MyBandStock at the Blind Pig

I've gotten myself involved in a truly revolutionary enterprise that is set to send waves through the music industry. As we find ourselves moving deeper and deeper into the information age, it is becoming harder and harder for musicians at the start of their careers to find funding in order to get them to the next level. Fortunately, for music bands and fans alike, there is finally a resource that uses the power of the Internet to harness rather than hinder these musicians progress.

Enter My Band Stock (MBS). MBS is a revolutionary website that uses the power of crowdsourcing in order to empower musicians at the brink of their careers find the monetary funding to accomplish projects that set them on a road a path to stardom. The idea is that fans buy "stock" in a musician that they enjoy (one that they are likely a fan in to begin with) and the band uses that money to fulfill various goals that they think would be most helpful to their success.

When a fan purchases "stock" in a band, they are not tying that investment to monetary increase or the potential explosion of a particular artist, rather, fans get perks from the band that they are supporting. This may be things like a free CD, signed drum sticks, cool t-shirts, or exclusive merchandise only available through the My Band Stock website.

My Band Stock is motivated by leveraging the personal relationship that one stands to gain in buying "stock" in a musician that they are a fan of. My Band Stock facilitates this relationship cultivation through entitling those who invest to the aforementioned merchandise, as well as, recognizing those fans for supporting music.

The website was launched in January of 2009 by students at the University of Michigan.

This past Friday, my duties as a music revolution intern included going to the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan in order to market this revolutionary website as well as promote Charlene Kaye, a featured musician on the website.

The experience can best be described as fun-filled. We arrived early in the evening with My Band Stock merchandise and marketing materials and began setting up. Soon thereafter, the musicians who were going to perform began to arrive. The Blind Pig was featuring three wonderful female vocalists this evening and aptly called the event "Super Women."

The night started off with Anna Ash who has a soothing, pleasant voice, that I would liken to Yael Naim, who gained popularity through her Apple Macbook Air commercials.

She was followed by Laurel Premo, who incorporates a double bass into her act, which I was particularly fond of. The headlining act was performed by My Band Stock's very own Charlene Kaye. Charlene's voice and music are both exquisite, and I encourage you to listen and purchase "stock" in this up-and-comer.

Marketing for My Band Stock was not only fun but relatively easy. We were set up right next to the merchandise area for the respective musicians, and people would typically look at the CDs they could purchase, and then happened to glance over at what all this My Band Stock stuff was alongside it.

This is where I was able to engage with the various attendees of the event and help showcase this phenomenal concept. The dialogue was varied for each individual, but typically began by enthusiastically asking if the person had ever heard of My Band Stock. Most of the people who attended this event, even though it featured MBS's Charlene Kaye, were unaware of this remarkable music service.

This gave me an opportunity to enlighten people about the features of the website and why it is vitally necessary to the music industry. I found that people were highly receptive to the idea and were more than willing to check out the website. One individual was so impressed by it that he signed up there and then and even bought some "stock" in Charlene Kaye.

Overall, the event was a complete success and enjoyed by all who attended. I'm glad that I have the opportunity to help spread this phenomenal idea and interact with musicians and fans.

I hope I get a chance to share more details with you about my internship with My Band Stock as the summer progresses. Please be sure to check out the website, listen to some music, and buy some "stock"!

Menlo Innovations

I get so impressed with ideas that just seem to make absolute sense. They are a lot rarer than what may be expected also. But recently, I was exposed to a business that has chosen to shift the paradigm. They are doing things far differently than what other companies do, but they are executing their approach and are achieving phenomenal results.

The company I am referring to is Menlo Innovations which is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Being a student at the University of Michigan, and always keeping an eye and ear out for great ideas, it was nice for me to hear of such a cool company around my neck of the woods.

Menlo Innovations is a software company that provides solutions to their customers. But they do so in a way that is not at all the prescribed method by the industry, and for that very reason, I think they are succeeding.

The origins of Menlo Innovations can be attributed to the economic decline following the tech-bubble burst of 2000. The CEO of Menlo Innovations, Richard Sheridan, was layed off at his prior job as a vice president of software development and needed to look for something to do. While he tried very hard to find a new job, his attempts were unsuccessful, and therefore, he decided to get together with a few other people and begin his own company: Menlo Innovations.

The name Menlo Innovations came from the invention factory initially established by Thomas Edison in 1876 located in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Similar to the images of Edison's invention factory, the office of Menlo Innovations is set up as an open space in which communication and collaboration is maximized. The atmosphere is relaxed with a majority of the workers in their younger ages just post an undergraduate or graduate degree. The entire essence of the company evokes a similar feeling to the general state of Kerrytown, Ann Arbor, where the office is located.

If you know anything about Kerrytown, you already know it is the home of the famous Zingerman's Delicatessan, where people come from far and wide to buy sandwiches that cost $15 and balsamic vinigrette from Italy for $100. Across the street is Sparrow Market, yet another staple of Kerrytown. Sparrow Market is a fresh produce market that provides the inhabitants of Ann Arbor with high quality, fresh food. Just next to Sparrow Market is Monahan's Seafood which has been around for ages and has lovely fish and chips for a reasonable amount. Finally, you will find Kosmo which has some of the greatest B-Bim-Bop and original hot sauce you will likely ever have.

All of these elements combined create an atmosphere that is so unique to Kerrytown, it is hard to truly convey in words. But, amidst all of this, Menlo Innovations runs its factory just upstairs from Sparrow Market, the company itself adding to the Kerrytown atmosphere.

