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Forget about Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy’s awkward on-stage interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which has been amply detailed
elsewhere (although watching them might have been akin to the uncomfortable pleasure of watching a fight at a hockey game). I really wish I’d seen the panel discussion on ad-supported music. According to a posting on PaidContent.org, it degenerated into a shouting match, with a Capitol records exec saying he needed more Internet promotion like he needed a root canal without anesthetic, RCRD LBL founder Peter Rojas dissing iTunes as irrelevant, and audience members yelling that Rojas doesn’t respect intellectual property. (RCRD LBL is essentially a music blog with free music provided by bands as a promotional tool.)

There was also a presentation by Apple engineering manager Michael Lopp (aka Rands in Repose, he of the greatest guide to Vegas ever blogged), in which he discussed the company’s unique approach to design–think painstaking mockups and brainstorming, both of which are taken seriously rather than treated as afterthoughts or mere team-building exercises.

This year’s South-by-Southwest Interactive seems to have reached a kind of critical mass, with lots of smart and opinionated people converging around a rapidly changing industry, creating the kind of excitement that used to be found at CES or (way back) Comdex.

This year's South by Southwest Interactive conference seems to have reached the kind of critical mass that used to characterize CES and Comdex.

Microsoft launched its Zune video store this week with about 800 TV show episodes, including content from NBC, which earlier pulled its content from iTunes in a dispute over pricing and other issues. Despite the apparent coup with NBC, Microsoft is still lagging Apple badly on the sales front.

“Microsoft has no plans or commitments to implement content filtering features in the Zune family of devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC,” the software maker said in a statement.

In a blog, the Times’ Saul Hansell said that, as part of Microsoft’s deal to get NBC TV shows, it had agreed to look into the possibility of adding technology into the MP3 player that would scan a user’s collection for unauthorized content.

And no, I’m not talking about some sort of bundled action flick.

The blog cites Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn as saying that the software maker is exploring antipiracy measures with NBC. Microsoft issued a statement on Wednesday denying that there was any agreement to filter content.

The New York Times suggested Wednesday that future versions of the
Zune might come with a tiny cop capable of catching digital lawbreakers.

Sohn echoed the sentiment. “We’ve agreed to work with these guys on a number of issues, but we have no plans or commitment to put filtering technology as part of this arrangement with NBC,” he told CNET News.com.

Rochester Institute of Technology President Bill Destler tries out the banjo with Alex Lifschitz, a second-year game design and development major.

(Credit:
A. Sue Weisler)

A couple of years ago, I bought an
Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Rock Band. I’d played it a few times and fell in love. I also love the Guitar Hero series and most of the other music-themed modern games out there. But sometimes things can go too far, and this might be one of those times.

Oh-No Banjo is a Guitar Hero-based game students from the Rochester Institute of Technology cooked up for the school’s president, Bill Destler. He happens to be a hard-core collector of antique banjos from the 1840s to 1920s (as if there are any soft-core banjo collectors out there).

You can see the simulated banjo game in action in the video below. I particularly like the old-timey fonts they used. I’m into old-timey-ness. Harmonix, if you’re reading this, you’ve got a potential new product on your hands.

If you’re a person who loves live music but hates having to keep up on when your favorite bands are coming into town, there’s a great new service for you. It’s called Songkick, and it’s been designed to help you stay on top of upcoming concert dates, as well as discover new music from your existing tastes. It’s making a complicated process wonderfully simple, and I expect it to be the next big thing in live music in the same way that Last.fm and Pandora were with prerecorded music tracks.

To figure out what you like in the first place, the service makes it easy by letting you import the library data from iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media player using a small plug-in. That same plug-in will also update the data if you add new music to your collection.

Each artist has a page on Songkick that lists some similar bands as well as pricing and direct links to buy the tickets from 17 different vendors. Users can also leave comments (called “two cents”) about a band, although CEO Ian Hogarth told me they might add a bona fide rating system to complement it later on. Also on artist pages, and an integral part of the service is the blog listing guide. Songkick will scour the web and pull up any references to the band or artist in blog posts. These show up in reverse-chronological order on the band page, and can be toggled with upcoming tour dates.

