Eight Hour Email Break

You know you’re probably doing something wrong when there’s exactly eight hours between your last email from the night before and the first from the next day. At least I’m sleeping eight hours a day. I call it my eight hour email break.

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Track of the Week: Healesville Sanctuary by Roger Shah & Signum

A little bit of a change of pace this week, track of the week comes off of Armin van Buuren’s Universal Religion Chapter 4, it’s Roger Shah & Signum’s Healesville Sanctuary (Roger Shah Mix).

On a early morning like today, after I’ve been napping on the train trying to catch some sleep before I arrive to work this is exactly the kind of music to wake me up when I get off the train, put the headphones in the ears and walk in to the office. It’s a Friday and if you’re looking for a wake-me-up, put this track on and it’ll set you straight.

The is a beautiful little trance track, that starts over soaring vocals and plucked strings. This mix is recorded live, and there’s an energy as the crowd gets in to it. As the first progression builds the cheers and whistling from the ground grows as everybody is waiting for the melody to drop. In typical trance style the song goes huge, drops away again and the crowd goes wild waiting for the same beat the second time. Give it a full listen through to hear both halves of the song.

The entire Universal Religion Chapter 4 mix makes for a great 80 minutes of solid trance. It was was the latest work available from van Buuren for a while but A State of Trance 2010 was released at the beginning of the month so expect a TOTW from that later in the spring.

FYI: unfortunately the YouTube link is a slightly different mix from the email than the van Buuren mix, so listener beware.

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Track of the Week: Don’t Be Too Late by Montana 1948

The second appearance of local band Montana 1948 in track of the week, this week’s track comes from their latest album Picket Fences, Don’t Be Too Late. I first heard this song about a year ago while going to a MT48 show in San Francisco. It had been at that point one of the first songs they had written after their Tiny Drawings EP. Like most Montana 1948 songs, it’s a catchy, pop-y rock song that finds the chorus stuck in your head after a while. When I last saw them at Cafe du Nord, I took a few friends and over the next few days we all ended up having some of their songs stuck in our heads.

My favorite parts are the bridge at about the 3m mark, and the strong close as the band jams over the singer’s lyrics. If you’re in the Bay Area, I recommend going to one of their shows. They have great stage presence and are a ton of fun to watch play. “don’t don’t tell me no / don’t, don’t tell me no”

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New Year, New Job (Same Adobe!)

What’s a better way to start a new year than a new job? In January, I moved over from our AIR group, where I was doing iPhone stuff, to our Digital Home group, helping to bring Flash in to the Digital Home and connected living room segment.

I’ve had an amazing time working to bring AIR to the iPhone (and now the iPad!). It was a very unique opportunity to work within the company on a small, motivated, focused and talented team to bring out what was effectively a secret project and launch it at MAX. With the CS5 launch right around the corner, it’s super-exciting to see the technology ship in Flash (apparently our team is in the credits!) and get developers access to what we’ve been working on.

It’s a very exciting change and I’ve been having a blast these last three months working in the new team. We’ve been working hard to build out our strategy and get all the pieces in place to really execute and bring out a whole new set of TV experiences over the next few years. Having spent the last few weeks traveling and talking to customers it’s amazing what kind of innovation will happen in this space in the next few years. Hardware specs in TVs, Bluray Players, and set top boxes are growing rapidly which will enable content creators and developers to unlock the TV in ways we haven’t seen before. To give you some flavor of this, we’re seeing a quick move in the industry from 300MHz CPUs last year up to nearly GHz CPUs in the next 6-18 months.

So what is Adobe doing in the Digital Home space? Well, there’s some stuff that’s pretty obvious, some stuff we’ve shipped, and some stuff I can’t mention just yet. I’m lucky enough to be working with a team that has the first release under their belt which is a Flash Lite 3.1 based runtime optimized for TV-style devices. We’ve got a ton of customers building content and others shipping that content on their devices. As we go in to the year  we’ll see a lot more devices ship with Flash. Plus, we’re hard at work on the next version of our runtime and our software solution (hint: it’s a lot like we’ve done for mobile web browsing). But more details on that later!

BTW: I’ll be at NAB next week in Las Vegas if anybody is there and wants to chat about what Adobe is doing in this space. DM me @hyperionab. I’m also presenting at the theater in the Adobe booth Tuesday at 230pm in the Las Vegas Convention Center, giving a talk entitled “Extending the Adobe Flash Platform Across Screens”. It’ll also be on Adobe TV if you missed it and wanted to see it.

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