Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the host of “Keen On†show, the popular Techcrunch chat show.
Andrew is an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew’s new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo”, will be published by St Martin’s Press in 2012.
Executives at the big music labels tend to get a bad rap. But some of the most innovative people in the music business began their careers at the labels. Take, for example, Ethan Kaplan, the VP of Product Development at LiveNation.com who used to be SVP of Emerging Technologies at Warner Music Group. Not only is Kaplan an irreverent blogger, but he’s also brutally frank about the failed business model of the music industry. → Read More
While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the Berkeley based company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million and is one of the real pioneers of the evolving digital economy. Gracenote has built its business out of maintaining and licensing a massive (currently 100 million tracks) database of information about music. And today, Gracenote – with its 350 employees in Europe, the US and Asia – is expanding into licensing digital data for video and television content. → Read More
12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech, I met again with Lowenstein, a former popular musician himself, to talk about StageIt’s progress and how he is helping reinvent the music industry by enabling a new kind of intimacy between artist and audience. → Read More
So maybe there really is a sensible middle ground in the music business – somewhere between David Lowery’s pessimism and Bram Cohen’s blind faith in our digital future. That future may be the pop music band Pomplamoose. Its members are Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte, two young musician-entrepreneurs who are not only making a living marketing and selling their music online, but who even own a “nice house” with two recording studios. Nataly and Jack, I suspect (and hope), are the viable future of the music industry – one that will neither revolve around Platinum records nor completely free online content. → Read More
Not everyone agrees with BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen that the Internet has been good for the musician. Indeed, some musicians think the exact reverse. Take, for example, David Lowery, the lead singer for the bands Camper Von Beethoven and Cracker – a Platinum artist who now also teaches “rock economics” at the University of Georgia. According to Lowery, who claims that he has “data” to back up his argument, things are actually worse for the musician now than they were in the good/bad old days of big labels and even bigger limousines. → Read More
I’ve been waiting for this one. Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the P2P file sharing service BitTorrent. And he may also be one of the guys most responsible for the decline in the music industry. So I asked Bram, when we sat down together earlier this week at SFMusicTech, whether he did indeed have any responsibility for killing the music business. → Read More
Most of us know the guitarist and singer-songwriter Bob Weir as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. But Weir is also the founder of Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), a state-of-the-art performance studio which offers musicians the opportunity to distribute their work in high-end digital form. → Read More
Founded just seven and a half years ago, Glam Media is one of Silicon Valley’s few media success stories. Beginning in the women’s interest vertical and expanding to entertainment, health and wellness and now food, Glam acquired Ning last September and is rumored to be preparing an IPO for later this year. Glam’s great achievement, it claims, is to pioneer “vertical media” and thus to “transform the way consumers interact with content”. → Read More
The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.
But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. → Read More
Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who end up doing the most damage. I always thought of Larry Downes, the co-author of the mega-selling Unleashing the Killer App, as an unusually gentle and wise soul. But this was before Downes unleashed his all-too-critical powers on Best Buy, transforming himself from a cerebral author into a bomb throwing critic of America’s leading consumer electronics retailer. In Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, a brilliant article he published at Forbes last month, Downes finally told the truth about the terrible customer service at Best Buy. And the article went viral, of course, amassing close to 3 million page views and even forcing Best Buy CEO, Brian Dunn, to issue a response. → Read More
My own views about SOPA and the need to protect online intellectual property are well-known. But even I acknowledge that SOPA was a flawed bill that didn’t represent a viable solution to policing the Internet against intellectual property theft. So is there life after SOPA? How can the technology and content communities carve out a compromise which will simultaneously protect innovation and the rights of the creative community?
In the spirit of compromise, I invited Larry Downes, one of SOPA’s most articulate critics, into our San Francisco studio to talk about what comes next. → Read More
There are few more articulate supporters of high speed broadband access than Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. Not only does he think Americans should have the right to high quality broadband, but he also thinks that it is the key to innovation in the broader economy. Home video is, of course, increasingly dependent on broadband and so, Japser told me when he came into our San Francisco studio earlier this week, is innovation in our healthcare and education sectors. → Read More
It’s always nice to see a small, plucky start-up take on the big guys and not only survive but also prosper. My excellent Santa Rosa based ISP Sonic.net is doing just that – laying its own fiber-to-the-premises network in Sebastopol for only $70 a month and signing up 30% of the local market. While the numbers are still small (the fiber network still only reaches 700 Sebastopol homes), the Sonic.net story is encouraging because it shows that innovation is still possible in the ISP space, a market that has been dramatically “consolidated” since 1995, shrinking from thousands of thousands of local providers in the nineties to just a handful of national carriers today. → Read More
It was, of course, inevitable. After book after book explaining the importance of being forward, of aggressively networking and noisily self-promoting ourselves, the correction has finally arrived. And it comes in the shape of a stimulating new book by Susan Cain entitled Quiet: The Power of Introverts. So enough with the extroverted ideologues of self-promotion like Gary V, Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. It’s Susan Cain time now. Quiet. The hour of the introvert has finally arrived. → Read More
Earlier this week, Facebook announced changes to its Open Graph which have huge implications to the social ecommerce platform Payvment. The two year-old Palo Alto based start-up, which already manages 80% of the ecommerce transactions on Facebook, will now be able to be integrated into the Open Graph. What this means, according to Payvment’s Founder and CEO Christian Taylor, is that we can now broadcast what we want on our Facebook pages. Such social one-click purchasing power is “big trouble” for Amazon and eBay, Taylor predicts. And even bigger trouble, I suspect, for parents who will now be inundated with gift ideas by their Facebook loving kids. → Read More
Walter Isaacson has unleashed a torrent of new books about Steve Jobs and Apple. But nobody has written anything quite like Caleb Melby’s The Zen of Steve Jobs, a graphic novel that charts Jobs’ relationship with a Buddhist priest called Koby Chino Otogawa. The book is a both a visual and textual delight and I couldn’t resist inviting Melby, who also writes for Forbes, into our New York City studio to talk about Zen and the art of Steve Jobs. → Read More
Google’s “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) continues to jeopardize the company’s world. It’s a moral minus, Alexia says. Others have gone further – saying that SPYW fundamentally compromises Google as an objective search engine and raises many anti-trust issues. So what, exactly, will be the impact of SPYW on Google’s artificial algorithm and how central will social search become in our Web 3.0 age? → Read More
The more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America’s most admired company is also America’s least understandable company. And that’s why he wrote Inside Apple – to reveal to the world how, as the subtitle of his book says, the Company Really Works. → Read More
After Walter Isaacson’s magnum opus, do we really need yet another book about Apple? Yes, I think we do. Whereas Isaacson wrote the authorized biography of Jobs, the journalist and author Adam Lashinsky has written a most unauthorized and, in some ways, unpalatable book about Jobs’ company which gets Inside Apple and explains How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really works. → Read More
Ed Schmit’s AT&T Developer Program was busy this week at CES. Not only did they run an innovative Hackathon, but they also announced the winner of their $20,000 Power the Future competition, a six month quest to find the best sustainability app to help consumers improve the quality of their environment. → Read More
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