An overall update / NUvention Web
Posted by: todd in NUvention Web, Uncategorized on February 28th, 2010
I haven’t written in the blog in a while, so thought it would be useful to give an update of what I am doing these days. The activity that’s occupying most of my time right now is teaching NUvention Web at Northwestern. Additionally, I am spending time on two other for profit ventures. I am helping Pcubed create an overall innovation practice as a board member. Finally, I have become an official advisor to Divergent Ventures. Of course, I’m also still doing alot of work with Ashesi University as we start to close out the capital campaign.
NUvention Web has been running for about 9 weeks. The process was students applied to the class, and I worked with the Mike Marasco, who co-teaches with me to assign them to teams with a good balance of skills—marketing, software development, user interface design, finance—so that they can create the concept and product. Of the 45 students in the class, 1/3 are from the Kellogg school of management, 1/3 are from the McCormick School of Engineering graduate program, and the balance are undergraduates, primarily from McCormick, but also representing the Weinberg college of arts and sciences, the school of communication, the Medill school of Journalism, and the school for education and social policy. Students are grouped into 7 teams and assigned a topic area in which they develop their concept. Some topics are broad, like Social Networking or Web Marketing. Others are more specific and have sponsorship from a faculty member or advisory board member. Bill White, a fellow Northwestern trustee and professor, has a team pursuing helping companies improve their ethics training. I am working with one team that is focused on applications for a Sonim Mobile product.
The course runs over two quarters. In the first quarter the goal is to get to a preliminary business pitch and product prototype. In the second quarter, the team will develop and launch their product. The syllabus is below. This week we will here draft pitches and review the current state of the prototype. We were covered in the Northwestern Daily a few weeks ago.
With Divergent, we are now starting to review business plans, as the second fund has been closed. Divergent’s philosophy is to work in an advisory role to companies in advance of making an investment decision. We also are always a co-investor with other funds. Its fun to get to see new businesses at this stage.
Facebook Developer Meet-Up/Zynga FarmVille
I got an invite via facebook developer group to a “social gaming meet-up” that I went to today. I was interested in going in part to see what was happenign intheir dev community and to start to do some research for the NUvention Web class.
They had two speakers,Will O’Brien, GM of Socail Games from trialpay and the lead developer of FarmVille at zynga, Amitt Mahajan. The event had terrific turnout, maybe 200 people. Demographics of the group were largely male, and late 20’s to mid 30’s primarily (i was in the older part of the distribtuion). Seemed like a mix of designers, biz dev, and developers; many freelance or trying to start something. A few Microsoftees, including from the Windows Mobile group. I didn’t see or meet anyone from facebook; it’s organized by a guy named AJ Archibald, who i didn’t really talk with but he was terrific at making the mic generate feedback.
The whole thing was an interesting window on a different software platform and market structure; and it was very interesting to talk to Amitt about the how and what of the development of FarmVille. I haven’t really worked in gaming (and more than half the attendees were gaming oriented) so that was new to me. It was interesting to see the approaches here. The thing that is clear is if your business model is about getting scale and virality, facebook is where its at. To paraphrase Amitt, “It’s the only game in town and other networks haven’t shown the momentum to justify a port.
The evening started with the trialpay presentation, which was about how to make money through social gaming. I don’t know much about trialplay; but it seems to be a mash-up of advertising, virtual currency/game awards, and referals. Will talked about a model where he said to be successful social apps need to Aquire->Engage->Monetize. He said people make the mistake of trying to jump to monetization too early. Amitt also emphsized engagement as the key to social/casual gaming (more about that in a second). The other interesting thing that Will talked about was the strategy to get to monetization. He talked about in worlds with virtual currency or prizes to first make sure that at the entry level gamers can do enough to be interesting (e.g. base amount of money gets you seeds to grow something) but create an aspiration for what they could do with more virtual currency in the system, by showing what peers have done or great tools they could buy if they had way more virtual cash. This way you help create a need in the mind of your gamer to incent them to buy some of the pay for virtual content. He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.
