Category Archives: Startups

Mavrix Monthly Update October-2011

Announced beta launch. We announced the beta launch of MySwar a few days ago. Here is a synopsis of some early responses.
Winding up. We spent the entire month reviewing, and in some cases re-reviewing, the content we have put together. By the time we are through, we would have reviewed the analysis of more than 15% of all the songs. We’ll still have mistakes but despite that our content will be the most comprehensive and accurate online source of information on Hindi film music.
Miscellaneous. A whole bunch of other things in progress including associating songs/albums in our DB with corresponding iTunes and Flipkart links. We are seeding the database with trivia, external reviews (we’ve used just one source for now – Millblog) and award information (Filmfare and National Awards).
Testing. A lot of testing done and bugs found. Once they’re fixed, our content team will test the app before unleashing it to the beta users. Another few days and we should be done.
Planning beyond launch. We’re lining up features we have prioritized for post-launch releases. As the regular readers might know, we’re launching with the 1971 – 2011 period. We will move on to the pre-70s decades post launch.

Digital Music Landscape III: Consumption

[This is the concluding part of a three-part post on the Digital Music Landscape. You can read the first post and the second post to get up to speed]

Let’s look at the services that exist in the West against the services for Indian music in an attempt to look at how music recommendations serve people’s needs. In the previous posts, we’ve discussed a few approaches for recommendation. Let’s pair that up against the following music consumption models:

Downloads: Wherein the service allows you to browse and download songs for purchase. Most services allow downloaded songs to be played in any device/player but certain services provide DRM-restricted songs. Such songs can only be played on certain devices or certain players.
On-demand streaming: The user can listen to any music, any time. These services are either free (ad-supported) or based on a subscription plan. Increasingly, the free plans are getting capped to a limited amount of music.
Non-Interactive streaming: The service is pre-programmed with content, allowing users to only skip tracks and provide ratings. The content is either delivered through a recommendation engine based on the users’ taste or curated by experts.

Download services limit the number of songs people can listen to (only purchased songs) while streaming offers potentially unlimited number of songs for listening. On the other hand, downloaded songs can be listened to anytime, anywhere. Whereas, streaming services typically require an internet connection. The line between download and stream services is blurring though, as the download services are providing cloud-based features in addition to song previews; and streaming services are allowing downloads either directly or through other download services.

Music Consumption – Mature Markets

Service	Consumption model			Recommendation approach based on
	Download	On-demand	Non-interactive	Musical attributes	Wisdom of the Crowds	Expert curation
iTunes
Amazon
Napster
Emusic
Rhapsody
Last.fm
Grooveshark
Spotify
Pandora
Live365
Thesixtyone
Wearehunted

Music Consumption – India

Service	Consumption model			Recommendation approach based on
	Dowload	On-Demand	Non-Interactive	Musical attributes	Wisdom of the Crowds	Expert curation
Gaana
Saavn
Dhingana
Musicindiaonline
Smashits
Raaga
NH7
Hungama

A more detailed look at the Indian music services show that:

There are fewer consumption choices in India.
There is very little differentiation between various services.
The business model behind some of these services is not evident. All streaming services are free to users. Do they make enough money from ads? What about those that don’t even show ads?
Services are in the early stages of building recommendation capabilities. Recommendations from Indian services are either poor or limited (e.g.: NH7 does a pretty good job but serves a niche).
A lot of popular Indian music is made for films and has unique factors driving people’s interests – music directors, singers, lyricists, actors on which they are filmed, etc. These factors don’t come into play for non-Indian music.
Interest in multiples languages need to be catered to.
Services have big holes in their song catalogs because of limitations in their licensing agreements.

Given all these challenges, the quest is still on for a good, Indian music service that is comparable to an iTunes or a Spotify. While we’re not launching a music consumption service (not yet at least!), we at Mavrix keenly watch this space because we’re trying to solve one of the challenges listed above – that of serving good recommendations. We will be launching MySwar in a few days as a first step in this journey.

MySwar Beta Announcement – Reactions And How We Are Responding

I announced the MySwar beta a few days ago on this blog, on our Twitter account, our Facebook page, directly to a few people who I view as early adopters and music geeks and also a forum called RMIM. All of us at Mavrix also shared the announcement with friends and family.

