Three days of music in New York

It was a joy to attend the 14,438th concert of The New York Philharmonic this past weekend at Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center. The all-Brahms program included the Academic Festival Overture and Symphony No. 1 in C minor. Twenty-four year old Julia Fischer performed the Concerto in D major. I now know why […]

Royalty Free Music

I have to admit to my confidence that it would happen — more than $1 Billion in sales of digital music in 2005, which was triple the year before. Revenues in 2006 doubled to about $2 billion. People are willing to pay for music if it is offered to them in a contemporary way — […]

Home Automation (update)

Thanks for all the feedback on the BusinessWeek magazine and video pieces. Seems to be a lot of interest in home automation. I will continue working on the series of stories that I promised. I just realized that BW has archived the video version of the story. It is still available and I have updated […]

Home Automation – Part 3 (System Design)

The overall system design for home automation offers many choices. The two extremes are highly decentralized and highly centralized. The decentralized is to have a subsystems for each functional area — security, audio distribution, solar shades, irrigation, etc. The centralized approach would utilize a central control computer to interconnect and supervise all activities and functions, […]

Home Automation – Part 2 (Planning)

The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don’t have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a […]