September 21, 2005
Video Games as TV Entertainment
After over a year of starts and stops and trying different approaches, I am officially working on XQuest, this next-generation entertainment project. It is at true convergence play -- the point where realtime 3D graphics engines meet TV (or digital filmed entertainment, to perhaps be more accurate) The long-term vision (season 2 and beyond) of this type of show is truly compelling as more forms of interactive entertainment mesh with the filming. My new company's exact role in the show is still hush-hush but will come to light in the next few months.
Posted by raza at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 6, 2005
Pandora
I played with Pandora a bit last week...it is certainly great to have such a simple way to enjoy music..and that should be the basis of their product positioning and any and all marketing campaigns. The bottom line for me is that it is probably better at music discovery than playlist...Also, entering a band works a bit better than entering a song.
my tests were relatively straightforward -- create a "station" based on what I consider to be the perfect non-Beatles pop ditty...so I created channels with these songs:
1. Have You Seen Here Face? - The Byrds -- this was super disappointing. I love the punchy guitar lick and though the results had some poppy numbers none had punchy guitar licks...it also included a Christopher Cross song which immediately killed the channel for me.
2. Tell Me To My Face - The Hollies -- for this it gave me a Dan Fogelberg song by the same name and started playing Takin' Care of Business by BTO. I actually have a soft spot for BTO as the second LP I ever bought (after Deep Purple's Stormbringer) was BTO's Not Fragile back when I was 10 years old...however, not what I was looking for so I had to resort to:
3. Bus Stop - The Hollies -- this resulted in a bit of hippy drippy songs and not as much pop perfection as I wanted...low on the music discovery count (ie, bands I didn't know)
4. Picture Book - The Kinks -- pretty much the same as 3 but more bands I didn’t know than 3
5. Care of Cell 44 - The Zombies...this was actually the most enjoyable mix but it moved into more poppy prog rock ...i guess Rod Argent's keyboards were too prominent in the tune maybe his later noodlings with Argent moved things in this direction? I had a fair amount of Roxy Music circa Siren coming in...I'm a prog rock fiend so I dug it but it wasn't really what I was looking for.
6. Phantasmagoria in Two - Tim Buckley - this is a great pop tune but it is mid-tempo and in a minor key ...so thought I'd try something different...decent results...some bands I had never heard of which is very encouraging.
7. From the wacky test dept -- I am not a big reggae fan though I always want to be...I really dig when the Bad Brains go totally reggae as in the song "I and I Survive" because it gives Reggae a bit of an edge...search ended up with a song of the same name by "Burning Spear" which was a bit lame...bummer...
For Band tests - I tend to like deep, brooding baritone voices on top of moody music that can on occasion totally rock...things like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks, early Leonard Cohen...this is tricky music because they use a lot of strings, background vocalists, slow tempos...but it is challenging music to listen to...Out of the three, testing Nick Cave worked the best...
at times it seems to be that if there are too many parameters, then there is no way for the system to understand which are the parameters that are MOST important to me...Tindersticks channel brings in a lot of music with background strings...very, very trickty because if it is not brooding and moody then it is probably really sappy...Of course, there is the "Guide Me" button with which one can fine tune a station...but it seems too many clicks away...which brings me so some UI issues which are a bummer including the aforementioned negative result on a song name...need a quicker way to exit as its creating a channel you don't want...and, as an avid LP man, I always get upset because when they show cover art it is so often the greatest hits album...A big drag of the solution and perhaps the killer for me is not being able to skip songs...that Christopher Cross was painful.
Posted by raza at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2005
Movable Type
Well, after various weeks of trying, several months lost upgrading from RedHat to Debian, I finally have Movable Type running...From the cursory look, i think it will take me some time to make it look pretty. Not that I have much to say, mind you, but I do have plans for movable type or something like it for this new project I am working on
Posted by raza at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)