The 3rd Annual Tech Strategy Business Case Competition concluded tonight at Boston University. 16 international teams competed for the $25,000 prize and a chance to present their ideas to top executives at Ericsson, this year's sponsor. This event was 11-months in the making, and with the help of a stellar committee, we pulled it off. It feels incredible to run an event of this magnitude and know that all the participants and sponsor were impressed with the professionalism and organization. It was all made possible by the amazing team of students and faculty on the committee. Special thanks to Nicole who went above and beyond the call of duty, you will surely be missed next year. I hope that the first-year students now have a better understanding of the significance of this event and will carry on the tradition by making each year better than the last.

In one of my MBA classes this week, my professor recommended a management book called The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.
A business book about monkeys??? Sold. 8(|)
The author Ken Blanchard also has a personal blog that has a wealth of information but not enough monkey pictures.

The F.A.T. crew -- Free Art and Technology have developed a Firefox add-on that is ripe for a hilarious yet harmless prank on public computers. It has just one function. It turns every Youtube video into Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
Get it here.
This might annoy some people, but it's guaranteed to make anyone who's seen the Family Guy - Back to the Future - parody laugh. The same video was also used as a hoax by a website claiming to offer Radiohead's In Rainbows album a few weeks early.

Youtube has been experimenting with higher resolution encoding using the h.264 format. Lifehacker posted a simple hack to get a nice bump in quality:
Add the string:
&fmt=6
To the end of a youtube link.

Alternatively, you can make this automatic by getting the Greasemonkey script or Better Youtube add-on if you use Firefox.

Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora radio spoke at Boston University last week. He held a town hall style event where he discussed the genesis of the Music Genome Project, the future of digital music delivery, and solicited feedback throughout his talk. Pandora recently reached a milestone -- they have over ten million unique users. Remarkably, Pandora has accomplished this without any advertising. In other words, the popularity of Pandora was generated almost exclusively through the positive word of mouth of its users.
A few things struck me about the talk that I wanted to share. First, Tim takes enormous pride in being able to hire musicians to rate songs on over 400 dimensions that form the music genome or DNA fingerprint of the songs. He was himself a struggling musician when he started his company, and has a singular vision -- to make it easier for musicians to be heard and connect listeners to new music they might otherwise never hear. In fact, the business model that took shape at Pandora was more of an after thought.
Tim originally sought to license the genome engine and rating system, but eventually pursued an ad-supported radio model. In his mind, the music industry is coming full circle and returning to its roots. During the golden of radio, DJs and on-air personalities introduced new music to the masses. Music publishers existed primarily to record tracks for radio play. It was only much later that the whole industry became lopsided, and the recording industry developed a distribution system that dwarfed radio. However today, we can see the tide turning once again. The role of the music publisher is becoming obsolete. No one buys cds anymore. Bands are turning to self-publishing. These trends make Pandora a very attractive model for the new paradigm of the music industry.
For those unfamiliar with how Pandora works, Tim explains the basic concept in this Rocketboom video:

Rocketboom: Interview With Tim Westergren Of Pandora Radio

I'm also a fan of last.fm, which uses historical trends and collaborative filtering to find music tracks nearest neighbors, as opposed to the actual make-up of the song as used by Pandora. If you like both these services, you can link them using this handy Firefox plugin that submit tracks you listen to in Pandora to your last.fm profile.