What makes Menlo Innovations so unique in my mind is their approach to dealing with software issues. They have established a method called High-Tech Anthropology, which aside from its excellent name, also adequately describes their method unbelievably well.

In a recent presentation I went to at their offices, a monthly "Taste of Success" meeting, in which Richard Sheridan describes why the software industry is going about their business all wrong and why Menlo Innovations has truly narrowed in on the correct approach, I was able to learn about the intricacies of High-Tech Anthropology and why it seems to work so well.

To begin, its important to understand what an anthropologist is. In the simplest sense, an anthropologist studies culture and studies individuals in that culture. One of the things that Mr. Sheridan talked about initially was how one goes out and finds information these days. He asked the crowd at his discussion, and every seat was filled, and some of the best suggestions included going to Google, the Internet, or reading about it in books.

Mr. Sheridan then took it a step further and asked how we would learn about animals. Would we go to the zoo to do so. Many of the audience members agreed, but Mr. Sheridan was quick to show the downfalls in this approach.

He explains that its important to go and study something in its natural state. See how it functions, and you have to do that up close and personal. He cares very deeply about truly getting to know his customers, how they live their lives, and what would be most beneficial to them. This is where the anthropology of Menlo Innovations comes into play, and it is such a critical element to their success.

Then, what he has done is bridged the gap between the lives of his customers and the software designers, who he has aptly named "homo logicus" because of software designers propensity to do things logically and sometimes forget about the end user in the process.

To combat this, Menlo Innovations uses a "persona web" that is designed based on a marketing approach. It focuses on targeting the largest potential user of the software. In so doing, it also personalizes the software for the developers, which makes them think twice about adding features that may be unnecessary or consider how to present those features in order to make the software as effective as possible. When dealing with projects, software developers actually refer to an individual's name who has been given a biography with certain behaviors associated with their software usage and things that that ideal person would like to accomplish.

The people that are created are fictional, but it is a really innovating means of making the project personal. Software developers are encouraged to ask themselves, "How would this feature benefit Jim or Jack or Jill" depending on the particular project at hand. Therefore, these "personas" become a decision making tool as well as a personalizing tool.

I think Menlo Innovations has really taken an innovative approach to the software industry and it really just makes a lot of good sense. I expect their company to continue to perform well as it has done so already and perhaps even shift the industry standard in the years to come.

You can read more about Menlo Innovations in this Forbes article.

The Flood on South Forest

Unfortunately, my first days back at the University of Michigan were tainted with some unfortunate occurrences. When I got back to Ann Arbor, I needed to turn my water back on. In order to do so, I had to go to the Ann Arbor City Council and pay them directly. Little to my knowledge, as soon as I paid for the water at the Ann Arbor City Council they turned it back on and the pressure forced all of the faucets in the house to open.

This ordinarily would not have been a problem, except for a single drain on the second floor that happened to be clogged. All of the other drains in the house were able to drain the water that was rushing into them fast enough so that it would not overflow. However, this one drain on the second floor obviously had some issues and therefore, water ended up overflowing from this drain and flooding the second floor.

If this wasn't enough, the water from the second floor then fell through to the first floor and then eventually to the basement below it. As a result, our house has had to undergo intense maintenance. They had to rip out the drywall and dry the inside of the house on the first floor due to concerns of potential warping of the wood in the interior of the house. Wood also takes a while to dry, so it has been a lengthy process, almost two weeks now.

However, what I was interested in, and the reason for me writing this post in the first place, was to explore the volume of water that caused all of this damage. It is really quite amazing to me that a job that will cost around $4,000 and has taken almost two weeks was the result of just a couple hours of not being at home. I wanted to know what volume of water created such damage.

Therefore, in this post, I intend to explore the amount of water that escaped the faucet on the second floor.

• Results

In order to figure out the rate at which water was coming out the faucet, I went directly to the second floor bathroom and timed how quickly the water at full blast would fill a 2.2 liter container. I performed this task 11 times to get an average. I threw out the longest and shortest time that it took to fill the 2.2 liter container, which gave me 9 samples to average.

I found that the faucet at full blast takes 10.18889 seconds to fill a 2.2 liter container. In other words, the rate at which water leaves the faucet is equal to 0.21592 Liters per seconds. The rate is displayed graphically below.


The next step in the process was then to determine how long this occurred for. I went into the Ann Arbor City Council at around noon and then arrived home at 3pm. This means that three full hours passed before I got home.

Due to the fact that I won't ever truly know when they turned on the water, I'll assume that they did it as I paid for the bill, which was 11:49am and I'll assume I arrived home at 3:08pm, because I answered someone's text message at 3:03pm and said I would be back at the house "in five." This means that I was away from the house for 199 minutes total.

If we then understand that there are 60 seconds in a minute, all we have to do is multiply 199 minutes by 60 seconds, which equals 11,940 seconds total that passed.

With this information we can then find out the total volume of water that escaped the faucet in the 199 minutes (11,940 seconds).

If we take 11,940 and multiply this number by the rate of 0.21592 liters, we arrive at a total amount of 2,578.097 Liters (681.06 gallons). We can see the volume of water entering our house in Ann Arbor graphically by the graph below.

• Conclusion

Overall, there was 2,578.097 liters that entered into my house on South Forest in Ann Arbor. This occurred over a span of 199 minutes and was the result of a single faucet that had a rate of 0.21592 liters per second.

To put this in perspective, however, at this rate, in order to fill up an Olympic-size swimming pool (2,500,000 liters), it would take 11,578,308 seconds which equates to 134 days.