The Outsidr

By now you must have read about the widely-covered TechCrunch / Last.fm fiasco. To recap very, very quickly: TechCrunch posted what turned out to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor that Last.fm had handed sensitive user data over to the RIAA, Last.fm said it was completely false several times, Ars Technica revealed that not even the RIAA knew what TechCrunch was talking about and then Last.fm clarified the situation one last time in a blog post entitled, “Techcrunch are full of shit”. Zoinks.

To be fair, I can definitely empathize with Erick Schonfeld’s situation. I am a tech blogger and I know what kind of pressure bloggers can be under to be the first to cover an exclusive scoop. At the same time, when dealing with a sensitive topic that essentially accuses a company of violating the trust of its users, one must exercise some restraint. Schonfled did the right thing by reaching out for comment and Last.fm did the wrong thing by responding with PResque bullshit: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.”

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Quite some time ago, I was chatting with a group of people about Nokia’s effort to break into the US market with its high-end smartphone lines. Among those in the group were two well-positioned higher ups from Nokia, two bloggers and a handful of people I hadn’t been introduced to.

At one point during the conversation, we began talking about advertising and marketing. Being a marcom guy, I jumped right in. Nokia had hardly been aggressive up to that point in time (not that it is aggressive now) and I began talking about what might help the company position its devices a bit better in the US. Directly addressing the Nokians, I talked about apps.

There are only a handful of factors that separate one phone from the next in the eyes of the typical US consumer. Styling and form factor are among those factors; camera quality and dedicated multimedia keys are not. Why not focus on some of the amazing applications that have been developed for Nokia handsets? Why not bring some of this functionality – that is entirely unheard of where the typical US consumer is concerned, mind you – before the consumer and wow him/her? Show him that his handset can automatically switch profiles to silent or vibrate when he arrives at the movie theater to catch a flick. Show her that she can snap a picture and upload it instantly, without pressing a single button, to her Facebook page. Show them that they can actually speak to their handsets and their speech can be converted into text, to then be emailed/posted/texted and so on.

They looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my forehead.

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Apparently not everyone here thought that little joke was quite as funny as I did. Regardless, it was all in good fun despite a heaping portion of it possibly falling into the sad but true category. If you’d like to read Maroon’s follow up – recommended – head on over.

I know I shared this via delicious but I had to put it up in a post. Originally posted on Matt Maroon’s blog, the following is a presentation given at a recent Whiner Jerkins meeting with all of the CEOs from its portfolio companies in attendance. There is only one word that can describe it: AMAZING. Please view it in full screen mode…

The following is a(nother) slightly-modified version of a post I wrote for BGR that will run this morning. I can’t stress how much I urge you to read Ouellette’s article and keep tabs on Muxtape…

Talk about great reads. Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette finally let the cat out of the bag today and published a lengthy report of his recent trials and tribulations. For outsiders looking in, reading about dealings with the unmitigated disaster that is the music industry is like a guilty pleasure. Rage seems to build with each passing paragraph and one can’t help but think, “are they really this stupid?” Ouellette’s recount of his experiences in recent history fits the mold perfectly. The behind the scenes plan for Muxtape was anything but ill-intentioned; Ouelette had some pretty big ideas and spent a great deal of time reaching out to labels in an effort to move music consumption forward in a very symbiotic manner. In fact in the midst of an extended series of meetings with major labels that seemed to be progressing, albeit slowly, the RIAA struck without warning and dropped an axe that would force Muxtape to go offline. It registered a complaint with Amazon Web Services, Muxtape’s host, that required Muxtape to dump a launrdy list of content within one business day or risk having his data deleted and servers shut down. The rest, as they say, is history.

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