Five Lessons I’ve Learned From Turntable.fm

The new social music website turntable.fm has seen a rapid increase in popularity this summer thanks to its signature blend of DJing, music sharing and weird avatars. The website lets you sit in on themed rooms, each of which has spots for five DJs who alternate picking songs from a growing database of material to keep the party going, and keep weird avatar heads bobbing. When a spot opens up, your avatar can jump on stage and join the fun, spinning your own selections. Play what the crowd likes and get points. If the crowd doesn’t like your selections, they can vote down your choice and skip it.

Turntable.fm can seem daunting at first, but I’ve DJed about 20 times now and here are a few lessons I have learned that can help you get started.

1. Nobody has any idea what “the kids” are listening to. I don’t care how old you are, everybody younger than you has access to a whole world of culture you can only guess at. So, don’t try and guess. If there are younger people in the room, you will not recognize a single thing they play. Try to find a room with only older people and stump them with your hip new swagger.
2. Hip hop is dead. Maybe it’s just bad luck on my part (and certainly my sample size could use growth) but across the board, in every room not specifically tailored to hip hop, rap performed poorly. New school, old school, it didn’t matter. Nobody wanted to listen to rap.
3. Chat it up. People respond better to talkative DJs. Compliment other DJs’ songs enough and you might even be able to slip in some rap and not have it get voted down immediately.
4. Play “Peaches” by Presidents of the United States of America. I swear, that song has come on and cleaned up in every room I’ve been in.
5. 90′s night always plays. Perhaps it’s more telling of the current user base than anything else, but I’ve found it very easy to push a room into playing nothing but 90′s music. Bring flannel.

Now that you are ready to jump in and DJ, here comes the bad news. Turntable.fm recently restricted service to exclude everybody outside the US, as it was getting a bit jittery about licensing rights. No word on when it will open back up to the rest of the world, but one would suspect it is top priority given the global popularity the website was enjoying.

In the meantime, for our American readers (and hopefully soon for all of you) if you ever come across Q.E.D. in one of the rooms, that would be me. And if you wait around for seven minutes, you will most likely hear “Peaches.”

- Jason Oberholtzer

Tags: Arts, Disc jockey, Facebook, Hip-Hop, iTunes, Music, Spotify, turntable, turntable.fm, United States

Creating a Virtual Viewing Party

By all accounts, Ali Ahmed is an ambitious man, further, the type of man to whom the word ambitious does credit. Ahmed gets things done, thinks big picture and stands by his ideas. It is good then, for those interested in the success of Lutebox, the entertainment service Ahmed founded, that he remains the driving force behind the service, because Lutebox is among the more ambitious (certainly the more broad) ideas you are likely to encounter. Whether its scope keeps Lutebox from reaching its potential or sets it firmly above competing entertainment services remains to be seen, however it is clear that Lutebox lacks in neither ambition nor leadership.

The idea behind Lutebox is to create a service which makes available to users a variety of mainstream content (e.g. movies, TV shows, sports, music videos) while building a social community around that content. The community allows users to keep tabs on the viewing patterns of their network and to schedule group screenings wherein they can watch content simultaneously with friends while on a group video conference. The idea sounds great — premium content plus the means to enjoy it with your friends — but presents a few challenges when it comes to execution.

For one, building any social network from scratch is difficult, and Ahmed seems set against incorporating external social networks. Another challenge involves obtaining the wide range of rights required for the many categories of content promised. Finally, there is the technical challenge of making sure the videoconferences don’t interfere with the content screening; Lutebox plans to offer six-way video conferencing while in your scheduled group viewing which can put a strain on most computers.

Here is where the ambitious nature of Lutebox is most apparent. A very small segment of the population has the processor power available to them to stream HD content while maintaining a video conference, let alone eight, but when the technology catches up, or Lutebox finds a way to gracefully address the problem, this kind of simultaneous viewing is precisely the entertainment experience users will demand. And if anybody can find a way to get it to them, it’s probably Ali Ahmed.

You can register for an early alpha invite to Lutebox here.

Tags: Business, Business Services, Entertainment, Facebook, Social network, Television program, Videoconferencing, YouTube

When Data Trumps Content

Last week AdAge reported that Google has big plans for a data-exchange. This was seriously important news but two things conspired to bury it. First, there was all the Google+ hype and second, it was story about data.

