It's really quite different from SoundCloud. Mixlr is about sharing live (streaming) music, while SoundCloud is about moving MP3 and WAV files about the internet. There is some crossover of course but a completely different focus.
I will be building a search/discovery mechanism when there is more music to search for and discover :-)
I think search/discovery is going to be what really makes this service special. I imagine one day being able to see all live music being streamed from venues in my area at the moment, maybe even a link to the venue, the band's homepage, similar acts, etc.
Right now you have a great tool that helps artists connect with their existing fan base in a way that removes previous technological barriers and streamlines the process, but what about new potential fans?
We are a 2 person start-up and have been through exactly the same mental re-adjustment. We started by defining success as 6 figure investment and 7 figure exit. We're now happy to define it as a positive trend: maybe 5 figure investment - or bootstrap sales - and a sustainable business or 6 figure exit. This adjustment comes from seeing how hard it really is to sell a product, no matter how good, and a belief that what really matters is the trend not absolute outcomes, so long as you are constantly learning along the way.
In so far as search engines go it's certainly worth playing around with Lucene. It's well implemented and you'll learn a lot of what really matters when it comes to indexing and retrieval.
For the text processing (classification, data extraction) side It may also be worth brushing up on your stats (a good excuse to learn R) and checking out Mahout http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/
I never understood why people actually get so angry when they take offence to something.
Consider what happens to someone who is offended, absolutely nothing. If your offended by something, it's not as is something really bad has actually happened. It's not as if you've physically been hurt, or someone you know has been hurt. The world is still exactly the same place it was before you took offence.
We so need an open & portable way of managing our social information online. I use OpenID to manage online authentication across different sites, and am pleased with this. I have a choice of providers, or I can manage it myself. But, it is limited to managing basic authentication, and is a long way from a repository for all the other types of social data that are needed for a full online identify.
Surely there is a market opportunity here? And whatever happened to opensocial?
I have suffered from RSI repeatedly over the years. I use an ergonomic microsoft keyboard, and this really helps. However what made the biggest difference was when I started using a Logitech Mouseman Marble mouse. The pain in my right arm/wrist vanished. I will never use a normal mouse again.
I agree with the sentiments echoed in this article. For me, tablets, although useful, are not the revolutionary devices they are made out to be. As I see it they are not the gateway for new types of applications, anything you can do on a tablet, you can do on laptop (personally I like the idea of a laptop with a detachable screen).
I wholly agree with the comments about Kindle too. I can see the benefit in having a Kindle, it offers a relaxing and focussed environment on which to catch up on the one thing I never have enough time - or am to distracted by web/mail/chat - to do, and that is READ.
Does the result of this research end up as products?
Microsoft Research is excellent as a research organization, but it seems that it's goal isn't to develop new products based on this research but rather to make sure that the scientists aren't developing products based on their research elsewhere.
Note: there's also lots of research work that needs to be done that isn't going to be applied immediately. That's certainly fine -- but there's been research that has went on at Sun that has been turned into industry changing products (from NFS to Java).
Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.
From what I've read, IBM was a top-notch R&D company up until the late 90s/early 2000s (with all the innovations you mentioned, as well as literally writing the book on software development -- they were in no way a pure research shop). Since then they've transformed into a professional services company, however (although they've always been known for having great sales/professional services).
Secondly, I don't appear to be able to search for or find existing uploaded mixes, is this intentional or have I missed something?