After all, it is not easy to do what he is trying to do given his background. He started playing piano at the age of 3 and began his professional music career at the age of 12 (!). In his early twenties he was already a busy music producer, composer and pianist in Israel. He played with many artists, produced mega hit records and concerts like Rita‘s “A Great Love” 4 times platinum album and tour, HaYehudim (The Jews) debut album called “Separate Reality”, one of Meir Banai’s albums and many others including Guy Zu-Aretz (his brother) upcoming album. He wrote scores for movies and theater and had a successful and busy career in the Israeli music industry. But then he decided leave everything behind and went after his dream – move to the US to become a musician in the premier league. He first spent a few years in New York where he attend Julliard & Mannes music academies, and then he moved to Los Angeles where he is trying break into the small, close group of Hollywood movies score writers. In the mean time, he is slowly establishing impressive milestones n the US which including producing Taking Back Sunday’s “Where you want to be?” platinum album, and writing MacHeads soundtrack, but he has not gotten to work on a really big movie since in Hollywood it is very difficult for a “nobody” to become “somebody”.

This might change though, very soon, thanks to the way he uses YouTube to share his talent, music and work process with the masses. Every morning, as part of his warm-up, he improvises melodies based on his mood and feelings. None of these melodies were composed before and he does not memorize notes – he “simply” plays the melody that is going in his head at that very moment. His studio neighbors, owners of a video production company, heard him play and suggested to video tape those short improvisations and publish them to YouTube as part of a documentary series called “Confessions of a Composer”. The videos are recorded using two iPhone 3GS phones, the sound is recorded separately using Roy’s studio equipment (thus the high quality), and then they mix and edit everything to a short video clip that gets posted to YouTube. This entire process happens 5 days a week, Mon-Fri.

I predict that it is just a matter of time until one of Roy’s improvisation videos will become a major hit on YouTube. Naturally, the variation on a popular songs tend to get more traffic and views (probably not enough views given the quality of these videos), like Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” (see embed below), Michael Jackson’s Earth Song and Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling. But the improvisations are even more fascinating to watch, as they truly show his qualities as a composer and pianist.

From what I have gathered from Roy, the amount of feedback he has been getting after a few weeks of daily videos submissions is unbelievable. This includes comments, ratings and many emails from YouTube viewers from all over the world. More than that, a well known Hollywood director who stumbled upon one of his videos and loved it, already came to meet Roy at his Hollywood studio.

So, here are two video clips that illustrate how talented and versatile he is. My recommendation is to subscribe to his channel as well as go back and watch all the videos uploaded since the project began on July 13th. You will get a daily injection of heavenly and inspiring music from such an extraordinary & gifted talent.

Chrome failed and here’s what it shows (homage to the best search ever!):

Thanks Jason

As it currently looks, I think we are a day or two away from the launch of the new Hype Machine. Still, this is a great viral marketing tactic.

 I love popurls. It enables me to get a quick snap shot of the current buzz on the web in one place and in less than 5 minutes.

popurls.tv is a brand new mashup of popurls and Google Maps. It displays real-time traffic of the most viewed stories on popurls.

So what is the problem and why is popurls.tv the dark side of popurls? Because it does the opposite of what popurls is there for – it does not save time. On the contrary, it sucks time since it’s an extremely addictive service…Thomas–Nice work!

BTW, There is plenty of room for improvement, but knowing Thomas, I am sure he is already working on v1.1.

Technorati Tags: Mashups, Google Maps, Popurls, Thomas Marban

Paul Angles, Snap.com Director of Marketing, wanted to help to a friend get rid of a Dell laptop. Using his creative skills, Paul put an ad on ebay and used craigslist to increase traffic to that page. Using this technique, he was able able to get over 1100 visits to the product page and 40 bids, as well as to get the attention of Dell and a senior tech support manager has been personally assigned to grovel.

• Bourne is back. I look forward for his Ultimatum.

• Blog day, initiated by Nir Oren from BlogTV, is coming soon (Aug 31st). Now it’s the time prepare – find five new blogs that you have never read before and share your discoveries with your readers. This great initiative is done in order to give blog readers the opporunity to get to know new blogs they have never read before and to create new waves of traffic in the blogesphere. I prmoise to focus on finding non-webby blogs.

Update: The Smart Player was causing script errors whenever the page loads and I had to remove the embedded player. To view the clip, Click here.

Technorati Tags: Viral Marketing, 5min, Venture Capital

A short viral video that Snap.com design & marketing folks created.

Too bad both environments still disallow a great utility such as Snap Shots to be added to users pages.