Tag: business

2016 Workgroup Topic Proposals

From Audinary to Visionary

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YouTube is now the largest music-streaming service. Facebook lets you post videos, but not audio. Many musicians get around this by posting non-moving movies consisting of a stereo music track and a picture of an album cover. But what if music could become the foundation for dynamic, compelling video? That could make the whole audio chain more popular.

Imagine a visualizer driven by a combination of audio metadata, DSP, and artificial intelligence…perhaps even influenced by other sensor inputs. Instead of wiggling wireframes, this system could approach cinematic storytelling. And not just in video, but AR and VR as well.

What hooks could we add to audio files to generate more immersive visuals? What are the opportunities in production and delivery? And why are people who imagine the future called visionaries?

Footnote: Creative Labs did some groundbreaking work on music visualization back in 1999 with Lava/Oozic. The system used a proprietary file format and web player, and it died around the dot-com crash, but there were some ambitious ideas in there.

2014 Workgroup Topic Proposals

Lets play lean startup

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We’ve got two days to validate a business model for a new company that we have created out of the ether of beer, sweat and BBQ.

We will identify our target customers, understand what they’re bitching about, and propose what we’re going to do about it & blow their socks off. We’ll run experiments on other groups (our target customers) to validate the hypotheses of our model.  We’ll iterate, and pivot and all that good stuff. And when our model is complete, we will be ready to put a dent in the universe and make a ton of cash.  Yeehaw!

With some sincerity, this topic is really about tech and business, not just tech.  I’ve heard as many grumblings about business and politics at BBQ as I have about tech problems.  Like Love and Marriage, you can’t have one without the other.  So, what if we set out to solve some business problems?