Tuesday, July 7, 2015

let's spotify on instead of music on


I am a kind of guy who has least interest about music. But these days, my interest towards music is growing rapidly. Thanks to +Spotify

It is good that Spotify uses Machine Learning for some usecases. This music streaming company has so many opportunities to change the human beings into music lovers. 

Wakeup Song 
Aren't you bored of listening to default alarm sound in your phone. I want Spotify to wake me with my favorite song. Like google updates home page with new doodle everyday, I want Spotify to surprise me with new tune/lyric everyday.

Contextual songs
We see in many movies that a lover proposes his girl friend using his/her favorite song at the background.

I want Spotify to understand the context that current user is in and play songs. 

Few instances are:
when I am fishing... 
when I am working... 
when I am sad...
when I am having food...

Many think that they might loose the privacy if they let an application read more about them. I don't have any comments in this except suggesting Spotify to enable/disable the option to know more about user.

Test run for musicians
Do you think only software developers have a chance to do A/B testing? Musicians also can. Only if Spotify helps them.
Let musicians release unnamed and unknown songs to users and observe the user's interest.

Last but NOT least, whenever I come home I want to the say 'Spotify on' instead of music on. Let's add to Google Now/Siri keywords

when a software developer like me can think of these many scenarios? why can't +Spotify  with more than 1k employees think?

+Spotify +Oskar Stål 






Thursday, February 5, 2015

soaring rents in big cities... fight back?



Rents are increasing day by day. This applies to all big cities in United states. We are almost paying 1/4 - 1/2th of salary to rents. Did you ever think on what you are paying vs what you are getting? 

is there any association or government which control these rents? did you ever think on fighting back instead of accepting?

I agree to some extent that demand is more in several cities because of good employment/high salaried area. But if supply(no of houses) is less, then people should be living on road. But this is NOT the case. Since we receive good salaries, we are NOT backing off in paying high rents. I strongly feel that it is better pay more taxes instead of high rents. At least, this might help for society or in future when we face financial crisis.  

At least now, lets devise a methodology to fight back here. I am confident that if we are together, we can reduce the rents. My idea is as follows:

Lets vacate/boycott a community in a city. If we don't take/renew leases for a particular community for a period of time, they end up reducing the rents instead of increasing. Of course, this might cause little inconvenience for some but for greater good, we should withstand. If we keep on focusing on few communities, owners realize what is happening and eventually they have to give up. 

Please feel free to leave a comment...