.
Can you see me now?
Work it, Make it, Do it.
Nice musical flash piece from the song “Harder Better Faster Stronger” by Daft Punk. Redone by Kanye West / “Stronger”.
YouTube Box app on Facebook
YouTube Box on Facebook has recently been moving up the charts within the Facebook app directory. The app is now the 2nd most actively used app in the Music category right behind iLike with over 650,000 unique users per month. In the Video category, YouTube Box moved all the way to the 5th most actively used app spot.
CycleSite Web Site Framework for Cycling Teams
Many cycling teams struggle with poorly designed team web sites that are difficult to use, hard to update, always out of date, and simply not professional — making it even harder than it already is to attract team sponsorship. CycleSite offers a specialized and powerful solution to cycling teams looking for a better web presence.
