We stopped by the Cedar Street Courtyard yesterday evening for a pretty great night of music. The opener was a band called Pete & The Pirates from the UK. Here’s a clip of their show:
That’s the great thing about SXSW, finding bands you love that you didn’t expect to.
The major problem at SXSW is the sheer volume of bands performing – if you can call that a problem. What ends up happening is the schedule you’ve mapped out for yourself is overloaded with artists all at the same time, in many different venues. You need to pick and chose the artists you really want to see, and if one them doesn’t work out, then you have others to fall back on. That’s sortof what happened last night.
I waited in line at Stubb’s BBQ to see Andrew Bird. I had heard great things about Andrew and his self-controlled loop building, his whistling and of course the huge spinning speakers behind him that gave off this great wah-wah effect. I was looking forward to this show! (I even met a fellow Ontarian, Keith, in line – we had a great chat about the South By event and how much fun we were having!)
Listening to Andrew Bird and checking the schedule on my Blackberry, I realize that I’m missing Blind Pilot. Coming to Austin and not seeing them would have been disappointing. So, I walked up the street to this little venue called Club DeVille, complete with outdoor loungers and sofas, grabbed a beer and waited for them to start.
The first thing I noticed about Blind Pilot is that there’s a female band member! I’ve listened to their record dozens of times and never knew there was a female in the band. (In fact, I’m listening to it right now and still don’t hear her) Doesn’t matter, she was cute and could she ever play the banjo! In addition to the banjo, there was a marimba, a double-bass and a trumpet. Such a great sound!
I love going to see great bands where I’m familiar with most of the songs. It really allows you to connect with the band and be a part of the show. I’m really happy I made the choice to move my schedule around and see them perform – It turned out to be a great night!
Here’s a short clip of the performance:
The Decemberists‘ show was part of an NPR hosted event at Stubb’s BBQ, also showcasing Heartless Bastards, and The Avett Brothers. Picture a BBQ restaurant with a stage for a backyard and hundreds of your closest friends. I’m still getting over how much of this city is geared to live music.
The main purpose for the Decemberists’ performance was to unveil their new record, The Hazards of Love. From what I could tell, all of the songs were from the new record with a couple of familiar songs in the encore, including a song from the recently released Always the Bridesmaid called A Record Year for Rainfall.
Here’s a short clip of The Decemberists’ performance at Stubb’s.
The Phenomenal Handclap Band was, well, phenomenal! I doubt that this clip will do the performance justice, but there were 8 people on stage and the funk beat was constant throughout the performance!
Here’s a short clip of Mother Mother’s Molly Guldemond doing her thing at the Canadian Blast BBQ.
I have to agree with this post over at NPR about muddy sound. The sound quality for this Mother Mother performance can almost be described as terrible. It wasn’t until about half-way through that the right speaker kicked in (someone forgot to pan right?), not to mention you could barely hear the great vocals of Molly and Jasmin!
Note: Apologies for sloppy video. I really don’t have great gear to shoot with.
It’s literally only been a couple of hours since landing in Austin, TX for SXSW and already great things have started to happen. I heard a group of people talking about what bands they were going to see, waiting for my connecting flight in Detroit. I met Amanda Palmer on the plane who’s playing a couple of shows this week, and of course, I promised I would be there. And, after a great dinner at Katz’s we wandered down 6th Street to where I’m pretty sure I saw Bob Boilen from All Songs Considered, of which I am a huge fan!
Here are just some of the bands on the agenda tomorrow:
We ended the night with a couple of pints at an irish pub, where my friend was hit on by a cute texan girl! It’s going to be a great week if this keeps up!
I read this article entitled Microsoft Commerce Server in the Cloud: a threat to Amazon? and this was after I saw at least 10 tweets on the subject in my Twitter feed. Given my proximity to the product and some pretty in depth details of Commerce Server 2009, I thought I would post my thoughts on the subject.
The new Commerce Server architecture exposes platform functionality through a new services layer, theoretically supporting a cloud based implementation. Unfortunately, there is also a check to ensure that all calls through the API are made in-process rendering this scenario unsupportable at this time.
Services
Let’s assume for a minute that we could make calls to theses new services using some sort of framework (like this Service Invocation Framework). I would install a complete instance of Commerce Server 2009 on a cloud computing platform, like Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2, and make sure my services were properly exposed. Configuring the instances and exposing this new service layer would allow for applications to consume and render Commerce Server functionality. An example of one of these applications could be an ASP.Net website, a Silverlight application or even a mobile application – and not necessarily a mobile browser either! (think iPhone application)
One important point to mention is that Azure does not currently support the ability to install applications. You’d need to compile and deploy your code directly to their cloud computing environment. For testing purposes, I have begun to create an AMI running on Amazon EC2 and will provide more details in a follow-up post.
