Credit where credit is due. TJ introduced me to Pandora.com, an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by The Music Genome Project and also the best freakin’ web-based application I’ve seen in ages.

The idea behind it is to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes like rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies or displayed instrumental proficiency to describe songs. You start by firing away your favorite band and Pandora will stream a song from that band and then follow with songs that match the attributes of your favorite band. The funky shit is that its works! It catched my ear since the first minute and I listened to it all day.

There are so many things I would like to say about this I don’t know where to start.

1. Pandora doesn’t require Login/Register/Sign-Up to begin using the application. You can have several previews first which makes all sense. First you see the real value of what you will be using, then you register. Not the other way around.

2. Can you imagine the amount of songs they index and have information about? It blows my mind thinking of it.

3. There’s an article on Pandora by Fast Company magazine called “Algorhythm and Blues” that gives an overview on the history of this application and the Oakland small company behind it.

4. For those of you who read Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start”, you may like to know the company behind Pandora nailed down a $1.5 million round of angel funding – including a sizable chunk from Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com, back in late 1999. No doubt well invested money, this is now definitely a million-dollar company (not that I would know).

Oh well, that’s it. Enjoy and relax. After all… “music calms even the savage beast”.

Techcrunch has an article about Innovate 2006, a conference that went down in Zaragoza, Spain, this week. Dozens of European startup companies showcased their products and services, of which some are web applications. Skype, eBay Europe, Symbian, Six Apart, Netvibes and the list goes on… see the complete list here.

They even summarized the startups they found most interesting which is way cool.

Interesting quotes from the article:

>“First, entrepreneurs in Europe are not revered in the same way as the U.S. Many people in Europe consider entrepreneurs to be greedy and arrogant, trying to reach above themselves. That has to change. Entrepreneurs tend to ignore risk/reward ratios, drive economic growth, bring new jobs to a country. They should be encouraged, not socially chastised”

>“Second, the complexity of creating a corporate entity, hiring employees and raising capital needs to be reduced. It’s simply too hard to create a company and get started.”

>“Third, taxes must come down, or entrepreneurs will continue to flee to the US and elsewhere.”

There’s algo a blog that seems to have some good reading.

• “Europe Shows Its Stuff: Innovate 2006”

In the begining of the month I said I would live the whole month in Évora with 250€ (house rent excluded). That has failed miserably. It’s now the 23th and I’ve spend 270€ already.

The main reason for this failure I think was the fact that I didn’t use a separate account to manage the 250€. Lesson number one: Having more money favors more spending. Another lesson, rather obvious, is that by eating at home I save more. Since many times, especially at lunch there isn’t time to cook, eating at the University has become an alternative to other restaurants because it is rather cheap (less than 4€ for a meal).

Drive less, walk more! It’s the best way to save these days. The gas price has gone nuts.

On another note, I read the latest post on Graham’s blog and a quote caught my eye:

>“Here we are. So what is our purpose here? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. In our case the distinguishing feature is the ability to reason. So obviously that is what we should be doing, and a human who doesn’t is doing a bad job of being human– is no better than an animal.”

I wonder how this contradicts the search for emptyness, normally associated with Zen Budishm.

The guys at Steelpixel had a great idea. They are offering lifetime hosting starting at 150$, one-time fee. Read on because it is worth it:

>VC or not to VC, that is a tricky question. Chris and I made the decision long ago that we would never take VC. We don’t feel it allows you the freedom to run a company the way you think it should be run. If you can’t do that, what is the point of running your own company?

>We have kicked around a few ideas on how to get money to pay for things we need. We talked about borrowing Kevin Burton’s idea and setup adsense and have people use that for us. We decided we wanted to offer something in return for helping us out so we decided to use the same idea TextDrive did. We are offering two lifetime hosting packages to customers, starting now.

>The money we raise will allow us to add more server capacity, increase our support response time (by make this our full time gig), and to focus on ways to improve the entire hosting process for our customers.

Ryan Carson, one of the developers behind DropSend, a well-known service for sending large files over the Web, in a piece called “Will your Web App Make Money”, talks about how people vastly overestimate the number of paying customers they’ll get when deploying a web app:

> If you’re offering a free plan to your customers (for example DropSend offers a free plan that enables users to send 5 free sends a month before they start paying) then expect to get around 98% or 99% of your customers on that plan. That means that you can only really bank on 1% or 2% of your total customers on the paying plan. In our experience this is true and other major players in the web app industry have agreed. This is about the industry average.

Coming from Ryan Carson this is especially interesting. DropSend currently has 17,000 users gained in just over five months. Their business model is based on subscription plans. Wouldn’t you expect more than 1% of the total customers would use the paying plan?

The article is published at ThinkVitamin, a new resource launched recently for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs, also powered by Ryan. I saw this via PlasticBag and as they say it’s already a pretty interesting looking site with some extremely cool people commenting and supporting the venture.