One highly unscientific indicator of a product or service hitting some sort of inflection point is when I hear about it from my non-tecg/media friends. I still remember the first time I heard about YouTube from someone outside the industry. It was at a Celtics game and my friend Dan was telling me how cool it was to watch dunks and other highlights.
And so I found it interesting last night when a friend at a cocktail party mentioned Shazam and went on to describe it and extol its benefits. Shazam is a music recognition service. Ever hear music and want to know what it is? Shazam will identify it by ‘listening’ for a few seconds though your phone. I’d been familiar with Shazam for a while (and their BD exec, Katie, is a friend), but I’d never heard it mentioned ‘in the field’. So I asked my friend how she’d heard about Shazam. Turns out her colleagues put her on to it as she was looking for cool iPhone apps (they even play a game to try to stump the service).

Twitter came up in another conversation and there was more awareness around it but it still has a ways to go.

Good signs for both companies and also a testament to the power of the iPhone platform.

From the Independent:

"British passengers on the Titanic died in disproportionate numbers
because they queued politely for lifeboats while Americans elbowed
their way on, an Australian researcher believes."

Well, it would make sense…

I wanted to share a video from a recent reunion with my family members and I was struck at the lack of options to share the video with them:

• I first put it on Facebook and restricted access to it.  But then some family members aren't on FB and I didn't want them to have to sign up so that was out.  For photos, there is a non-public link that an be shared with anyone, even if they're not on FB, but that wasn't the case for video.
• I then tried YouTube.  It has a privacy feature to restrict access to a video you upload to people on your contact list, but it apparently requires everyone to have a YT account, so that was out.
• I didn't really consider other sharing sites or social networks mainly because they would require me to sign up.

There's no Picasa or Ofoto for video that I'm aware of (unless I'm missing something?) that is optimized for sharing video on a more private basis.  In the end, I uploaded it to DropSend so my relatives could download it.

I'd like to be able to 'follow' my favorite artists without having to do much work.  Services like Songkick, iLike and others already provide concert information based on their scrobbling my library.  But I'd like to take it a step further and be able to subscribe to updates on my favorite artists.  Could be artist news from their own sites or blogs, from industry news sites like Stereogum or even the tweets that more and more artists are doing.  That way it'd be easy enough to see passively what an artist is up to without having to seek it out. 

Should be easy enough to do…So guys, what of it?

2009 is looking to be a year of change.  Of course there is the macro-economic climate and the start of the Obama Presidency, but it seems to be on a micro-level too.  We're just a few days into the year and I already know a couple of people that will be making significant changes in their lives.  I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store…