All posts by Mark

I’m the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Previously I was responsible for Product Strategy and Product Management at Telenav, after they acquired goby. Prior to that I was the ceo of Goby, since acquired by Telenav. Before that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music. (What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Books

Empire, by Steven Saylor

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What would it be like to have the best tour guide in Rome give you a guided tour through the city, giving you the history of every building, the cultural context, the events and emotions that transpired there? That’s what Empire (and its predecessor Rome) is like. Saylor has lived his entire professional life in ancient Rome and knows it like the back of his hand. Rome & Empire are very different in format to his Roma Sub Rosa detective series; they are much more episodic “food tastings” from different periods. The history and context are wonderful. But they’re not always a fictional “meal”. Characters do not live for the entire novel, but come and go as the tapestry is woven. Almost all the characters die offstage, and so the novel rarely strikes deep emotionally. But it’s wonderfully informative.

Covering the period from AD 14 to 141, Empire shows us the madness of Caligula and the architectural passion of Hadrian. The scenes with Caligula are salacious yet horrifying, and bring home the reality of an infamous period of history. Many familiar characters and stories make their appearance (Nero “fiddling” while Rome burns, the stammering Claudius first popularized by Robert Graves). The early rise of Christianity is present as well. There is an ironic and amusing nod to our current military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Apparently Emperor Trajan had an “Ask not, Tell not” policy towards Christians, who were viewed with suspicion by Roman society.

Empire is half fiction and half history lesson. As a history lesson, it goes down easily and is far more consumable, if less serious than, say, The Fall of the Roman Empire. As fiction, it’s enjoyable, but doesn’t truly strike deeply. And it is a tome – weighing in at 600+ pages. I think the novel could profitably have been edited down. Still, it’s enjoyable, engaging history; but to my tastes not nearly as enjoyable as the Gordianus novels.

(Reviewed for the Early Reviewers Program)

Music

Ping = Lame

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On Wednesday, Apple introduced Ping, their self-described Social Music Discovery environment. It’s a micro Twitter/Facebook social media environment, embedded inside of iTunes. In one sense, it’s a huge statement – Apple is moving into social media, trying to play in the universe where Facebook and Twitter reign supreme and Google Buzz and Googleme and …. are trying to keep up. It’s rumored that this is the output of taking on the Lala development team, and shutting down lala.com. If that’s in fact the case – bad move, Apple. Ping does have a few things going for it, but in general it’s really lame.

Unsurprisingly, it’s embedded inside iTunes. For those of you who don’t use iTunes as your media player, you can stop reading now, Ping isn’t for you. Even for those who do use iTunes, this feels like a poor decision – it’s cut off from all the power of all the other environments we know like the web, email, twitter, Facebook, or even things like RSS.

The basic idea is Twitter + music – you can follow artists, follow individuals (iTunes differentiates between the two, where Twitter does not), and you can invite your friends to participate. You can “like” artists and write reviews or posts, and see your activity (or others) on a wall. You can declare what music you like – either manually or via automation. That’s it. I don’t really see how this is a discovery tool – just one more place to read reviews. Ping will recommend artists you should follow, but these recommendations seem rote, editorial and depersonalized – for me it recommended I follow Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber, and Kenny Chesney – really Ping? Kidding right?

Annoyingly, the only way to invite people is through email – no way to leverage your investment in Twitter or Facebook. Do I really need to recreate yet another social network? By hand? Seriously Apple? I understand not wanting to empower potential competitors, but this feels like Ostrich behavior – Apple sticking their head in the sands and pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

Ping’s idea of music you are engaging with is music you “rate, purchase, review or like”. In my experience, it actually ignored music I rated, and only reflected music I’d purchased (I purchase little music in iTunes because I don’t want to be locked into their music format). Since the last 10 songs I bought were for my son, Ping is pretty sure I like Lady Gaga and Eminem. One of the big problems I see with Ping is that it is based on what I do in the iTunes Store, and completely disassociated from my Library or what I listen to. Why do I have to tell Ping that I love Calexico? They can see from what I play all the time that I love it – it completely ignores my listening behavior. Ping also seems disassociated from Genius, the current “Discovery” environment inside iTunes. iTunes has so many assets it could use to enable music discovery or let me create a social presence around my musical identity – none of which seem to be used! Which bands do I like? I shouldn’t have to tell them. Why doesn’t it suggest concerts nearby for bands I listen to? It could. Instead I have to go manually to each artist’s page to see that info. Just a few examples….

If this is what we get for losing Lala, bad trade. It’s like the Ping developers paid no attention whatsoever to what existing music discovery services have been doing for the last few years. Not even close to what Last.FM does for me for discovery and a social environment – can’t imagine giving up last.fm for Ping. Or why not do a deal with Pandora and do real music discovery? I don’t feel anything innovative here – just a somewhat lame ripoff of Twitter with cover art.

Books, Music

Tijuana Straights, by Kem Nunn

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Kem Nunn is a genre unto himself. Starting with Tapping the Source and leading up to “The Dogs of Winter”, perhaps his best work, Nunn has blazed a trail with “surfer noir” – down on their luck old surfers, looking for that one last wave to bring them to redemption. Tijuana Straights is his most recent novel. Fahey is the aging surfer, living in Tijuana River Valley near the Mexican border, remembering the time he rode the Mystic Peak wave before he went wrong. Nunn rages about the destruction (environmental and psychological) wrought by the factories constructed along the border on the mexican side, and their impact on Mexicans and Americans alike. Magdalena is the woman who is trying to make a difference. She and Fahey are thrown together and….

Nunn is strong prose stylist, melding biblical cadence with modern sensibilities. Consider this Faulkner-esque masterpiece:

And just for that instant, sea water seeping into his socks, gun held loosely in the crook of an arm, was thoroughly transported…and beheld the boy, not yet sixteen, hunkered at the foot of these selfsame dunes, and the old Dakota Badlander right there beside him, surfboards like graven images of wood and fiberglass set before them, tail blocks sunk into the very sand upon which Fahey now stood, and the boy watching, as the old man waves toward the sea with a stick held at the end of one long arm corded with muscle, burnt by the sun, then uses the stick to trace in the sand the route they will follow and the lineups they will use to find their way among the shifting peaks that stretch into the ocean for as far as the eye can see, wave crests capped by tongues of flame as the mist of feathering lips flies before the light of an approaching sunrise…and this when the light was still pure, before the smog, before the fence at the heart of the valley, before the shit had hit the fan.

Magdalena and Fahey adventure together, and (trust me this is not a spoiler), have what passes for happy endings in Nunn novels. Tijuana Straights has many similarities to The Dogs of Winter – I found the Dogs of Winter to be slightly stronger – but Tijuana Straights is well worth the “2 in the morning” finish it will undoubtedly provoke.

[Update: This post was begging for a soundtrack. Here it is. The Aqua Velvets, Calexico, Chris Whitley, Joe Strummer – these guys were made for Kem Nunn.]

Surf Noir Kings Ride Again – The Aqua Velvets
Crooked Road and The Briar – Calexico
Quattro (World Drifts In) – Calexico
They Drive By Night – The Aqua Velvets
The Ride (Part II) – Calexico
Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
Black Heart – Calexico
Ball Peen Hammer – Chris Whitley
Living With the Law – Chris Whitley
Crystal Frontier – Calexico
Dirt Floor – Calexico

Goby, Music

The 60s are back, but this time they’re just Carbon Neutral.

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On the lawn at the Jack Johnson concert
As some of you may have heard, one of the inspirations for Goby was me missing Jack Johnson playing a concert on Oahu one time when I was there. The lack of a single place to go to find out “what’s going on” is one of the reasons why people miss great events, and missing Jack Johnson playing in his native Hawaii would have been so cool! (Aside: we feel a special bond because my wife is part Hawaiian and her aunt actually taught at Jack’s high school).

So, it was great to finally close the loop and see Jack play this weekend (albeit at the Comcast center in Marshfield, MA, not in Hawaii). It was a great show – he played pretty much all his well-known tunes (“Taylor”, “Flake” , “Breakdown”) plus a bunch of songs from his new album To The Sea. Some bands are rough when they perform live, and some bands are so tight they sound like their recordings. Jack, for all his loose-and-free Hawaii surfer-dude attitude, is tight. His live performances are almost indistinguishable from his recordings.

G-Love opened for him, and was strong in both the warm-up set as well as when he returned for a few songs with Jack later in the evening.

The 60s were in full swing as the crowd took full advantage of the recent Massachusetts law making marijuana a civil violation; tie-dye, tiaras and headbands, biblical beards and other vestiges of the 60s seemed to be everywhere – you would have thought you were at a Led Zeppelin concert. The social element of the 60s was also visible in the form of Carbon Offsets being sold by the tour to cover the tour’s carbon footprint. Jack’s admirable work starting up his own social action network was in evidence in the booths at the concert for the All At Once (allatonce.org) Foundation. But the real atmosphere was the spirit of Aloha and friendliness of the crowd as well as the performers (including other Hawaiian musicians like Paula Fuga who joined Jack on stage). A little bit of Hawaii in Massachusetts!

Goby, Search, Startups, Travel

Some quick thoughts on Google’s acquisition of ITA

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Wow. Things are really getting interesting. I’ve been talking for a while now about the convergence of search & travel, search & local, search & mobile/location based services. This is just another proof point (a $700M proof point). It doesn’t really affect Goby directly – we really haven’t been playing in the airfare space, we decided a long time ago to leave that to people who already do it well. The biggest potential losers in this deal are the metasearch players and online travel agencies – Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, because Google can now build a user experience for flight search that dis-intermediates those companies and connects users directly to airlines for purchasing.

There’s also an interesting tension with many travel advertisers – Google receives billions of dollars in travel advertising revenue, but increasingly travel companies are viewing Google as competition (through things like Google Places pages and Google City Tours), and might take their ad $ elsewhere. The other interesting potential loser is Microsoft, for two reasons. First, Bing Travel is a great differentiator for Bing, and now Google has said they will build a competitor, where previously they had none. Second, Bing Travel (an enhanced and re-branded version of Farecast), was powered by ITA – it will be interesting to see how long that lasts!

Interesting times indeed. As airfares become more and more of a pure commodity, at Goby we’re thinking the action in the industry will turn to finding experiences – the real reason people travel. And Goby is perfectly positioned for that.

(btw – in addition to the obvious, Google is a winner in that they get a huge pool of deep engineering talent, and vertical expertise in the travel industry. They also pick up an interesting and not well publicized asset of ITA, the Needle project).