Gary Robinson's Rants

Emergent Music LLC

Well, my big news for the week is the formation of Emergent Music LLC to capitalize on Goombah. Essentially, EM has acquired Transpose's assets. Goombah will be the sole focus of the new company for the foreseeable future.

The thing that is extremely exciting about this to me is the people who are involved; here are their bios.

I won't be CEO. Diane Sammer will be (again, see the bio page). She's a classic "done it before" entrepreneurial CEO, so it is really great to have her aboard. And not having CEO responsibilities myself will free me to focus on technology. Madeline Mooney is an experienced VP/Marketing, and Randy Labbe, VP/Industry Relations, is an experienced and successful indie label owner and producer (check out this superb recording by Maria Muldaur, for example). Bob Swerdlow, who worked with me at Transpose, is still aboard as VP/Engineering, and we've added another superb programmer in Alec Wysoker.

More will be said as time goes on; I'm just too busy with working on Goombah's recommendation code right now to be writing much. I'm adding more of the kind of mathematical approach that was used in my spam-filtering suggestions, which have been adopted for use in a wide range of spam filters, including SpamAssassin, SpamSieve (MacWorld Software of the Year for 2003), and SpamBayes. It took me quite some time to see how to use them effectively in the Goombah context -- it involves an algorithmic problem I've been thinking about for about 10 years -- but those optimizations should now be expected to appear the product in the near-term.

In all, I am proud to be associated with Emergent Music LLC and its product, Goombah, and am truly excited about the future as the technology and business sides of the company move ahead.

The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

From the Museum of Hoaxes, here's #1:

In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."