blog.seevl.net

An inside view on Seevl. Music, Data, APIs, start-up life and stuff.

[seevl-blog]

Barcelona MHD

Here we are .. Barcelona Music Hack Day!!! The Hack Day started a few hours ago, and we're glad to sponsor the event. In addition, we offer a 200€ cash prize for the best hack using our data! 14 companies are involved, presenting their API. Check out our MHD wiki page to know more about us and how to use our data. Looking forward for good and fun hacks!

Oh and at least but not least, the MHD is co-located with the Sonar Festival - Yeah, nice Location!

-- Julie

[seevl-blog]

Seevl at SemTech

Here are the slides of the 5 minute Lightning Talk I gave yesterday evening at SemTech.

In order to stick in the timing, and rather than doing a live demo, I recorded a short video of our semantic search feature, as follows. Since I talked about Rock guitarists from Hammersmith and the Who in the previous AES talk in London, I decided to go local for that one and talk about San Francisco psychedelic rock from the 60s and the Grateful dead. 

If you missed it, I'll talk about it tonight at the Semantic Web meet-up and we'll also be at the DERI exhibit booth in SemTech today and tomorrow.

Last but not least, thanks a lot to everyone that voted for us at the Vator SemTech challenge ! We eventually finished on top of this first round with more than 200 votes ! Yet, due to unforeseen reasons, the second round will not happen this week. But stay tuned, and be sure that the votes were not useless - and that it means a lot for us and our next steps !

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

Where to meet us in the next weeks ?

We will travel and participate in several events in the upcoming weeks. If you are attending those, we'd be glad to meet you, just come and say hello ! And if you're in town but not attending and want to meet, drop-us an e-mail to find an alternative place.

New-York, May 23-25. We are excited to join the Start-Up Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt, New York City. We will soon be able to let you know which day we will exhibit - either monday or tuesday.

Berlin, May 28-29. We'll be at the Music Hack Day, presenting our API and hacking all the weekend! If you want to have a look at our API before the event, sign-up for the Dev Zone!

San Francisco, June 5-9. On Monday 6th, Alex will present Seevl in the Lightning Sessions at SemTech2011, the Semantic Technology Conference.

Barcelona, June 16-17. Less than a month after the Berlin event, we'll also have the pleasure to present our API at the Music Hack Day.

More to come, stay tuned!

-- Julie

[seevl-blog]

Updates after our first public week

After only a week of public beta, we've already received lots of feedback, thanks to everyone ! Based on your comments, we've just released some platform updates:

Sharing and commenting across networks. You can now not only "like" every page, but also tweet it or send it to any other social network, thanks to the addthis sharing widget;

Artist / bands pictures. Many pages now include a picture of the artist / band, so that you can quickly identify them. These pictures (from Wikipedia) are also available through our JSON export;

Improved Open Graph markup. Every page that you "like" will be now properly displayed in your Facebook feed, featuring the previous picture, if available;

CSS updates. We've also tweaked the CSS to make it more usable, and display linkable items in a uniform way;

Introducing our FAQ. We've added a FAQ, to give you more insights on the platform, its features, and the underlying technology stack.

Much more updates and features are still planned for the next weeks, and - once again - feel free to share your thoughts and needs on our GetSatisfaction page !

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

Slides of the "Music and the Semantic Web" session

Here are the slides of the talk I gave this morning at the Music and the Semantic Web session at the 130 AES, in London. I found the panel very interesting and informative, especially as it showed both the opportunities and challenges (check this post from Greg [1]) for the Semantic Web in terms of managing the huge amount of music-related meta-data on the Web - or in internal information systems. Thanks again to Yves, David and the other panelists for making this happen - as well as the audience for the long and motivating Q/A session !

  [1] I personally believe that a (or some) JSON serialisation(s) of RDF is/are the solution to these issues, and I'll come back to this in another post discussion the rationale for our JSON export.

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

Music and the Semantic Web workshop at AES

This Friday, I will be talking about what we're doing (and why and how !) at a Workshop on Music on Semantic Web at the 130th AES in London. The workshop, chaired by Yves (BBC and Seevl) and David de Roure (University of Oxford), will feature presentations by David Bretherton, (Southampton University)  Gregg Kellogg (Connected Media Experience), Evan Stein (Decibel) and myself.

Here's the abstract:

This workshop will provide an inter-disciplinary forum to explore and promote the combination of music and Semantic Web technologies—specifically, to develop an understanding of how Semantic Web technologies can contribute to the growth of music-related data on the Web, as well as applications of this data. Activities in this area are becoming well established, driven by projects in both research and industry, and they span personal applications together with all aspects of the creation, management, discovery, delivery and analysis of musical content. The ambitions of this inaugural workshop are to bring together this emerging and energetic community, to share information and practice, and especially to articulate the research agenda in Music and the Semantic Web. Through this we aim to facilitate innovation, inform Semantic Web research, and establish the basis and momentum for future events.

Slides will be on this blog shortly after the event.

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

seevl.net is live !

During the last weeks, we received lots of feedback from our private beta testers (thanks to all of you !). From bugfixes to UX improvements, several things have been changed - in addition to architecture considerations. Today, we're happy to launch seevl.net to the public.

Of course, this is still a beta, so you may experience quality or performance issues, and some nasty bugs could appear. But we believe that the best way to improve the system is to let you play with it, and see what you need. Whether you just want to browse it or reuse our data to discover new bands, we would love to get your feedback !

So, enjoy, and keep following this blog - and our Facebook and Twitter feeds - for upcoming announcement about new features, and insights on how we've been building seevl.

