[Music Monday] Taking OpenEMI’s Torch And Taking It Further

On April 22-24, 2012, a conference aptly named Rethink Music was organized by the Berklee College of Music in Boston. They basically brought together professionals from all over the music industry – from media, from the music labels, from artist management, and even from technology companies like Youtube, Rhapsody and Echo Nest (you can look at the whole speaker roster here). But one of the most interesting things announced and discussed at Rethink Music, in my opinion, is OpenEMI.

The basic concept of OpenEMI is to provide access to startups who want to create music applications and services based on EMI’s music library – and if the app is interesting enough, EMI may partner with the startup to develop it further. You can either request for a access to a wide range of songs, or request deeper access to single artists with more audio, video and other content. This developer-friendly system is supported by Echo Nest, the company that also has a wider-range API for music applications that power services like Spotify’s Radio feature.

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[Dailyssimo] Stand Out, Folks…!

The word lay-off or termination will probably always be the scourge of the professional workers who depend their lives on a company. Perhaps we still remember a short while ago when Yahoo! laid off 2000 employees worldwide, and Sony followed – but has nothing to do with what happened at Yahoo! – by laying off 10.000 of its own employees.

We can imagine how the employees affected by the layoffs suddenly have no income and at a crisis in their lives, especially those who have families. Yes, it’s terrible if all of the sudden, we are in that position without having any lifeboat.

Many tend to believe that layoffs occur due to reasons caused by the employees themselves but this is clearly not true because there are plenty of reasons for layoffs to occur. Don’t be surprised when you see a top employee getting laid off seemingly without any clear reason.

When the financial crisis hit the United States a few years ago, we saw how the wave of layoffs happened, with a rapid domino effect and within a few weeks, reached my workplace at that time (at Yahoo! Southeast Asia) and for the first time in my life, I saw how a company lays off employees in the interest of the company itself on a large scale.

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Facebook’s Billion Dollar Paranoia

Silicon Valley is partly driven by Paranoia, even former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote a book on this subject back in 1996. Companies often buy other companies not to advance themselves or to add assets but to prevent competitors from gaining an advantage by acquiring them instead. This applies across industries though, not just Silicon Valley but it seems to be more pronounced in the personal technology world where innovation seems to happen much more rapidly.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced the acquisition of Instagram, he said that Facebook will not change how Instagram works and will make sure that all the reasons that make Instagram so popular will remain as they are. Sure, Facebook is still trying to figure out how to monetize mobile and Instagram’s team has been working exclusively on mobile platforms, so having them on board at Facebook makes sense, but really, a billion dollars for a photography-based social network that Facebook itself could have built in-house sounds ridiculous no matter how you spin it.

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Is Google Drive Even Worth Using?

Google has finally released Google Drive, the long awaited online file storage service that had been rumored for six years. But don’t call it that, because Google SVP of Chrome and Apps, Sundar Pichai, hates files and file management. In fact, he was the one who killed the original Google Drive project, dubbed GDrive, several years ago.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Pichai refers to Google Drive as “living your life online”, whatever that means. Regardless of what he believes, the majority of Drive users will understand it as a place to store your files online. Does it let you place files in it? Does it let you organize them into folders? Does it let you add, remove, and modify your files? Yes, yes, and yes, plus, Google Drive synchronizes its content with that of the corresponding folders on your computer.

Google Drive gives you 5GB of space for free which is integrated with Google Docs. If you haven’t got 5GB in your Docs storage now instead of the usual 1GB, you will eventually. You’ll also be able to purchase additional storage for a monthly fee as soon as Drive is available for your Google account. The company is rolling Drive out to all Gmail users over the next several days.

Let’s take a deeper look at Google Drive and see what it really is.

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[Simply Business] Go Local, Screw Global

Going global! That’s pretty much the dream of any startup founders when planning on their startups. The dream that has been achieved by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and everyone else in Silicon Valley. It’s a common thing to think globally, but don’t forget that to go global, you need to plant your roots locally first.

I’m pretty sure we all watched “The Social Network” so we all know that Facebook started in a dorm room targeting Harvard students. It grew to target more universities and then only after that, it went public and achieved nationwide recognition. The process it takes when going global is by doing it one step at a time. Facebook did not start as a global company, it started as an exclusive Harvard-only social network and it grew one step at a time.

Let’s look at another site: Groupon. Groupon started by Andrew Mason in November 2008. The first city that got stormed by Groupon was Chicago. They hit jackpot in that city and then expanded to Boston, New York and Toronto. They grew enormously in 2 years with 35 million users in North and South America, Europe, and Asia by buying local Groupon-like startups across the globe. Yes, they became a massive force globally, but they started all that in one city: Chicago.

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Learn to Fail, Fail to Learn

For people who pioneered a business, the word “fail” is a scary word. Loss of income, loss of pride; maybe it’s something that will be associated with the word “fail”. Like every other young people who live today that has “poisoned” by entrepreneur virus, also as a writer, I also have a small business. I must admit that until now, the business is not growing as expected. The available indicator hasn’t reached a condition referred to as a “success”.

Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, wrote an article titled “How to Fail” in Business Week. He talked about failure faced by him (many times) before finally succeeding with Zynga as one of the largest online game providers in the world. There he wrote a closing that is quite memorable for me. His quote is as follows:

I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble. Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed. You have a lot of time to think about it.

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[Music Monday] Music Labels, Make Something Simple And Put It On The Web!

As covered by DailySocial a few days ago, Touchten launched a music app in collaboration with Aquarius Musikindo, one of the ‘major independent’ labels (this is the term they use in the industry to note a large music label not affiliated with the Big Four: Sony, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI). This move deserves applause as it shows that the music labels are willing to try out untested new waters, instead of trying to find a new medium to repeat the old business model of record music and profit by amount of sold copies.

I mean, if we’re going to move on from the issue if piracy, we might as well try something new. The increasing trend of concerts being a major income contributor for musicians has emphasized that the recorded music itself, obtained legally or illegally, is a way to sell a music experience, which in some cases in better enjoyed live.

I think if you checked each person who came to a Katy Perry concert, not all would have bought the original CD – but they definitely have paid full price to buy the concert tickets. Why? Because the concert is an irreplaceable experience, with different meaning to different people. Just like the songs themselves.

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[Simply Business] Believe in Your Stupid Ideas

There is a very thin line between a brilliant idea and a stupid idea. Some ideas just didn’t make sense at the time, but it may made more sense in the future. Some are just plain stupid. You may think you can differentiate instantly between the two, but that’s not always the case.

For example, let’s take a look at Encarta vs Wikipedia. Both are encyclopedia with massive amount of articles covering various fields and languages. One was made by a giant company written by (maybe) thousands of selected experts and the other was from a non-profit charitable organization written by anonymous internet volunteers who write without pay.

Now if I were to ask you which one will win based on the above statement alone, what answer will you give me?

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Why Rocket Internet is actually doing Indonesia a favor

They come, they execute, they sell.

Samwer Brothers might not be the idol for most entrepreneurs, but their company is giving an amazing impact for startup market like Indonesia.

Since their existence broke a few months ago, Rocket Internet has been hiring people like crazy, they’re bringing cloned companies to the market and make good money out of it. These people don’t talk much, in fact one of their strategy is to stay away from tech blogs like us. That might mean they have something to hide, but it might also mean they want to focus on what they do and things that can add value for them. Of course Rocket Internet is not exactly popular amongst tech publications for their anti-innovation principles, which probably the ultimate reason they avoid tech journalists.

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