Interview With Benjamin Scherrey – Chief Systems Architect of Proteus Technologies

Benjamin Scherrey and his team were responsible for the kick-ass presentation of eJAMMING AUDiiO, a collaborative platform for creating music. We interview Benjamin about eJAMMING, his company Proteus Technologies and software development.

eJamming AUDiiO has been around for some time. How did your company Proteus Technologies get involved?

eJamming contacted us to build a prototype of their upcoming product, eJamming Jamcast, for Intel’s Developer Forum in Shanghai last year. It went very well and we were able to close a licensing deal with MTV a few months later. As a result, eJamming has retained us to do all their web services development and operations.

What is the problem eJamming AUDiiO is trying to solve?

The founders of eJamming are all top level artists and music business people. Check out this page for details. Their goal is to build a product and service to enable musicians to meet and collaborate over the internet. eJamming also believes that without being able to play live and interact real-time it can never be good enough so dealing with the latency issue for real-time jam sessions was the primary obstacle to overcome. I believe they are the first to successfully accomplish this.

How is eJamming’s solution unique to the competitors out there?

eJamming has a few patents on addressing synchronizing live music amongst multiple data streams in real-time. This means that 2-4 musicians can be at their individual homes or studios and not only play together as if they were in the same room, but can also record their session in better than CD quality audiio. We’ve had this in beta for quite some time with excellent feedback from amateur and professional musicians alike. They always tell us they couldn’t imagine it was possible but now can’t imagine not having it. Also, we view other music site “competitors” more like future collaborators because we think our service only expands the opportunities for the music business and that so many other services have lots of value to offer as well.

Any new features planned for eJamming?

eJamming AUDiiO, our core musician to musician service, is launched commercially now. It is, however, only the beginning. The next product, which we demo’d the prototype for at last year’s Intel Developers Forum in Shanghai, is called JamCast Live. JamCast lives allows AUDiiO users to play live concerts online to fans around the world and get paid doing it. JamCast live will complete our social network by bringing in the other participants in the music industry that the major music sites have disenfranchised. The people behind the scenes who make the business work are the promoters, managers, sound engineers, etc + the fans can all participate and profit from the online economy that is enabled by eJamming.

The old music business model was controlled by record companies because they controlled distribution. When the record companies behind the RIAA tried to defend this unnatural monopoly and proceeded to litigate themselves right out of access to internet revenue streams, Steve Jobs stepped up and proceeded to duplicate their same business model but stick it online and make iTunes the distribution network. But how is it that old school distribution monopolists can control the music industry when the INTERNET IS THE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK?!? It’s completely upside down, has clearly impacted the quality of new music and new artists and is not sustainable.

This is where we’ll demonstrate the disruptive new business model for music over the internet because now an artist or band can make money by playing live shows over the internet. Those disenfranchised but critical support roles are back in the game helping bring the new & innovative music directly to the fans. We’ve got some unique features that will make it as close to being in the live audience as possible that I, as a live music lover, find particularly compelling. After JamCast Live we have a video product which I can’t say much about except it builds on top of our previous two products and will blow you away. It’s in early prototype stages and just waiting for the funding to take to completion.

Could you share with us about Proteus Technologies and your roles in Proteus Technologies and the eJamming AUDiiO project?

I’ve spent most of my career since 1989 building software development groups for customers. As an independent consultant I would be hired to build a product for a company but, in doing so, I would also hire a team for them, select the appropriate technologies, introduce and train them on the development process, and build their technical infrastructure. Once the first release of the product was done I’d move on to a new customer and they would be left with a group that could maintain an extend what they had invested in. Eventually I decided I would rather not deal with a new set of internal politics each project and build a team exactly the way I wanted.