I know – data? Snore. New accounting rules make for more compelling reading.

But the biggest digital advertising story you have never heard is data. Never mind mobile. Never mind video and real-time bidding. Gathering info about you as a consumer and finding ways to use that info, across different media, is the future of advertising. Everything else is just details.

From the beginning, the Web promised advertisers a utopia where they could show the right ads to exactly the right people. No more aggregated, generalized audiences, they could target individuals.

But digital advertising still does not differ significantly from the way Don Draper did business. Despite oceans of data being available, targeting and segmentation are still based on the media, not the user.

One problem is that data and content are both very fragmented. Publishers know about your habits on their site but little about your media habits as a whole.

Companies like BlueKai or AudienceScience attempt to address this by providing aggregated user surfing data.

This third party data presents an interesting challenge for content creators and publishers.

In the old days, you bought ads in GQ because you assumed readers of the magazine fit the segment you wanted. GQ got paid a premium because they aggregated that audience.

But third party data allows advertsiers to slice out audiences from different pools of traffic. Information gathered about users’ web habits, search history, their gender etc. can be used to make assumptions about the kind of ads to serve, carving out a segment independent of the publishers audience.

“Thanks New York Times but I will go find my own users on your website.”

If advertisers feel they need these data suppliers to truly aggregate the audience they want, this begs the question:

What value do publishers bring beyond raw ad impressions?

Of course the assumption is that all the data and attendant blackbox targeting actually works.

But assuming it does work as advertised – no one should be paying premium to be on a particular site.

If publishers were doing their job – cultivating audience instead of generating impressions – there would not be a serious market for third party data. But as the business is developing right now, the value of content is in danger.

Which brings us back to Google’s data-exchange. The report is they are working on a market where publishers and third-party data would be combined centrally. Advertisers could buy desired segments from a rich data set, hop on an ad exchange and bid on inventory, never considering an individual publisher’s content.

Google has already woven itself into the online advertising ecosystem in an unprecedented way: search, display, adserving, ad management etc. Becoming the arbiter of audience would be the last step in making their advertising Death Star fully operational.

Occasional contributor, Josh Mortensen first appeared on the Web in 2002, writing for Salon.com.

A version of this post first appeared in The Hippo Files.

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A Productive Conversation

Davorin Gabrovec is the Co-Founder of Flowr, a communication service meant to encourage true collaborative work flow.

This week, I exchanged emails with Davorin regarding collaborative productivity and the orgin of Flowr.

Tattletech: I assume that now, if your office, you use Flowr as your primary tool for organization. Before you founded Flowr, what was your project organization like? A mess of emails and shared documents like the rest of us, or were you always ahead of the game?

Davorin Gabrovec:  Before we built up Flowr, we used email, skype and scheduled meetings as our major communication tools. However, from the moment we wrote first few lines of code, we started with using Flowr for the development of Flowr and then evolved it based on our needs and our first beta users.

Tattletech: Wow. Using Flowr to develop Flowr, very Inception of you. When was the first time you had an idea that you wanted to create something like Flowr? Was it in a dream?

DG: Haha, it was not in a dream. It was came from thinking about improving our communication/collaboration issues within the small (20 employee) company which I funded before Flowr. We had been using several tools such as wikis, intranets and blogs to manage our internal information along with tons of emails and meetings, all of which were time consuming. At the same time, I was looking at social networks, which provided good examples of how you can easily get an information flow about your network, even amongst people you have never met in person.

Then I started to think about making a very easy “twitter-like” 140 character message box, where anyone inside our team could share a new idea, ask other some questions or just pass on an interesting link, without spamming the rest of the team–this would be great! We could reduce meetings, colleagues could interact when they will had time and all the information and knowledge would stay in one place. When I started talking with few of my colleagues from other companies, they loved the idea. That was the moment when two of my colleagues and I decided to build such a tool.

Tattletech: What was your biggest challenge in development?

DG: Our biggest challenge was making the product beautifully designed and as simple as possible. Our next biggest challenge was scalability from the tech perspective where our CTO Vlada played his role very well.

Tattletech: Have you had to change anything major from your original design to Flowr’s current iteration?

DG: We changed the user interface two times to make the product perfect (from our perspective). After the first redesign we put several analytics in place to start measuring how users actually use Flowr. Now we are much closer to what we want Flowr to be.

