Joining MyStrands

It was in early 2000 that I joined a company called PDA Verticals that was made up of a bunch of guys I worked at Amazon with. Great company, great team, totally fun time … only one problem. I lived in Portland, OR and the office was in Kirkland, WA. This wasn’t as bad as you’d think … most of the development team was remote and so I was able to telecommute from Portland. The bummer was that I had gigs and gigs of personal music data and no laptop. Music was a part of my workflow … I could get under my headphones and just blaze away on email, code or whatever. So, when I traveled to Seattle for a few days, I was music-less.

Enter Ampache. Ampache was a web-based tool that allowed me to personally stream my music from my house to anywhere with a decent network connection. It was for personal use only (i.e. I didn’t have it available to the public, just me via username and password). It was the first open source application I had ever built and my experience building that tool was what has led me down my ‘open’ path over the last 7 years.

Ever since then I’ve been hoping to find something that mated my passion for the open web with my love of music. Last week, I was lucky enough to find exactly that. I have recently joined MyStrands as their Open Technology Lead helping them define their strategy as it relates to the ‘open web’. MyStrands mission is to help people discover new things and they have developed a unique social recommender engine over the past 3 years. They also recently raised a round of funding and are looking to expand the scope of that mission beyond just music. Hopefully I can help play a role in shaping that mission and making it happen.

I’m excited about where MyStrands is headed and we’ll be making some big announcements in the future that relate to my background and very heavily with the ‘open web’. Keep an eye on this space to learn more … :-)