Gary Robinson's Rants

Pinpoint dropped Amazon case?

From an SEC filing made by Amazon this past week:

On July 17, 2003, Pinpoint, Inc. filed a complaint for patent infringement in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against us and several other companies with which we have commercial agreements. The original complaint was dismissed without prejudice in December 2004, but the lawsuit was re-filed in March 2005 in the same court. The complaint alleged that our personalization technology infringed patents obtained by Pinpoint and sought injunctive relief, monetary damages in an amount no less than a reasonable royalty, treble damages for alleged willful infringement, prejudgment interest, and attorneys’ fees against all defendants. On May 27, 2005, following a court ruling on the scope of the asserted patents, the plaintiff decided to drop the case and dismissed all claims with prejudice.

Thanks to ZDNet for pointing this out.

Ninjam

Still too wrapped up in product development to blog on any kind of regular schedule. But I couldn't resist posting a note about Ninjam.

This is way cool. I've thought that a product like this would be way cool for about the last 10 years, but had too many other things on my plate to do anything about it. And here it is. Open-source even.

Here's their description.

NINJAM is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant. Each user can also tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. NINJAM is cross-platform, with clients available for Mac OS X and Windows.

NINJAM uses compressed audio which allows it to work with any instrument or combination of instruments. You can sing, play a real piano, play a real saxophone, play a real guitar with whatever effects and guitar amplifier you want, anything. If your computer can record it, then you can jam with it (as opposed to MIDI-only systems that automatically preclude any kind of natural audio collaboration1).

Since the inherent latency of the Internet prevents true realtime synchronization of the jam2, and playing with latency is weird (and often uncomfortable), NINJAM provides a solution by making latency (and the weirdness) much longer.

Latency in NINJAM is measured in measures, and that's what makes it interesting.

The NINJAM client records and streams synchronized intervals of music between participants. Just as the interval finishes recording, it begins playing on everyone else's client. So when you play through an interval, you're playing along with the previous interval of everybody else, and they're playing along with your previous interval. If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until you get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural. In many ways, it can be more forgiving than a normal jam, because mistakes propagate differently.

That idea for handling the latency had occurred to me. I thought it seemed logical, but strange. It was hard to tell how it would "play out" in the real world. Now we know! Here's a Ninjam mp3 made from one such jam.