-- Alex

[seevl-blog]

The Next Web

We'll be at The Next Web from this wednesday, in Amsterdam, together with people from 3scale, with whom we worked for our API management.

We're opening the beta to the public soon, but if you're around, come and see us to get a preview of Seevl's music discovery and mash-ups capabilities. We gathered really useful feedback from people browsing the app at SXSW, and we're sure we''ll come back from TNW with some new ideas for improving the platform !

[seevl-blog]

Internships positions: Web Engineering and BizDev

You're passionate about music? Want to join a team working on state-of-the-art Linked Data, Social Semantic Web and NoSQL technologies? Want to work with third-party services to let them know what they can do with our data? Let's join the team! We are currently looking for interns on Web Engineering and Business Development. The internships last between three and six months and are based in Galway, Ireland.

About Us

Seevl provides a new way to explore the cultural and musical universe of your favorite artists, and lets you discover new ones by understanding how they are connected. We are a spin-out of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), at the National University or Ireland, Galway. DERI is the world's largest Semantic Web research institute, and Seevl brings together several years of R&D on the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Social Web and Web Science areas.

About You

You are passionate about Music, Social Web and Linked Data technologies. You think that the Web could be a better place for music discovery if data was more integrated, structured and interlinked - and also more open. You want to investigate the related engineering or business development challenges.

Required Skills

Good written and oral communication

Motivation, autonomy and self-organisation

Ongoing appetite for knowledge

Good musical knowledge, whatever the style is

Additional Skills for the Engineering Position

Python, Django, HTML, Javascript

RDF(S), Linked Data, APIs, REST architectures

Additional Skills for the BizDev Position

Knowledge of the Music and / or Web industries

Interest in Open Source / Open Data and related business models

Benefits

The opportunity to work on exciting and emerging Web standards and to integrate Music and technology in a brand-new product

A stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural workplace combined with a spin-out environment, having strong ties with world-class researchers

Flexible working hours and free coffee

Want to apply?

Great. Please send us your resume (or LinkedIn profile), a short statement on why you are interested and some links to your blog and Twitter account to jobs[AT]seevl.net. For the engineering position, please send a link to your github account (or equivalent).

[seevl-blog]

What happened so far

We haven't blogged recently, but the past weeks have been very busy. The first thing to report is SXSW, where we showcased Seevl on the Enterprise Ireland both, and enjoyed various panels / keynotes / events, in addition to the huge networking opportunities. Besides the Lean Startup track that I already reported, the music-related sessions of the interactive conference were great - check in particular the slides / video of the music visualisation one by Paul Lamere from the Echo Nest. If you're looking for more data sources to build such apps, I'm sure you'll be happy with what we provide in a few weeks.

In addition, we worked hard to improve the platform, incorporating feedback provided by our beta-testers. They helped us not only by identifying bugs, but also by asking for new features, and a few pivots already started to emerge - while our focus remains structured (and interlinked) musical meta-data. After all, we're a start-up by and for music and data geeks. In the background, we consolidated our RDF / NoSQL architecture, and re-shaped our API (or the lack thereof - as we'll explain later) while keeping an agile development strategy in mind. 

There are still several gaps to fill, but we hope to go live by the end of the month - both for the website and the data access capabilities !

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

Lean startup and scientific methods

I had the pleasure to attend the Lean Startup track yesterday at SWSX. A great event, lots of food for thought on customer development, do and don'ts of early-stages start-ups, etc. But what struck me is the relationships between the Lean Startup cycle and scientific methods. As we heard all day, Lean Startup is all about "Building, Measuring and Learning". Put your hypothesis in front of your users (hopefully customers), get feedback, and improve. Then, iterate.

Coming from an academic background (and still involved in it), I see lots of similarities with these patterns and research in Computer Science. Isn't all what scientific methods are about ? Building hypothesis on top of previous work (from yourself or your peers), conducting experiments, and learning from them to build better algorithms, models or systems. Further, some of the methods for customer validation presented yesterday were very close to user studies in CS. Actually, some of them where the same. Such as, the pen and paper strategy by Food on the Table, or the live user observation describe later by Performable (IIRC, correct me if that was in someone's else talk). These are things we do in many CS evaluations, especially from a HCI perspective. Steve Blank made a similar comment on the relationship between Science and this lifecycle in his very inspiring talk.

Or course, while the method sound similar, I guess there are lots of differences, starting with the impact in case of failure (a rejected paper versus the loss of X customers) and the timeframe (the minimal amount for a scientific publication, e.g. 2 months for a workshop, is much more that the continuous development lifecycle advocated by the Lean Startup methodology).

I'd be glad to hear some more comments about this relationships, either from (ex-)academics applying the Lean Startup methodology in their companies, or entrepreneur working with academics, for instance in the customer development stage. Oh, and talking about academic studies, to answer the question "Can we prove the value of the Lean Startup methodology?", that would make a great Ph.D. topic !

-- Alex.

[seevl-blog]

Here we go !

For the past few months, we have been working hard to make this day happen. And we're happy to be finally here !

Our goal is to make music discovery smarter, and more generally to enhance your music discovery experience. Whether you are a music junkie or a business owner, seevl is there to help. Through our website, our API and other services, we provide music-related data integration, search and recommendation services. Want to create a playlist of all punk bands signed on Chrysalis ? No problem. Want to know why you should listen to the Quarrymen if you like the Beatles ? We'll tell you. Want to offer your customers a fact-list of each band you're selling online ? Look no further. We are here.

In the next few weeks, we will continue improving the platform, scaling the architecture and fixing the remaining bugs before opening it to the world. If you want to know more, drop us a line, and we'll be glad to let you know when our services become public.

Stay tuned !

-- Alex.