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I just got back from a trip to New York City (and surrounding areas) with my family, and as a part of this trip we had a rather convoluted travel/transport situation to get into the city after some time on Long Island.

Long story short: we landed at JFK, got a rental car for some things on Long Island and in New Jersey before heading into the city. To coordinate this, we were going to drop off the car at Newark and get a car service into the city.

Since FoundersCard has a discount for LimoRes, and Uber doesn’t have many cars in the area (and we needed a toddler seat), I decided to use LimoRes to book the car.

We had booked the car for pickup at 4:50PM. The car arrived 30 minutes early (which was great), but without a car seat. This was not ideal. I had explicitly called the dispatcher to ensure that we had a car seat provided. Being that LimoRes dispatch is in New York City, and Pride was going on this day, the driver warned us it would take him over an hour to go get the car seat.

We waited and waited, and I called to find out status. The driver ended up having to stop at a Target in NJ to get a car seat. He came back, we (four adults and one two year old) loaded into the car and were off out of the pit of hell that is Newark.

As we left, we were happy to finally be going into the city. We were with my wife’s brother and his girlfriend who were leaving the next day, so they were anxious to get into the city. Right as we left, right about here, we get a flat. The driver pulls over and we stop.

If you look at the map, you can see we are now blocking one lane on a two way onramp, right at a split, around a blind corner. Cars are zooming past.

The driver takes all our luggage out and puts it on the side of the road. I ask him to call for another car, but he thinks he can change the spare. I advise him that a car falling on his passengers is probably not covered under his liability insurance.

So now our luggage is on the side of the road, drivers are speeding past and honking. I get out of the car to see if I can at least keep him from throwing our bags down only to get a lit cigarette thrown at my head. At this point I call LimoRes dispatch and they advise me that no cars are in the area.

A taxi cab (non yellow cab) shows up and offers to take us into the city for 80 bucks, but they didn’t have room for all of us. I send away my brother-in-law and his girlfriend. Meanwhile I’m contemplating hailing another cab and buying the toddler seat from the driver.

The driver does not know how to lower the spare tire, so I help and get it to lower a bit. At this point two police cars show up to divert traffic with flares. They also call a tow truck. That tow truck calls another tow truck as they don’t know how to change the tires on this car. As it turns out the spare is flat and stuck.

It is now 45 minutes since we broke down and my wife and son are getting upset in the car.

The police are getting impatient by this time and insisting that the driver get his car towed. I am now getting furious and calling LimoRes dispatch and screaming that we need another driver.

Right as they are starting to lift the car we’re in, another suburban shows up to take us into the city and LimoRes advises us that we won’t be charged for this one. The driver is understandably upset at a 0 dollar fare but at least its a car and moving.

We end up getting into the city two hours later than planned.

So to summarize:

• Do not ever use LimoRes
• LimoRes does not consider the fact that a two year old + family are stuck at the side of a busy offramp cause for concern
• We received no follow up after this incident.

Charles Fraas who just took over LimoRes as CEO on 4/1/11 and Seth Lasser who is their new CMO as of the first of June should know what drivers and their employees are doing in the name of their company. FoundersCard should immediately remove them from their vendors.

From now on, I’ll associate this company with lit cigarettes thrown at my head, an incompetent driver, dismissive dispatch, a police officer who offered to yell at dispatch for me and a crying two year old on the side of the freeway in New Jersey.

For the record: we used Legends Limousine on the way out of the city and they were really good.

The biggest challenge facing the music business is not necessarily piracy or the competition of attention for fan’s money and time, it’s making an experience joyful for people.

And historically this has been the biggest miss.

A lot of what is built as a means of saving an industry is a solution in search of a problem. Or more specifically, a solution for a problem, created by those that are reliant on the survival of their industry. Rarely do you see a solution created with the goal of making a joyful experience for a fan; to address a problem they never knew they had.

There are a few companies that do this well:

Apple is one, and the entire WWDC keynote is an example of this, as is the experience of using iOS5, Lion and iCloud, even in beta. Square I view as another. Foursquare another.