Tattletech: What is the next step for Flowr? What can we look forward to in the fall?

DG: The focus for the next few months is integration with third party apps such as customer relationship management, helpdesk and project management tools, as well as further development of mobile apps and an iPad app. We hope that Flowr will become a major communication tool for every small and medium business, with basic social features and notifications from the different applications companies usually use. That way, Flowr will become a major internal collaboration and information hub.

– Jason Oberholtzer

Follow Davorin on Twitter and take a look at Flowr.

Tags: Business, Collaboration, Davorin Gabrovec, flowr, Google, Issuu, Niccolo Pantucci, Online Communities, Peter Gibbons, productivity, Social network, Social Networking, Socialcast, Twitter

Venturing Into The Plus

I want to root against Google+ so badly I can almost taste it. A failure here would make my life so much easier! This isn’t like Google Wave where I saw something that could potentially be useful, helpful and game-changing for how I could communicate with people. This is just more of the same stuff we already have.

Google+ is just sharing things with a mixture of friends, acquaintances and strangers. That’s it. Just sharing and following. The content isn’t any different than I can get from these people anywhere else; it’s the same kitty video I see on Facebook, now with a whiter background design.

So, I want to root against this new, redundant time suck. I don’t need it and I certainly don’t need more social networks to keep tabs on.

That said, I am now on Google+.

It’s research only, I swear! Strangely addicting research…but anyway, the point is that I am on Google+ despite my desire to watch it fail. I still hope it amounts to nothing, but in the mean time, I might as well check out what these circles are all about, and spruce up my profile, and well…I have to come clean. I’m hooked.

Maybe we are now hardwired to enjoy novelty in any form, but every time I sign on to Google+ it feels like getting into a new car. All I want to do is take it for a spin and see what kind of power it has. I am enjoying every bit of minutiae, every second of exploration. I mean, not that I still don’t want it to fail and all, but it is kind of fun.

I went to one of the first colleges to get Facebook, and in the early years, it had a similar feel. Simple acts of navigation were novel and everything had a weird lawless and vaguely stalkerish feel about it.

It’s this fun with form (a new system to navigate!) and function (new people to stalk!) that Google+ has going for it. I don’t think we need Google+ at all, and I still wish it would go away, but I’m pretty sure I like it, against my better judgement. As Facebook would say, “it’s complicated.”

- Jason Oberholtzer

Tags: Facebook, Google, Google Buzz, Google Wave, New People, Search Engines, Searching, Social network, Twitter

First Ever Animated Tattoo

The proliferation of QR codes has advanced, for the first time, onto the human body in a permanent fashion. Paris-based tattoo artist K.A.R.L. broke new ground by tattooing the first QR code meant to be read from human flesh, for the purpose of creating body art perpetually one smartphone away from being animated. QR codes have certainly come a long way from their warehouse origin as part trackers. Watch the video of his incredible tattoo here.

Though QR codes are now commonly seen in marketing and in some art, this is brand new frontier, and one that seems to hint at future QR cyborg potential, which frankly sounds really awesome!

Tags: art, Body art, Bodyart, Facebook, Paris, QR code, Tattoo, Tattoo artist

Twitter High

I’ve come to the disturbing realization that I am using Twitter to recreate my high school experience. I’m not sure if this means I’m stunted, the Internet is stunted, or the whole process of normative socialization is stunted, but I can no longer deny what I see. I am currently enrolled in Twitter High.

Let’s start with the institution. Organization and segmentation are the typical characteristics of a high school environment. Time is institutionally managed, activities regimented, and the day is broken into 47 minute work intervals with two and a half minutes for travel between classrooms. All this organization promotes compartmentalization. Math is studied for 47 minutes in this room, with these people; a bell rings and within three minutes, you change your work, your peers and your location. So goes the day. Each pursuit has its own setting.

My Internet life operates in similar compartments. I have folders of bookmarks for my different interests, times of the day where I work on different pursuits. I’ve even written myself a daily schedule that cuts my day into half-hour segments.

The activities of my day are vaguely connected by setting. Just like the high school building I took classes in didn’t change, regardless of the class, I am still on my computer, regardless of what I’m doing. And just like in high school, there is some overlap of work and peers; people of similar intelligence level or with similar interests tend to glom together. Communities form, but I’ll get back to that later.

