Opening Pandora's Box

Pandora.com is an amazing music service that gives a Web 2.0 touch to internet radio. It's powered by the Music Genome Project and it can create music stations which play songs "musically similar" to tracks or artists that you suggest. The best thing I suppose is that - it really works well!

The Music Genome Project provides controlled tagging and categorization to music out there. The selections can then be refined by users while they listen to the songs. They can indicate whether they liked or disliked the track and whether they think the songs aren't musically alike! By giving everyone this ability, Pandora harnesses the wisdom of crowds and along with the opinions of the experts, can give you a really unique musical experience.

I've discovered more new artists that I liked in the last week, than I did all of last year! It taps into the long tail very well by slipping in great songs by lesser known artists. The closest experience I've had to this was when AudioGalaxy was at it's peak around 2002.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Links

• Pandora.com

The Top Entrepreneurs Lies

Guy Kawasaki has a blog entry with some of the top entrepreneur lies. A lot of these will be true for intrapreneurs as well. Here goes:

1. "Our projections are conservative."
2. “Gartner says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.”
3. “Boeing is going to sign our purchase order next week.”
4. “Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.”
5. “No one is doing what we're doing.”
6. “No one can do what we're doing.”
7. “Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.”
8. “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.”
9. “We have a proven management team.”
10. “Patents make our product defensible.”
11. “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.”
12. Robert Scoble adds one, "We don’t need a blog, we’re working on a Superbowl commercial".

Number #2 is my favorite! Whats yours?

Links

• The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

There is no killer app

An increasing culture of customization and large variations in our sense of style, performance and value seem to limiting the birth of killer applications. Wikipedia defines a killer app as:

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular piece of computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program.

Seems like a reasonable enough goal for any new application. :-)

Killer apps were essential in the rise of personal computers and the Internet with things like VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe PostScript and E-mail. However it has to be said that most applications don't start out by being killer applications. They would mostly start small and be useful to a few users or in a lot of cases, just be useful to the author! If the application was well designed and implemented then they might end up being useful to a lot more people and thus achieve killer app status.

It seems the approach to take is to solve as many user problems as you can, and solve them well. If we keep sitting around for that big idea then it might never come - or so argues Ramit Sethi in his blog post, The Myth of the Great Idea. He says,

Success almost never comes from a mind-blowing idea, so sitting around trying to find one is a waste of time. Success comes from a basic idea executed amazingly well. Ideas are rarely found by thinking. They're found by doing.

So get those smaller ideas out again and start working on them! Now where did I put that darn paper napkin?

Links

• The Myth of the Great Idea