I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback.
Independent artists and labels have always been the trend setters in music and the music business.
Bertelsmann understood our vision when they first invested in us... They still believe in that vision.
I think in terms of the work we're doing now a lot of the UI cleanup... I see it getting much prettier.
He said this has the potential to be the first broadband killer application, and it has sort of become the truth because obviously it's so bandwidth intensive. I mean, it has been an issue.
So the bandwidth issue is definitely a big concern of ours.
I had to actually purchase a book to learn the API and write the client. It was pretty frustrating trying to learn the API and develop a product quickly.
It's been all over the press, and schools are deciding to shut it down. We released a public announcement saying that we had some potential solutions that we were working with, and once we had something concrete we would start implementing it and approach schools.
Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.
I was at Northeastern University playing with the idea and getting feedback from my roommates, and then started drafting a really basic design idea.
I wasn't really sure that my implementation of it would be what really took off, but fortunately I was able to get a prototype done.
I understood an idea like this could become popular, but at the same time I didn't think it was my implementation that would be so widely used.