Let me take an aside and discuss the business model implications of the discussion and what trialpay appears to do. They effectively provide a syndicate or exchange for product placement and product referal and information wtihin other websites. A related business helps retailers place incentive coupons on web pages to intice them to purchase more. Since this model requires “reach” for advertisers, the model is that it is free for people to leverage in their applications, and sponsors “pay to play” to reach all the different vehicles that exist on the web and mobile web. He talked about how a successful social game with monetization should generates .50-3.00/user in arpu; and in the $8 range for “paying” customers—that is customers who have payed at least once before on the network or game.
Amitt’s talk was more product development and product concept focus. Farmville is extremely successful. Amitt said nearly 30m users/day use the application and 84m unique users a month. The app has risen to that height after just 6 months (and it added its first million uers in the first month. He started out by discussing that one of the key goals in creating FarmVille was to create a game that lasts forever (i.e. engages the user forever). In this way they also focused on the fundamental product infrastructure they need (including to put in place what would be necessary to make it scale). He talked about the fundamental thing to make it last forever was the idea of engaging users, a priority he put above everything else. He also talked about picking a general enough concept that it could scale to all regions and all age groups. He said this implied keeping the content pretty PG so that kids could play with their parents, etc. He also talked about the competition as things like playing solitair between meetings, reading blogs, or watching youtube, so it had to be visually exciting and equivalently engaging. After engagement, he said secondary priorities were about making it viral and last monetizing the work that was done (though it was clear he and his team think about monetization alot!). A good example he gave of engagement over viralness was that he said you really didn’t want the game to cause alot of spam on the friendfeeds.
Amitt talked about the architecture of his game. It’s basically a flash front end to a PHP application. He built a special library in flash that routes the bits in an encrypted, secure way back to the php application. It sounded like this protocol was built on top the ajax bulding block XMLHttpRequest, the fundamental building block of Ajax. Part of this protocol is also He also talked about how they worked to isolate the application from facebook and the database to get performance and resilience. His goal is that the game can go on even if facebook and the underlying database fall over, and so they have done alot of work on caching both kinds of information in the app. In this regard he talked about creating caches of the info you would get from facebook. It sounded like he was using a mildly persistent set of classes in php; refreshing and saving the data to facebook and the database. He talked about a technique where in addition to the application being loaded on the desktop, he used a hidden iframe in order to make calls against the facebook api and pre-populate the cache for performance.In order to do this, he made a wrapper. He talked about insuring that they could scale horizontally using this approach. he was using a cloud service but declined to say which one. He does use dynamic virtual pools of PHP front end servers for the application part; and trys to make the app less reliant on a database connection via his caching strategy. He also has a data driven model for the major elements of the game, so that designers and marketers can change their variables—e.g. what earns money and how things look—without affecting any of the code. He talked about how this enabled the designers to do the current snow theme, which he said had been great at getting users who had drifted away active again.
I followed up with him afterward and discussed more about FarmVille’s development process. Farmville has about 14 developers and an equal number of testers. They do releases twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday. They run 2-3 teams working in parallel. Amitt worked hard to manage a branching structure to support this development. Their test model is layered and first a tester works with the developer on a drop before it is up integrated into the main test bed and battery. They then have an automated process that does “continuous integrates and deployment” to their test configuration. Farmville heavily instruments every aspect of their application, and Amitt said their product development and feature list is very data driven. They look at how you got to the marketplace and new items. He talked about how it was important to continue to refresh the game, and that too much change is hard for the users to digest. He talked about the benefits of just having simple additions, like new elements within the framework, were as important as substantial game changes. He said feature definition came primarily from the product management role; but that platform driven changes (e.g. facebook changing something) was a high priority, and why he valued separation in the architecture from facebook proper so they could have agility on how to address.
So all in all, it was an interesting presentation, with good lessons on business model, product development, product architecture, and software engineering process. Thanks Amitt.
NUvention Web: Advisory Board
Posted by: todd in NUvention Web, Northwestern on November 30th, 2009
In my post last week, I discussed the new course I am chairing at Northwestern called NUvention Web. It’s a two quarter sequence where teams of students across engineering (McCormick), the business school (Kellogg), the liberal arts school (Weinberg), the Medill school of journalism, and Communications, work together to develop a web business concept, develop and launch the project.