Battle of the bands tracks three different bands of your choice against MySpace activity and sales data. (Click to enlarge)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

To compliment the band mentions on blog posts there’s a really great service the team has built called battle of the bands. Like Alexa and Compete, battle of the bands lets you compare up to three bands together to see which one’s been the most “hot” in the past five weeks based on various interactions on MySpace as well as mentions in blog posts, and the Amazon.com sales rank. The system is built to accept other streams of data, so if and when Facebook begins to make the data on artist pages a little more transparent, those numbers could be integrated into the stats too.

This third leg of the service, called “BandSense” is a very novel concept. Bloggers who want to opt into the service can embed a line of Javascript into a single post or their entire blog template and get links to bands at the bottom of a post if they’re mentioned. It’s not just any a link spamming option, the service will only create links for bands only that are on tour. Clicking the band link in the blog goes straight to the tour dates and ticket pricing information, and if a user buys a ticket, the blog owner gets a cut. To compliment the system and keep bands you don’t like (but mentioned) off your blog, you can create a blacklist. These blacklisted artists will get no such link love.

In the future Hogarth tells me there will be music integration on the Songkick band pages as well as the recommendations so you can listen to some tracks without having to navigate offsite. The only delay has been finding a way to do it democratically with all of the music hosting services out there. Songkick already has integration on partnered sites like Qloud and Seeqpod, and in the future intends to spread its tour date and recommendation engine even further.

Over the years, I’ve become inured to David Brooks’ predictable platitudes about politics and culture. He’s been wrong so often on the big story of our times–the war–that I automatically tune out his musings on contemporary culture. But after stewing all weekend about his most recent New York Times column, I’ve got to get this off my chest.

(Credit:
http://www.pocketprotectors.com )

Writing about the ascent of the “alpha geek”–a contradiction in terms?–Brooks cobbles together a series of easy generalizations regularly tossed around as shorthand to explain more complex developments. Call it cliche as socio-economic analysis. To wit:

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls–Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin and so on.

At last he didn’t peddle past the idea of the techno-elite as a tribe of bad-smelling, social losers with barely enough sense to wipe the snot off their faces. But Brooks’ assignment of a present-at-the-creation date for the “nerd ascendency” to Microsoft and the digital economy in the 1980s is subjective. He could just have easily moved the time line back to around the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the myriad successful tech companies later founded by its alumni.

And let’s not forget the likes of Hewlett-Packard and other sundry start-ups, which put Silicon Valley on the map. But that was long before the emergence of the era of 24/7 naval-gazing, so I suppose that doesn’t count as much today.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

If anyone has the address of this “geek cohort,” please pass it along. Until then, I think that’s utter hogwash. I’ve watched several generations of college-educated Americans under 30 and beyond and, truth be told, there’s nothing in that history to suggest the current crop’s presumed group sensibility is going to last into middle age. And the only “newly militant geeks” I can point to usually surface when Twitter goes haywire during another of its prolonged brown-outs.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the
iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

The iPhone hordes! Hide the women and children before they get “i-mashed.” Hoo boy. Brooks must have received special dispensation from The New York Times copy desk because this is rhetorical overkill to the point of being ridiculous. If there’s a political darling among the nerd set these days, it’s probably Ron Paul (though Obama definitely has the coolness factor). But defining a generation by the popularity of a commercial product is a Madison Avenue cliche waiting to be born. Maybe the ghost of Lionel Trilling will get so worked up about the cacophony of the blogosphere it will soon haunt the ramparts of Columbia’s Morningside Heights.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Um, sure David. On the basis of the most flimsy evidence, we’re expected to believe that a fundamental societal transformation is under way. I suppose that’s not as over the top as your Candyland declarations cheerleading our way into Iraq. But it’s as equally rooted in unreality.

Are Twitter’s performance problems due to flimsy engineering or the choice of Ruby on Rails to build the application?

In the Twitter developer blog on Thursday, an engineer said that Ruby on Rails still rocks as a Web development platform. The service’s woes are due more to a creaky architecture, he said.

Twitter performance problems have brought heaps of scorn from the busy Web 2.0 digerati. That has prompted the company to disclose more technical details like today’s Q and A format blog.

Many people have questioned whether choosing to write the application using Ruby on Rails was a smart move and whether Twitter should shift to a different Web development technology.

Ruby is a scripting, or dynamic, language, which means that it can be slower than Java or C for some applications. The trade-off is that in general it’s faster to write code with. Rails, meanwhile, is a Web development framework optimized for speed.

Ruby still makes sense for much of what Twitter does–essentially sending messages around the Web–but the company has left the door open to using other languages. The Twitter developer blog says this:

We’ve got a ton of code in Ruby, and we’ll continue to develop in Ruby with Rails for our front-end work for some time. There’s plenty to do in our system that Ruby is a great fit for, and other places where different languages and technologies are a better fit. Our key problems have been primarily architectural and growing our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. Working in Ruby has been, in our experience, a trade-off between developer speed/productivity and VM speed/instrumentation/visibility.

The outages and slow performance are due to “popular” members of Twitter with many followers who “tweet” a lot all at once, according to Twitter. Because of that, the company says will put some limits on what some users can do, but it should not be noticeable.

We have some limits, and we’re adding more. Legitimate users should never notice them, but these new limits should help mitigate the worst case failures and attacks.

commentary

An old friend from the open-source world, Ira Heffan, called me today about his company, TopCoder. Ira is a smart guy so I figured anything with which he was involved must be good.

And it is. At its most basic, TopCoder stages programming competitions, both for itself (that is, its direct consulting clients) and for third parties like Google. Companies hire TopCoder to stage competitions to build functionality for them (as well as to scout for new talent). TopCoder also provides consulting services and uses competitions to create the requested applications, and heavily reuses its portfolio of applications and components to drive down development costs.

As an example, TopCoder has its premier competition in Las Vegas next week at the 2008 TopCoder Open (May 12 through 15), hosting 120 finalists from 30 countries. $260,000 in prize money is on the line.

Ira told me that one developer made over $500,000 last year in TopCoder prize money. Not too shabby. This, coupled with recruiting interest from top companies means that developers may be winning themselves a new job, as well as a competition.

However, it’s actually a lower-profile component of TopCoder’s business that I find the most fascinating: Bug Races.

Bug races are a way for TopCoder to do maintenance on the software it develops, but the company is considering opening the program up to third parties interested in “renting” a community to spot and fix bugs. It’s a great way to provide comparatively small dollars ($25 to $200 per bug fix) to find quick fixes for TopCoder’s internal stable of Jira-reported bugs.

Now imagine what this could mean for commercial open-source projects. Despite the myth of open-source development (zillions of eyeballs making all bugs shallow), the reality is that most projects don’t have the luxury of zillions, or even hundreds, of qualified people actively looking at their code to find bugs. Here’s where rent-a-bug-killer comes in handy, as Ira noted to me:

…[T]he Bug Races might be an interesting way for open source companies to do bug fixes. The companies could post issues on the site with a bounty on them, and then review the member’s submissions to see if they take care of the issue. The companies would need to provide the members with information on where to get the source, and environment requirements, etc., but that’s something that open source companies would already have in place anyway. TopCoder already has in place the developer community and the payment and IP transfer processes, so it could be a very easy thing for us to do.

I think this is absolutely brilliant. Most open-source companies are adept at finding bugs after a product release because their customers and system integrators - their community - discover these when trying to go into production. But getting qualified volunteers before a release to find bugs, and getting bandwidth post-release to fix the bugs, would be invaluable.

Rent-a-community. It might not fit the myth of open source, but it seems like a direct hit on the reality of open source. If you’d like an introduction to the company, ping me.

Oscar Robertson: Few were better.

(Credit:
Thebigo.com)

Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have his “Oscar Robertson” moment this week?

Bear with me on this one for a moment.

In case you missed it, Sunday’s New York Times sports section carried a wonderful first-person retrospective piece by Robertson, one of the greatest basketball guards in the history of the game. But when he played at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1950s, Robertson was anything but a household name.

That changed after he lit up Madison Square Garden for 56 points in front of the New York media. Unfortunately, the post-game news conference was less stellar. A 19-year-old sophomore from the sticks, Robertson was uncomfortable being on center stage. I’ll let him take the narrative from here:

I’m afraid I wasn’t a very exciting interview, giving mostly monosyllabic replies and identifying my first state high school championship as my biggest thrill to date. One writer stayed until after all the others had left, and introduced himself as Milton Gross of The New York Post.

“You know, if you’re a star, you have to learn how to talk to the media,” he said.

“But I don’t know them,” I replied.

He said he would be willing to give advice on dealing with the press–an offer I was happy to accept–and he became a trusted friend and confidant for the rest of my college and professional careers.

Lesson learned, Robertson subsequently mastered the knack of telling his story to the press with the best of them.

