I like to listen to music on SoundCloud. For one, I am the Chairman of the Company. For another, I love the unsigned artists, remixes, and mixed tapes that make up more than half of the catalog on the service and mostly don't exist anywhere else. The more I listen on SoundCloud, the better recommendations I get for emerging artists, mixes, and remixes. It's more fun for me than the other services. But most people listen on Spotify or Apple Music. And so when I get a playlist sent to me on Spotify or Apple Music, I have to listen there.
No more.
Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.
SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.
I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.
I like to listen to music on SoundCloud. For one, I am the Chairman of the Company. For another, I love the unsigned artists, remixes, and mixed tapes that make up more than half of the catalog on the service and mostly don't exist anywhere else. The more I listen on SoundCloud, the better recommendations I get for emerging artists, mixes, and remixes. It's more fun for me than the other services. But most people listen on Spotify or Apple Music. And so when I get a playlist sent to me on Spotify or Apple Music, I have to listen there.
No more.
Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.
SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.
I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.
Here's what that looked like:
You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import:
You choose what other service you want to import from:
You log into that service, I chose Spotify, and you choose the playlists you want to sync:
And they show up in your SoundCloud library in a few minutes:
Back in 2014, I wrote a post called The Dentist Office Software Story that outlined the lack of defensibility in enterprise software. Many people have told me how much they appreciated it when I wrote it.
But we now need an additional "chapter" in the story. An over-the-air update, if you will.
So here it is, with the new chapter in italics:
An entrepreneur, tired of the long waits he is experiencing in his dentist’s office, decides that dentist offices are badly managed. So he designs and builds a comprehensive dentist office management system and brings it to market. The software is expensive, at $25,000 per year per dentist office, but it’s a hit anyway as dentists realize significant cost savings after deploying the system. The company, Dentasoft, grows quickly into a $100mm annual revenue business, goes public, and trades up to a billion dollar valuation.
Two young entrepreneurs graduate from college, and go to YC. They pitch PG on a low cost version of Dentasoft, which will be built on a modern software stock and include mobile apps for the dentist to remotely manage their office from the golf course. PG likes the idea and they are accepted into YC. Their company, Dent.io, gets their product in market quickly and prices it at $5,000 per year per office. Dentists like this new entrant and start switching over in droves. Dentasoft misses its quarter, citing competitive pressures, churn, and declining revenues. Dentasoft stock crashes. Meanwhile, Dent.io does a growth round from Sequoia and hires a CEO out of Workday.
Around this time, an open source community crops up to build an open source version of dental office software. This open source project is called DentOps. The project takes on real life as its leader, a former dentist turned socialist blogger and software developer named NitrousOxide, has a real agenda to disrupt the entire dental industry. A hosted version of DentOps called DentHub is launched and becomes very popular with forward thinking dentist offices that don’t want to be hostage to companies like Dentasoft and
I picked up my new Meta "Display" smartglasses a few days ago and have been playing with them a bit since.
The one feature that feels really important and powerful to me is "live captions."
Most people are familiar with closed captioning on TVs and in theaters, where the speech is translated into text and shown at the bottom of the screen.
The Display smart glasses have this feature on the lower portion of the lenses. You can turn it on to understand someone speaking your native language better and you can use it for real-time translation of foreign language speakers.
I tried to take a photo of live captions running in my Display glasses but could not figure out how to do that. So here is an image I took from Meta's marketing assets:
You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import:
You choose what other service you want to import from:
You log into that service, I chose Spotify, and you choose the playlists you want to sync:
And they show up in your SoundCloud library in a few minutes:
Back in 2014, I wrote a post called The Dentist Office Software Story that outlined the lack of defensibility in enterprise software. Many people have told me how much they appreciated it when I wrote it.
But we now need an additional "chapter" in the story. An over-the-air update, if you will.
So here it is, with the new chapter in italics:
An entrepreneur, tired of the long waits he is experiencing in his dentist’s office, decides that dentist offices are badly managed. So he designs and builds a comprehensive dentist office management system and brings it to market. The software is expensive, at $25,000 per year per dentist office, but it’s a hit anyway as dentists realize significant cost savings after deploying the system. The company, Dentasoft, grows quickly into a $100mm annual revenue business, goes public, and trades up to a billion dollar valuation.
Two young entrepreneurs graduate from college, and go to YC. They pitch PG on a low cost version of Dentasoft, which will be built on a modern software stock and include mobile apps for the dentist to remotely manage their office from the golf course. PG likes the idea and they are accepted into YC. Their company, Dent.io, gets their product in market quickly and prices it at $5,000 per year per office. Dentists like this new entrant and start switching over in droves. Dentasoft misses its quarter, citing competitive pressures, churn, and declining revenues. Dentasoft stock crashes. Meanwhile, Dent.io does a growth round from Sequoia and hires a CEO out of Workday.
