I love music. I can’t live without good music.
A lot of people love music, but I love it to the extend of loosing hearing for enjoying too much of it, sometimes too loudly.

But I’m still ok, thanks.

Except that I am now living in Dubai and I listen radio while driving, or at least I try.

We have one of the worst radios music-wise in Dubai: I know this guys are living from advertising but at primetime, the playlists are so painful that I always end up switching it off and playing my MP3 which unfortunately I always forget to reload with fresh tunes.

And I have a fairly broad taste in music: blues, rock, R’nB, Soul, jazz, pop, funk, classical, electro…

But there’s one bright spot in here: there’s no better place in the world than driving on Sheikh Zayed Road while listening to Schooly Soulful Session with the sunset as a background in your rear-view mirror.

This guy is dope. He is my hope: I love you Schooly. I can say every saturday that “DJ Schooly saved my life”. Make sure to check him at 360 Jumeirah Beach Hotel every Saturday live on radio 1 at 104.1 FM in Dubai or online here.

Which brings me to this idea:

Can someone build a streaming service which can leverage from my public status (privacy is dead, remember?) and geo location (think weather, traffic info, even news!) to stream the right kind of music I would like to hear at this moment?

I’m a heavy user of Last.fm, Youtube, Pandora (at least when it was accessible outside US), Squeezebox (I’ve bought this amazing device in a state of desperation after moving to the UAE) but none of this services can reach me wherever I am and deliver automagically the right playlist.

I did not try yet musicovery.com but I’m looking for a service one step beyond: knowing my taste and based on my guessed mood, serve me the music I want!

Comments?

It’s now 20:15 Dubai time, I finished my jog, kids are asleep, I had dinner: why stop playing if you’re on a roll?

For industrialsDirectory.com, I’ve long planned a feature providing exhibition and events information to the industrial and B2B users in the middle east. Lets call this feature the event service.

As usual, it’s all started with some diagrams:

My wife told me for years that she though my job was drawing boxes and pipes on piles of paper I will then scatter accross whatever planed surface I will consider “my office”.

The problem

I want to manage and display a comprehensive list of events for industrialsDirectory.com (iD) users.
iD has been developed with a custom framework built on top of the Joomla CMS. Joomla (at least the original version used here) is not flexible enough to handle this project.

The solution

Wordpress!
Wordpress, IMHO, is the most versatile and extensible framework for Web Content Management should you not require features like user profile, advanced search or heavy OO design patterns.
Wordpress give you the ability to use its simple taxonomy to publish any type of content. Its core features are:

• powerful templating system
• built for maximum SEO benefit
• amazing plugins management
• complete documentation and online resources
• built-in rss support
• …

Goal

Deliver the new feature in 4 hours, as simple as that.
Specs:

• Events management interface (CRUD)
• Events categorization
• Events publishing into Joomla CMS*
• Events RSS feeds
• Adversting integration

* ideally, I would like to use a full fledge web service (SOAP server on Wordpress and SOAP client on Joomla developed with nuSOAP) but I may start with a simple XML feed due to time constraint).

Tools

The infrastructure is ready, wich will obviously save a lot of time.
Webserver, DNS, database server, IDE are up an running (let me know if you want more details, nothing fancy here).
Plugins list to follow.

Other resources:

When Google announced its 10 to the 100 project, I decided to give it a chance and submitted the idea.

The Problem

The problem we’re trying to solve is the functionning model of the NGOs and international aid agencies. These institutions rely mainly on donation to manage their operation and fuel their ambition of bringing food, education, shelter and support to the needed of our world.

I will take a gross shortcut but lets aknowledge that worldwide capitalism has a large role to play here wether by putting unecessary pressure on the local economies or by challenging development projects.

See the irony: money is the problem we’re trying to solve without money or by begging for it.

The Solution

Lets use capitalism tools to fight capitalism effects

The Open Fund is a for-profit investment fund aiming at generating positive return, like any other investment fund.

Draft for The Open Fund organization
The difference lies in the people investing in the fund, the team runing it and what we want to achieve with the profit generated.

• Investing in The Open Fund means you agree on giving up any profit generated to the distribution arm of the fund.
• Working for The Open Fund means beign socially responsible and put your knowledge and skills at work to enhance and save people lives.

To be continued…