When I open my laptop in the morning, my daily “productive purpose” plays out quite like a school day (though unfortunately, the day doesn’t end in the afternoon but rather continues until I close the laptop again for the night). I force myself to focus for periods and then let myself wander before switching gears. I haven’t bought a bell to ring when I need to change what I’m doing, but I haven’t yet ruled out the purchase.

More compelling than my general organization is my social life. Okay, it’s maybe not that much more compelling, but if I were in high school it would be! After all, that arena launched a million horrible movies, TV shows and best-selling vampire series. High school is all about socializing—trying to hang out with the cool kids and get the girls. Here is where we get to Twitter, the place the Internet goes to socialize.

In high school I hung out with a variety of different groups, which I think is a rather typical experience. I was into music, so I had my music friends. I played sports, so I had my athlete friends. I was good at English, so I had my smart friends and horrible at French, which I didn’t take seriously, so I had my slacker friends.

Here are the main groups I follow on Twitter: battle rappers, professional athletes, writers, bloggers, journalists and people in the media. It seems like I’ve filled my high school quota for cliques (though I won’t tip off which group is the “slacker friend”). I’ve managed to recreate the socialization patterns I had in high school on my Twitter stream, and in no way is that pathetic!

What is easy to miss in all the snark regarding high school is the importance of these categories when we socialize. A large reason Twitter is succeeding is the ease with which we can compartmentalize our interests and manufacture communities. I’m not a part of the world of professional sports, but I get to hang around that world. I’m no rapper, but I get to see battle rappers be creative and appreciate their process even though I’ve never battled (though if I were you, I wouldn’t test me—I got bars). However, I am a part of that loose group of introverts known as “writers, bloggers and journalists” and by participating in that clique, I get to feel some camaraderie. Twitter might benefit the writers most of all, as we wrestle with insomnia, self-doubt, and Vitamin D deficiency while staring at blank Word documents alone in our respective homes.

Basically, Twitter gave me back the ability to do what I love: hang out with people who are more interesting than I am, pick their brains, and be social in a broad sense.  My days are more like high school because of it, but I don’t mind—47 minutes of work, then a few minutes of chatting in the hallway. So it goes.

- Jason Oberholtzer

Tags: Facebook, High school, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social network, Student, Trending and Popularity, Twitter, United States

Interviewing a Bully Award Finalist

Elizabeth Parry from White Bull sits down with 2010 Bully Award Finalist, Paul Veugen (Founder, CEO of Usabilla) to talk about his exciting year. During the conversation, he gives a few good bits of advice to other startups.

“From the beginning, I think a company should be focused on getting the numbers straight and building a good business case. And if you know who your customers are then you’ve already got a nice story for yourself and others as well.”

Read the rest of the interview here, and remember: submissions for the 2011 Bully Awards are open until the end of July.

Tags: Bully Awards, Business case, Design, Paul Veugen, startups, Usability, Usability testing, Usabilla, Website, White Bull

What We Can Learn From Supermarkets

Analyst firm Canalys projects that mobile apps will generate $7.3 billion in revenue in 2011 from downloads, in-app payments and subscriptions. And they expect that number to double to $14.1 billion in 2012. As huge as these revenue numbers are, a big opportunity is being missed. With a little more thought and understanding of retail psychology, I believe those numbers could be considerably higher.

In a high tech mobile world it may seem a little dull to draw inspiration from the humble supermarket chain. But if such immensely successful examples of retail genius exist, wouldn’t it make sense to explore the various ways the same strategy could provide a monetization masterclass for mobile applications developers?

There are few companies better at selling physical goods and services than supermarket chains. They offer a vast array of products and services, creating an in-store shopping experience (with seemingly minimal effort) which sells massive volumes of both necessity and impulse purchases, generating billions of dollars in sales in the process. The customer experience has been refined to an art form—intelligent product placement and subtle but precise special offers cater to all demographic groups while still feeling targeted.

Personally, I am the world’s biggest sucker for such deals and frequently end up spending at least 10% more than I plan to when I do the weekly shopping. Over the course of 10 months this could increase my spend by over $1500! Surely it must be possible to replicate this success within mobile applications.

However, a majority of application developers seem to lack even the most basic understanding of retail psychology when they craft their monetization strategies. Limited availability of end user profiled data should not be an excuse for only using the most basic Freemium model.

