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I think F# (pronounced F Sharp, like the music note) and Pete Jimison might have serious staying power.  Now, I have no degrees for that statement but I do believe you can sense whom a person is and where they can go.

Pete is the CEO and Founder of F#, Software as a Service (SaaS) advertising solution based in NYC connecting brands and audiences with music in a scalable (IAB compliant), customizable (several products) and social way.  They are driving millions in revenue with clients your mom would know, have global hubs in place and are positioned for growth.  With F# retooled and ready to jam, I asked Pete for a quick coffee.

Why did you start F#?

F# was formed by 3 individuals: myself, my brother Dave, and our third business partner Dan.  To be honest, we didn’t set out to create F#, it was an evolution of sorts.

In 2010 I jumped from the Corporate world to start a digital agency with my brother.  My brother had finished his PHD coursework in Digital Media at the time and I had a finance/ops background with some sales experience.  So we set out for NYC.

Before up and moving to New York, I had been in Switzerland living the cush life: nice clothes, a nice car, travel, etc. Then I found myself in NYC sleeping on a hardwood floor in a closet-sized room adjacent to my brother’s room in a Brooklyn apartment, eating beans and rice to scrape by… no joke.  We lived like that for about 18 months slowly building our business and taking on higher paying clients and more interesting work as we went.  It was a hustle in every sense of the word.

As we grew, we eventually got more involved in music.  We met our third business partner at the end of 2011 and by mid-2012 we decided to focus just on digital music and transformed into F#.  Music was a great fit for us and it was something that both my brother and I shared an extreme passion for, though our music tastes hardly align.

So though we did not set out to create F#, as an entrepreneur you naturally gravitate towards things based on your interests and passions, and of course where market opportunity is.  And we saw that in our early work with Spotify.

What have been the drivers of your success?

I’d say I have a relentless drive for achieving my goals.  Not because I’m OCD or anything, but more because I imagine what I want my future to look like and I drive myself to achieve it.  I’m definitely a day dreamer and obscenely optimistic, and that’s helped me to overlook the burdens and perils of starting and running a business.

I’m also a risk taker.  I started with my first adventure moving to California after school to find something different.   At that point I had a credit card, a Toyota Camry, and $800 to my name.  Since then I’ve taken hundreds of risks, some small, some very big.  I’ve realized that the only way I’ve been able to get a business to move is by taking risks.  You just need to calculate as much as you can and then jump.  And if you don’t make it, the bruises make you tougher and force you to just push harder.

F# has definitely had its fair share of bruises.  Just last year we had the exit of our founding partner Dan.  As you and I have discussed, founding partner dynamics are critical.  A company is built on top of the founding members, the basis for the vision, the culture, the foundation to a successful team.  So I had to push hard to stabilize culture.

Our culture, I believe, is the absolute driver of its success.  It’s the DNA of the company, and every single person in the organization plays a role and makes up a strand of the DNA.  People think that you can remove personalities from a workplace and just “get the job done”.  I completely disagree.  Each of those personalities needs to mesh in order for efficiency to happen.  And its all of the personalities of our team that make-up the overall personality of F#.

What do you love most about F#?

Music.

Music is a universal language, a connector for people, hitting at the very soul of what makes us tick.

Thus, there’s no better time to be in the music/tech space.  The advent of digital music from music streaming to music-focused online services has brought about all sorts of new opportunities for artists, fans, and brands.  The level of access that we have now to explore, discover, play, create, share, and connect music is unprecedented.  Artists are finding it easier to grab exposure and not have to rely on the bigger players for distribution and marketing.  And funnily enough, artists are becoming more comfortable with the notion of being sponsored by brands.  So many of these artists and brands have an affinity for each other that combining the two actually can help promote both at the same time.

And this is where F# comes in.  Using technology we can identify what people are listening to, understand their affinity for music and brands, then create experiences that allow artists and brands to promote their music or sponsor an experience around music.   For years, brands have used music to make these individual and collective emotional connections with music but now with F#, brands can creatively make emotional connections where people live their lives today – digitally.

Andy Von Kennel is SVP Business Development at Mediabrands. You can follow his thoughts on leadership, entrepreneurship, business strategy, media and marketing at avkthinks

Read the original story on The Verge

VSCO Cam is arguably the preferred “mobile darkroom” app, with options to tweak photos in ways that were previously impossible in a mobile setting. Most liked the app because it was entirely dedicated to photo editing, and was very good at what it did. But from a development perspective, there was no way to take photos, make comments, or really make friends in the VSCO Cam social section. Now, the Grid section in the app’s sidebar offers pure inspiration from strangers: it features a handpicked section of VSCO’s favorite inspiring photos from around the web. It keeps the app focused on photos rather than social discovery – something that was appealing about Instagram in early days. Whether it becomes Instagram remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a step forward for the app.

Read the original story on Mashable

The biggest mall in the country now has the biggest Pinterest board in the country. Caribou Coffee created a five story Pinterest board at the Mall of America in Minnesota, and it’s emblematic of the way in which Pinterest has forced its way into the retail conversation. Caribou Coffee recently partnered with Pinterest to make a Real Inspiration Blend of coffee, and the giant board is in celebration of its release. Coffee lovers can get their photos onto the interactive exhibit by tagging Instagram and Twitter photos with #CaribouInspires. The board will be up until February 13th, and is yet another example of out of home interactive advertisements driving user engagement.

Read the original story on The Next Web

In a play to convince customers that its product is genuinely waterproof, Sony – in partnership with Draft FCB – put its latest MP3 player inside of a water bottle and sold it in vending machines in gym’s with pools. The MP3 player itself isn’t new; the issue is that most people now use their phones for MP3 playback and haven’t been buying the device itself. But by leveraging a niche crowd that would have a particular use for the product, namely swimmers, they’ve managed to make the product readily accessible in a way that appeals specifically to the target market. It’s a nifty way to take a product and thrust it forcefully into a target market.

A study from the Digital Advertising Alliance found that advertisers will pay 3x more for cookie-based ads and 7x more if the cookie is 90 days old. Amidst White House efforts to review privacy implications of Big Data this week, groups like the IAB and DAA are hoping these numbers will position advertising as the lifeblood of the internet. For instance, 60% of small websites ad revenue comes from interest-based ads. Yet, the industry will need to do a better job of being transparent and educating the public on data and targeting if they want to maintain consumer trust. Companies like Enliken are already doing that, providing a service to ad networks and brands which makes it easy for the public to see which consumer segments they have been categorized in.

Microsoft and Superfly Presents, the production company behind Bonnaroo, have agreed to stream the music festival on Xbox consoles this summer. Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners will have access to the “exclusive” experience. The companies say that it will be streaming in high definition where possible, and fans will be able to switch between multiple streams – that is, different stages – and will be able to watch performances from year’s past. The lineup, of course, has yet to be announced, and Xbox will also stream this event, which features Bonnaroo’s trademark Super Jams. Whether or not you can have the full “festival” experience over Xbox is certainly debatable, but nevertheless the deal is just further evidence of the continued trend of decentralized, streamed on-demand media across screens and devices.

Pandora is the first online streaming service to open its doors to independent artists of all stripes. There will now be an online submission process for self-releasing artists across the Internet, allowing musicians with digital copies of their music to be broadcast on the network. In the past, artists on Pandora needed to have a hard copy of a CD with a UPC on Amazon, but now all that’s required is work digitally submitted through iTunes, Amazon/MP3, CD Baby, or Bandcamp. Pandora will screen the singles by hand. The catch is: in light of recent payment disputes, is the publicity of being available on Pandora worth the paltry paycheck?