Yeah!Fi Mate of the Week - Free Music!

At last week's 27dinner I had the pleasure to meet Galen Hossack, who together with Daryn Smith is the co-founder of LoadTheShow.

Here's how 'LoadTheShow' works:

You register as a user. You download free music. The artist receives R2 every time you download their songs. This is paid for by advertisers.

Now that's a simple yet clever business model!

It does raise some sustainability questions. Overseas the typical rate per 1000 impressions is $25 or R175, so every song that gets downloaded needs to provide about 12 impressions. In South Africa, advertisers probably pay a bit more, but it could still equate to a lot of advertising noise. In the short term, LoadTheShow has a daily limit of 50 downloads, on a first come first serve basis.

LoadTheShow has attracted sponsorship from Levi Jeans, and is about to launch a new website soon (the current one is very 'early stage' and somewhat too verbose)

Galen has a solid background in the music industry, as a band member, owner of a recording studio and as a partner in a music publisher. This has helped the site to "sign" 75 artists since launching in April.

If they keep adding artists and advertisers and can figure out how to make 1000s of downloads available daily, LoadTheShow could well be another great South African success story!

Amatomu for Breakfast

Some people have a newspaper with breakfast.

I prefer to have Amatomu for breakfast:



This was from a promo done for Charly's Bakery ("Mucking Afazing Cakes") by Goldee at the 27Dinner last night.

The Next Big Thing is not Web 2.0

Check out this article on Vinny Lingham, one of Skyrove's shareholders.

I think GQ misquoted him on Incredible Connection though. What Vinny meant to say was that traditional software, distributed on CD or DVD media, was a thing of the past and that the future was online Web 2.0 applications.

Personally, I think the future is a bit different.

Currently, I can use OpenOffice to edit my offline files. For online collaboration on documents, I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

What I really want to be able to do is combine offline and online work seamlessly. Internet connectivity is not ubiquitous yet, and I need access to my files and appointments when I'm on the go, but also want the collaborative power when I am.

The next revolution is not that everything will go online or Web 2.0, but rather that there would be seamless synchronization between online and offline applications.

Plaxo is Dead. Where is Plaxo?

Remember Plaxo?

No, it's not a kind of mouthwash. Plaxo is an online address book that syncs with Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Address Book. You never need to ask your contacts for updated contact details again. All they need to do is install Plaxo as well and your address book will always be up to date with their latest contact details. Vice versa, your details will always be up to date in their address books as well.

Brilliant! So why does Plaxo suck? Eric Edelstein and I were chatting the other day, when he mentioned how cool it would be to have an app like the one described above. He mentioned all the features it should have, and I thought hey, Presto Plaxo!

So why has Plaxo faded away?

One of the main things mentioned in other blogs is the infamous 'Plaxo Spam'. Plaxo will send out update requests to everyone on my address book who does NOT have Plaxo. Until they join, that is. Basically, they tried to spam you into joining!

This seems to have raised the ire of a lot of people, and it backfired hugely for Plaxo.

But why would it backfire for Plaxo, but not Facebook, which does the same thing? Facebook will also look through your address book and send invites to all your contacts who aren't on Facebook yet.

The difference seems to be Facebook simply asks your friends to 'Join'.

Plaxo, on the other hand, asks your friends to 'Update their Details'. They don't need to join. So the first time you do this with pleasure using the attached form. The 2nd time you get a little annoyed and by the 3rd time you probably join Plaxo or you simply ignore future messages from the service. Most people chose the latter.

Ironically, Plaxo did it this way so it would be less annoying. It wouldn't force your friends to join.

I suspect what happened was that people were introduced to Plaxo by being asked to do something for Plaxo. Plaxo did nothing for them in return. It would have been better if Plaxo simply asked you to join a few times, "so that your friends will always have your most up to date contact information and you will have theirs".

Unfortunately, it seems it's mostly Game Over for Plaxo already, unless Google buys them and revamps the product and their drab-looking website. I for one hope that a young programmer working from his bedroom will take the charge and build an online address book that not only syncs with Outlook, but also integrates with Facebook!

UPDATE: Plaxo 3.0 was released today with a whole host of new features. I'll give it a thorough spin and report back soon.
UPDATE 2:So far the Plaxo Assistant for OS X is using more than 500MB of my 1GB of RAM, causing a massive slowdown! It also creates a new duplicate for calendar entries in iCal every time it syncs.

Underpromise, Overdeliver

This is Paul Potts. A humble cellphone salesman from Cardiff, trying his hand at the 'Britain's Got Talent' auditions.

Make sure your sound is nice and loud for this.



UPDATE: If you'd like to download videos such as this from YouTube to keep forever, simply use KeepVid

Speed Dating for VCs & Entrepreneurs

The 3rd Open Coffee Club (OCC) Cape Town is happening this Wednesday.

If you are an entrepreneur, a VC, or someone clever looking for some 'Entrepreneur Porn' this is the perfect place to meet some like-minded folks with smart ideas and/or cash to invest in the next killer app!

From their website:

The Open Coffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. Read the blog post that started the ball rolling.

I will be giving a short (10 min max) presentation about some of the experiences (read: mistakes) I've had with trying to raise funding for Skyrove, as well as how the Open Coffee Club was integral to raising our latest round from Lingham Capital.

Check out Eric Edelstein's post for details.

Sales is All About the Angle

One of the great difficulties with building a complex product, is that it means different things to different people. I got a new Nokia E61 phone specifically because it has Wi-Fi amongst its many features. For many people this feature might not matter one bit, and telling them it has Wi-Fi might confuse them and steer them away from this product.

Look at this sculpture carefully:



Doesn't look like anything interesting. But apply a light source at just the right angle and have a look at the shadow it casts:



Some people will only be interested in the 'technical' details of the sculpture, but for most people out there it's actually about the shadow. In the case of software applications and services, the interface.

More pictures like this

Creating 3D Images from Social Networks