At first, the mission of the Public Radio Exchange was simple enough: Create an online clearinghouse for news-and-culture radio programming where public radio stations would have an easier time shopping for shows and independent producers would have a better shot at getting their stuff on the air. PRX launched that system in 2003, and it’s now used by 400 stations across the country. But one thing leads to another—and under the entrepreneurial leadership of its founding executive director, Jake Shapiro, the Cambridge, MA, non-profit has developed from a mere marketplace into an increasingly disruptive force in the public radio ecosystem.

Through projects like the Public Radio Player, an iPhone application that lets users listen to virtually any public radio program instantly, PRX is showing the way toward a future in which individual stations, such as Boston’s own WBUR and WGBH, may have drastically different, probably smaller, roles. But at the same time, the opportunities for public radio to serve specific communities and to distribute more types of programming from a broader range of sources may be growing.

I wanted to sit down with Shapiro to pick his brain about the Public Radio Player and PRX’s other game-changing projects because public radio is such an important cultural and intellectual resource in innovative regions like Boston, San Diego, and Seattle—and because the public radio ecosystem still tends to attract the people doing the most thought-provoking audio storytelling out there, whether those stories travel via Internet packets or frequency-modulated radio waves. In my two-hour interview with him at the organization’s Harvard Square office last week, I asked him to outline how PRX was born and how the organization is guiding public radio through an era when old-fashioned broadcasting is gradually giving way to personalized, Internet-based multicasting. The interview is drastically condensed below.

Xconomy: So, how did you get into the world of digital radio distribution?

Jake Shapiro: Right prior to PRX, I’d been associate director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society [at Harvard Law School] for about a year, after having been producer for The Connection on WBUR for Chris Lydon. When that show and the [WBUR] management ended up getting into a tussle over the ownership and future direction of the show, Chris started a production company that ended up creating Open Source Media. [Lydon also became a fellow at the Berkman Center, where he and Dave Winer, another fellow, created the first-ever RSS-based podcasts.] That was my introduction to the business of public media and a segue into my work at the Berkman Center. This was the summer of 2002 and there was a lot of work going on there at that time around intellectual property and copyrights. The Creative Commons was just getting its start. Digital distribution of music, in particular, was becoming a focus of transformative change.

That tied to my other hat, which has been as an independent rock musician, guitarist, cellist, and cofounder of a number of bands. I don’t look like it, but I’m a Korean rock star. It’s the ultimate success story in long-tail music distribution. My band Two Ton Shoe, which we started in the ’90s in Boston, was one of the first 100 bands to sign up on MP3.com, so we were pretty involved in digital media from the beginning. One of our songs, called Medicine, took off of its own accord in the Korean blogosphere, and started to get passed around by aspiring Korean musicians. We got a call out of the blue from a guy who said he represented a Korean record label, and he wanted to know if he could represent us in South Korea…They licensed our back catalog and put out a double album, and a few years ago, this was in 2005, they called and said they’d like to fly us over to Seoul to perform. It was a true Spinal Tap moment—the fulfillment of your teenage rock star fantasies. The true indicator of the phenomenon is that there are now more hits on YouTube of Korean bands covering our songs than on our songs themselves.

So music and the Internet as a change agent for the arts and fans; public radio producing; the Berkman Center; all of those things only in retrospect ended up being the perfect training ground for what PRX would be as an opportunity and an idea.

X: Where did the original idea for PRX come from?

JS: Two partners—the Station Research Group in Maryland, which is a group that does strategy research and policy work for public radio stations, and Jay Allison, who runs [the NPR productions] This I Believe and Lost and Found Sound and Transom.org and is a true pied piper of public radio—had taken a look at the industry back in 2001, 2002 and said …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Biology has never really had a social-networking movement like open-source computing, where thousands of loosely-affiliated people around the world pool brainpower to make better software. If Merck’s Stephen Friend gets his way, about five years from now, he will have ushered in a new era in which biologists work together to make drugs that are better than any company can today inside its walls.

Friend, 54, is leaving his high-profile job as Merck’s senior vice president of cancer research, after having nailed down $5 million in anonymous donations to pursue this vision at a nonprofit organization getting started in Seattle called Sage, Xconomy has learned. I heard about this potentially transformative idea during a phone conversation a couple days ago with Friend and his co-founder from Merck, Eric Schadt.

Sage is built on the premise that vast networks of genes get perturbed, or thrown off-kilter, in complex diseases like cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Scientists can’t just pick one faulty gene or protein and make a magic bullet to shut it down. But what if researchers around the world capturing genomic profiles on patients could get all of their data to talk to each other through a free, open database? A researcher in Seattle looking at how all 35,000 genes in breast cancer patients are dialed on or off at a certain stage of illness might be able to make critical comparisons by stacking results up against a deeper and broader data pool that integrates clinical, genetic, and other molecular data from peers in, say, San Francisco, New Haven, CT, or anywhere else.

Besides helping scientists aim higher, this will make medicine more transparent than ever, Friend says. Physicians from around the world could look at genetic profiles from their patients, match it up with the Sage database, and then prescribe the medicine most likely to work, Friend says. The FDA could look for insight into the proper balance between the risk and benefit of a drug. Health insurers could look at drugs for certain patients that have the greatest likelihood of success, and pay for ones that work. Drug companies could use the database to weed out treatments that are bound to fail or cause side effects for patients with certain genetic profiles, potentially saving years of wasted effort and hundreds of millions of dollars.