One thing that differentiates this course from others that students take is access to an advisory board of software industry veterans, who evaluate their projects and can provide advice. In addition to the formal advisory board, we have several informal advisors, who are helping us with specific topics. Michael Marasco, the director of the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and I have been recruiting members, including during a recent trip to silicon valley to talk to a number of successful NU alums who have done things in Silicon Valley. We are still talking to a number of people, but I thought I would share on the blog of few of those we are working with.
One of the most exciting is Steve Olechowski, who currently works at Google and was one of the co-founders of feedburner. Steve is a serial entrepreneur, also having had a successful exit from his first company that provided internet based alerts. It’s great that steve is local in chicago and that we are looking forward to his advice.
From our silicon valley trip, we were able to recruit a number of good advisors. Bob Plascke is a 1985 graduate who runs a company called sonim, which builds hardened phones for rough environments. Our students will work on a project related to one of his under development; and have the benefit of an encouraging first customer in sonim, as well as the advice of those in the industry. Another advisor we are working with to sponsor a project is Kristin McDonnell, the ceo of Limelife, a mobile social networking site for women. Kristin has worked in high tech for over 20 years. After Northwestern, I first encountered her when I was being recruited by Lante, a very early PC consulting and solution provider. After business school she worked in the gaming industry for Electronic Arts as well as several other silicon valley companies. She will add wonderful perspective to our students given her current startup experience and intersting background. One other I wanted to mention who is advising us from our silicon valley visit is Vivek Ragavan, founder of xorp.net and serial entrepreneur. Among other things, Vivek is the former CEO of redback networks and has terrific experience to benefit our teams.
Two others to mention in this post. Hon Wong is another successful serial entrepreneur and Northwestern Alum. I first met Hon when he was starting NetIQ, a company that went public and was eventually sold to compuware. Most recently, he was CEO at Symphoniq, a software as a service management company. Hon has given us great feedback on the structure of the course, and will be a terrific advisor. Finally, I want to mention Ben Slivka. Ben is an old friend at this point, and fellow trustee at Northwestern. Ben was one of my first contacts when I was recruited to Microsoft. Ben led many successful software projects including DOS 5 and Internet Explorer at Microsoft, was one of the key architects of the Win32 api. He currently is chairman of DreamBox Learning, a startup working to re-invent educational software.
We have several more advisors that are in the works. Additionally, many of the folks we are talking to will be informal advisors on topics ranging from technical development strategy, to marketing, financing and positioning. I’ll update you as the course evolves how that is going.
NUvention Web
Posted by: todd in NUvention Web, Northwestern on November 24th, 2009
Well, fall has come on gone with hardly a blog post. It’s been busy. I’ve been back and forth to Chicago several times since returning from my end of summer travels. I do alot of different things at Northwestern, including serving on the board of trustees, as well as the board of advisors for the McCormick School of Engineering, the Weinberg school of arts and sciences, and the School of communication. While I spent some time on most of those things, my main endevor has been designing a new course that Northwestern hosted in McCormick, but open to all schools at the graduate and undergraduate level focused on software entrepreneurship.
We call the class NUvention Web and it is a two quarter sequence starting in Winter quarter (January) and running to spring. The structure of the class is modeled after the NUvention Medical course. NUvention medical takes graduate students from across McCormick, the medical school (Feinberg), the law school, and Kellogg who form a company with shared equity between the participants to design and build a medical device. The teams shadow surgeons in particular disciplines, and then develop a product proposal, pitch, and business plan. In the 3 years the course has run, several of the teams have continued after the course as going concerns, and some have licensed their innovations to larger medical device companies. Each team is coached by a faculty advisor, and the class is team taught across the school. A board of industry advisors, including a “chair” from industry help guide the overall course, provide advice to teams, and evaluate their progress.
