Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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MacBook Air
So finally Apple has released the laptop I have been longing for since 2003, and it’s neither called MacBook Nano nor Thin, but Air. So, there we have it: the world’s first beautiful subnotebook.
The only problem is, I won’t buy it. At least not the first revision. I have a black MacBook since almost two years now, and buying a MacBook Air would be a downgrade. CPU is slower, hard drive too (unless I’d pay up EUR800 for an SSD, that is), graphics card too, RAM is the same (just when I started craving for more…), and, heck, my MB disk almost is twice the size of the SSD. Looks like More’s law has stopped working.
Meanwhile the new Lenovo apparently has most of what I had wanted to see in the Air; 4GB RAM, 2GHz, 13.3′ 1440*900, 3G card, and weighs… less.
C’Mon Apple, you can beat ‘em. My credit card is ready for you.
2008 Web Tech Predictions
Here are some bold predictions for next year (while listening to Scriabin’s Op. 8/No. 12 on repeat in the San Francisco sun, so you’ll have to bear with me here…):
- The proliferation of Single page webapps (SPA:s)
- OAuth gets support from some major players (Google, Yahoo, etc) which leads to some really interesting inter-webapp mashups
- Gmail sort of kills Facebook for many mainstream users (by offering status updates, some kind of social graph interface, etc)
- A handful of OpenSocial apps get a surprising amount of traction, with more exposure than any single social network
- Spotify is a smash hit, and people in areas with mobile broadband (like Scandinavia) start to realise they won’t have to download music, ever again
- Twitter gets aquired, possibly by Yahoo (who I’m sure will do better in 2008)
- Flash 9 “Moviestar release” kills Joost
- Wikia kills Google (ok, I don’t really believe this will happen, but it sure would be interesting…)
UPDATE: Here are some more 2008 predictions from the latest What’s Next panel with Henrik, Joakim, Tomas and me (In Swedish, sorry!)
A few impressions from the first day of SIME07
- Alexander Bard had a point talking about “talent-generated content” in the first conversation. Unfortunately he really didn’t seem to get SoundCloud when I spoke to him later (SoundCloud is really about talent-generated…). He was rambling about the secret sauce about being an A&R, which is not really what the cloud is about. That man may be clever, but he’s getting older…
- The only conference in recent times where the Wifi didn’t make trouble was Hej! 07. I remember having trouble on all other conferences I attended since then… Is it that hard? Without Internet these kind of conferences are a pain. It also kills both backchannels and many of the potential IRL meetings.
- The SoundCloud / Le Choix (Let me know if you want an invite) / Radon concept seems to work. There’s been two remixes of the SIME Theme anthem this far, and the main mix is coming a long nicely.
- The talks have not been terribly interesting, unfortunately. Not sure the artistic ambition mixes too well with the very corporate feel of many presentations.
- Less than 5% of the crowd knew about Creative Commons. And these people are in the media business? I thought that was sort of baseline knowledge by now. Or is the problem that CC does not really have much relevance for big media.
Google buys Jaiku
Too many phone calls and IM messages have prevented me from blogging about this sooner, but a personal favorite piece of social software that I use on a daily basis–yes, it’s Jaiku–has been bought by Google at an undisclosed sum (Some remarks by me in the post). Congratulations goes out to Jyri and the whole Jaiku team. Wow!
Being 100% rational…
…I just pre-ordered the new Radio Head album for £1.00. I don’t think the set-your-own-price scheme is going to work at scale.
Jeff Barr on S3/EC2/SQS
I attended a workshop/presentation by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr yesterday at RUG-B, and thought I’d share some “insider” info about AWS that is not so easy to come by on the web.
- Amazon currently has 260k developer accounts in their network. More than I thought.
- Hierarchical filesystems is inherently hard to simulate on s3 as it’s a fully distributed system (no global locks, among other things). So we might not get satisfactory performance out of those abstraction layers anytime soon. Instead, Barr suggests, we should start thinking about new, web-savvy mass storage architectures. ElasticDrive and Nirvanix are intersting players to watch.
- Although Barr did not mention a specific release date, I think we should expect a european S3 datacenter very soon. That is good news since s3 performance in Europe is currently rather poor. Currently S3 runs on a couple of data centers (or rings, actually) in the U.S.
- We will have to take care of CDN integration ourselves for now, but there might also be support for that in S3 in the future.
- We can expect more flexible EC2 configurations in the future. Both smaller and larger VM:s will be possible.
- A “placement”-API will enable admins to place servers either very close to one another (same rack, for speed) or very far apart (for stability/security) in the future. Very cool.
- There’s a nifty Firefox extension for controlling EC2 instances built by the EC2 team.
Latest Spotify beta has permalinks
And they look fairly good, too. Here’s a link to a song of mine.
SoundCloud, Berlin, Etc
Ok, so it’s official.
I’m done with engineering studies at the Institute of Technology.
I’m done with the Trustmojo research project.
I’m moving to Berlin.
I’m starting a new company in music sharing.
Yes, I’m beginning a new life.