A standing-room-only crowd of some of the most experienced venture
capitalists discovered they still hadn't seen it all on Monday when South Korean startup MusicShake kicked off its presentation at the TechCrunch40 Conference by playing a catchy dance tune, only to disclose that it had been composed by a 9-year-old using a PC.
MusicShake, an online amateur music-mixing service that also calls
itself the composing site that even your grandparents can use, offers users a collection of menus from which to chose a
music genre, beat, vocals and sound effects, along with a sophisticated
program for mixing them into professional-sounding tunes. As the
company founders played a broad sampling of music composed on its site
by nonmusicians, most of the people in the conference audience stopped
their multitasking, looked up from their laptops and listened in awe,
finally breaking into a resounding applause.
At a time when the term Web 2.0 is typically applied to the usual mix of
blogs, online photo albums and amateur videos, this startup and some of
the others at the conference demonstrated that entrepreneurs have barely
scratched the surface of the services they can whip up with the help
of a computer and a mouse.
The variety of business plans also
demonstrated that not all user-generated content is created equal.
While a site like MusicShake dumbed down the process of making music, 8020 Publishing, which puts out slick magazines such as the travel book Everywhere,
mines undiscovered talent. 8020's magazines are created with editorial
and photographic submissions from a generally nonprofessional
community of Internet users who have interest or experience in a given
topic. Ponoko,
meanwhile, is a Web site that lets users create products, such as jewelry, toys and furniture, and offers packaging and marketing support
to get these creations to consumers.
Because these sites offer ways for amateurs to put their creations
up for sale, they also signal a potential explosion in the range of Web
2.0 services. While many of these companies
will eventually have to address copyright and other legal matters,
those unresolved issues won't slow consumers from using these services any
more than they slowed people from watching YouTube. - Andrea Orr
Continue reading below
