> I also find it suspicious that this article emphasizes how much buy-in LTE Direct has from gigantic corporations
The last line of the article is the submarine:
"Wireless carriers might even gain a new stream of revenue by charging companies that want to offer services or apps using the technology, Qualcomm says."
The main motivation of this sort of technology transfer program isn't the license revenue itself. That's insignificant when compared to their operating budget. The point of this program is to provide evidence that the research has commercial applications. With this evidence, they are able to go to Congress and show their research helps the economy, which is used as part of the justification of their research budget.
The challenge is not technical. The challenge is community. RapGenius is a network effects driven site, so it's utility is driven by how many people use the site. Technology is table-stakes, but branding and marketing matter much more at this point.
RapGenius grew because their user experience was much better than their competition. This was the foundation for their branding & marketing. Their growth will be sustained by their content and (once these penalties are phased out) by users' ability to discover their unique content. The technology is merely an enabler for the community-generated content. New competitors must find ways around the community's cold-start problem.
I largely agree with the article, but also agree with your conclusions.
>Instead, the "competition" is by delivering Rihanna for free by infringing copyrights.
This is a problem for Rihanna and a Maserati problem once a musician become famous, but the author states this article does not apply to "the majors or rock stars."
The challenge faced by the indies is as old as the music industry, they have merely been exacerbated by technology. Even before the decline of music sales, the main challenge for an indie musician was discovery. I think we have a confirmation bias about the past. There have always been unsuccessful musicians, but we forget they existed. Starving artist is not a new cliche.
Have people rejected indie music or is there something else behind superstar popularity? Conventional thinking is that free music makes it easier to get discovered (but harder to monetize, once discovered) because it cost nothing for consumers to try new music. It turns out that there is so much content/competition out there now (because music cost less to produce + free distribution), consumers have choice overload. This makes it harder for people to try indie music.
Music is cultural, so what is popular follows the same power-law dynamics as social networks (in fact, it is driven by social networks). Hence, what's popular becomes more popular.
Agree that the fact that the product has a zero marginal cost does not mean people are unwilling to pay. The entire software industry is built upon a business model of building a product with high production costs and zero marginal cost.
This "dropped phone" search in interesting. This could be the most dangerous aspect of this program.
Chances are little scientific research was done on the accuracy. What is the false positive rate? Are there policies and procedures in place to determine if the phones actually matched the individual? This can't be done without the voice data.
Are the analysts savvy enough about the limitation of the underlying algorithms?
If these questions have not been addressed, it's possible innocent people have been prosecuted.
A big topic of discussion in music tech right now is active vs passive usage. Active usage is when someone uses a music service or station with the intent of discovering new songs and artists. This mode of consumption values a diverse playlist.
On the other hand, passive consumption is when the user just wants background music and doesn't care what's playing as long as it sounds good and matches the mood. This mode tends to favor a more limited playlist, as the overall quality of the music will be higher.
Best resource in my experience is a business cofounder who will do all that for you.
Marketing is more than just getting the word out, but also who to get the word out to, want to say, etc. There isn't enough time in the day to really do this right and write code for your product at the same time.
Agreed. Whether journalists are legally allowed to protect their sources or not, this right (or lack thereof) needs to apply to all citizens. Otherwise, we would have created a new class of people who have different constitutional rights than others.
How can the legal system selectively allow some people the right to protect sources and not others? Who gets to decide who's a journalist? Do we draw the line at establishment reporters? Or do we allow full-time bloggers? What about part-time bloggers? What about if someone's never blogged before, but suddenly has something to say?
There must be a big disconnect between the tech team & the product team. Time to first tweet takes several minutes because the user is forced to follow multiple accounts upon signup. The latency is not the tech. I wonder how much $ goes into shaving off a few milliseconds, despite the fact that even latency zero still results in minute long signup?
*I'm sure it's in twitter's interest to keep the on-boarding the way it is, but that's a separate topic.
This really comes down to the need/demand for the infrastructure. Projects like this do occasionally happen in the US. NYC is getting a 60 mile long, $6B water tunnel. Unfortunately, that tunnel has been under construction for decades, and is still years from completion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._...
Not entirely. Daft Punk had a big success with free streaming on iTunes a couple weeks before the album was officially for sale.
This got listeners onto iTunes, where Apple put up a pre-sale button. Music industry convention is that pre-sales count towards 1st week sales. The end result is artificially high opening week sales, which further builds the buzz.
I personally think this album helped the reluctant labels signup for iTunes Radio, since labels were able to see free streaming can convert into digital purchases.
The article mentions the Coachella event in passing, but it had a huge role in building anticipation for the album. Thousands of people (many of them influencers) were hoping for a Daft Punk surprise show. This anticipation (and subsequent disappointment when they did not perform) created an emotional connection that is hard to achieve through traditional marketing channels.
I'm using Titanium for my app. Some things are still a little buggy, but it's a lot better now. It is open source, so I am modding the SDK to fix the bugs I have.
Along these lines, it was surprising to me that many non-techies never close out their apps. They leave them running in the background and are not even aware it was possible to close an app.
As a developer, this means the only time many users will "restart" the app is when they update, and the restart is forced upon them. So make sure your apps are stable!
I like the takeaway that the only slide that matters is traction.
Looking at the Team slide, they have a decent amount of social validation from their advisors & previous investors. I'm guessing this was critical for getting the intro's to ~200 prospective investors.
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2004-09/obsession-mr-sing...