“We see this becoming like the Google of biological science. It will be such an informative platform, you won’t be able to make decisions without it,” Schadt says. He adds: “We want this to be like the Internet. Nobody owns it.”

Some big names have signed on for the early incubating phase. Besides the full-time efforts of Friend and Schadt, the Sage board includes Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Paul Ramsey dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Washington; Richard Lifton, the chairman of genetics at Yale University; and Hans Wigzell, director emeritus of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. For insight into how to apply lessons from the open-source computing world, the board has brought on John Wilbanks, the vice president of science at the San Francisco-based Creative Commons.

To get started, Merck is in the process of donating some needed equipment and software that has been used at the Rosetta Inpharmatics subsidiary in Seattle, Friend says. The Whitehouse Station, NJ-based pharmaceutical giant will also donate important genomic data that doesn’t relate to its proprietary drug discovery programs, Friend says. And, as Sage plans to build up a staff of about 30 people, it will draw partially from the remaining talent pool that worked for Friend and Schadt, since Merck announced last fall it is closing the Seattle facility and transferring some people to Boston.

Sage hopes to follow the road map of Facebook, which started on campus at Harvard University, quickly caught on there …Next Page »

Comments (15) | Reprints | Share:        

Highland Capital Partners of Lexington, MA, said today that it has brought on intellectual-property scholar John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as a venture executive. We interviewed Palfrey and business partner Rudy Rouhana in December for our story about RightsAgent, which offers a system of licenses based on the Creative Commons license that allow content creators to give away some rights to their works while charging for others. “There is no one who is more thoughtful about how user-generated content, intellectual property ownership and digital media will play out together,” Dan Nova, General Partner at Highland, said of Palfrey in the firm’s announcement. “He’ll be a great resource for our companies, helping them shape the future of their industries.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

You know that little “CC” you see here and there on the Web, in the margins of blogs or attached to photos on Flickr? It stands for the Creative Commons license, and until now, it’s basically been a way for content creators to say, “I don’t approve of traditional copyrights, so I’m just going to give my work away, with a few minor restrictions.” But a Cambridge startup being launched this weekend will add a new dimension to content protection. RightsAgent is rolling out a way for creators to still be liberal and open about sharing their work, while at the same time collecting money for certain uses of it.

The idea behind the Creative Commons licensing scheme, when Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and some allies got together five years ago to set it up, was to promote a kind of “copyleft”—an alternative to the excesses of traditional copyright law, which was being used at the time to attack MP3 downloaders, rap-song remixers, and other people experimenting with the newfound flexibility of digital media. In effect, the Creative Commons licenses offered writers, photographers, lyricists and other creative folks a new way to explicitly make their content more open—that is, to cede some rights to other users, such as the right to reproduce a work in full or modify it for non-commercial purposes, free of charge.

It was a nice idea that fit well with Lessig’s Free Culture crusade, and it served as an antidote to draconian digital-rights management technologies that threatened (and still threaten) to undermine age-old doctrines about fair use of copyrighted material. But the movement’s feel-good vibe—”Let’s make all content free!”—elided an important point: content creators still need to put dinner on their tables.

RightsAgent’s new online service, which was switched on last night, helps to fill in that missing piece. And appropriately enough, it’s being formally introduced to the public tomorrow at the Creative Commons organization’s fifth birthday celebration in San Francisco.

At the core of the service is a way for users to set up “personal feeds” that include all of the digital content they create, including their blog writings, the photos they put on Flickr, and the videos they post on Revvr. (The service will work with more content sources in the future; RightsAgent’s builders say they wanted to start with the services that already recognize Creative Commons licenses.) RightsAgent users can then choose the type of license under which they’d like to offer that content for various uses—a Creative Commons license, a Rights Agent Commercial license, or traditional “all rights reserved” copyright.

If they choose the RightsAgent Commercial license, which is modeled after a new type of Creative Commons license called Creative Commons Plus, anyone who wants to buy the rights to re-use that content for commercial purposes can do so directly through RightsAgent, which collects a 10 percent commission. People who want to use the content for non-commercial purposes can still do so under a Creative Commons License. Neither the Creative Commons licenses nor traditional copyright, by themselves, offer this kind of flexibility. As Lessig puts it in the company’s launch announcement, “RightsAgent plugs a big hole in the world of user generated creativity, by making it simple for creators to license rights commercially with their creative work.”

Yesterday I had the opportunity to ask RightsAgent’s two co-founders, John Palfrey and Rudy Rouhana, to explain more about the new company, which has a four-person staff and is operating on a seed-stage investment from Menlo Park, CA-based venture firm Venrock and Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital Partners. Palfrey is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and executive director of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Rouhana is a serial entrepreneur and former vice president of Cambridge-based Top Ten Media, which operates new media properties Top 10 Sources and StyleFeeder.

Xconomy: Say more about this hole in the Creative Commons licensing scheme that RightsAgent is filling.

John Palfrey: Creative Commons itself, five years ago when it was founded, filled an extraordinarily important gap in the marketplace. It was very difficult if not impossible for somebody to give away some rights [to their work] and retain other rights. CC became an extremely simple way to do that. Five years later, what’s clear is that there is great value in what some people are generating online, and the gap we think RightsAgent will fill now is that …Next Page »

Comments (6) | Reprints | Share: