Lime Wire Adds Digital Media Exec (aka Me) to Oversee Product

I have been a bit cagey over the past few weeks about what was next for me in a professional sense. Those you that follow what I am up to have probably noticed that my work on Playtapus has dropped off considerably, and I have been talking about moving to NYC. Well, today the cat comes out of the bag.... and I am very excited about it. I am moving up to Brooklyn tomorrow and will start my first day at Lime Wire the following day (July 1).


As you can imagine, there is a lot of exciting stuff going on over there, a massive worldwide audience and huge opportunities to do even more great things. I am honored to be able to join the team over there...

Lime Wire Adds Digital Media Exec to Oversee Product: "NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - June 29, 2009) - Jason Herskowitz has joined Lime Wire as Vice President, Product Management, it was announced today by George Searle, Lime Wire CEO. In this newly created position, Herskowitz will oversee Lime Wire's integrated product strategy, planning, design and management. Lime Wire's product teams will report to Herskowitz. Herskowitz reports to Lime Wire CEO, George Searle."

Herskowitz comes to Lime Wire from TotalMusic, where he held the position of Vice President, Product Management, managing a team of product managers, UX architects, designers, and QA engineers in the creation and management of music platform, products and services. Prior to TotalMusic, Herskowitz was Vice President at Strands, where he managed the Social Media business unit in the creation of holistic content discovery recommendation engine and critically acclaimed content sharing experience at Strands.com. Strands.com, music.Strands.tv, mystrands.com and the Strands Tracker software were all defined, launched and/or managed by Herskowitz.

Prior to Strands, Herskowitz was the Director of Music Products for America Online (AOL). While there, he defined and managed the product releases, and roadmaps and strategies for a range of AOL's digital media products and services. He directed product teams in the strategic and tactical definitions for a wide range of digital media products and services including AOL Music Now, AOLmusic.com, AOL Radio, SHOUTcast, and Winamp. Additionally, he spearheaded integrations of these experiences across a wide range of other AOL products including AIM, AOL Search as well as a host of connected media devices via partnerships with major consumer electronics and networking device manufacturers.

Prior to AOL, he was with Analog Devices. He joined as Director of Market Development of the company's Audio Rendering and Technology Center, and then was named Director of Product Marketing for their Media Platforms and Services Group. Earlier in his career, he helped launch DigiScents, a biotechnology offshoot that developed hardware and software platforms for incorporating scent into all forms of digital media including movies, music and video games. Prior to launching DigiScents, he was with video gaming giant, InterAct Accessories, which he joined as Director of Product Marketing and was subsequently promoted to Vice President-Strategic & Product Marketing.

He was President and founder of Prodigal Sun Records, one of the first record labels to provide streaming audio clips of artists online.

Herskowitz holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Georgia and a Bachelor of Science from Virginia Tech. He is currently relocating from Potomac Falls, VA to Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, Karen, and two children.

About Lime Wire LLC

Founded in 2000 by Chairman Mark Gorton, Lime Wire LLC (http://www.limewire.com) is a leader of innovative peer-to-peer software development and solutions in the file sharing industry. The company currently employs the largest number of expert Java developers at the forefront of the file sharing revolution. Its signature products, LimeWire BASIC and LimeWire PRO, run on the decentralized Gnutella Network and are the world's most popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications with over 70 million unique monthly users. The programs are downloaded 350,000 times every day and boast approximately 5 million active users at any moment. It is reported that up to 18% of the computers worldwide have LimeWire on their computer. LimeWire Store sells high-quality, DRM-free MP3 downloads a la carte and through low-cost subscription plans. Intelligent product placement, unique editorial content, and links within Lime Wire's ecosystem are utilized to market and merchandise its licensed music. Additional titles from established and developing artists are produced and sold exclusively through LimeWire Store. The Lime Wire team enjoys a dynamic work environment at company headquarters in New York City.

Good Riddance, Shiny Plastic Discs

Image via Wikipedia

I have been going through a spring cleaning/purging for the past few weeks... a neighborhood garage sale helped me get rid of the numerous old PCs, routers, tape decks, video game consoles, cell phones and MP3 players I had accumulated over the years. But, one of the biggest space-hog culprits in my house has been the boxes of CDs (with jewel cases).

