Tech Trends: No Kluge For You

Seems everyone is talking about music services and the technology powering them. There’s been a bit of confusion as well. Almost all of these new challengers to iTunes include some form of cloud technology. I’d like to spend a moment talking about what it really means to benefit from the cloud and some of the other innovations that really set Lime Company’s music service apart.

True Cloud

Wired.com recently posted an article about how a “tiny upstart” beat Google “to the punch” with a cloud music service based on Google’s own Docs infrastructure. But hooking into Google’s free storage is not an example of what we consider true cloud technology.

When we talk about basing our music service on the cloud at Lime Company we’re not talking about hacks and hooks. We’re talking about using the elasticity and stability that running on the cloud provides. Our music service won’t suffer from slowness or interruptions when a hot new track is released because our cloud infrastructure expands and contracts on demand. We’re working with Amazon Web Services, the most experienced cloud provider in the world.

Hybrid Apps

Another critical component in building an awesome music service is the part you see: the user interface. In the early days of the Internet, the best user experiences were on the desktop. I remember a senior technologist at Apple (back in 1995) telling me that HTML would never make a great user experience. Oops. These days we all recognize the superiority of web applications. But web apps are limited to their sandboxes inside the web browser. HTML5 will help expand that sandbox but nothing beats a local desktop application for convenience and speed. We’re building our UI with a sexy HTML5 web center and a bulletproof Java desktop shell. Our user experience contains no artificial flavor or phony native controls and no stale metadata (as it’s freshly served from the cloud with every click).

Agile Development

Any good chef can tell you that how you do something is just as important as what you do. We’ve designed a great product, and we’re building it on world-class innovation, but we’ve also adopted a great process to perfect it. Agile development isn’t new anymore, but it’s rarely done right. We’re following the Agile Manifesto, which empowers our engineers to work in small teams, respond quickly to users, and focus on releasing what’s really important. Agile prevents an engineering team from working on the “64% of features that are never or rarely used.” This means you’ll only find the good stuff in Lime Company’s music service.

APIs for You

If you’re a developer who loves making music then you are going to love our APIs. Why should our engineers have all the fun? We’re building a full set of RESTful APIs that can power music applications on desktops, web sites, and mobile phones. Soon we’ll host invitation-only “Hack-a-thons” to test those APIs in fall. Many of our engineers are regulars at Music Hack Days, and we want to give our fellow music geeks chance to build widgets and gadgets and apps on top of our music service cloud.

As our music service get closer to reality (and it’s very close), I’ll have a lot more info to share about our tech and our innovation. We want you to share our cloud!