Friday, October 08, 1999

The Cyber Scene in Portland ~ by Mike Kingsella

The NXNW Field Guide

Last Thursday through Saturday Portland played host to the NXNW Music and New Media festival.  In this week’s field guide, you will get the scoop on the exciting world of Music and New Media convergence!

On Friday night I was greeted by Hugh Forest, NXNW event director and traffic coordinator.  Hugh was standing outside of the bar to welcome guests and make sure everything ran smoothly. 

So I stepped out of the cold northwest air into an exciting world of VIP insanity, where I met many cool folks.  Folks like Linda Hollister from the hellonetwork.com, who told me all about their incredible streaming video application, using Java technology.  Folks like John Siska from Los Angeles UnderGround Sounds, a strategic partner of hellonetwork.com – they specialize in live streaming using the hellonetwork technology.  UGS provided all the live video streaming of the NXNW panels. 

I had a chance to talk with Dave Williams, Rosemary Pepper, and Nick Tangborn from listen.com about the San Francisco interactive scene and listen.com.  Listen.com is the music download directory.  Expect to hear a lot more about this company in the future.

Live365.com had a strong presence at the VIP party and I had an opportunity to talk with John Jeffrey about the company.  In case you haven’t heard, if you want to broadcast great shoutcast streams over the Internet but don’t want the hassle of setting up your own server, Live365.com is the place for you! 

I also met Joseph Friedman, co-founder of EarMedia, a new online radio company.  Joseph explained that EarMedia will be playing four simultaneous genre streams to start out with, and to build the site from there.  You can look forward to a rollout first quarter of 2000.

A perfect tone setter for Saturday morning, I spoke with Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3.com.  Michael told me that while the Internet has significantly changed many businesses, the largest impact of the Internet is the transformation of the music industry.  After all, amazon.com still delivers books the old way. 

After speaking with Michael from MP3.com, I spoke with Wayne Price from musicdownloads.com.  Wayne was in town from the big apple to take part in the NXNW event. 

During the course of the day I met Lorick Russon, from Sunhawk.com an interactive sheet music company that uses relational database technology to create powerful linked library of music.

David B. Kurtz, minister of indie culture at Liquid Audio demonstrated their software and Web site to me at the trade show.  Also at the trade show, I met Kiki Hernandez, a broadcaster from Green Witch Internet Radio.   

So hopefully by now you’ve had your share of NXNW name-dropping.  If you would like to meet these people up close and personal, make sure you come to the next NXNW next year!  Also, be sure to check out the 2000 SXSW in Austin, Texas.  The interactive competition is sure to be a hoot!