While I haven’t actively promoted MySwar yet, the responses I have received so far have given me some inkling of how MySwar will be received at launch. I also feel that the initial response has helped me prepare better for the launch.

Here’s a summary of the initial reaction and my assessment of how I should address them at launch.

We hate the idea. This response completely blind-sided me. Music is one of those things that evoke extreme reactions and I should have anticipated some of these responses. But it’s one thing to watch people flame others and completely another to be at the receiving end. You can read the gory details in this thread but to summarize – I was called stupid, a liar and also a “pig” among other things. After my initial attempts to reason with these people, I realize that I was engaging in a pointless exercise.

Ignore. While this constituency is very vocal, it’s also fringe. They’re best ignored because they’re not the kind of customers I want anyway. To take these reactions in stride, it’s essential to develop a thick skin.

Sounds interesting but can you deliver? Many people were skeptical because they felt that the scope of MySwar was very big/complex/difficult. I am sure my ambitious analogy – “digitized Geet Kosh on steroids” – also contributed to the skepticism. Some people wondered if I should have avoided the Geet Kosh reference. [For people who haven’t heard of the Hindi Film Geet Kosh – it’s like the Bible for Hindi film music geeks. Uh oh, will the people who revere the Bible come after me now?!] I stand behind my decision to use the Geet Kosh reference – I view the analogy as a tribute and I see nothing wrong in setting a high bar for MySwar. In fact, I take the skepticism positively. It tells me that people appreciate that the effort behind MySwar is not trivial.

Deliver. Delivering what we’re promising is the only response. We’re putting our heads down and focusing on wrapping up the work we’ve done in the past few months. Sure, we’ll make mistakes but I believe our passion and effort will shine through in what we deliver.

Sounds great! Can’t wait to get our hands on it. This response obviously came from friends and family. I was pleasantly surprised that it also came from some complete strangers.

Sincerely thank them. Forget about other people’s cynicism, I myself have been racked by periods of doubt several times over the last few months. So when people offer encouragement and support, I lap it up happily. My own conviction has helped but Mavrix couldn’t have made it this far without the love it has received from some very kind people.

Digital Music Landscape I : Recommenders

[This is the first part of a three-part post that provides a high level overview of the digital music landscape where Mavrix and MySwar fits in.]

Recommender: specific type of information filtering system technique that attempts to recommend information items (movies, music, books, news, images, web pages, etc.) or social elements (e.g. people, events or groups) that are likely to be of interest to the user. – Wikipedia

Recommendation engines work as blend of many algorithms and approaches, to find similarities between what you find interesting , and what you may potentially find interesting. Often people use a Collaborative filtering model, or ‘wisdom of the crowd’ approach to generate lists of music, movies, news and other items you wouldn’t have come across in the mess of information around.

Recommendation services have evolved over the decades as I’ve tried to outline below

The idea of collaborative filtering was derived, when developing an automatic filtering system for electronic mail called Tapestry, over at Xerox Palo Alto Research in 1992. They needed to handle the large amounts of email and messages posted to newsgroups. Users were encouraged to annotate documents , and these annotations could be used for further filtering.
Grouplens began as a research group in the University of Minnesota where the students made a system to recommend Usenet News. It collected ratings from Usenet readers and used those ratings to predict how much other readers would like an article before they read it. This recommendation engine was one of the first automated collaborative filtering systems in which algorithms were used to automatically form predictions based on historical patterns of ratings. The research project would eventually spin out the Movielens project in 1997 and be featured in a Malcolm Gladwell column.
Engineers from the MIT Media labs created a email-based collaborative music recommendation system called RINGO. The community around this project eventually became known as the Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service (HORM). In 1999, it eventually spun out into a company called Firefly which was acquired by Microsoft where it was killed suddenly.

Today technology has advanced into a stage where recommender systems have become ubiquitous.

Amazon is well-known for its item to item recommendation system. All recommendations are based on individual behavior. Whether you like to buy something because it is related to something that you purchased before, or because it is popular with other users, you have a list of social recommendations – what other users bought, or personal recommendations-based on your purchase history.
Netflix encourages subscribers to rate the movies they’ve viewed, and their CineMatch program recommends titles similar to those well liked — regardless of a film’s popularity at the box office.
Google news serves a personalized news feed by assimilating the user’s genuine news interests as validated by click history and influences of local news trends, together with a collaborative filtering method. The result is that you view articles that align to your interests.

