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Friday, January 10, 2014
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If your Spotify friends have terrible taste in music, newly launched iPhone app LuckyPennie may be for you. This L.A.-based startup is hoping to re-imagine the way people discover music, including not only new songs available for streaming or download on iTunes, but those performed by local bands, too.


The company was founded by a trio who have backgrounds in music, including Dr. John Wolanin, a Ph.D whose passion for music saw him writing his dissertation on using music as a therapeutic tool, and connecting with clients through music to get them back on the road to recovery. And on the side, Dr. Wolanin was in a band of his own.


Team-LP-crop(logo)Meanwhile, co-founder and CTO Joe Ladon (previously CTO of Break.com) also has a background in music technology and theory, while LuckyPennie’s third co-founder Jonathan Lane (who co-founded NextSpace in L.A.) is a musician, too, and ran a music distribution business in the past.


Says Dr. Wolanin, “we’re actually toying with the idea of forming a band together.”


(He’s not really kidding.)


With LuckyPennie, the idea is to build a mobile music community where you can share and discover songs, concerts, photos and notes with others, and be able to connect with those who have similar musical tastes. You can add users to your “crew” or chat with them in the app itself.


The app’s main screen is meant to serve as something of a community bulletin board of things happening around you which you can filter by distance and content type. (Right now, this seems biased to the West Coast scene, it appears. It could use a bigger feed of concerts across the U.S. to get things going.)


More broadly, the app also lets you see what’s new and what’s trending, and soon, the app will introduce more social features, as well as a framework for building up your “cred”.


showcase


The idea, the co-founder explains, is that you’ll be able to establish yourself as influential about your local scene, and one day other users will be able to easily follow those who are knowledgable about a given city’s music scene.


Today, however, the app is focused on more general music and concert discovery, where you can buy concert tickets, and either preview tracks or play them full-length if you’re a premium Rdio or Spotify subscriber. This is available in the app’s “Radio” section, available from the side menu.


LuckyPennie launched just yesterday in the iTunes App Store, and is a free download. The company is basically bootstrapped with a little bit of friends and family funding to help them get off the ground.


It’s worth noting too that the app is beautifully designed, with screens and menus that move around fluidly in ways I wish other startups would consider copying. However, the main feed is also a bit busy for newcomers as it lacks separations between posts, the filtering tools and navigational elements. It can be a lot to take in at first.


But given that LuckyPennie is only a day old, it’s worth giving the company a chance to figure things out. After all, if your Facebook/Spotify friends are listening to awful stuff, you could use the help.







1:54 PM

If your Spotify friends have terrible taste in music, newly launched iPhone app LuckyPennie may be for you. This L.A.-based startup is hopi...

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1:10 PM

Stormtrooper: Let me see your headphones. Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his headphones. Stormtrooper: We d...

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snakebyte

Many companies are betting that people want some kind of Android-based gaming solution in their living room, from Ouya to GameStick to Nvidia. One new initiative along those lines debuted at CES 2014 called the Snakebyte Vyper. The Vyper is from a German startup, and the company is bringing the product the U.S. in the coming months.


It’s one device that has a number of different faces, including a standalone 7-inch tablet that’s powered by Android, packing a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, along with 8GB of storage (and expandable Micro SD-based storage). There are two USB ports, a front-facing 2 megapixel and rear-facing 5 megapixel camera and HDMI out for plugging into your TV.


There’s a docking base that you plug it into when you want to play games from your home theatre setup, or any television anywhere. It provides power and transmits video to your screen, and automatically puts the tablet into television mode. There’s a controller that acts as an air mouse and has a full QWERTY keyboard on the back for input, as well as a Bluetooth game controller with a fairly standard layout compatible with many Android games.


The advantage of its platform over others, according to the company, is that it doesn’t focus on either gaming or media to the exclusion of the other. Instead it’s designed to do both equally well, as well as to be a standard, full-featured Android tablet in its own right, too. It’ll retail for $199 when it goes on sale later this month, which is a surprisingly good deal, provided it works well and offers at least a decent user experience.







