During the last few months, I've had the opportunity to record two titles for the folks at Lynda.com. It was a great experience for me, and it opened my eyes to a world I had known little about. I knew Lynda, of course, from the heyday of web graphics. She was, and still is, the expert when it comes to publishing rich media on the web. But I had no idea about the depth and breath of her online training business.

I've decided that given my stock in trade is my rolodex, periodically I'm going to do blogs on some of my esteemed colleagues. We'll start here with Dave Ulmer, who is most definitely a member of the "10-year+ Club" I alluded to in an earlier blog (fellow pioneers in Digital Music). About 10 years ago, Dave was at Adaptec forming...

I received an email letter today from Bob Moog's daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa. The Moog family has established the Bob Moog Memorial Foundation for Electronic Music. The letter states that they have "...carefully chosen objectives, each tied to his life and work" * Endowed Scholarships * The Bob Moog Memorial Museum * Outreach Programs for Disadvantaged Students * Special Events for...

We all remember the Mellotron from the Strawberry Fields flute line. "...always know sometimes think it's me..." I had no idea it was such an ambitious, fancy, and musical machine, on top of being dang clever and cool. See it demonstrated here by immensely stereotypical Brits. But what does this tell us about Digital Media? I guess we've had awesome...

Go here and bang around for "appliance." http://www.projectbarbq.com/bbqtopic.htm (thanks for the photo, Dave Battino) http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2032 You'll see that the topic of "PC versus Appliance," especially as relates to audio, was brought up elegantly in 1997 by Van Webster in a talk he gave at our conference, Project BBQ. Since then, the "church of appliantology" has created quite a stir...

For decades the entire royalty system has become increasingly complex, tedious, and difficult for artists and labels to decipher or audit. A long-time colleague of mine, Bob Kohn ( a very successful serial entrepreneur, attorney, & author of the BIBLE of legal issues in the music world -- "Music Licensing"), has launched a new venture called Royalty Share to address...

Satellite radio may well fail. But it won't have anything to do with podcasting. More likely, the very high costs of delivery and customer acquisition in the satellite radio business will be the killer, not podcasting.

John Buckman says he created Magnatune out of personal frustration with record labels and to give artists a fair deal. Does their tagline "We Are Not Evil" ring true for artists?...

http://www.projecthorseshoe.com This is a bright group--I thought you might be interested in knowing about the 50-person Game Design Think-Tank that my partners and I are putting on. This will be the first one on the topic of Game Design, but we've had 10 very successful conferences on Music on Comptuers (Project BarBQ). The high concept, basically, is to "Solve...

The old saying, "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" expresses a deep truth about creativity: two things that differ in characteristics but share a common domain may yield fruitful results when combined. The people at Frontier Design have taken that lesson to heart. They've taken the wireless network and the audio control surface, spread one all over the other,...