Music discovery is the new keyword on the digital block. To put it simply, an event of listening to a song by accident, having it play in your head, get you to like it and have you realize you want to hear it again is simplified to a website/app doing all that work for you. The music recommendation world today is vastly different from the Ringo email system where you rated some songs on an absolute scale and emailed it to the system, which would reply with songs/albums it thought you would like.

Let’s look at some awesome platforms that are driving this new experience in the second part of this post.

Coming Soon! The Complete Guide To Hindi Film Music.

We’re launching! We’re launching! We’re launching! Soon that is. The beta will launch in a few weeks and the public launch will happen soon after.

We’re calling it MySwar.in because in the end, it’s about your taste in music. The Coming Soon page is up so you can sign-up right away and be one of the first to participate in the beta. Also, please help us get the word out. Your friends will thank you!

What can you expect? In a nutshell:

Information about Hindi film albums and songs. Think IMDb.
For any song, find similar songs.
Personalized recommendations.

Sign-up now!

PS: We’re launching with 40 decades of Hindi film music – from the 70s through current day. We’ll add the remaining after launch.

Working in a Startup – The Learning Curve

It’s been 9 months I quit my 5 years job in a prestigious company, Infosys BPO Ltd, and joined a startup. Today I feel contended for taking that brave leap. I made the decision because Mavrix’s intentions and my interest were like cake and the cherry.
The journey so long has been memorable, a crash course in life, more of ups than downs.When I joined as Content Manager, it was just me and my boss at office.

Let me describe my boss – Param. Param has close to 15 years of experience in Infosys Technologies Limited. He is very passionate, a true visionary, highly focussed on what he wants to do. He never goes off-track, be it personnel management, office management or work management. He has been a great inspiration to me in these 9 months of time. He inspires me professionally and as a person. My initial month at office was a self-learning phase where I had to get into the terms of Mavrix’s vision and a great leader to work with.

From second month onwards we sensed it was time to hire people who were similarly passionate to work with us. A tough task, as the requirements were unique and unusual. Though it was difficult to get right people, fortunately we ended up creating a capable Content Team which is full of enthu and dedication. We also have a technical team of two, which is again a wonderful team.

I’m listing some very good things I learnt working in a startup –

Value – Startups are built on top of a strong vision and purpose. They provide true meaning in the work to other like-minded people.
Opportunities – Get opportunities to expand your horizons, capabilities.
Learning – I have learnt more in 6 months in a startup than I did in 5 years in my previous job.
Employee Relationship – Everyone is closer to one another and feels good to work.
Flexibility – Creates a sense of comfort and ease with flexi-timings (unless misused). On Fridays I do not say ‘TGIF!’ :-), neither I’m less-charged on Monday mornings.
Intensity – Start-ups are intense and the emotional charge I get on regular basis is a worthwhile experience.
Fun – Startups have more fun. Frequent parties, get-togethers make things even better.

Things have been going great and we, the people at Mavrix, are giving our best to achieve our company’s motto. Good news is that we are ready for the launch of our product website, as already told by Param in one of his post. Do stay in touch with Mavrix for our product launch.

Thank You Steve Jobs

For opening up a whole new world of music to me.

For giving me wonderful experiences through your magical products.

For being a source of inspiration and teaching me important lessons. Through your Stanford commencement speech. Through your Thoughts on Music. Through your many keynotes. Most importantly, through the act of building a great company that built great products.

Mavrix Monthly Update September-2011

Beta launch. You should see our ‘Coming Soon’ page come up in the next few days. When it does come up, please do sign-up to stay informed about the beta launch. If all goes well (fingers crossed!), the beta will be launched in the late October – early November timeframe.
Completed UI development. The UI components are complete and undergoing QA this week. A few back-end components need to be completed in the next few weeks before we launch the beta.
New team member. Anitha Reghunathan joined us as Developer. Check out her profile on the Team page.
Completed analyzing the 70s . We finally completed the analysis of another decade of Hindi film music. We have come a long way since we started this work in March. We started with the 2000s music and worked our way back to the 1970s. Between six people in our team, we have listened to every song in Hindi films composed in the last four decades. We’re quite proud of our achievement.