1:10 PM

Many companies are betting that people want some kind of Android-based gaming solution in their living room, from Ouya to GameStick to Nvidi...

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suprememcourt

Aereo, a streaming TV startup backed by media mogul Barry Diller, has been embroiled in a legal battle with network broadcasters for the better part of this year.


But the case has finally reached the home stretch, as the supreme court today decided to take on the issue and settle the matter once and for all.


Aereo takes OTA signals out of the air through miniature antennas and streams that content over the internet to any device for a low monthly fee. It’s the first major step toward disrupting the current TV/cable subscription model.


Obviously, broadcasters aren’t happy with it, despite the fact that courts have deemed Aereo to be as legal as cloud-based DVR or using rabbit ears.


So far, whenever Aereo wins in one market such as New York or Boston, broadcasters pick up the case in another one.


Tired of losing appellate cases, the broadcasters asked the Supreme Court to intervene and, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, Aereo agreed to have the case heard by the Supreme Court.


Why? Well, if the Supreme Court follows the decision of earlier rulings and deems Aereo’s operations legal, broadcasters can no longer implement the “divide and conquer” strategy of suing Aereo in various districts. Once the Supreme Court makes a ruling, that ruling is final.


By agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court will most certainly shape the future of the media industry. Aereo’s long term goal is to create a market place where content creators can sell content directly to those who want to view it, rather than selling bundles of content at higher prices.


By allowing Aereo to operate, offering customers access to what are ultimately free broadcast signals, the Supreme Court is opening us up to a more on-demand future.


Here’s the official statement from Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia:



We said from the beginning that it was our hope that this case would be decided on the merits and not through a wasteful war of attrition. We look forward to presenting our case to the Supreme Court and we have every confidence that the Court will validate and preserve a consumer’s right to access local over-the-air television with an individual antenna, make a personal recording with a DVR, and watch that recording on a device of their choice.


This case is critically important not only to Aereo, but to the entire cloud computing and cloud storage industry. The landmark Second Circuit decision in Cablevision provided much needed clarity for the cloud industry and as a result, helped foster massive investment, growth and innovation in the sector. The challenges outlined in the broadcasters’ filing make clear that they are using Aereo as a proxy to attack Cablevision itself and thus, undermine a critical foundation of the cloud computing and storage industry.


We believe that consumers have a right to use an antenna to access over-the-air television and to make personal recordings of those broadcasts. The broadcasters are asking the Court to deny consumers the ability to use the cloud to access a more modern-day television antenna and DVR. If the broadcasters succeed, the consequences to consumers and the cloud industry are chilling.


We remain unwavering in our confidence that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law and our team will continue to work hard to provide our consumers with best-in-class technology that delights and adds meaningful value to their lives.








12:39 PM

Aereo , a streaming TV startup backed by media mogul Barry Diller , has been embroiled in a legal battle with network broadcasters for the b...

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Google is rolling out changes designed to further integrate its Gmail and Google+ platforms. The updates make it easier for Google+ users to contact other users without knowing their email addresses. Going forward, when users with both a Gmail and a Google+ account begin typing a contact's name into an email draft, a list of Google+ contacts will appear. For instance, if a user typed "Michael" into the "To" field while composing an email, Google would suggest, say, three Michaels from email contacts, along with another two from Google+ circles.


12:39 PM

Google is rolling out changes designed to further integrate its Gmail and Google+ platforms. The updates make it easier for Google+ users ...

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Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications outfit best known for its mobile phones and its propensity to spook U.S. lawmakers, announced that it has created China's first videogame console. The timing of Huawei's announcement, coming at this week's CES extravaganza in Las Vegas, is interesting: Just this week, Beijing announced that it would for the first time allow foreign-made videogame consoles. Huawei's console, called "Tron," is small and cylindrical -- roughly the size of a coffee mug.


9:39 AM

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications outfit best known for its mobile phones and its propensity to spook U.S. lawmakers, announced that ...

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