End of the Road Trip

We head back to San Diego today. It's been a good trip. Recap later. Very tired.

Press Release

Is here.

Intercasting Blog

Shawn debuts the Intercasting Corp blog here.

Intercasting Corporation and Rabble at CTIA

We unveil our company today at CTIA. Our press release hits the wire later this AM and I will put out a link once I have it. We pushed the Intercasting website earlier this evening and are doing some cleanup. By the time I post this it should be pretty clean. It gives a good overview of what we aim to accomplish at least philosophically.

Our first product, Rabble, passed BREW certification last week and is now ready for distribution on CDMA networks who support BREW. We hope to announce some more things around that shortly.

We have spent a lot of time working on a robust and easy to use personal publication platform for consumers. Its taken a lot of people to get it this far and we are really proud of how far it has come. As Shawn would say though, "We just made it to the starting line."

Participatory Culture And The Empowered Media Prosumer

I am a fan of all the people I have met at unmediated so far including Eli Chapman, Dan Melinger and Jay Dedman. I haven't been reading feeds much this trip, but Eli wrote this piece that I had to blog about.

I really like how it hits on the combination of Create, Promote and Consume, which are concepts we are big believers in. In fact the product we are unveiling tomorrow is built around these concepts. It's been a fun trip the last several months having conversations with a variety of people who see the world in this way and how each of us take different approaches to trying to create different pieces in that puzzle that Eli so plainly demonstrated. Good stuff.

New Orleans Day 1

Last night after we got in, we headed over to The Napoleon House for my traditional and obligatory muffaletta and Pimms Cup.

Afterwards we actually worked. That was a Big Easy first for me.

This morning I also had another first, I went jogging. It was fun making my way through the Quarter on a slightly balmy morning. That was until my iPod battery died. I think I am at the battery failure point right now. Not cool.

Rhapsody Part Two

A good friend called me the other day to follow up on a call I had made when I was in NYC. He was calling to catch up but also gave me some grief for making fun of Rhapsody. I told him that the cancellation shenanigans are ridiculous but I thought that Rhapsody was by far the best service available. If you like music and don’t have a problem paying for it, the best experience to date, IMHO is Rhapsody. It is a real music discovery tool. It falls down in a couple of areas but they are minor.

That said, my comments above are as it relates to content and content discovery. The whole scheme that RealNetworks deploys to make you cancel your service with a phone call is worse than laughable. It has been about a year and a half since I have voluntarily viewed a file delivered in their format. Their intrusive and deceptive client doesn’t have a place on any of the machines that I own.

Travel Log - LA to SD to The Big Easy

LA was busy. We started to each get a bit sick. My allergies got really bad and Shawn got a nasty cold. We did the usual all day in meetings thing and then ran off to catch the train to SD.

We got into SD late Thursday, got to spend the day in the office on calls on Friday and then hit the airport, yet again to get to New Orleans.

New Orleans rules. It's one of the places that I come back to very often. I think 4-5 Jazzfests and a Mardi Gras for me. It's going to be a long week.

Request for a Unicorn

Over the last several weeks we have been traveling heavily. Most of the longer distance travel has been on American Airlines. As someone who has been a longtime customer with elite status, you get in the habit of requesting upgrades as you have accumulated a large collection of upgrades. Unfortunately with the introduction of JetBlue in the SD to JFK market, AA has been forced to have comparable prices. I guess fortunately is the better word because a roundtrip ticket between SD and NYC is like $200.

The downside is that getting an upgrade is impossible. The other day I went to the ticket counter and checked the status of my upgrade request. They said that I was on the list but it didn’t look good. I told Shawn that this was a joke. He said that it was better than that. He said it was like a request to have a unicorn. "“Excuse me, I wanted to check the status of my request to have a Unicorn.” “Mr. Oien, we have your request, but it doesn’t look like we will be able to accommodate you at this time.” " Ok. Maybe next time. Ironically I got upgraded today on the flight to Dallas. Must have been a glitch. The unicorn said that he was double booked later today and that after this leg of the trip he had other business to attend to. Sigh.

Travel Log - SF to LA

San Francisco was beautiful yesterday in terms of weather. Our meetings went by so quickly it felt like we weren’t there for more than five minutes before we were rushing off to catch another plane.

Our last meeting was at SFO which was unfortunate as we were flying out of OAK. We had yet another frantic cab ride to catch a flight and got there with at least five minutes to spare.

We decided to stay downtown so we could grab a bite to eat at Ciudad, which is one of my favorite places in LA.

I had a bout of insomnia and did an early morning run from the Bonaventure to the Disney Concert Hall, around Pershing Square and then back to the hotel.