In NUvention web, we will build on this model. We will have teams of 5 students, drawn from across the schools. Students apply to the program, and our applicants are a mix across Kellogg, McCormick, Weinberg, Communication, and the other schools at NU. We will have 8 teams total; each with a faculty advisor. Like medical, NUvention Web is team taught across the schools. We are very lucky to have Dipak Jain, who was dean of Kellogg from 2001-2009, teaching marketing in our class. We will also have Chris Riesbeck from computer science. While Chris’s specialty is AI, several conversations with him a few years ago shaped my developing software products course, including getting me interested in some of the emerging Agile methods at the time. He also teaches in the master’s program in product development at Northwestern on these topics. Mike Marasco is also contributing to the course both teaching and coaching a team. We will have some others, including some entrepreneur guests; but it should be an exciting course.
Another significant part of the course that we borrow from NUvention medical is an advisory board from industry. I’m serving in the “chair” role, and Mike Marasco and I have been recruiting a world class set of folks from industry to help guide our student teams and give feedback.
I’ll be writing a few posts between now and then to tell you more, but start by going to the course site, http://web.nuvention.org, built by one of the students in our course, Jon Drake.
Ashesi Friends
I’m in Accra Ghana right now as I’m writing this. I’m here for the groundbreaking of Ashesi University’s permanent campus. During the week, we are spending some time seeing Ghana and seeing the impact Ashesi students can have. I encourage you to take a look at a blog we set up just for the occasion at http://ashesifriends.wordpress.com. There you will see more pictures and stories about what’s happening over here in West Africa.
Constructive Summer
I’ve taken a hiatus from blogging since the end of the quarter, but thought I would give you a bit of an update. To parphrase the Hold Steady, it has indeed been a contrsutive summer (though there has been no drinking on top of water towers). It’s mostly been one of non-stop travel—biking in tuscany, visiting Stasha’s family in Montenegro, dropping Rachel at Cambridge, Seabeck, hiking in Stehekin, a week at the lake house in Minnesota, and now getting ready to go to Ghana and then biking in Croatia.
After the quarter at Northwestern ended, we spent a few weeks in Seattle as a family. It was a glorious June in Seattle with terrific weather. Ruth and I did a lot of tandem biking to get ready for our first adventure, which was a Ciclismo Classico trip through Tuscany (Rachel and Sam went too, and rode at the head of the pack with a few others). We also went to Montenegro, where our exchange student, Stasha Djursic, from the 2008-2009 school year is from. We were graciously hosted by her parents for 9 days of touring and enjoying the amazing Montenegrin coast line on the Adriatic. I’ve posted the pictures on smugmug, but here are a few highlights:
We then returned to Seattle, to do things like go to Seabeck family camp with our church, and enjoy the rather balmy weather we had in late July. Ruth and I went camping for a few days in the North Cascades outside Stehekin. We also traveled to see my extended family in Minnesota on Fish Hook Lake, just outside Park Rapids
We are now preparing to go to Ghana for the Ashesi groundbreaking, and then on another bike trip (this time with Backroads) in Croatia. Whew! I think I will need fall just to recover.
Teaching and a general update
Posted by: todd in EECS395, Northwestern, Software on April 29th, 2009
I’ve been working on these massive SXSW music posts, but mostly I’ve been focused on what my “new work” has been since I left Microsoft. First, I’m having a great time and staying much busier than I anticipated. Patrick Awuah from Ashesi was in town last week; and we held a great event at our house. The shcool continues to do amazing things. I also joined the board of a company called Pcubed. I’ve worked with pcubed for years. They were a great partner when I was the General Manager of Microsoft Project, and I used them to help implement Project Portfolio management when I was the VP of Mobile product development. They really bring to companies the kind of know-how to improve operational efficiency, get a handle on their organizational priorities, and improve overall execution. I’m helping them develop an innovation practice based on my experience at Microsoft and some of the things I’m teaching at Northwestern.
