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The Echo Nest is a music technology company founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs. The Echo Nest’s proprietary music analyzer API automatically analyzes audio (e.g., aif, wav, mp3, m4a), and generates an XML file describing the musical and structural content of the music. Computation takes about 1/50th of the duration of the track and the text output is about 1/20th of the size of its corresponding mp3.

Unlike other automatic methods of acoustic feature extraction, which progress strictly on raw audio signal, our technology was inspired by how people perceive music.  As a result, developers are able to automatically extract and use a wide array of time-based musical attributes for any song, including: timbre, pitch, rhythm, loudness, onsets, beats, tempo, sections, time signature, key, etc.

First and foremost, in the development of DP-related business models I’m seeking win-win solutions for consumers and businesses. As DP goes mainstream there will be proponents and opponents of a slew of different, important, and highly controversial aspects of DP. At the front of the line and at the top of my mind are privacy concerns. I actually think we have a chance to change privacy for the better, gain the (nearly) complete trust of consumers, and at the same time, provide businesses with better opportunities to engage in opt-in, targeted, 1-to-1 marketing. This is the holy-grail of DP IMO and the future of advertising.

This post represents a rough sketch-up of the future of DP and DP business models. It’s not quite the “sharing data between facebook and Myspace” that seems to be all the rage today. But I believe this is a realistic direction in which to head, and I think it makes a lot of sense to develop models that maintain customer privacy while sharing data in every aspect of their lives, not just on and over the Web. Furthermore, these models will help businesses employ next generation advertising that allow them to serve customers to the highest potential of the business.

If you are anything like me (which I hope for your sake you’re not), you’ll be constantly tripping over the names of new data portability initiatives concerned with exchanging social information. Combine any of the following words and create a new name [‘Open’, ‘Social’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Data’, ‘ID’], I checked all the domains and guess what? They’re all taken. (No shit, Sherlock) I thought it would be helpful to list these initiatives and provide a quick comparison of what they do and why they exist. This is my current understanding of the various players. Please comment and correct me where I’m wrong or have omitted important initiatives.

Gartner analysts at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas discussed what they believe will be the most disruptive technologies through 2012. Disruptive technologies are those that force changes in industry models, business processes, vendor types, products and services, as well as the all-important user model. Take a look at this list and tell us whether you think something has been omitted—or just plain doesn't belong. This list is ranked in order from least disruptive to most disruptive.