Tonight:
9°c
Yes, there is a Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra. It's been performing for over a year now. There's also a Stanford Laptop Orchestra. Both work out of the university's center for computer research in music and acoustics and are founded by Ge Wang, a Stanford assistant professor of music.
Neither ensemble is much into Bach-to-Bacharach melodic tunefulness. We're talking compositions with titles like Drone here, and concert invitations that remind you (I kid you not) to "bring earplugs".
So far, so esoteric. And if Wang were still at Princeton, where he first ran a laptop ensemble, that's how his work would probably still be categorised.
But here's where being in the Valley adds a twist. Last July Wang co-founded a start-up dedicated to creating oddball, but also extremely engaging, sonic iPhone applications. In less than a year, this little venture, Smule, has become one of the most successful of all iPhone developers. Smule's digital flute, the Ocarina, has sold well over half a million copies.
Wang's location played a key role in this. It just happened that a PhD student in his department had co-founded a successful communication software outfit. That student, Jeff Smith, is now Wang's partner in Smule.
Local connections quickly supplied them with powerhouse employees, legal support, office space, and VC money. a February funding round that raised $3.9 million was led by Stanford grad Chris Hollenbeck at Granite Ventures.
It's not that Smule couldn't have succeeded elsewhere, nor that a Valley address guarantees success. But here's proof again that, in Silicon Valley, excellent entrepreneurial ideas fall by default on richly fertile ground, however idiosyncratic their origin.
* It was Ada Lovelace Day this week, an event started by British software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson to celebrate women working in technology. We love Ada here, as well as Charles Babbage, for whom Lovelace (who was Lord Byron's daughter) wrote the first computer program. Ada's software was meant to operate Babbage's monumental Difference Engine. Of the only two reconstructed Engines in existence, one has pride of place at Mountain View's Computer History Museum.
* After the near-universal dismay that greeted Facebook's recent redesign, it looks like local CEO Mark Zuckerberg is having second thoughts. At first, Zuckerberg emailed employees that "the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers". Now a company blog promises to bring back much of the functionality he took away.
