Tom Conrad

Since Thomas Hawk mentioned this blog and my company [Savage Beast] in a recent post, I thought I’d tell you a bit about what we’re doing here.

Savage Beast got its start 5 years ago with a mission to create software to help people discover music they will love. Have you ever spent enough time in a record store that the personnel started to develop a sense of your taste and started to make recommendations? Maybe you’ve even been lucky enough to have someone stash stuff behind the counter for the next time you visit the store? At Savage Beast, we’re working on systems that will give users that same experience, but in the digital domain. We’re particularly passionate about helping you discover artists out on the “long tail” (blog).

How do we do this? We believe that your musical preferences are first and foremost derived from the way music sounds. So, to help you find music that sounds like the music you like, we’ve spent the last 5 years working on something we call the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome is a detailed analysis of a century of popular music. We employee a large team of professional musicians who spend their days listening to music one song at a time and “analyzing” the detailed musical characteristics of the song. This includes obvious stuff like tempo and key, but more importantly it covers a lot of subtle nuance: how much tremolo in the voice, what kid of harmony, guitar picking style, how much cowbell, etc. In total we listen for hundreds of different qualities and painstakingly record the results for each some. After 5 years, we’ve built up an incredible asset that allows us predict music you will like based on simple input (for example, the name of an album, artist, or song that you love).

While we’ve been building this database we’ve been working with various partners and customers to deliver recommendations and music discovery experiences to end users. For example, we’ve built a complete retail kiosk solution for Music Discovery that have been deployed for pilot by Best Buy and Borders. AOL is also a customer and uses Savage Beast technology to power recommendations within their music properties. You’ll see us branching out into new opportunities as 2005 goes on.

If you have a passion for music and are an exceptional software engineer, I’d love to talk to you about a job on our engineering team. Feel free to write to me directly at tomconrad-at-gmail.com.

Apple also announced the iPod shuffle today. $99 for the 512M version (about 12 albums) and $149 for the 1G version (about 25 albums). Flash based, no display.

Apple is in the process right now of announcing the Mac mini. A system they’re calling “The most important Mac ever.” It’s has a very tiny footprint (half the height of the iPod mini, about the size of a salad plate. Available in 1.25 & 1.4 Mhz varieties with both digital and analog video out. $499 - $599. Comes with iLife ‘05 (new) and Panther. It appears to be a straight-up Mac, not something designed particularly to connect to your television or stereo.

Microsoft was showing off a future version of their Microsoft TV product at CES. Here in the US, the closest thing we have to this at the moment is Microsoft TV - Foundation Edition which Comcast has deployed in some cities. This version has been covered elsewhere quite a bit, and strikes me as a pretty basic system. Basic PVR, basic program guide, and so on.

The version on display at the show was the new MSTV - IPTV Edition designed to allow folks like SBC and BellSouth to enter the television market over their IP networks. The idea is to deliver HD-quality streams at 3-6Mbps into the home in both unicast (video on demand) and multicast variants. The system has a much sexier user interface than its Foundation Edition cousin. It looks almost exactly like the Media Center UI (alpha-channel transparency effects and all). I was pretty impressed. The system apparently puts most of the smarts in the network and is designed to work within a very small footprint on the client device.

An early version of Microsoft TV - IPTV Edition has already been deployed in pilots in Canada and Europe. SBC and BellSouth will start trials in the US later this year.

Pentax used CES to show off a prototype of their new Optio WP. This tiny camera, which will ship in April, features a 5MP CCD, 3X optical zoom, a big display (2″), and is waterproof to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. This looks to be a great small camera. No price has been announced.

I was pretty surprised that Sony didn’t have a booth on the main show floor. It seems they decided to show their wares behind closed doors; I was really hoping to get a chance to play with the PSP at the show. Happily there was a company called Marvel in the South Hall that makes embedded technology. Their Wi-Fi chip is in the PSP and they had a few PSP’s on hand in their booth.

I was very impressed with the device; if they’re able to launch these in the US for $199 there is no question that they’re going to sell millions of them. It’s a great design, with lots of beautiful details. Sure it will scratch easily; yes it shows fingerprints like glass, but you will want one. It’s gorgeous. Oh yeah, the games look pretty impressive too. This isn’t an iPod killer — it’s way too big for that, but it’s not going to be pretty for Nintendo. As with the N64 and Gamecube (two great products), I’m sure there will continue to be an appetite for Nintendo’s unique spin on gaming, but the PSP is going to be the 1,000 lb gorilla.

There’s nothing terribly new about the Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center. It was released late last year. It’s not terribly distinguished on the features (20G drive, USB 2.0, 3 hour battery life for video, etc.) but I was really surprised at how much I liked the form factor. It’s a pretty thin unit and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. The other units, which are more the shape of the Sony PSP, are much more cumbersome to hold onto. Samsung did a nice job with this one.

Shuttle had a nice booth with all their latest offerings. I thought this new model (SB86i) was quite stunning; great simple lines. Sitting off in a corner in their booth was an XPC with a stereo component form factor. It appeared to be a prototype. Here’s a picture.

One of the really big (both literally and figuratively) items at CES this year were 1080p televisions. Every major manufacturer was featuring these in their booth. They’re pretty impressive. With 1080p you get a progressive scan (non-interlaced) display with a full 1080 lines of resolution. A side-by-side comparison against either 1080i or 780p shows very clearly that 1080p is the winner. These displays are beautiful.

Epson was showing off a technology called 3LCD that is designed to compete with DLP in the projection HDTV market. A 1080p 3LCD TV is shown at left. In a side by side demonstration, the 3LCD products were dramatically clearer with much better color fidelity. Of course, this was all in the Epson booth with products supposedly set to “out of the box” settings, so your mileage may vary. I was pretty impressed with how much progress has been made on the viewing angle problem with these rear-projection systems. Still, it’s just not cool to have a TV that’s 12 inches deep these days, so the market will probably continue to skew towards plasmas and LCD’s.

Speaking of LCD, great progress has been made this year with respect to size and response time. Many manufactures where showing displays in excess of 50 inches with 8ms response times. Given the burn in and brightness problems with plasma, it is great to see LCD technology advancing. I’m hoping for a sub-$2000 HD unit by years end.

On the plasma front, Samsung (who gets the award for the most ginormous booth at the show) was showing off a stunning 102″ model. This thing is really huge and was constantly surrounded by a sizeable crowd of admirers.

Shades of 1964: it’s been 40 years since the first video phone was shown at the World’s Fair in New York City. At CES this week Motorola became the most recent company to try to make this idea work. The Ojo is a “Personal Video Phone” designed to connect to both your home LAN and your telephone line. The former is used for video and the latter for voice. A built-in portrait monitor shows the video while a wireless handset is used for voice. It’s a pretty great industrial design (if a little large) and the video quality is quite impressive. It will retail for $799 and is being targeted at home users. That’s a lot of money for a solution that I’m not sure most consumers are clamoring for.