In the music space, Spotify is the one that comes to mind as a key example of this. They started from the get go creating a product oriented toward a great user experience, rather than a capitulation to demands from those their product is supposed to “save.” It is an arrogant method of engineering, and one that served them well. If you look at the Spotify product, it is oriented toward creating a joyful experience, starting first and foremost in the fact that it is a native app. It leverages the joy of discovery by not obscuring inventory through marketing, and by doing so democratizes what was commonly (and endemically) held tight by the providers of the content.

For this reason, some in the music business don’t like it. The experience is too joyful, and too much power in the hands of (happy) consumers means that there is less available room for marketing and direction.

But I don’t buy that.

The non-music side of the business has always been about joy. The joy of being a fan, of being a spectator, of meeting your idols. People used to go to Tower Records on a Saturday morning, and leave with a three foot stack of LP’s. There was a visceral pleasure in that act.

The paranoia induced by Napster changed that, and forced everyone in the business to react out of fear and protection rather than enablement. You ended up with “services” which served no purpose other than to check off an item on a list. You ended up with DRM from FairPlay to Plays For Sure, which did nothing but infuriate, confuse and tire consumers.

In the end, this protectionist mentality lead to the joyful act of being a music fan only being satiated through the very means which caused the problematic mentality in the first place. It became easier to infringe and make good experiences than to play by the rules. See Muxtape and to a degree Grooveshark as an example. Being “legitimate” lead to a soulless experience. Being illicit was fun not for its illegality, but because the experiences created through unencumbered creativity were exciting.

How then do we then bring the sense of joy back while building a sustainable business?

I posit that these need to go hand in hand. An honest approach to the making of a market and ecosystem around something that which gives you enjoyment. How refreshing would that be?

If this industry is to be rebuilt, it has to start at 0. Write every thing that is wrong with record companies down (that is for another post), then move on. Focus instead on two things:

How do we being joy back?
How do we add value with what we produce?

Microsoft keynote:

Apple Keynote:

Sometimes you need to scratch an itch.

I left my job at the end of January and while I’ve enjoyed the time off, I wanted to take the opportunity while I had it to expand my horizons technically. For the past five years at Warners I was neck deep in Drupal, as Drupal powered most of our Platform. I also did some exploration into Python, Node and Rails.

Seeing as I had some downtime to do something for fun rather than any business need, I decided to give myself the challenge to make a mashup in Rails.

I have been toying around with Rails since pre-Version 1 beta. I never really took it seriously or considered it to power the WBR platform because at the time it wasn’t mature enough. Since Version 3 came out however I’ve been looking at it with some interest as it addresses a lot of the deficiencies from versions 1 and 2, and presents, to me, a much more refined workflow than Drupal.

Concertgram is not great, but its something I wanted to do to scratch an itch. I wanted to see photos taken at shows, without having to rely on people checking into the events on Foursquare. As such it gets the longitude/latitude of a show from Songkick, gets the timezone for the show from AskGeo, then uses both to query Instagram for photos taken within +/- 4 hours of the show, and 500m from its location.

Not super complicated at all.

User interface wise I wanted to explore simplicity and fluidity. I’m by no means a designer, so I also wanted to avoid images and work with CSS3. Mostly however I wanted to throw myself into a project to learn some new things, refresh myself on other things (i.e., JQuery, CSS) and just to code.

A few things I learned during this, some of which warrant more discussion:

• Maintaining proper Git workflow and deployment strategies is much simpler in Rails than in Drupal. Drupal conflates a lot of things into the database, which makes maintainability very difficult. I know that things are moving away from that.
• The combination of Github, Pow and Dotcloud make for ease of rapid iteration.
• There are many ways to skin the asynchronous user interface pattern cat.
• API’s are unpredictable
• Dealing with timezones sucks
• In dense urban environments, you get a lot of collateral Instagrams from around the venue
• Instagram isn’t as popular as I suspected, at least at shows

At some point Concertgram will reach a point of completion and I’ll stop iterating it, but for now it’s a bit of fun. I do have in mind a more complicated Rails app to make good on my promise.

PS: Concertgram isn’t currently in a public Github repo due to API keys in it. However if anyone that is a Rails expert wants to give it a once over to critique the code, please let me know.