Internet Svengali. Ignoble Mogul. Entreprenerd. Hotshot Guitarist. Bit Fiddler. Push Up Lover. NJ/NYC
Greg Battle is GBAttle. These are the half-eaten ideas in the back of my mental refrigerator next to the baking soda.
The JB’s - “The Grunt”. This instrumental cut by James Brown’s band, The JB’s, arranged by the incredible trombonist Fred Wesley, was the foundation for three key Public Enemy songs:
(Plays: 87)
Dizzee Rascal - “Fix up, Look Sharp”. Gotta love the Billy Squier “Big Beat” sample in this song, uses in the funky fresh 1983 classic RUN-DMC’s “Here We Go”.
(Plays: 330)
Grant Green - “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” (Chicago cover) - Visions.
“As I was walking down the street one daaaaaaaay”
(Plays: 35)
“Percolator” by Dj Cajmere
download link
Dj Cajmere aka Green Velvet is an institution for dance music. La La Land was one of my favorite tracks from the rave days and he is still doing it with shake and pop. Cajmere/G.Velvet is now a reborn christian from what I read and that La La Land was in fact and anti-ecstasy song, though at raves and clubs it really was used as an ecstasy/candy flipping anthem.
gbattle sez:
Well, I know nothing about the drug related traditions around this song (so not my scene, ever), but I do know that this song is prominent in my friend Hue Rhodes’ movie “Saint John of Las Vegas” that came out in January.
(Plays: 360)
THE NEW DORK - “Entrepreneur State of Mind”. A parody from the guys behind Grasshopper.com. Well done. Not as great. Umm, ok, enough.
zoya:
Biggie is the first celebrity death in my memory. I was watching MTV and Kurt Loder’s solemn face came on with the news, and it actually made me pause and reflect because “Hypnotize” was all over the station at the time, and I was kinda into it. It took years for me to stop being 13, and finally listen to Ready to Die.
(Note to my future children reading my blog: before The Hype Machine, we used to find out when musicians died on MTV News, which was a legitimate thing at the time.)
gbattle sez:
My classmate and good friend Selwyn Sefu Hinds was editor in chief at the Source Magazine when Biggie died. I remember Sel being all over the major news outlets speaking about the murder and Biggie’s significance, all with a solemn look that belied a universal agony among the people who knew and loved him as an artist, as a father and husband, and as a friend. Tragic and unnecessary.
There’s a lot startups could learn from “The Ten Crack Commandments,” and I considered writing a full post on it today. This graphic and my previous post should illustrate that street pharma and tech entrepreneurs have a lot in common by means of hustle, grind and common sense.
Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts - “Ten Crack Commandments”. I had to drop a Biggie cover you might not have heard. Here’s the original. And here are the lyrics.
(Plays: 228)
“The greatest rapper alive died on March 9th”
Goapele - “Butterfly Kisses” - Soul Divas. Another cut from the Soul Divas series, with some serious metric modulation on the drums (most often heard in modern jazz fusion) during the verses. It’s too bad she’s not drop dead gorgeous or anything. Really, it is.
(Plays: 213)
With Stickybits, Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein are matching the social phenomenon of location based services with the unique identification of barcodes. Built on the RedLaser and SimpleGeo service stack, Stickybits offers exactly what you’d expect from a social mobile app, as per the TechCrunch review:
Each barcode is programmable by the first person who scans it and and leaves a photo, video, audio, or text message. The next time somebody scans that barcode, the previous message will appear on their phone. Anyone can add a new message to the same code, resulting in a stream of messages connected to whatever object or place the barcode is stuck on. Each scan, and related message, is geo-tagged so you can see as an object moves around how its story evolves.
The app lets you follow people and see their object stream, or get notified whenever one of your objects is scanned, moved, or new bits are attached to them. You can toggle between stream and map views. It supports Facebook Connect for login and any scan can be broadcast out to Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare. With Foursquare, it actually gives you the option to check into the place where you are by scanning the barcode.
I like the idea of making augmented reality applications simple and readily accessible to everyone. This is more practical than the myriad of AR business card video use cases to be found on YouTube, transforming abject nerd porn into something useful. This isn’t the first barcode/QR code generator/reader (if only the iPhone or Android had RFID readers built in too), but it may be the best so far in terms of frictionless social connectivity. My only question is whether Stickybits is angling to be an ultimate destination for consumption and generation of ID code based content or simply settle for being a breadcrumb in the expansive accretive datastream: SMS/iPhone SDK => Twitter/Facebook => Stickybits (RedLaser => SimpleGeo) => FourSquare => The actual application I use for all this stuff. We’re seeing a whole lot of great service application layers but not enough experience layers. Who is going to lay claim to owning the experience, and thus lifeline to the customer, around all these great services?