Northwestern is going well. As I’ve mentioned, I have this dual life where I commute most weeks. I teach a seminar style class on software product development Tuesday and Thursday. The first half is spent on vision and requirements process, and the second half is focused on development and testing. Structurally, I center the first half of the class around Contextual Design and vision statement development. Because of the seminar style, we are working as a single team and after the vision statements were done, we picked as a class one to implement. We are doing a facebook application designed around coordinating with others for chance encounters and vacations. The students debriefed on the Contextual Design yesterday, and are now developing the feature list and building a deep specification Microsoft style. In May, we will transition to running an agile iteration of development, using Extreme Programming (XP). I use XP, because it is a great teaching methodology for 3 reasons: it’s test first, so students learn the value of designing and running tests, pair programming introduces them to the idea of co-design vs. assignment lone wolf development, and finally, its approach to estimating helps students think about developing a system to figure out how long something will take. XP has matured since I taught it in 2001 (as has C#), and in fact there are books and materials on test first development and doing extreme with C#. Currently as a teacher I’m wrestling with getting the scaffolding in place for the project, which will be done in ASP.Net. We’re also going to store the product code on SourceForge and manage with subversion so that the students get the experience of source code control (we also have a short unit on open source so this ties in).
I’m also working on two other things at Northwestern. First, I’m working with the McCormick school of engineering on a proposal to do a software entrepreneurship sequence across multiple of Northwestern’s schools. It’s modeled on a successful program already in place for biomedical devices called NUvention. The link has a nice video that overviews the current program—imagine it with software instead of surgery. Second, there is a course being taught between the Medill school of journalism and computer science that is a project class, and I’ve been helping a little bit there in reviewing projects and coaching class teams. The projects are quite interesting, with the teams being half journalism students and have computer scientists. They are doing things like automatically writing sports stories that are journalistically compelling from raw statistical data, to mining twitter to alert you to articles that interest you. Also, they are doing tools to assist journalists in fact checking and research. I even got to help a team by hacking a little word add-in code to bootstrap them.
Some Documents on Ashesi University in Ghana
Just a short post regarding Ashesi. I’m putting 3 pdf’s of our printed materials that talk about the impact we are having on on the environment, women and ashesi, and how we are catalyzing african development.
ashesi-and-environment-final ashesi-and-women-final development-leaders-and-ashesi
SXSW 2009 – Music Narrative Thursday – Geek Rock You!
This is one of several belated posts related to the SXSW music festival in March 2009. I mentioned we had a full Wednesday; which was followed by an even fuller Thursday. We started the day going to the Memphis barbecue. The king was there, at least in cut out form. Dennis Shin poses with him here:
SXSW has lots of events and parties during the day, many of them are regionally hosted. For example, Seattle had a party (which I didn’t make it to unfortunately) as do cities like Memphis, record labels like Bloodshot, and countries like New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. The UK for example features a different region each day. Japan runs a showcase; and as a geek, this poster resonated with me
I have to say the best part of the Memphis party was the barbecue. The bands were pretty good; but nothing really to remember. There is also a tremendous amount of swag handed out at these events. One thing I noticed at SXSW is that the industry is trying to make vinyl have a comeback; and I received my only LP during the convention there. I gave my copy to dennis; since I thought it was too big to haul home. Those of you who know me know I’m certainly into some retro audiophile gear—I love my Cary tube amps and my wavelength tube powered A/D converter, and i do own a turntable—but I find that vinyl is too much trouble in practice. Good Vinyl, especially early 60’s jazz certainly has a depth of sound (especially when matched with tube gear) that CD’s and MP3’s doesn’t touch to my ears (even after my ears were damaged by metallica) but I think its time to move to the modern age. The barbecue was a great chance to socialize with other attendees and soak up the texas sun.
From the bbq, we went to the keynote from Quincy Jones. I was excited to see him live as a Jazz fan, music fan, and Seattlelite (Quincy grew up in bremerton and told stories at SXSW of the shenanigans he and his brothers did there, as well as discovering muisc). From his work as a performer to his work as a producer Quincy certainly has made a tremendous impact on the Music biz. He recounted his history with Michael Jackson and the making of thriller, as well as his relationship with Ray Charles and meeting in the Jackson Street jazz scene in Seattle in the early 50’s. I would say however, like the Richard Branson keynote at CTIA last year, Quincy rambled on alot. As I said on twitter it took him 60 years to recount 60 years. Even so, it was neat to see him discuss his life and the industry.