Content Distribution & Performance
So what if we did have this scenario running in a production environment? What are some of the other concerns? Performance certainly comes to mind. Overall server performance wouldn’t be much of an issue if you’re using a service like Amazon who provide multiple edge servers in different regions across the globe. But what about the performance of the eCommerce functionality? For this, Commerce Server provides internal methods for caching data that is used frequently, like catalog and product data. Commerce Server content is stored in datasets and is persisted in the cache using .Net caching (System.Web.Caching.Cache). This caching is divided up into 6 different areas and can be configured independently of one another to allow greater flexibility. The idea is to cache the items that change less for a longer period of time, like product descriptions for example. Pricing and inventory would be cached for a shorter amount of time, if at all, depending on your business rules.
In addition to caching, the new API is more efficient as well. By creating an instance of CommerceQuery, you can now attach sequence components to retrieve related items, such as cross-sells or up-sells or get inventory details all with one call to the API. This allows for less direct calls, and subsequently less calls to the database layer resulting in far better page performance.
Conclusion, Next Steps and Additional Links
Microsoft is already beginning to release many cloud based services such as SQL Data Services and SharePoint Services. It is not impossible to imagine cloud based eCommerce Services exposed via the cloud as well. Combine that with data managed by SQL Data Services and content management using SharePoint Services and we’ve got ourselves a viable cloud-based eCommerce platform.
Keep an eye out for part II of this post, where I will have results and samples from a proof-of-concept.
After listening to the All Songs Considered SXSW Preview Show, I can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed. There are literally close to 2000 bands performing this year, and there are so many that are worth going to see. Before the preview show, my calendar was overloaded with bands to the point where there were at least 3 or 4 acts in one timeslot at different venues! After the preview show, it’s worse – In a good way of course.
Here are some highlights from the preview show that I’ve added to my calendar: The Phenomenal Handclap Band, The Weird Weeds, Vijay Kishore, Ponytail, and Pink Nasty. But to be honest, I actually added most of what they recommended (except for a couple) – I’d probably go see anything if Carrie Brownstein told me to!
I decided at the beginning of this year that it was time I immerse myself in some really great undiscovered music, and go to South By Southwest (SXSW). I was able to find a like-minded music lover – a co-worker of mine – and we started making the necessary plans. We booked flights, hotels and bought the badge that gets us access to all of the music events taking place that week. The whole thing is costing a small fortune, but man, what a great week it will be!
Once you’ve registered, there are tons of resources available to you to help plan the week. Events calendar, Twitter-like message board, profiles of other attendees and integration to social networks like Facebook. The main thing I noticed looking through all of the other Canadian attendees was that there were very few people going that were just music fans. It turns out that SXSW is not only a great place to see up and coming bands, in 80 different venues, but it’s also a music industry trade show – attended by record labels, radio stations and producers!
So, I’m new to the event and didn’t know certain things but really, who cares! The list of showcasing bands is incredible and I think I’ll love every minute of it. Here are some highlights of our very busy schedule: M. Ward, The Decemberists, Mother Mother, Blind Pilot, Grizzly Bear, The High Dials, Andrew Bird
I know that list has some of the more popular acts listed, but don’t worry, there are certainly some lesser known bands on the agenda. NPR’s All Songs Considered usually does quite a bit of work in trying to determine the best bands to see. This week’s episode will likely give us a really nice sneak peak at some of the best bands to see.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my SXSW experiences!
Commerce Server 2009 provides some great new features to greatly decrease time-to-market with a pre-built site to get you started. There is support for cross-channel out of the box, with a pre-built mobile channel that can be maintained inside SharePoint. There is also a brand new programming model to make developing against Commerce Server much easier and more efficient than it ever has been. CS09 becomes widely available to purchase on April 1st, 2009, but until then feel free to check out some of the resources below:
MSDN Subscriber Downloads
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx
Product Website
http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/
Partner Information
https://partner.microsoft.com/US/productssolutions/servers/commerceserver/
Forums on MSDN
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/commserver2009/threads/
Multi-Channel Foundation Samples
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CS2K9Samples
Default SharePoint Site Performance Guide
I’m sure you will agree that there are some great advances in the platform, but let me know what your thoughts are in the comments.
