At last - Componence has achieved a major goal at the end of this first quarter! Our first example mashup is ready! It has been a about a month ago when we began to work on the LastFM - Facebook mashup. And after a month, with approximately 500 - 600 hours of work, we’ve put it to a rest. The result:
- Different demonstrations to music producers showed interest, the producer of The Dream might be interested.
- Mubito probably will do a Proof of Concept with us in May - we should add their APIs to it.
- A demo of our new Chameleon technology that I can easily use & show in our sales. The goal from last summer was to have this at the end of Q1.
The background of this mashup
The idea for this mashup was triggered by this e-mail response of Yannick De Rechapt, CTO of Mubito:
” What type of applications do you want to expose into the communities?
- Basically expose content such as, audio, video, member data, feeds, shop widgets with search based on our catalogues + single cart etc… this is a non exhaustive list.
What kind of communities are you thinking about?
- Again I don’t have an exhaustive list but : flicker, myspace, imeem, lastfm, facebook and so and so”
Although they had switched their WLP platform to a PHP platform, Yannick was keen about our Chameleon technology, that would allow him to make widgets to be posted to different social networks. We just took it a little bit further …
Not enough real data
Before I want to tell about what was mixed & matched, here is a list of everything that is hard coded due to lack of time / real data:
News not yet implemented - it can be a combination of different news sources and Twitter
Photos & Videos - no reliable real source - can be user generated content or Webservices
The mashup ingredients
The main source of the mashup is LastFM, but the mix might make it more valuable for end users.
- LastFM
- User preferences / top artists, artist data, event data
- Google Maps
- Allowing us to show the events in a map
- Amazon
- Allowing us to connect e-commerce to the app
Why Facebook as first choice?
The combination above has been implemented in a Facebook look & feel for the following reasons:
- The design is functional - not all pimped up like the pages on MySpace
- Facebook is growing much faster than MySpace
- Facebook users are very frequent users, like myself, and are used to add an app to their profile
But if this continues into a real project, of course the app would also be available in other communities.
Value for potential business?
Although we don’t know the music industry is not our own comfort zone, I do think this kind of application can help them to deal better with their pains:
- Revenues - due to illegal downloads - their revenues are continuously under pressure
- The theory is that if the mashup is valuable enough, the user can take it along into their comfort zone (community, desktop, mobile). And then probably we might get fans to buy albums / merchandise more easily. From once a year to twice a year can already be a huge increase in revenues.
- Better cost / benefits
- An insider told me that the music industry are like dinosaurs, they’re so far behind on technology. Just look at the websites of most artists, most of them just don’t really appeal for engagement / interaction with endusers. A mashup can incorporate many popular, of course Twitter on top, webplatforms that are already favorites for user generated content (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, blogs). If there is better interaction, there are more chances there are sales.
- Easier way to engage and keep fans happy
- By being in their comfort zone, artists can consider giving out special freebies to fans who have this app in their profile. Just think of live webcam feeds of concerts? Or free downloads of the latest single within the first 24 hours? Or a sweepstake contest with the ultimate prize being a private appearance.
- New business model - different subscriptions
- Silver, Gold, Platinum? With maybe just $1-$3 dollars a month, you can get access to more cool features. With the ultimate privileges like access to special webcam chats, or another free download, or the details to secret appearances or even invites to hangout with the artist.
- More prolonged return for investments
- For any artist - starter or already a star - eventually millions is put into marketing. How much return is their in an ad in a magazine or a billboard? How the return of those investments be prolonged? I believe that such offline promotions can easily be connected to the online Fanbase.
- I think if a fan spends $50 for a single concert and merchandising, by giving discount coupons at the concert to the online shop and special access codes to behind the scenes reports, we might get the fan to spend another $20 online in the week after the concert. And if we’re really good, the fan will make use of the special discount on the Gold membership, that can last for years.
- Personally I think a really cool mashup would cost between $50.000 - $100.000. With 10.000 fans - online sales between $5-$10 per fan would already be enough. But what if there are 25.000 or 100.000 fans?
Standard Chameleon panels ready
With this mashup we already have different panels that can be easily reused for our other mashup projects:
- Check login with LastFM
- Retrieve & show favorite artists from LastFM
- Retrieve & show Events list from 1 artist from LastFM
- Retrieve & show Details of 1 event from 1 artist from LastFM
- Search & show results of artists from LastFM
- GoogleMaps to show events from LastFM
- List of related downloads from Amazon
We might come up with cooler names for the panels, but for now, we’ll use the word ‘Panel’ from the Wicket technology - the base of Chameleon technology.
Why our Chameleon technology is really cool
Although the above sounds not to difficult, the real reasons why our Chameleon technology is so cool:
- The panels can function as different applications - and listen to events from each other
- The whole mashup can be shown in different comfort zones
- Each panel can be configured to become a widget that can function in different environments (Java portal with JSR-286, iGoogle, Facebook, OpenSocial, iPhone web app, gadgets on your MacOSX or Vista
Yesterday Eric van den Wildenberg, Director at Brand republic called our technology trendsetting! And he invited me to give a presentation to the whole group of Central Park.
More mashup following
To show and proof the value of mashups, we’ll implement a few more mashups in the coming months:
- April: social media marketing mashup - easily invite & share from different social networks
- May: knowledge management mashup - combine different media sources about a specific topic
- Summer: some more … to come
