Technically Speaking

Not much going on today. Unless of course you have not caught up on all the good items that Mashable dished out in the past 24 hours! Of course, unfortunately if you live in Thailand, you won’t be able to go there. Also if you lived in Thailand you couldn’t enjoy reeds jewelers, but that is an entirely different story.

VoIP - Growing in Argentina; maybe Vonage should set up shop there?

Less Accounting - Moves into public beta; I could swear I talked about them in the past. I couldn’t find the link. ?

BlackBerry is DOWN - Wow, all those crackberry addicts are probably freaking out.

Afterworld - New show that is taking off via Bud.tv

TechStars - Kind of like Y-Combinator.

Podcast Hotel 3 - In San Francisco this weekend. Here is the SplashCast below:

Technically Speaking, that is it for now.

One last thing, I was speaking with Mr Business Golf, and he will definitely be putting out some statistics on his survey. Just need some more participation. It should only take a few minutes of your time (only 10 questions) - so - Hit The Survey Today. I thank you for helping out my sponsor, and if you have already taken it - Double Thanks!

If you are a start up that wants the money, Y-Combinator is now ready to start accepting applications for their summer money funding. Here is a direct link to their application process and the application.

Technically Speaking, it may be a good time for some startups to consider the Y-Combinator route.

Q1: Today I am interviewing Matt Rubens, of Jamglue. Jamglue is that new remixing site that was talked about here on Friday 12/15/06 as well as on TechCrunch and other media and blogging outlets. So Matt, what was the inspiration in creating Jamglue? The reason I ask that is I have seen so many online “music” type of sites come and go. What do you think is not only the inspiration, but also are you trying to create a music social network of sorts of remixers?

Why isn’t there a hugely popular user-generated content community like YouTube for audio? That’s the big question that motivated us to create Jamglue.

We believe that the answer is that music is a fundamentally collaborative form of media. While it’s possible for one person to shoot a funny video and post it on YouTube or take a great photograph and send it to Flickr, it’s a lot harder for one person to make interesting audio on their own. Specifically, desktop music mixing software can be expensive and complicated to use, and it’s difficult to collaborate and share the music you create with your friends.

With Jamglue, we’re trying to make making music easier and more fun. To do this, we provide free tools for remixing songs and clips from within your browser and a vast library of searchable content to use in your mixes.

We’re hoping to build up a social network around our mixing tools that appeals to music fans and musicians of all sorts. Musicians who want to give their listeners more freedom to interact with their music can import their songs into Jamglue. Remixers can showcase their skills on Jamglue and build up a fan base. Music fans can discover new songs through their friends and find new friends with similar musical taste.

Q2: How has Y-Combinator, your investor, treated you and your company? I wrote a bit about them, and I think they are a “smart” investor company. Have they let you have creative and artistic control of the Jamglue project?

Working with YCombinator has been a great experience for us. My co-founders and I are all first-time entrepreneurs, and they provided us with exactly what we needed to get started: a little bit of money, a little bit of advice, and a little bit of involvement.

We consider YCombinator to be trusted advisors and we have a lot of respect for their opinions, but we’ve always had creative and artistic control of the project.

Q3: What are some of the obstacles you have run into while building Jamglue? Things I would imagine would be such things as copyright law, bandwidth, etc. Can you maybe share some of your experiences in building a music site to help out the aspiring or future music site creator?

To be honest, the things you listed haven’t actually been huge obstacles for us. We take copyright seriously and have the infrastructure in place to respond to takedown requests, but it hasn’t been an issue to date. Thanks to Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3), bandwidth hasn’t been a problem for us either. We stream all of our audio files directly from S3, which only costs us $0.15/GB/month for storage and $0.20/GB for bandwidth.

With these issues out of the way, we’re able to spend most of our time thinking of ways to make Jamglue fun and easy to use.

Q4: As stated above in Question #2, we all know you have the smart investor backing you. This question is usually reserved for you telling everyone a bit more about the company. Where you are located, how many of you are there, if you are looking for new employees, etc… If you think you can reveal it or to help people to understand your company, go ahead and let the readers know.

Jamglue is located in Seattle, WA. There are four of us working on the project now, but we’re always looking for more good people!

Q5: I want to thank Matt Rubens from Jamglue for spending a few minutes of his time today to answer the questions. Now, it’s your turn Matt. Anything you wanted to say or want the readers to know - say it here.

Thanks for having me, Rex!

I hope that your readers will take a few minutes to check out Jamglue. We’re currently holding a remix contest with Nettwerk recording artists The Submarines ( http://www.jamglue.com/contests/thesubmarines), and even people who haven’t tried remixing before are having a great time making their own mixes for the contest.

Technically Speaking, I still have a few more interviews that I’m waiting on return answers. Hopefully we will have them online in 2007.