We hit the official “tradeshow” portion of SXSW after that. The tradeshow was a bit of a disappointment I would say—though I wasn’t sure what to expect—the action in the music portion of SXSW seems to be at the day parties and the evening showcases. It was populated by a few musical instrument makers, purveyors of software/websites for bands to use to get promoted, at least one myspace wannabe (one other note is its clear that myspace is THE place for a band to publish and track its info…that’s probably not news, and I know in some work we did researching social networking amoung teens and twenty-somethings, myspace was definitely the go-to site for determining what clubs to go to on a friday evening).
Then onto the concerts. We went to a party where Graham Coxson
f
ormerly of Blur was playing acoustic at a party hosted by Transgressive records. He sounded great. I have to admit I was more an Oasis fan during the time of blur (this makes me a bit uncool in indie geek circles); but since SXSW have been listening to quite a bit of Blur and it’s very good (as was graham’s acoustic stuff). Blur had other offspring including the Gorillaz which I know are popular in our household.
Next up, was the Von Blondies at a show we could actually see. This was the DirectTV filiming; and it was excellent. The band seemed a bit nervous; but gave a performance that was definitely in the top 6 or so I saw in Austin. The girls in the band had great choreography; and the new material sounded great. Recommended to listen to or go see if you like things in the “white stripes” vein. From there we attempted unsuccessfully to see Peter Murphy; but our backup choice was one of my favorites and a new discovery for me at SXSW, Nelly McKay. She’s sort of tom lehrer crossed with tori amos and a dash of torch singer; or the offspring of spike jones and nora jones. Either way, an excellent combination. Songs like david, sari, and the dog song have become staples on my Zune since. Great voice, piano, and she does a killer turn on the ukulele.
From there we went to see the Meat Puppets, at Stubbs. They played a terrific concert, playing favorites like Lake of Fire (which many first heard in the Nirvana unplugged record) and Backwater. I would say for all the 80’s musicians they are definitely showing some wear—I guess that’s the rock and roll lifestyle—and the Meat Puppets were not exceptions. But the grizzled appearance fit the presentation, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Dennis hadn’t heard them before and liked them; and I really wish my daughter Rachel had been there as they are one of her favorite bands. Here’s a photo
From there we went to zona rosa to see Tori Amos. Wow. She was breathtaking. I had always admired her music; but boy does she put on a great show. The sight lines at zona rosa stunk; but for one person sitting at the piano to wrap the audience around her finger like she did was amazing. She was also really fun to watch. She would do this thing where between phrases she would switch between pianos; which must take incredible skill given the complexity of her playing. I would definitely recommend seeing her, even if your only a casual fan. Powerful performer.
Night wasn’t over yet. We took a roots rock break at Antone’s, which is a fantastic primarily blues venue when SXSW is not happening. We saw bloodshot records artist Justin Townes Earle. The band look like guys I’d run into at the tea steak house outside my home town of Sioux Falls, SD. They are definitely more on the country side of country rock; but he was very enjoyable in a Hank Williams (not jr.) way. Great. The other diversion at Antone’s was Pinetop Perkins, who played piano with Muddy Waters amoung other mid 20th century blues muscians. He sits by the shoeshine stand and sells his CD’s and DVD’s; and he’ll pose for a photograph:
We were then on to see Primal Scream at the Cedar Street courtyard which was terrific. Dennis was into them, and i hadn’t heard them and they forward a very solid show at a great venue that is literally a courtyard between two buildings. My feet were hurting, I felt musically sated, but now, Dennis urges me onward, and at about 1:30am we head to redbull after party. On the edge of town, past this junk yard dog:
We bluff our way in (we look more grown up than all the UT students trying to get in I think) and then get their RIDICULOUS tattoo stamp (took lots of scrubbing a few days later to get off) only benefit was it let you into the party the next two nights. We chatted up a great austin high tech company, she at dell, he formerly at AMD. They gave us the best tip of the week about an afterparty the next day. We walk around the party pit, and just when I think my feet have given up; we hear Lady Sovereign is going to perform, and Dennis rightly gets us to stay, and watch—where else—right next to the stage. She did a great job, though she is really a novelty act. Here she is in a particularly lady sovereign like pose:
whew! 3am. Time to call it a night, put the feet in the ice bucket and get ready for the big day tomorrow, and the show I’ve been looking forward to, the Hold Steady.