Supermarkets don’t work that way; in-store sales are driven not by a static model, but by a fluid one—a combination of seasonal events, timed offers, demographic probability, and knowledge of what’s hot and what the competition is offering. Then, the customer journey is scrutinized and high margin products are placed in “sweet spots” which catch your attention from the time you enter the store to the time you leave.

This model stands in stark contrast to the “one size fits all” strategy of virtual goods and other services, propped up with a bit of blind network advertising that seems boring and grossly unsophisticated. The predictability of Freemium services can be annoying and has an adverse effect on the buying mindset. They are boring and often ignored. Perhaps, replicating some of these supermarket upsell techniques could enliven mobile app market.

Even high profile apps like Foursquare are massively short-changing themselves when it comes to monetizating end user eyeball time. They have a great brand persona, a slick and engaging experience, great social and reward hooks (with Mayorships, check-in leaderboards and badges) and now 10 million users, many of whom (like me) are very active. So where is the revenue source to justify the estimated $600m market CAP? Right now it’s via “special nearby” tabs, many of which are next-to-useless unless you happen to be Mayor. Why hold back? The potential to deliver multi-layer value to partners, brands and the user is immense. You have their eyes, now develop some “sweet spots.”

Incorporating the same sophisticated product placement and special offer techniques used by supermarkets, Foursquare could easily apply numerous special deal layers within the user journey, based not only on location but user profile. They could Optimize UI real estate in the same way supermarkets optimize shelf space to deliver a multitude of well-placed promotions based on the age/sex demographics of people who are likely to visit a location. They could even deliver a variety of promotions depending on what time of day a user checks in. The possibilities are endless and, if deployed in a slick and uncluttered fashion, they could have a significant impact on Foursquare’s earnings potential.

Foursquare is a great example, but I am convinced a more tactical approach to app-based monetization can be applied in varying degrees by most developers. By understanding the profile of the user, analyzing the user journey and deploying a smarter variable upsell strategy within the flow of the application (gaming credits, virtual goods, subscription services, special offers, etc.) there is much more profit to be found in the mobile app market.

You can follow Geoff Casely on Twitter @geoffcasely

Tags: Android, Business, Canalys, Facebook, Foursquare, INQ, Mobile application development, Product placement

Submit for the 2011 Bully Awards

White Bull Summits, ‘Champions of the European Innovation Ecosystem’, yesterday announced its official call for the 2011 Bully Awards, honouring Europe’s leading privately held technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies.

Submissions for the 2011 Bully Awards are now open, and nominations will be accepted through July 31, 2011.

The 2011 Bully Awards will honour 30 TMT firms as winners in three categories:

• Yearlings: firms that seek or have received angel/seed rounds or equivalent; classic startups
• Young Bulls: firms that seek or have received Series A financing; early stage companies
• Longhorns: post Series A firms; growth stage companies

White Bull Summits will shortlist 60 firms as finalists, and these finalists will receive a special invitation to present at its 2nd Annual Pathways to Exit conference October 3 – 5, 2011 in Barcelona, where they will have the opportunity to present to potential partners and deal makers who can help them reach their goals.

The Bully Award applicants will be carefully reviewed and selected by White Bull’s panel of industry experts based on the following criteria:

• Market Opportunity: How large is the opportunity? Is the ‘problem’ compelling enough to build a substantial business?
• Competitive Landscape: Does the business have key sustainable competitive advantages over the existing and future competition?
• Business Models and Revenues: Does the business model, existing revenues and growth forecasts present a compelling story?
• Execution: Strength of milestones reached, customer base and progress?
• Management Team: Is the existing management team and structure in place sufficient to drive the company forward?
• Sector Activity: How competitive is the sector, and what is the strength of the exit market in the industry?

The 2011 Bully Award winners will be announced and celebrated at the 2011 Bully Awards ceremony on the evening of October 5th at the close of the White Bull Summit, Pathways to Exit, a three-day, invitation-only, conference forum for entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and visionaries in the TMT and clean tech sectors. Learn more about White Bull Summits or request an invitation to attend here.

So, send in your worthy submissions for the 2011 Bully Awards now!

Tags: Arts, Barcelona, bully, Business, media, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Site Awards, Student, Technology, telecomunications, White Bull Summit