Sylvain Zimmer

Some new cool features on jamendo I’ve been working on this week :

 - A tag cloud for each user : http://www.jamendo.com/us/user/sylvinus/tags/
 - Friends : http://www.jamendo.com/us/user/sylvinus/friends/
 - IE-ready spy : http://www.jamendo.com/us/spy/

Next week, we’ll unveil our new member homepage with music recommendations… A bit late compared to last.fm and pandora, but we didn’t have enough albums before to make it really interesting.

What will make us quite unique is that you get the recommendation AND the music for free ;-)

Some artists I’ve to listen to next week…

- Sly & the family stone
- Level 42
- Gojira
- Ultra vomit (?!)
- Prince
- Stefano Di Battista
- Stanley Clarke

What’s up with music ? Currently I play bass in 5 different bands. It seems obvious I’ll have to quit some of them because 5 is just too much, but the choice is going to be quite hard :-/ Maybe listening to new music will help!

My blog has been down for a few days … we had some serious hardware failures so we were too busy working on jamendo.

I just came back from a 5-day-long road trip to Florence with my girlfriend Eliane! This was really among the best holidays in my life so I’ll try to keep some memories here.

I took the car from Grenoble to L’albenc where I picked up Eliane and eventually met his mother and little sister for the first time. Then we drove to Montelimar, France where we had lunch with my aunt and her little family. We arrived to St Raphael on the coast right on time for the office, and we spent a lovely evening on the seaside.

We slept in the car every night with a quite comfortable home-made bed, maybe the trickiest moment of each day was when we were looking in the dark for a place to park the car and spend the rest of the night. It was really funny to wake up and discover the landscape that we hadn’t seen completely before.

So we did that in St Raphael and drove to Genova, Italy on Thursday. There, we ate in a good restaurant and visited the city until the night came. Genova has a great historical center and it was worth the walk!

Friday, we drove to Pisa, then to Vinci (birthplace of Leonardo Da Vinci) and then to Sienna. It was 6pm when we arrived there and I’ve to say that Sienna amazed me… it’s a so beautiful and small old city that I wouldn’t mind buying an house there someday ;-) The streets are so …. human! We ate in yet another delicious (and expensive!) restaurant and we slept near San Gimigianno.

We didn’t get to Florence before 1pm because we got stuck in the field where we parked the car! It was crazy, we tried to get the car out of there during 1 hour but it was quite impossible for us and a few wood sticks. So we asked some local farmer to use his tractor to pull the car… and he agreed ;-) In my opinion it was actually too easy! We could have given him some gift but we had nothing, so once again, thank you!

Florence was fine, I was expecting to be dissapointed… I think I find it boring and a little bit overrated. Of course there are some incredible momuments and museums but you have to pay in order to visit every single church and tourist spot so it wasn’t really motivating for us poor students ;-)

After a last visit in the north of Florence on Sunday morning, we drove back to Grenoble and nearly got stuck in the snow near Briancon, France. But we made it!

I’m so happy to be full of happy memories of this trip with Eliane, I hope they’ll last! Of course now it’s quite hard to get back to work on jamendo, but as you know … the show must go on…

This is incredible. Yesterday jamendo had a special 2-minute feature on the first french TV channel, in the news report of Sunday evening which is basically one of the most viewed TV shows in France. A conservative estimate of the audience is 10+ million.

The report was really clear and focused on both the artists and Creative Commons, with Pierre from Jamendo explaining shortly what’s CC, and a zoom on a License Deed.

It’s so exciting to bring CC into mainstream like that. I really feel that this is the greatest accomplishment for jamendo so far. Now that more than 10 million people have heard of what we’re doing, a lot of things are going to be much easier.

Here is the full video in French :

Note for fun : our servers went down seconds after the airing ;-) We expected our database to crash but surprisingly our load balancer died first. It took us a few minutes to get the website back up but since then we have been experiencing very high trafic.

Some figures… Today we have 10.000+ members and countless new album uploads, yesterday we had more than 600 concurrent BitTorrent downloads, our main BitTorrent seeder was uploading at 5Mo/s… Impressive! Keep sharing!

I’ve been playing bass in some bands for a few months, here are some of their members I enjoyed playing with :

Simon, an amazing guitarist who enjoys playing Radiohead ;-) He also has a terrific look :p	Eric, the second guitarist of this band (“nameless” …). He really has the rock’n'roll attitude ;-)
Mus’, the lead singer and guitarist of my cover band (“Twist and Floyd”… guess what we play ;-)	He is fond of the Beatles and really rocks on stage, check his bloody fingers at the end of the show!! :-/
Olivier, the mighty drummer of Twist and Floyd. Too bad he’s going back to Lille for his internship next month :(	Eliane is the lovely pianist of Twist and Shout … Big kisses to her!!!!!! (Okay she’s my girlfriend :p)

That’s all, I will hopefully take more pictures of the other members if I free space on my damned cellphone. Some pictures of the last concerts I’ve been to :

Both : One of the first jamendo bands : download their albums on jamendo! This was the first concert with their new guitarist, who was pretty good I think.	YES I’VE BEEN TO A STICK CONCERT! AAAAARRGGHHH!
One of my favourite bassists : Richard Bona	I was to his concert in Lyons with ttoine from jamendo. It was some really great time!