So it was that I found myself wondering about Zuckerberg and his famously press-shy ways. Robertson’s column ran the same day as Zuckerberg’s now-famous (or perhaps infamous?) interview with Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Festival. Enough ink’s already been spilled diagnosing the metaphysical implications of that affair. But this much is clear: If Zuckerberg’s handlers are smart, they need to sit down with their meal ticket for a frank one-on-one.

Whether he likes it or not, Zuckerberg’s being thrust into the public sphere by virtue of who he is and it’s time he got over being shy about dealing with strangers.

As long as Zuckerberg refuses to turn over the CEO reins to somebody else, he is going to find himself fair game for the press’ fascination with his personal odyssey as the dropout billionaire boy wonder, etc. So what’s the deal with the monosyllabic grunts and the similarly brief–but equally frustrating–verbal evasions? Jeez, the guy went to Harvard for a few semesters. I’m sure he can do better.

If Facebook’s CEO is to realize his aspirations, the hoodie, aw shucks routine has to go. The silver lining in the Sunday interview debacle was the magnified public attention to all things Zuckerbergian. For a fair chunk of Sunday and Monday, TechMeme morphed into a 24-hour chronicle of his doings at South by Southwest. You can’t buy that sort of coverage these days.

Facebook doesn’t have the cyber footprint of a Microsoft–at least not yet. But if Zuckerberg learns how to tell the corporate story to developers as well as the media, he’ll turn into the most potent marketing weapon Facebook could ever muster.

And there’s no reason he can’t. After all, Bill Gates once was a nebbish, too.

All Zuckerberg, all the time.

(Credit:
TechMeme)

In the world of Sega and especially the Dreamcast, few video game series were able to live up to the considerable hype that preceded them. And while some critics thought Shenmue was nothing more than a poor attempt at writing a real saga, others knew better. And although the chances of seeing this series come back to today’s consoles are slim, it should and it must.

So what is Shenmue?
Shenmue is the result of $70 million and countless of hours of development that were summed up in one simple statement at the beginning of the saga:

“He shall come from a far eastern land across the sea. A young man who has yet to know his potential. This potential is a power that could either destroy him or realize his will. His courage shall determine his fate. The path he must traversed brought with adversity. I await whilst praying, for this destiny predetermined since ancient times. Awaiting in anticipation. A dragon emerges from the earth as ominous clouds fill the sky. A phoenix descends from the heavens trailing purple from its wings. The pitch-black night unfolds with the morning star as its only light. And thus, the saga begins…..”

And it’s that saga that not only revolutionized gaming, but kept millions across the globe captivated by the story of Ryo Hazuki, a young man who watched his father die at the hands of the Lan Di in 1986. From there, this Japanese man set out to find the man who killed his father, solve the mystery of why his father was killed and seek revenge.

Although a few simple paragraphs may not do this story justice, those that have played the titles and want to lead Ryo in his quest know that there would be no greater moment than to hear Sega announce that the next installment in the series is coming soon.

The story behind-the-scenes of Shenmue isn’t nearly as epic as Yu Suzuki’s own story. In reality, the series cost Sega far too much cash at a time when its hardware business was on the ropes and it was trying to find its way in a gaming environment that had left it far behind.

According to most estimates, Shenmue’s original capital outlay was about $70 million. During the development, Yu Suzuki created the full storyline and prepped for what he thought could be a seven-part series. In essence, he believed that $70 million was more of an investment than an expense.

But after selling the first game for the floundering Dreamcast, the future was in doubt for the popular franchise even though it sold about 1.2 million units. To stop the bleeding, Shenmue II was released on the Dreamcast soon thereafter, but it was not met with the same kind of love and adoration because, well, the Dreamcast was dead.

Realizing this, Sega ported the title to the
Xbox after it raised the white flag in the console business. Again the game was met with poor sales because some viewed it as an ugly title with graphics that couldn’t live up to other games on the platform, while others who hadn’t played the first game knew nothing about the story.

After two disappointing releases of Shenmue II and issues over how much the company spent and would have to spend to continue the saga, development went dark. And although some rumor sites have cropped up claiming Shenmue III is in development, most game journalists agree that the chances of it coming back soon are slim.

And while that may sound damning to the cause, Yu Suzuki has consistently said that he would like to finish the series and a slew of websites have cropped up that hope for the same thing. On top of that, a lively forum is currently online that, years later, a number of people still visit and opine about the future of Ryo Hazuki and his quest to avenge his father’s murder.

