Electric & Musical Industries

Wikipedia:

The EMI Group (Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.) is a British music company comprising the major record company EMI Music—which operates several labels and is based in London, England—and EMI Music Publishing, based in New York. EMI Music is one of the "big four" record companies.

I recently joined EMI , and I'm really psyched to be here—I'm working out of our San Francisco office with Cory Ondrejka, doing a bunch of exciting digital marketing-related things. I'll also be on the road a bit, as EMI operates out of London, NYC and LA. And Nashville. :)

Backstory: DCM's departure from Google was announced in April last year, which put EMI on my radar, then Cory joined him in June, which really got me curious—two top-notch techies heading to the music industry, and specifically to the first of the big four to go DRM-free? I reckoned EMI must be up to something interesting so I checked in with Cory—it turns out they are. I'd met him in late 2007 at a Van Heyst event in Bahrain of all places, and being the lone geeks there, we immediately clicked and stayed in touch.

Way-backstory: I've been a music lover all my life. My earliest musical memories are of watching bluegrass from hay bales at County Fairs in southeastern Ohio, where I'm from. I studied piano before taking up saxophone from 6th-12th grade. In high school we'd drive half-way across Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania to see concerts in actual cities. And oddly enough, I even got to see some then-mainstream acts in my hometown—why they played in Marietta will forever remain a mystery to me. I started ripping CDs to MP3 as soon as capable Mac software appeared, and traveled around Europe during college with a few favorite songs crammed into a 64MB Rio. I always have music playing, whether it's coming from a device or inside my head.

I've also been a tech nerd all my life. We had a TI hooked up to our TV when I was really young, and have had Apples around since our IIc. I ran up embarrassingly expensive long distance phone bills in high school, because Marietta didn't have local Internet access at the time. During college, my tech work for CAS faculty was often more exciting and fulfilling than my actual classes, and I was definitely the only Miami student in 1997 taking notes on an eMate. I took a laptop backpacking with me around the world in 2002, in order to share my travels with friends and family on this weblog. My five years at Google (my first job out of college) were an amazing experience, and taught me most of what I know about software and product development—the rest I learned hacking with Randy and Cameron.

Cory and EMI presented me with an opportunity too exciting to pass up, to combine my knowledge (and passion!) for both technology and music and apply it to a unique set of challenges EMI's set out to tackle. After all, applying tech is way different than building it. I'm hoping to talk more about our work here, as it unfolds in the coming months.

Etc.

What of nb.io?

Not to worry: Domainr's cruising happily along, and it's got an extensive roadmap we hope to spend random nights and weekends hacking on. And Yd and Ceedub are busy cranking on an extremely cool, über-secret project that has incredible, world-changing potential.

When did you start?

Back in May.

Are you stoked?

Hella.

Who are you working with?

An awesome crew: Cory, The Sydster, Midi Kris, ZBeat, Walter is Gross, Josh Saunders, Dan Levine, Alex Haar and b, among many, many others.

When did you start using Twitter?

July 3rd, 2006

What's with that hat you're wearing in all your profile photos?

It's a family heirloom. Decades ago a Great Aunt or another made it for my Dad or one of his siblings—no one remembers the exact story. I found it buried in our mudroom one day and adopted it as my own. It kept me warm through my many travels, and last year I passed it on to my cousin Cody. I really need to get a new profile photo.

Herb Hilgenberg: One-Man Weather Forecasting Service

Whenever I fly anywhere, I leaf through the airlines' in-flight magazines on the off chance I'll encounter something interesting. In between ads for Brazilian steakhouses and executive dating services, I found a gem of a piece in American Way about Herb Hilgenberg, a one-man weather forecasting service operating out of rural Canada. Fortunately AA puts their articles online in their entirety, so you can check it out without flying. Here's the beginning of the story:

Down inside a yacht anchored off an island in the Caribbean, skipper Jason White shows off a state-of-the-art computerized control center. He points out a marine single sideband (SSB) radio, somewhat of a sailing-instrument anachronism amid modern technology like satellite phones and weather faxes.

And then he tells me about Herb. Somewhere out there, on the frequency 12359 kilohertz, is a man named Herb who will give any boat a personalized weather forecast upon request. He’s more accurate than any weather service, say the mariners who rely upon his expertise. But very few sailors even know he exists.

“He only says it once, and he talks so fast, you have to record it and listen to it later,” says White, holding up a small digital recorder. “I use him all the time. But if you bug him too much, he’ll just ignore you.”

In November 1999, Hurricane Lenny developed south of Cuba and then moved west to east, the first Caribbean tropical storm in recorded history to do so. It would eventually smash through several islands, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Herb was in contact with a number of boats in the danger zone and immediately directed them around the Category 4 storm. Except one.

“There was one guy just sitting north of Puerto Rico,” Herb Hilgenberg recalls. “A Swiss couple and their dog. I talked to him and said, ‘You’re gonna have a hurricane in front of you, and it’s gonna approach you in the next six hours.’ “

The sailor radioed back, saying, “I need to get off the boat; I can’t make it. My engine’s not working.” In six hours, he, his wife, and their dog were going to get ravaged by a hurricane with wind speeds of 150 miles per hour and be pounded to pieces. And they couldn’t move.

Herb called the U.S. Coast Guard based in Puerto Rico, but they had already lashed down all their helicopters for the storm. They managed to establish contact with a nearby commercial vessel, and it was able to approach the boat and rescue the couple and their dog.

Read the rest.

On Leadership

Bill Taylor:

"The best leaders I know don't want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together."

Bike More

Green by Design: "For now, the only real solution is the simplest one: Driving less. A lot less."

Update: note the drama and controversy in the comments of that GBD post! Hopefully driving less and biking more isn't controversial.