This is from the Tech Crunch:

Indaba: A Music Collaboration Hub That Can Build Your Band For You

by Jason Kincaid on January 13, 2009

Music collaboration service Indaba has just introduced a number of new features to its site, including a new Facebook-like chat system, enhanced commenting, and a recommendation engine that helps compatible artists find each other, effectively enabling it to automatically pick out potential bandmates. The site has passed under our radar since launching in 2007, but has grown to over 125,000 thousand musicians.

Indaba is a music community for musicians looking to remotely collaborate with each other, and to share the music they’ve composed. However, while the site does make it easy to listen to what other members have created (songs can be played using an intuitive player than sits at the bottom of the screen), Indaba isn’t geared towards promoting your band and gaining fans (at least not yet).

To actually create music, users typically record their tracks using programs like GarageBand, and then upload their tracks to an online session. In these sessions, multiple users can use an integrated chat box to talk about tracks, and can also use a Flash-based mixer to rearrange pieces from each musician. At this point the exporting functionality of the service could use some work (you can only export as regular audio tracks, not as GarageBand or ProTools, though this is because of proprietary file format issues).

The site also allows users to set up payment agreements, which means you can essentially work as a studio musician from the comfort of your own home. Users can also use the site to specify the rights associated with each song.

Among the new features being launched today are in-song comments, while allow users to leave a comment with a visual indicator specifying where in the track they are referring to (for example, I could leave a note saying that I liked a certain guitar solo or drum beat). Musicians can also leave notes for their audiences that will appear when the track has reached the relevant point (I could leave a note saying, “I’m still working on this part”).

Another new feature is an enhanced site-wide chat that is similar to Facebook Chat. Using the new system, users can monitor when their friends are online, and can talk regardless of where they’re browsing on Indaba.

Finally, the site is using technology from EchoNest (an audio company out of MIT Media Labs) to generate musician recommendations. Unlike most music recommendation engines, which pair users up with songs they might like, the EchoNest system is meant to pair musicians who might work well together. The system takes both the songs you’ve previously recorded on Indaba as well as interests you’ve specified in your user profile into account.

Indaba competitors include Minimum Noise (covered here), WeMix, and Indomite.

FUN BUT SCARY

This from the Tech Crunch blog:

October 3 2007

Earthmine Aims to Index the Real World with 3D Panoramas

Mark Hendrickson

19 comments »

You’ve probably tried the “Street View” feature in Google Maps, the one in which you can actually view 3D panoramas from the street level of several cities including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Houston, and New York. Earthmine is working to bring that concept of visually mapping the real world to a deeper level by improving the quality of virtualization and by enabling the indexation of objects found in landscapes.

Imagine for a second that you could notify your friends of something cool or noteworthy that you see when out on the town by simply pulling out your cellphone, bringing up a panorama of your location, and tagging something (a store, a parking spot, an historic landmark) with a note that is automatically shared with your friends. Then imagine you’re a restaurant owner who wants to entice potential customers by tagging the outside of your diner within a 3D panorama with menu information and digital coupons. None of this is possible yet, but Earthmine will provide the technology that could very well make it all a reality.

Like Google, Earthmine collects its data by driving vehicles equipped with special cameras around urban areas. Earthmine co-founder John Ristevski says that the company’s custom camera “uses a stereoscopic system with extremely wide angle lenses to capture full spherical images of the urban environment.” Webware has a good photo of one of these babies strapped to the top of a Pathfinder (it can also be seen at the beginning of the video embedded below).

Ristevski says that, unlike Google, Earthmine uses a data calibration process that preserves the camera input as an unfiltered data set, which contains a higher level of detail because scenes are stored in “pixel for pixel array[s] of ‘depth’ points.” The result: Earthmine panoramas look better. But they are also more useful, because more detail = better indexable data. The company is called “Earthmine” not because it wants to make Google Street View prettier, but because it wants to the “mine” the Earth’s data.

What this all means is that Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them (a process known as “asset mapping”). The latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes of garbage cans, telephone posts, manholes, and trees can be recorded and tracked in a pseudo-3D virtualization system. The information can be exploited within Earthmine’s software or exported to GIS or CAD systems. Alternatively, the information stored in preexisting Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be brought into Earthmine.

Not interested in using computers to identify and tag all of the objects you could just point out on the street? That’s okay, because Earthmine isn’t necessarily focusing on you, the casual consumer. The company has its sights set on bigger customers, like the government and enterprises (which is a little scary if you are a Big Brother conspiracy theorist).

That said, Earthmine is working to make mapping technology more accessible and efficient. Ristevski claims that cities the size of San Francisco can be mapped in less than 30 days. Once Earthmine takes care of the mapping, it plans to license out its 3D inventory to customers such as city governments, branches of the national government, PG&E, big insurance companies, transportation companies, and even other technology companies like RedFin or Zillow. Earthmine hopes to make its software easy to use and affordable enough for a wide-range of consumers who are not necessarily all that technically literate. Ristevski draws parallels between what Earthmine is doing for real world mapping and what Sketchup did for 3D modeling.

Earthmine presented at DEMO this fall but has not released its product yet. The company is based in Berkeley, California and has so far operated on $1M of seed money.

Check out our coverage of other companies who are innovating with 3D technology: Photosynth, Everyscape, and Fotowoosh are developing technologies that convert 2D photographs into 3D models; Microsoft has developed advanced 3D modeling on top of its Live Search Maps product, and has also implemented Photosynth technology; and VisualSize is developing a system for accurately measuring the dimensions within 2D photos.

The following is a demonstration video for Earthmine:

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

June 14 2007

The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?

Michael Arrington

How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views.

Two standouts are Microsoft’s Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O’Reilly Radar.

Photosynth

First, Photosynth. The idea is to take many pictures of a given thing or area and combine them into a 3D image. Fly around it, zoom in whatever. The results are jaw-droppingly beautiful - see the demo video above by Blaise Aguera y Arcas from earlier this year. The BBC also just announced a partnership with Microsoft; they’ve launched a new site using Photosynth technology that will show 3D photographic representations of historic sites around the UK (Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament buildings and Blackpool Tower Ballroom). For now, though, Photosynth only works on Windows machines. Everyscape Everyscape is a much simpler product technically but is quite a bit more useful in the near term. They turn regular 2D pictures into 3D images that look like they were taken with special cameras. Viewers can pan around a 3D area, and move from point to point. See the demo on their site to get a feel for it. The video at the top of the post was created by founder Mok Oh and seems to show features that go way beyond the early beta version of the product. Everyscape launches this Fall, promising ten cities. Users will also be encouraged to submit their own photos to be included in the models. The company is attacking Google and Microsoft head on in those companies’ efforts to photograph the world and let people meander through it. They may have a chance - there are no special downloads required and they’ll be relying on users to take many or most of the photos used in the service. Whether they make it or not is unclear, but it’s fun to play with these products anyway. Good luck to them. Fotowoosh is another service we’ve covered with much simpler goals than Photosynth or Everyscape: they just turn a single 2D photo into a 3D image. But the results are very cool.