We’ve always strived to make Last.fm as relevant to your music life as possible. Whatever you’re listening to and wherever you’re listening to it from – we know about it. There has however been one gap; the inability to play whatever you want by whoever you want directly on Last.fm. This has now changed.
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On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumour about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who’s been listening to the “leaked” U2 album.
After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins. This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world.
Prior to moving to London to join Last.fm I worked on credit card software for a leading international bank. When it comes to dealing with people’s money there isn’t much room for mistakes and buggy code can have major consequences. For these reasons there were a number of processes and systems in place to reduce the…
This is the second in a series of posts from the Last.fm engineering team covering the geekier aspects of our recent Last.fm on Xbox LIVE launch. Part one (“The War Room”) is here .
As a research intern here at Last.fm, dealing with huge datasets has become my daily bread. Having a herd of yellow elephants at my disposal makes this a lot easier, but the conventional way of writing Hadoop programs can be rather cumbersome. It generally involves lots of typing, compiling, building, and moving files…