And it’s that evidence that points to the necessity for Sega to revive the Shenmue series and finally allow gamers from across the globe to finish what they started. Where we left off, Ryo was in Hong Kong looking for Lan Di and was met with a number of new faces that would help him in his journey. There’s no reason to suggest we can’t continue that mission now.

The biggest issue facing a revival is the current state of the industry. Years ago, companies were far more willing to take chances and innovation usually gained a foothold when met with suits looking to turn a quick profit.

But all that has changed.

Today, developers are far more concerned about cash than innovation and consumer desire is rarely taken into account if it doesn’t breed immediate results. But Shenmue could be different. With millions across the globe hoping to end the series on a high note, Sega may have something on its hands that could turn a major profit.

Here’s an ideal scenario that would help everyone win:

Sega should release the entire Shenmue series so far (parts I and II) on both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This title would help those who haven’t played the game finally understand what Shenmue is all about and ensure that everyone has a basis of understanding when they finish the saga. But here’s the catch — release this DVD in tandem with the final chapter in the series. Instead of the customary $60 price tag, maybe Sega should charge $70 for the entire Shenmue series in one case to offset some of the cost.

Once that plan is set in motion, Sega should let Suzuki loose and set out on a year-long marketing campaign to build up hype for the final chapters in the Shenmue story. Sega should promote the title as an epic adventure that carries people through 20 years as Ryo Hazuki finally sets out to avenge his father’s death.

In essence, Sega should create a single release that carries you from the beginning of a saga through the end in a title that could span over a dozen discs. And as long as it’s done properly, there’s no reason to suggest that in this era of gaming, Sega couldn’t turn a considerable profit.

Call me a Shenmue fanboy or a glutton for punishment, but Sega should not only revive the series, but it must finally offer the saga’s huge following the opportunity to finish what Yu Suzuki started.

If you haven’t played the Shenmue series, you owe it to yourself to play through parts I and II.

Trust me, it’s that good.

Jerry Yang, still scrambling to find a last-minute suitor to avoid becoming Steve Ballmer’s vassal, is said to be girding for the certainty of a coming proxy war with Microsoft.

Sources familiar with the brain trust’s thinking say that Yahoo’s CEO is working out details of a plan he intends to submit to investors if Microsoft attempts to enlist shareholder support for a buyout. Microsoft has roughly three weeks
before announcing its opposition slate to Yahoo’s board of directors.

Wanna be Bill Gates’ new buddy?

In the meantime, one well-informed source described to me:

“Yang is personally committed to keeping the company out of Microsoft’s hands. Come what may–it doesn’t matter financially to him. Money is irrelevant…just as long as he can make a reasonable claim to (Yahoo) shareholders.”

Ah, there’s the rub. Yang is a dot-com millionaire and the periodic pops and drops in Yahoo’s share price are not as much of a concern as they are, say, to the big funds and individual investors who own the company’s stock. Not that he’s oblivious to what goes on in the market, but that’s not his No. 1 priority. Remember this quote from a former Yahoo employee who knows Yang.

“Jerry would rather give up his left pinky than see Microsoft wind up running this company.”

Maybe one sign of his desperation explains the recurring rumor being pushed on TechCrunch about News Corp. taking an equity position while spinning off some of its properties into Yahoo.

Covering this business, I’ve learned never to say never, but Rupert Murdoch’s too smart to hitch his company’s future to the dead weight that Yahoo would bring to this deal. The man’s got more pressing matters to consider, such as News Corp.’s mega-acquisition of Dow Jones. There’s not enough potential upside benefit to risk more manpower and money just to let Yang keep Yahoo as his personal toy.

Out of all the rumors and half-true reports to date, the one I like best was floated earlier this month on Silicon Alley Insider. To wit:

Microsoft and Yahoo combine their Internet forces and assets in a standalone company called Yahoo.

Microsoft will trade its Internet division and $10 billion to $15 billion in cash for 51 percent of the combined company’s stock (resulting in an overall valuation similar to Microsoft’s $45 billion offer). Fifty-fifty would make sense, but Steve won’t agree unless he has control, and Steve holds more cards.

Microsoft will control a majority of the board.

The new board will immediately decide on the combined company’s management team, and that team will immediately take control of the company. Not in early 2009. Now.

Steve (Ballmer) will be chairman of both boards.

An altogether creative and possibly workable plan. Too bad it won’t see the light of day–not as long as Jerry Yang likens an offer from Microsoft to a date with Luca Brasi.