I went through the extreme pain of ripping all of my CDs probably 7 or 8 years ago (over the span of a couple weeks), and I have not bought a physical CD since that time. I don't know why I held onto the CDs for so long... I don't read the jackets and I don't look at the artwork. My CD player (along with my dual cassette deck and turntable) have been disconnected from my stereo for a few years. So, when it came to (spouse-mandated) de-cluttering, I started to do some research on the best way to get rid of them. To me, these CDs were no longer anything more than non-biodegradable packaging for the music that now lived on my hard drives and network. I didn't want to just throw them away... with them spending an eternity in a landfill somewhere. I gave some away to anyone that would come and take them but, given the choice, most of my friends would prefer to have them as MP3s on a thumbdrive. I could drag them to a record store that buys/sells used stuff... but to be honest, I don't even know where one of those is around me. The thought of listing them all on eBay, individually or even as "collections" (e.g. 80's Hair Metal), just seemed like way too much work.

Google led me to SecondSpin.com, a used CD/DVD/video game retailer (online and physical) based in California. So, I bit the bullet and went through and manually entered the UPCs for each CD (to see what each was worth). I then filtered out all the ones that were worth less than $1 (a lot of stuff is only valued at less than what it would cost to ship) and the cut-outs (those are accepted on an "as-needed" basis). I then had to do some re-configuring.... putting the "valuable" ones in jewel cases that weren't cracked and falling apart. After all of that, I ended up shipping around 250 of them (media rate via USPS was only about $15). A couple of weeks later, I got an email from SecondSpin saying that they have accepted about 2/3 of them - they rejected ones that I had written on the disc (a requirement if you have ever lived with roommates!).

All said-and-done, it was a lot of work to get $175... but if nothing else, it is a greener way to dispose of CDs than putting them in a landfill. And that $175 will go right towards more digital purchases. What about the CDs they didn't accept? I didn't ask... it is SecondSpin's trash to dispose of now.

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Weekly Top Songs MP3 Playlist

I just extended my Playtapus Project to create MP3 playlists out of a users Weekly Top Songs chart from Last.fm. I have embedded the list into the sidebar of this page, and then let Streampad handle the playback of them (at the bottom of the page).

To get your your own MP3 playlist for Weekly Top Songs, go here: http://tr.im/mIkv then get as RSS.

Check it out, and let me know what you think...

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Mediaor Infrastructure Upgrades

Image by Frank Hamm via Flickr

After suffering thr0ough continued issues with Yahoo Pipes and other infrastructure pieces used in Mediaor (loosely pronounced "meteor"), I finally "reassembled" the music/technology news and views mashup. I think the new set up will be much more reliable, plus it lets me update, add and filter news sources easily and quickly.

There are some more improvements that I still would like to make to the front-end (www.mediaor.com) and the twitter bot (@mediaor) but wanted to get the backend sorted out first.

As always, if there are any other blogs or news sites that you think would make a good addition just let me know.

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Latest Experiment - Blip.fm Recommender Bot

Image via CrunchBase

For heavy Twitter users, we are all seeing the communication platform being used more and more heavily as a viral music/taste distribution tool. In my last post, I showed the traffic numbers of some of the more popular music services. One of the fastest growing at the moment is Blip.fm. That information served as the inspiration of my latest mashup... I wanted to create an easy way to request recommendations to be pushed back to me based on a song that I "blipped".

So, a rainy weekend later I present to you the basic concept. Here's how it works.

• just add the tag #recsplease to any "blip" (that gets published to Twitter)
• the mashup monitors Twitter for blips that have the tag/recommendation request
• from the Blip.fm URL I go and fetch/scrape the artist name for the song that was shared
• this "seed" artist is then used to generate an array of similar artists
  
• it constructs a tweet and replies to the requester with the list of recommendations

The next piece will be to link those recommendations off to a playlist, mix or radio station that includes those recommendations (in addition to trying to optimize the whole thing to be better, strong, faster). Maybe later this week. As always, let me know if you have any suggestions.

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State of (Part of) the Industry

Free Streaming and Social Music Sites:

The chart above includes Last.fm, Imeem, MySpace Music, Playlist.com, Pandora. While not on this graph, iLike's traffic has (according to Compete.com) now surpassed Last.fm's.

Above we show Lala, 8tracks, Hype Machine, Mog and Finetune.

Twitter-centric Music Services

Included are Song.ly, Twt.fm, Blip.fm, Twisten.fm and Twiturm.

MP3 Search Engines

Seeqpod (R.I.P?) and Skreemr.

Subscription Music Sites

Including Rhapsody and Napster.

Portal Music Sites:

Includes AOL Music, Yahoo Music and MSN Music.

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Hackintosh: It's Alive!

This week I became the proud owner of a Hackintosh (aka Dell Mini9 running Mac OS X). I needed a new laptop, and have pretty much become a complete Mac convert over the past few years, so my options were limited. Either spend $1000 - $2500 for a MacBook, or spend a 1/10 of that on a homebrewed Hackintosh. For both the obvious reason of price, combined with the benefits of a small, light, fast (solid state storage) and long battery life, I went with the Hackintosh.

