Addicted To Murfie

Not too long ago, a friend emailed me about a new online music retailer named Murfie http://www.murfie.com/ that he had heard about on NPR . I was addicted to Murfie within moments of hitting their site!

For me, Murfie rocks for four reasons:

First, when I buy a CD on Murfie, I actually own it. I own the plastic disc. It’s mine. They hold onto it for me and will ship it to me if I want. I buy and love CDs because I get all the “first-sale doctrine” legal rights I want with my music – rights that I assure you you want, and that you do NOT get with iTunes et. al. Here’s a great ZDnet article on the difference between online music and CD music legalities.

Second, it’s a marketplace. I can ship them the CDs in my collection that I think I might want to trade or sell (or, hell, ALL my discs!). They inventory them and rip them and when someone searches for something I have, it shows up and they can buy it or offer a trade for it. Ditto the discs I buy directly on Murfie (new or used). I used to be an avid user of Swap.com for my CDs – but no more.

Third, I’m a cheapskate. I own > 1,000 CDs and probably half of them were purchased used or were trades. Tonight I purchased five used discs on Murfie for a total of $16.00 ripped to FLAC and delivered to my hard drive. That averages to $3.20 per album. At iTunes pricing of $1.29 per song, that’s like buying 2.5 songs from the album except that you get ALL the songs on the album and the rights to listen to it wherever you like and trade it and sell it! To-date I have purchased a total of 26 discs on Murfie – averaging down to $4.69 each ripped and delivered. But 5 of those 26 were new discs, which seem to be priced between $8 and $12. If you remove those 5 new discs, you get down to an average of $3.29 per each of 21 CDs, ripped and delivered and owned. This is a no-brainer if you ask “cheap me!”

Fourth, rationally or irrationally, I’m an audio quality nut, and I “jst sy NO 2 lssy music.” Murfie lets me pick how I want my CDs ripped. I choose lossless FLAC, but they also offer MP3 (256 kbps ABR) and AAC. You may not care about this, of course, but it’s always nice to know there are options.

Why am I bothering YOU about this? Well, since Murfie is a market, it behaves along the lines of Metcalfe’s Law: the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The more people using Murfie, the more buyers and sellers and CDs in the system! That’s a good thing for me as a user, so I’m happy to pimp them out!

So go check out Murfie, sign up, and get Murfying!!!!

NB: I do not have any financial interest in Murfie – though that may change as they close up their A round. I’m simply a very very very happy, addicted customer. I LOVE YOU MURFIE!!!!!

Forbes Crunched

My tweetstream has been backfilled this evening with (entirely deserved!) kudos upon HubSpot regarding their placement in Forbes’s America’s 100 Most Promising Private Companies article. Since I pay attention to regional tech startup competitiveness, I was curious to slice and dice Forbes’s numbers on a state level to see what’s what.

It’s admittedly a roughshod cut of the data, but here’s the quick output:

The first set of numbers are for the complete 100 companies in the list. The second set are for the 48 of the companies that are technology firms (my analysis*). Green numbers are above the mean for the category and red numbers are below the mean.

I am neither drawing conclusions nor making any value judgements on the output (yet). Just sayin’…

Enjoy!

* These are software companies and computer hardware companies. The medical company that sells systems that read doctor’s notes is included. The medical company that makes artificial hearts is not included. If you don’t like my division, do your own analysis

Billions of Truths

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

- Carl Sagan

Competition Fucking Rocks!!!

I still have my iPhone 3GS, and it’s a solid device, for sure. The iPhone 4 is very cool. The rumored next-gen iPhone looks quite nice too.

But the pace of innovation in handsets outside the iOS world seems to just be accelerating and accelerating. This article discusses five upcoming Android devices – including the Nexus Prime that I’m particularly curious about (my Nexus One is still my main squeeze).

Long term, Apple simply won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change of dozens of independent handset manufacturers who spend their EVERY WAKING HOUR working to out-do their counterparts. Competition is a great fucking thing, and Apple has nobody shoving hard on their back.