Around this time, an open source community crops up to build an open source version of dental office software. This open source project is called DentOps. The project takes on real life as its leader, a former dentist turned socialist blogger and software developer named NitrousOxide, has a real agenda to disrupt the entire dental industry. A hosted version of DentOps called DentHub is launched and becomes very popular with forward thinking dentist offices that don’t want to be hostage to companies like Dentasoft and
I picked up my new Meta "Display" smartglasses a few days ago and have been playing with them a bit since.
The one feature that feels really important and powerful to me is "live captions."
Most people are familiar with closed captioning on TVs and in theaters, where the speech is translated into text and shown at the bottom of the screen.
The Display smart glasses have this feature on the lower portion of the lenses. You can turn it on to understand someone speaking your native language better and you can use it for real-time translation of foreign language speakers.
I tried to take a photo of live captions running in my Display glasses but could not figure out how to do that. So here is an image I took from Meta's marketing assets:
Dent.io
anymore.
Dentasoft is forced to file for bankruptcy protection while they restructure their $100mm debt round they took a year after going public. Dent.io’s board fires its CEO and begs the founders to come back and take control of the struggling company. NitrousOxide is featured on the cover of Wired as the man who disrupted the dental industry.
A decade later, a Dentist, tired of waiting for the latest update from the DentOps community, decides to vibecode her own custom dental office software product using Claude Code. Even though she has never written a line of code in her life, she keeps prompting, deploying, and modifying the software to meet the unique needs of her office that DentOps never could. She rips out DentOps and deploys her own software suite that she calls Dentsure. Her team loves using her software, and so do her patients.
I have had moderate hearing loss for at least a decade and struggle to hear in loud environments (busy restaurants, large events, sports arenas, etc). I hear fine in most places but certain environments give me real problems.
I've tried traditional hearing aids a few times and they have not worked well for my issues. I am a personal investor in one startup making advanced AI powered hearing aids that are delivered in eyeglass frames. I am excited to try them when the first units are ready soon and will blog about them then.
But it is also possible that a solution for people like me is live captioning. I am already familiar with captioning and we use it frequently on our TV at home, even for english language TV shows. So the idea of using the same approach to deal with hearing loss is very interesting to me. I plan to take the Display glasses with me the next time I dine at a loud restaurant or big event and see how they work.
I am also excited about using the foreign language translation when we travel overseas. It won't help me speak back in a foreign language but it will certainly help me understand.
Like most technologies when they arrive, live captioning feels "early." The UX around turning it on and off is clunky. For it to work well, it needs to just know when I need it to come on and when I don't. The current version of live captioning only works if you look directly at the speaker. These issues and others make it suboptimal in its current form. But I am confident all of that will improve in time.
But experiencing live captioning in my smartglasses has been an "aha" moment for me. I think the possibilities of this technology are quite powerful and important.
Dent.io
anymore.
Dentasoft is forced to file for bankruptcy protection while they restructure their $100mm debt round they took a year after going public. Dent.io’s board fires its CEO and begs the founders to come back and take control of the struggling company. NitrousOxide is featured on the cover of Wired as the man who disrupted the dental industry.
A decade later, a Dentist, tired of waiting for the latest update from the DentOps community, decides to vibecode her own custom dental office software product using Claude Code. Even though she has never written a line of code in her life, she keeps prompting, deploying, and modifying the software to meet the unique needs of her office that DentOps never could. She rips out DentOps and deploys her own software suite that she calls Dentsure. Her team loves using her software, and so do her patients.
I have had moderate hearing loss for at least a decade and struggle to hear in loud environments (busy restaurants, large events, sports arenas, etc). I hear fine in most places but certain environments give me real problems.
I've tried traditional hearing aids a few times and they have not worked well for my issues. I am a personal investor in one startup making advanced AI powered hearing aids that are delivered in eyeglass frames. I am excited to try them when the first units are ready soon and will blog about them then.
But it is also possible that a solution for people like me is live captioning. I am already familiar with captioning and we use it frequently on our TV at home, even for english language TV shows. So the idea of using the same approach to deal with hearing loss is very interesting to me. I plan to take the Display glasses with me the next time I dine at a loud restaurant or big event and see how they work.
I am also excited about using the foreign language translation when we travel overseas. It won't help me speak back in a foreign language but it will certainly help me understand.
Like most technologies when they arrive, live captioning feels "early." The UX around turning it on and off is clunky. For it to work well, it needs to just know when I need it to come on and when I don't. The current version of live captioning only works if you look directly at the speaker. These issues and others make it suboptimal in its current form. But I am confident all of that will improve in time.
But experiencing live captioning in my smartglasses has been an "aha" moment for me. I think the possibilities of this technology are quite powerful and important.