I was nervous for sure, but I knew a few people that had done it and said good things, so now I am paying it forward. Here's how I got a full-blow pseudo MacBook Air for under $200.

1. Redeem some of my American Express points for a Dell gift certificate (they best you can generally do with Amex points is 1 penny/point and this fit that bill). 20,000 Amex points = $200 Dell gift certificate (that's the max allowable)
2. Go to Dell.com and order and customize your Dell Mini 9 - the most compatible netbook for running OS X (and all of the device drivers seem to work). You need to upgrade to 16GB SSD (at minimum). I also included the webcam upgrade (higher resolution) and Windows XP. The total came out to around $390 (with 2 day shipping). You could get cheaper if you went Linux instead of XP (since you are going to install OS X over it anyway, but I wasn't sure whether I was going to do this so got XP as the backup plan). Enter your gift certificate number and voila... now you are billed only $190.
3. Wait for you Dell to arrive (mine took a couple of weeks - which they neglected to tell me until AFTER I paid extra for 2 day shipping). Boo Dell!
   
4. Dig up (or buy) a larger USB flash drive to use for the install (at least 8GB but 16GB is probably better). I found a 16GB online for about $30.
5. If you don't already have the RETAIL version of OS X (Leopard), you need to get it... the OEM version that ships with Macs won't work. I saw a special advertised the other day to MobileMe subscribers for $99. Luckily, I already had a copy so I didn't need to get another.
6. While you are still waiting for you Dell to arrive, get your USB drive ready for the install. Basically, you create 2 partitions on the drive where you copy a bunch of bootloaders and small utilities needed for the install on the small partition, and a copy of the OS X disk ISO image (.dmg) to the large partition. One of the files requires a Windows machine to execute/copy to the USB drive, but you could use the Dell when it arrives (if you got XP on it) or it will also work with Windows running in Parallels or Fusion on a Mac. The detailed directions (and links to required files) can be found here: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/how-to-mac-os-x-dellefi-installation-t3925.html. There are multiple methods to install, but the single USB drive method in "Section B (New)" is what I followed.
7. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not doing the "custom OS X install" (where I should have deselected all of the language packs, printer drivers, etc.) so that made my install take longer (over an hour) and eat up a lot of valuable storage space. So, now I had to uninstall all of the stuff I don't need to free up space (used a program called Monlingual).
   
8. Otherwise, I followed those directions and everything worked great. There was one part that wasn't completely clear in Step 7 (how to boot from the smaller USB drive into the Dell's SSD after install - I ended up having to hit ESC and then type "80" to get that option).
9. After I was done, everything worked out of the box except one minor issue with noisy sound output (sounded like some sort of interference). I read in one of the forums that if you encounter this just put the Dell into sleep mode and wake it back up. Sure enough, that did the trick. Everything worked right away... webcam, sound, trackpad, etc.

All-in-all, this seems like it is going to be a great travel machine for me. My only complaints with the hardware so far are that a) the vertical height of the screen is constraining... some windows are too tall to be able to get to the bottom of (e.g. system preferences) and it takes some finagling, and b) the keyboard takes some getting used to... the main keys are fine, but I am still having trouble finding some of the punctuation and secondary keys.

Now, my list of "must have apps" for your Hackintosh (after OS X install I only have a few gig of space left for apps).

• SimplifyMedia - don't waste your limited space on music, just stream from your home library (I also put Playdar on this machine which can serve the same purpose, but that is still very alpha)
• Firefox - I use a number of extensions that I really like (e.g. Delicious, Zemanta, etc) and have never gotten used to Safari
• Skitch - I can't live without it, although I may see if Jing can replace it since it handles screencasts & image capture
• Dropbox (or something similar) - online storage and syncing is a must for a small machine like this.
• Tweetie or Nambu - Adobe Airs apps can be resource hogs, so I opted for a native Mac app instead.
• Xslimmer - a small utility that will strip out all the bloat from other applications.)
• OnyX - a utility that will help you tweak settings and manage resources
  
• MobileMe Account - this makes things much easier when it comes to syncing everything between your machines. It also comes with iDisk remote storage/sync which could eliminate your need for Dropbox.
• Skype - I forgot this at first. I actually prefer iChat/AIM for voice and video chats, but Skype is a must have if you do any international business.
  

I also put Microsoft Office on it for now, although I don't recommend it. I will probably start to use Google Docs more now for this, and other hosted apps for presentation creation, etc. Everything else you need comes with OS X (iTunes, iChat, Mail, Calendar, Address Book, etc.). That comes close to maxing out the on-board storage, but between the online storage solutions and the new 16GB USB drive I bought for the install process, I think I should be good to go.

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