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I'm working for (somebody else's) startup at the moment and happy with my positioning there, but I've got thoughts coming from a number of these. > 1. A cure f

by cturner 18y ago

I'm working for (somebody else's) startup at the moment and happy with my positioning there, but I've got thoughts coming from a number of these. > 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. I built songseed.com with the intention of creating a community for artists (perhaps with careers in other fields) who care about the music and aren't hypnotised by the Big Lie that artists get the sign and then make lots of money (something that happens successfully very visibly when it happens but so rarely that it's an extreme statistical oddity). I'm obviously sending the wrong message in the way that I promoted it, because I found artists to be not very receptive at all to the idea of them giving away their music. IP is a big thing to take on as well. It's basically protection of the educated elite at the expense of consumers in general, and musicians are therefore very likely to be part of the grouping that benefits from it. (this isn't the language I use when discussing it normally - the about page covers that) Some feedback has focussed on the basic and not particularly pretty UI. My theory is that content is king, and that craigslist never needed fanciness, and I hate javascript where plainness will work. Then I got stuck because I couldn't find a cofounder I was happy to work with who was interested in it and I'm not very effective when I have to work in isolation. I also found that the dayjob I'd been doing in the meantime had landed me in another spot I'm quite happy with (software messaging and foreign exchange banking - I'm interested in both fields) and so I've neglected songseed. > 2. Simplified browsing I've been working on something to do with this just today. I have a feeling that Apple are going to create a platform on the back of Safari, and we have the new MS and Adobe thin platforms coming through. I've been playing around an idea for a while of creating a browser interface but one that doesn't require HTML or Javascript or DOM use for writing applications. I'm getting closer to realising this. I'm currently chipping away at the idea of an interface that works and is quite nice in the browser, but where you can develop an equiv. rich client frontends for it. > 7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist. Yet another thing I'm working at. Basically all document production systems you get at the moment suck because they don't handle styles well, except Microsoft Word which sucks because it's so heavy (offers features that allow people to do damage). This is quite incredible given how core document production is to what we do with computers. Anyway - long story short - I've recently made a release of what I've been working on there at songseed.org. Lot of work to do yet. I want to develop a locked down word frontend to the engine. > 17. New payment methods Two thoughts: - some sort of system that allows you to buy bonds on one-off contracts happening in a liberal country like switerland which would allow you to engage in contracts your gvt wanted to restrict you from engaging in - some sort of trading system that mixed FX with a whole bunch of wacky synthetics to allow you to easily take positions on things which are normally more complicated. This would be interesting. FX APIs are a developed field as well so there's lots of software liquidity that you could hook into to get started.

yummyfajitas 18y ago
Basically all document production systems you get at the moment suck because they don't handle styles well What about Latex?
- cturner 18y ago
  You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This system will very likely end up with a LaTeX filter for print rendering. Limitations of LaTeX for what I want: 1) It does too much - I want to be able to have documents generated once and then offer on multiple outputs. I can't do that if people use features of the platform that go beyond the 'web renderer'. The featureset you need for the save format of a document production system is actually very low. You need to be able to capture five grades of headings, support two types of emphasis, ordered and unordered lists that can nest, tabular data. I don't think anything else is needed. So in this sense, of existing technologies docbook is a lot closer to what I need than LaTeX. 2) Whatever system you end up coming up with, it needs to be able to support Microsoft Word as a frontend because users are sold on that interface, although they really don't care what goes on underneath. While I could have my Word plugin generating LaTeX, it would be much more sensible to have it turned into an intermediate format of simple XML and then transform into LaTeX for what it's good at. Good suggestion. It does have a place in the plan :)
- albertcardona 18y ago
  Latex is great. If only it was made easy!
narag 18y ago
>I'm obviously sending the wrong message in the way that I promoted it, because I found artists to be not very receptive at all to the idea of them giving away their music. I took the first steps for a similar thing in Spain a couple of years ago. Laws here are different so the problem to solve might not be the same. Anyway, the conclusion was that it's a hardware problem. It's possible, even easy, to atract musicians, but you need to offer a wider set of services than hosting. Then it became some sort of chicken-egg problem (because of higher needs for funding) and faded away.

by cturner 18y ago

yummyfajitas 18y ago

Basically all document production systems you get at the moment suck because they don't handle styles well What about Latex?

cturner 18y ago
You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This system will very likely end up with a LaTeX filter for print rendering. Limitations of LaTeX for what I want: 1) It does too much - I want to be able to have documents generated once and then offer on multiple outputs. I can't do that if people use features of the platform that go beyond the 'web renderer'. The featureset you need for the save format of a document production system is actually very low. You need to be able to capture five grades of headings, support two types of emphasis, ordered and unordered lists that can nest, tabular data. I don't think anything else is needed. So in this sense, of existing technologies docbook is a lot closer to what I need than LaTeX. 2) Whatever system you end up coming up with, it needs to be able to support Microsoft Word as a frontend because users are sold on that interface, although they really don't care what goes on underneath. While I could have my Word plugin generating LaTeX, it would be much more sensible to have it turned into an intermediate format of simple XML and then transform into LaTeX for what it's good at. Good suggestion. It does have a place in the plan :)
albertcardona 18y ago
Latex is great. If only it was made easy!

narag 18y ago

>I'm obviously sending the wrong message in the way that I promoted it, because I found artists to be not very receptive at all to the idea of them giving away their music. I took the first steps for a similar thing in Spain a couple of years ago. Laws here are different so the problem to solve might not be the same. Anyway, the conclusion was that it's a hardware problem. It's possible, even easy, to atract musicians, but you need to offer a wider set of services than hosting. Then it became some sort of chicken-egg problem (because of higher needs for funding) and faded away.