Similarly, the tablet market is going to evolve in the same way. Today, you’d literally have to shoot me, stab me, and dump me in a ditch to pry my iPad 2 out of my hands. But in 12 months or 18 months the market will have radically shifted in favor of a more open OS than what Apple can offer – because the hardware manufacturers are WILDLY more paranoid than Apple cares to be.

PS: my wife inherited my iPhone 3GS some time ago, and last week she replaced it with an Android phone…

A Fascinating Scotch

First off, I should say that I am NOT a scotch guy. I’m a bourbon guy, through and through to my bones. Over my plentiful years I have tried myriad single-malt, high-quality scotches and they’ve never captured my palette or imagination. My working assumption is that I have something (undoubtedly irrational) against filtering my liquor through burnt vegetation – in the case of scotch, peat. I’m also not a fan of JD – in that case, sugar maple.

But I was totally intrigued by the idea of Glenmorangie’s Lasanta scotch.

It’s a twelve-year-old, single-malt scotch. Of those twelve years, it spends the first ten aging inside previously-used bourbon barrels that they apparently purchase and then loan to an unnamed bourbon producer in the US – who presumably leverages them for 4-6 years and then ships ‘em out. You can only use a bourbon barrel once for making bourbon. The Lasanta scotch is then decanted out of these bourbon barrels and put into previously-used sherry casks for a final two years of aging. How’s that for different!

Just to put this out of the way quickly, if you offered me a twelve year old bourbon that had been aged with sherry or cherries or berries or whatever – I’d probably turn my nose up at you ‘cuz I’m a bourbon snob. So if you’re a scotch aficionado and you think this whole idea is moronic, I completely hear you! However, since I am not a scotch aficionado, I’m really digging this stuff! It has a very bourbon-y finish. A complex (to say the least) nose, and the sherry part of it does not overwhelm. The burnt peat is still in there – for sure. It’s a scotch – without doubt – but it’s a scotch mellowed by the bourbon barrel, and spiced-up by the sherry cask residues. If you’re a bourbon nut, you should try this out. It’s not trivial to find, unfortunately, but it is out there!

Happy whiskey!

Love & Death

Nuthin’ On We

And everything ain’t what it seems
And this is for the people that’s chasing their dreams
Get your money hustler
So could you get your money hustler
But don’t let them take it, rules we breakin’
Tryin’ to get it cause we over-achieve
Mama I made it, now they hate it
But you could trust they got nuthin’ on we
They got nuthin’ on we

- Chiddy Bang

Tom Waits “gets” me.

My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. “Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?” they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me…I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, “Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.” So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

- Tom Waits

Private First Class? Convicted Sociopath? Mentally Unstable?

Is he destined for Camp Lejeune, Sing Sing, or McClean?

Yeah, I look like a goober. I know .

Heavy Rotation

Been doing some deep dives into some new and old artists over the past few weeks. Thought I’d share the love.

• Chiddy Bang – The Preview is available online. Definitely check out Nothing on We.
• Girl Talk – I’m a serious Greg Gillis fanboi, but damn if All Day isn’t easily his best yet.
• Kid Cudi – The more I listen to his stuff, the more I love it.
• Lupe Fiasco – LASERS is finally out! It demands you use your brain a bit though – you are forewarned.
• Mos Dub – DJ Max Tannone has done a superb mix of Mos Def with lotsa dub. It’s a freakin’ blast!
• William Fitzsimmons – Gold In The Shadows dropped today. Workin’ through it – really distinctive stuff.
• Nappy Roots – These Kentucky gentlemen redefine country! I’m partial to their older work.
• Rhymefest – Seriously – what do they put in the water in Chicago? Che, Common, Cudi, Kanye, Lupe….
• The Roots – I was slow on the uptake on these guys, but How I Got Over is officially over in my track list.
• Sam Adams – Boston’s Boy!
• Swollen Members – Check out Black Magic and Bad Dreams.

Check ‘em out, and may an eargasm be upon you.