December 16, 2007
Ticketmaster Affiliate program
TIcketmaster started its affiliate program and it is disappointing to find out how low-tech it is...in its current incarnation, it is impossible to create there widgets programmatically. One has to create one like this:
and then update it from time to time. It is impossible to dynamically create widgets based on artist or venue metadata as these use some arcane IDs only known to TicketMaster...still, its a step in the right direction.
Posted by raza at 10:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 9, 2006
CES Trip Report
CES had the usual gear on display and with the usual technological advances – more megahertz and more megabytes and more megapixels. CES 2006 was the year of the HD display. Sure, you get brighter, more vivid color and resolution but what really excited me was the music collection browsing in Media Center Vista Edition. As an avid and obsessive music collector, I have always felt that a major downside to having one’s collection entirely in compressed format distributed on hard drives throughout the house is that it is difficult to pore over one’s collection. It is even harder to show off one’s collection.
In the LP and CD days, I would spend hours standing in front of the bookcases (often just boards on cinder blocks) poring over the shelves filled with vinyl and compact discs pulling a disc out here and there, reading the liner notes. My collection was hard to miss so when friends and guests came over they would invariably gravitate to the collection and browse through it. In the all digital age, this is hard to replicate. My Roku Soundbridge displays only two lines on its LCD making browsing a large, extensive collection very time consuming.
Enter Media Center Edition for Vista. The user interface is now horizontal instead of vertical taking full advantage of HDTV displays. When browsing your music collection, it displays the cover art in a huge matrix...maybe 30 across by 10 down. You can rifle through your collection this way. It was just like staring at my bookshelves all over again. Mind you the resolution of the cover art images was a bit fuzzy and I doubt you can increase their resolution. Oh, well, at least I'll be able to show off my collection again.
Posted by raza at 5:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2005
On Being Too Early
I just went through six months of trying to raise money for my latest venture. From the onset, we knew it would be a difficult task because it, for the most part, a tool (not VC friendly) and involved Hollywood (not Sandhill friendly). Having said that, I had the most interest from VCs than any other start-up I have attempted. That is to say, I had the highest ratio of email-to-meeting or phone-call-to-meeting than any other start-up. This is because the idea is quite visionary and, as most VCs, said the vision is right on. To boot, we have an experienced and well-connected team and, more importantly, a large customer. It is just that, alas, the vision is too far out for them. They believe in the vision but not our timeframe.
And this is the story of my "start-up career". I have a CD-R that is a pantheon of my (failed) start-up efforts -- all the investor presentations, business plans, financial models. Some of them are laughable but most were just too far ahead of their time -- there is Iquna which was my first effort with a bunch of colleagues in Munich which was an early variation on RSS...there was a music effort in 1999 which is exactly what Snocap does today. Then there was Earthnoise, a video-sharing community and infrastructure company, when there were only 17 broadband users and the list goes on.
The capital raising effort involved contacting over fifty VCs which in turn led to about ten in-depth meetings. Not all is lost though as I know have a great rolodex of VCs. The start-up is still limping along with money slowly trickling in from the customer. It's a tricky game to play with an erratic cash flow making it hard to hire and pay employees or contractors. The hope is that this painful effort will raise the valuation later when it is the correct time to raise money.
Posted by raza at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)