SXSW 2009 – The Music Wednesday
Posted by: todd in Recreation, SXSW, music, travel on April 15th, 2009
This is a follow on the SXSW 2009 overview. Dennis Shin and I saw 5 days of great music.
We started on Wednesday night, as both Dennis Shin and I arrived Wednesday afternoon. here I started with my plan from my.sxsw.com, listening to Suzana Choffel. This was at the Austin City Music awards, where she and her band received one for best indi performing band.. On twitter, I described her as eddie brickell meets lucinda williams backed by the modern jazz quartet. She and her band gave a superb performance, and the Austin City Music Hall was a great place to get introduced to the SXSW experience. My schedule had us going to see Ladyhawke, a New Zealand band that was heavily hyped going into the conference at Stubbs. We weren’t able to get in, and so we saw them later at the New Zealand party, so then we went back to the core club district to see the Von Blondies, who we saw twice. This first time was at the club vice. Vice was not one of my favorite venues of the conference. I’m sure its fine if you get there early; but we got there a little late, and our sight lines were really not good. I could see the woman bass player and woman guitarist, but not the lead singer. They sounded really good, and later we saw them again at the DirectTV venue where we could really see the band. The Von Blondies are from the White Stripes genre, in fact the lead singer, Jason Stollsteimer, had a semi-famous falling out with Jack White, and it has undergone some personnel changes from its first incarnation. Our next deviation from plan when we weren’t able to get in to see the old punk band The Circle Jerks, was to come back to Vice to see Peter, Bjorn and John. There not only did we have the vice typical poor sight lines because it was crowded, but the band entertained us by taking more than 30 minutes to get set up and going. They were ok; but I would say a bit of a disappointment. We then went back to schedule and headed over to see a relatively obscure band called Roll the Tanks. By the time we got there, they were partway through their set; but they were a great clash cum brit 80’s rock band. They covered Billy Bragg which is always a plus in my book.
After enjoying Roll the Tanks, we went to Emo’s and saw Juliette and the New romantics. This band is fronted by actress Juliette Lewis. The performance was good; and Emo’s has some of the best attributes of a SXSW venue—indoor/outdoor, lots of space, and a raised stage. Echo and the Bunnymen followed Juliette, but we decided to defer our thirst for 80’s new wave until the spin party where they were also performing. As you can probably tell, one of the great attributes of SXSW is that many of the bands play mulitple times, so you can see them again; or if there is a conflict (which with as many bands as play there, there is always a conflict) you can see them again at a party or at another scheduled time. So from Emo’s we went back to Stubbs to see the Decemberists. Now I had listened to the Decemberists a little bit before seeing them, but they put on a really impressive show. One feature of the Decemberists, and many current indie bands like Arcade Fire, is that they are really branching out with lots of instruments. The use of chimes in particular added alot to the performance I thought. Stubbs, perhaps the biggest venue of SXSW is terrific. Its on a big sloped yard yielding good views of the stage from most places. Shin also knew a secret way to get up toward the front of the stage (which we used in many shows) so we had a great view of the band; and the proximity to the speakers in later shows would leave my ears ringing in a pleasant way for days. Wednesday was a relatively early day for us, so we then concluded by going to see a band that Dennis had seen earlier in the day at the Canadian Barbecue (lots of beer and barbecue at SXSW), an electronica band called the Shout Out Out Out (not to be confused with a good swedish indie band the Shout Out Louds who did not seem to be at SXSW). I would describe there sound as sort of daft-punkish, and the lead singer uses a vocorder for his entire performance (something I usually find irritating) but it worked well. The crowd for this was small at a club off the beaten path, but we saw them briefly later in the week with a larger even more enthusiastic audience, where most everyone was a convert. Then back to the shearaton for a little shut eye before a full day thursday.