My current playlist…

• Steps Ahead – Trains
• Steps Ahead – Beirut (incredible jazz fusion band)
• Michael Brecker – Broadband
• Lenny Kravitz – Are you gonna go my way
• Ben Harper – Run Eyed Blue
• Incubus – The warmth
• Incubus – Privilege
• Amp Fiddler – If you can’t get me on your mind
• FFF – Free for fever
• Jade Leary – The lost art of human kindness
• Radiohead – I will
• Peter Gabriel – The tower that ate people
• Metallica – Fuel
• Eric Serra – “Le Grand Bleu” soundtrack
• Archive – Waste
• Archive – You make me feel
• The Beatles – Hey Bulldog
• Jamiroquai – Feels just like it should
• Lenny Kravitz – Minister of Rock and Roll
• The Beatles – I want you
• Daft Punk – Da Funk
• Marcus Miller – Portrait of Tracy (Tribute to Jaco)
• Coldplay – What if
• Muse – Forced in
• RHCP – Suck my kiss
• RHCP – Aeroplane
• Radiohead – The national anthem
• Spock’s Beard – At the end of the day
• Linkin Park – With you
• Marillion – Quartz
• System of a down – Mezmerize/Hypnotize

;-)

Okay so it has been a long time since I posted my last entry … my life has been a real mess in the past two months and I can’t really blog when I’m like that :-) No time to think, just going ahead …

So what’s up?

• I entered my nice school (Mathematics & Computer Science) in Grenoble, France. I’ll be there for the next 2 years and I’ll try to do my 3rd year in San Francisco or London or Barcelona… The scool is just great, most of the classes are actually boring but it’s getting better as we get into more advanced stuff…
• I went for a 10-day trip to Gothenburg (Sweeden) and London… It was awesome, there are some photos. As it was a cultural exchange we received Sweedish and Polish people during a week, it was sooo nice to see them again ! Big kisses to Camilo, Karen, Jonas, Petra, Michael, Mari-Liis, Ricardo, Anna, Michael2, and all the others (I can’t remember all the names !!!)
• Some hard work on jamendo…. We introduced the tags, new URLs (http://www.jamendo.com/tag/rock/), a new jamloader and so many little things I can’t think of at once.
• I’ve been playing bass guitar in a few bands for two weeks now, I couldn’t have waited more… I can’t live without daily rehearsals :-)
• I’ve been meeting so much new people every day, it’s so refreshing ! Many foreigners… now I can practice spanish and english :-)

That’s it… enough boring stuff, let’s talk about jamendo !

SO ! We’re in a very important period… I need to work endlessly on fixing bugs and implementing our new Web 2.0 features.

I have been doing nearly only technical stuff since I moved to Grenoble, I feel less involved in the day-to-day life of the project and it’s very frustrating … but I hope that’ll change. For various reasons (hmmm) I’ve got even more time to spend on jamendo now so we’ll see.

We are preparing for a big PR roundup of jamendo, maybe we’ll get featured on Slashdot… Time to fix those horrible english translations ;-)

After reading the very interesting Long Tail blog by Chris Anderson, I decided to see how his theories apply to jamendo.

I was delighted to see that jamendo is actually also following a Pareto distribution. I guess it’s a very good sign but I’d be happy to receive your insight about it !

A week ago, we discovered that a great set of conferences called Copyfight was starting off the very same day. Incredible casting : Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales, and much more. So in a few hours we packed up and drived the whole night to Barcelona !! Isn’t it crazy ? The 3 days we spent there were a complete blast, because of both the beach and the conference :-)

I had the chance to speak a few minutes with Larry Lessig (the founder of Creative Commons) about jamendo (photo). We also met people from Wikipedia, Burnstation, Blender, Freesound, CC-spain, lamundial.net, … (I’m too lazy for the links).

It was also quite relaxing to spend a few hours at the beach with David, Aurélien and Faustine. I hope we’ll do it again as soon as we can :-)

I just hacked into a private wifi network (thanks WEP…) here in the ENPC (“Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées”) where I have a week of exams going on.

The trip from Metz to Paris was awful I was really loaded…. sweating is good for the body they say so no problem there. Actually one more embarassing problem is that my oral english really sucks and so my english exam didn’t go too well :/ We’ll see…. I’ll enventually do an audioblog to help it.

I’m off to work on Physics now ! On june 30th all this sh*** will be over.. I can’t wait for it.