My First Media Interview

I provided an update yesterday about a Mint Lounge story featuring me. I thought some might find the story behind the story useful. So here goes.

After my initial interaction with Sidin (the writer), the process running up to this piece was a little scary since it was my first interaction with the media. Developing a severe case of coldfeetitis, I tried to get out of it but Sidin was persistent. Later, I realized that a little attention was probably good for Mavrix. Generally an introvert and a private person, I had already gone out of character by writing on this blog, tweeting and publishing my various online identities for the world to see. Opening up for the interview was a big but logical next step. I needn’t have worried. Apart from being a funny guy and a good writer, Sidin also happens to be a good listener and conversationalist, and put me at ease immediately.

While the interview ended up being a pleasant experience, the photo-shoot was anything but. After what seemed like a hundred odd clicks, I became very conscious of my plasticky, artificial smile. [Note – This was not the photographer’s fault. It’s me – I am the opposite of photogenic.]

After all this hoopla, I fretted and wondered if I had blabbered too much. Despite reassurances from friends and family, I secretly wished that the interview would be swept aside in favor of a bigger, juicier piece. Or that it would be a small piece, buried in small type, deep inside the newspaper.

It was anything but that. On the morning of the August 13, Google Analytics showed a spike of traffic on our website. My friend Google also informed me that the article had indeed been posted. I clicked the link and browsed through what seemed like a rather long piece (“Did I say all this?”). My mind went blank and I read the words without registering their meaning. I posted the link on my Facebook wall and went on to attend the business of the day. On my way back home, I bought the newspaper. When I opened the page that had the feature, I almost fell off the chair. Staring at me was the most ginormous photo of me I’ve ever seen. And the article was a full-page feature (“Did I really say all this?!”).

This time I actually read the article. And as I read it, my vital signs got back to normal. It was OK. I hadn’t made a complete ass of myself. Sidin had not written an exposé about me. A few congratulatory phone calls, Facebook comments/likes, emails and LinkedIn messages later, I actually began enjoying my 15 minutes of fame.

Now that it’s all over and I am back to the comfort of obscurity, I’d like to share of my takeaways with fellow start-uppers who are yet to go through their first media interview:

Put yourself out there. Social media, specifically Twitter, is probably the best way to have access to people who are otherwise not easily accessible. A very important part of putting yourself out there is about discovering interesting, cool people who are related to your field. I have been active on various social media platforms for just about a year now and I am still keep coming across fantastic people.
Trust your instincts. Once I got comfortable with Sidin, I shared a lot more with him than even I’ve shared with some friends. I don’t regret that.
Be honest. Or stay away from topics that you don’t want to talk about.
Don’t force your agenda. Some of my well-wishers told me that I should have spoken more about Mavrix. I respectfully disagree with them. This feature was not about Mavrix. It wasn’t even about me. It was about how liberalization impacted careers in India. I would be really ticked off if I were a reporter and someone blitzed me with information I was not interested in. Mavrix’s day in the sun will come.

Oh, and if you still haven’t read the post, it’s here.

Mavrix Monthly Update August-2011

New team member. Jyothirmayi RK joined us yesterday as Content Writer. As we mentioned in the last post, the content writing firm we had engaged for developing artist bios wasn’t delivering to our expectations. We finally decided to reduce our dependence on them.
Analyzing the 70s . Compared to the 00s, 90s and 80s, Bollywood produced some very good music in the 70s. It also produced a heck of a lot of movies. Our stats of albums analyzed per year so far: 2000s – 83, 1990s – 57, 1980s – 79, 1970s – 99 (Work in progress). This – in other words – is our excuse for still not being done with the 70s analysis!
Development work in progress. Thej and our IT partner firm are cranking it out. I wish all our business partnerships were this professional. We may be churning out code fast, but we’re adding to the feature list faster. But, we’re ruthlessly deferring most of them to future releases. Nothing but the most important features will get implemented at launch.
A Mint Lounge article features me. What started as quick exchange on Twitter between Sidin Vadukut and I, went on to become an article in Mint Lounge.