LA is a great place although many people not from here don’t get it. I don’t think I will explain my thoughts on it at this point rather I would say that if you get into town sometime make sure you grab a drink at the rooftop bar at The Standard. It’s not to be missed and to me gives a good flavor for the sense of the city.

Travel Log - Out of NYC and into SF

We 'weathered' our second nasty snowstorm on the east coast and managed to sneak out of NYC after a really long delay and a two hour cab ride to the airport. Glad to be back to the sunny west coast, at least for now. The meetings were fun but exhausting. Got to spend dinner one evening with Todd Rubenstein, a friend, that I got to know through his wife Laurie who worked with me at Vivendi running PR. Todd represents music executives, tv and other music related stuff in technology. We also have kids around the same age so its always a fun conversation covering a range of stuff.


Got into San Francisco last night at midnight or so. I decided to take a couple of mile run this morning. My Ipod dished out the following for my run:

Coheed and Cambria
Atreyu
Supersuckers
Saves The Day
This Mortal Coil
Circle Jerks
Yellowcard

It was great. A little aggressive but nice in the cool foggy morning as I ran from Fishermans Wharf into Golden Gate Park.

The guy sitting next to me on the flight was Andrew Thomas from CSFB, who coincidentally covered MP3.com back in the day. He covers Internet and Gaming sectors and was headed to The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco which explains why we had such a bad hotel.
In SF

The $250 Million Radio Show #18

Show #18 is here. I'll put credits on The $250 Million Radio Show site later today. I didn't plan on posting it until later tonight, but audio.weblogs.com sniffed out my new xml without my intervention. Actually very cool, but not expected as I have been using the pingform.

Early Press

We probably won't get any press coverage for Intercasting and our product launch until next week, but this is the first piece I have seen.

My Current Media

No books right now, too busy

CDs
Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, Its Morning. I love this CD. I can't get enough of the opening track. My 2 1/2 year old is starting to pick uo the lyrics.

Calexico - Feast of Wire. I am a late comer to this band, but I am really starting to dig their sound.

Indie Bands
Supernauts - The management company sent me a track and I have got to say I am hooked. I am going to lead off my next podcast with these guys.

Games
Rome Total War - On Flights Only

TV
24

Podcasts
Accident Hash Podcast
Other AMP Podcasts

Magazines
CMJ - Been a long time since I read this. Just recently subscribed.

Offline

I plan on doing podcast #18 tonight or tomorrow. After that I hit the road for two weeks. I plan to blog intermittently during the two weeks, but I am not sure how frequently. To be sure there will be plenty of photos from my travels both here and at Flickr.

Real Networks/Rhapsody - I will never use their products

I haven't been a fan of Real Networks for a longtime. I resent it when applications repeatedly steal your MIME types and generally do things to your computers configuration without your permission.

Late last year I did a brief consulting engagement where I provided an overview and evaluation of the various music services. It was fun getting back up to speed on the state of the various services.

After the evaluation I went about deleting the various applications. I had no problem canceling with any of them except Real/Rhapsody. When I tried to cancel, I found out that you could only cancel by a phone call. Hmmm. That's pretty weak for an online product. I called. It was Sunday. They were closed. I couldn't cancel. What a joke. Is that illegal?

This was in December, Yesterday while looking at the army of icons on my desktop I realized that this nasty program was still on my machine and I was STILL BEING CHARGED by them.

I called the number. They asked me why I was canceling. I freaked out. I promised them that I would ensure that there were no Real products on any of the machines that I own and that I would delete the products from any machines that I touch.

I know that the digital music space is a difficult business, but if this is how you have to make your money, I would recommend shorting their stock.

Oien Tribe

Oien Tribe,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

I find moments like this both amazing and shocking.

New Neighbors - San Diego Telecom Council

Our law firm, Fish and Richardson, have been the most awesome landlords in the world. We have been renting vacant space in one of the nicest buildings in the Golden Triangle area of San Diego. In fact we have been camping out in a corner of a 14,000 sq. ft floor for a long time. Over the weekend somebody else moved into the floor in a similar arrangement with us. They are the San Diego Telecom Council.

I walked around the floor to see who the new people were and to my surprise one of the people working there worked with me at Mp3.com. Small world, or rather small floor.

As we are getting down to the wire with our launch, I will take this as a good sign.

KCRW Podcasting - What No Music?

KCRW in Santa Monica just started publishing a lot of their content as a podcast.

Funny though, nothing from any of their music shows. Hmmm. I like what they have on the sidebar of the linked page:


"Legal constraints and copyright issues currently inhibit our ability to offer listeners our music shows as podcasts."

I am just so surprised. ;-) That said, I am dying to get a podcast dose of Morning Becomes Eclectic.

Podcasting and the Law

One of the guys on the pho list who is a DC lawyer/lobbyist set up a podcasting and the law forum here.