Andreas Ehn – Spotify 🔗
Computer Science @ KTH. A few months at Stardoll.
About trust: Google Pagerank is a algorithmically based trust extraction system.
Pre-mature optimization in terms of first test system of a web business. No need to think of scaling from the start.
Spotify launched Aug 2006. Beta release in a week.
Started by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.
The product: streaming music service for the Internet. No local storage needed. Discovery of new music in the client. Client-based application, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
700 kilobytes (of which 200 kb is a Vista high-res icon).
Embedded into cell phones.
Free service (for the users). Advertising-based. Audio spots (performance-based marketing for radio).
Music industry is open to new models (me: finally!)
Advertising industry want a specific Internet model. Transparency of web advertising.
Technology strategy: undvik inte svåra problem, återuppfinn inte hjulet (NIH-syndrome),
Återuppfinn hjulet!
An own streaming protocol. Some KTH PhD-students working on it. An own P2P-network. An own storage system. Commodity PC hardware with a thin software layer on top. An own advertising system.
Återuppfinn inte hjulet!
third-party software, open source. Free! Well-known to a new generation of hackers growing up with the Internet.
Debian GNU/Linux
A common problem: choosing Linux distribution. Debian has 18000 software packages. Just one command-line away. Debian project has a lot of infrastructure, to build your own packages for easy deployment. (Needed for scaling.) Why not use it?
Focus on the fun stuff. (We’re hiring).
www.spotify.com
–Q&A
95% of the software is open source software, 5% is developed locally.
Leaning on the technical side right now.