The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
SoundCloud has raised a new fundraising round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The amount was not released but TechCrunch understands it to be $50 million. This would give the company a $200 million pre-money valuation. GGV Capital also participated in this round. The social sound platform which has seen high growth in the past year will use the funding to expand more rapidly, especially in the US. Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will take a board observer seat at the company. She already serves on the board of Square.
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Silicon Valley is famously, and rightly, proud of its place as the spiritual home for startups. And it has an inspiring and awesome track record that’s tough to beat.
However, as the recent Le Web conference proved, European tech hubs like London, Berlin and more recently Paris, can now also lay claim to breeding world-class entrepreneurs. There’s a sense that Europe is finally getting its groove on when it comes to startup innovation, and that’s exciting to watch and be a part of. (When even Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld is getting in on the action, you know that Digital/Tech is having a moment…)
Below are five European startups you should keep your eye on. → Read More
I love Yvo Schaap, even though I’ve never met him in person.
Wanna know why? Because the man keeps on digging up interesting stuff by simply perusing code, and then alerting us.
Schaap found the embeddable +1 button and a a link to the Google Games logo before either of them was publicly released, and now he may have identified several companies that will be partnering with Facebook for the imminent launch of the latter’s Music service (which may be called Vibes). → Read More
Last month, we wrote about Vibedeck, which had just raised $2 million in funding for its eCommerce platform for musicians. As we wrote then, though VibeDeck is still in early development (having launched in beta 2 months ago), it’s value proposition is that it’s slick and easy to use. And the startup’s goal is simple, too: To be a low-cost eCommerce resource for small to medium size bands — or musical startups or mSMBs, if you will.
VibeDeck does this by giving artists customizable landing pages, where they can add band info, images, and make use of an embeddable player to share their tunes, in which they can drag and drop tracks to reorder etc. The platform also allows musicians to export sales data and connect their account to PayPal in order to receive payments directly from fans. And the best part is, beyond PayPal fees, VibeDeck is free to use. → Read More
One of the most interesting panels at last week’s Disrupt featured a discussion about social music between Steve Jang the co-founder and CEO of Schematic Labs and Alexander Ljung the founder and CEO of SoundCloud.
Jang and Ljung are both developing apps and services that enable us to share music, sounds and our musical taste. Jang’s product is Soundtracking, an iPhone app that allows us to geo-tag music as we experience it. While Ljung’s Berlin based SoundCloud – which already has four and a half million users – is a platform for not only sharing music but also audio and sounds.
So what, exactly, is social music? I asked Jang and Ljung when I interviewed them backstage at Disrupt. And how are services like Jang’s Soundtracking and Ljung’s SoundCloud disrupting what was once formerly known as the “music industry”? → Read More
Online payment methods are old and in the way. Sure, whether or not the world will have a generally-agreed-upon payment system is up for debate, but it seems that a new era of micropayments is here — hopefully to stay. With the political and regulatory inertia around bank and credit card-related payment tools, there is room for a third party without these hangups to bring a new perspective to micropayments. Minno, a startup that offers a simple, embeddable payment solution, is today announcing that it has changed its name to “BuySimple”. Its new name is appropriate given its objective, and gets rid of the small-fish-big-pond connotations that came with the name “Minno”. What’s more, BuySimple has partnered with SoundCloud and raised $700K. Not bad for a day’s work. → Read More
SoundCloud, the audio platform, has unveiled SoundCloud Labs, a new site to house experimental projects and features developed in-house, including via its open API.
The idea of creating a separate space for cutting-edge development branded as Labs isn’t a new one, of course, mostly notably employed by Google. But in SoundCloud’s case it perhaps makes even greater sense since the service was originally targeted at music makers but is now aiming to be a much wider consumer play. Strapping on additional features that move too far away from its core proposition could, arguably, dilute SoundCloud’s brand. However, cordoning these off goes someway to mitigate this, while at the same time doesn’t discourage innovation. → Read More
By now, you may have run across a SoundCloud audio track somewhere out there in the wild, wooly Interwebs — perhaps during one of your mad, late-night music searches. In which case, you’re familiar with the tell-tale signs: The scrolling orange cursor, the messages tagged mid-song, and that distinctive social waveform layout.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, SoundCloud is the fast-scaling, Berlin-based audio sharing platform that enables music-makers and audio-lovers to upload and share audio tracks. Because of SoundCloud’s somewhat unique visualization (tracks are laid out horizontally in waveform, as they might appear were they fresh out of the studio, or playing in GarageBand or some other music creation app), users can add comments to the waveform at specific times during the track. (Like, “you clearly stole this guitar riff from Steve Vie, loser”, for example.) You can then share your tracks privately with your family, publish to social networks, or embed your sounds on your site — all the while allowing your listeners to tag tracks with their comments. → Read More
SoundCloud, the audio platform originally targeted at music makers but now a wider consumer play, has announced that it’s reached three million registered users.
And considering that the Berlin-based startup was at a million users as recently as last May – pre-pivot, if you will – the change of direction would appear to be paying off or at least hasn’t affected the company’s growth trajectory negatively. That said, these are registered users-only not active users as it were but nonetheless growth does look steady. → Read More
R.E.M.’s upcoming album Collapse Into Now is coming in March, but the band is already getting the buzz going with a little crowdsourcing experiment. A couple days ago, the album’s producer released some tracks from the song “It Happened Today” in files that can easily be imported into Garageband, the music mixing software that comes on new Macs. Fans are invited to remix the song and upload their new versions under Creative Commons license to SoundCloud.
The individual tracks were also released under Creative Commons license so that anyone can download and remix them as long as it is not for commercial use. Producer Jacknife Lee writes: → Read More
As we hinted predicted four days ago, SoundCloud was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today on their blog that both firms have made undisclosed investments.
SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff. → Read More
Berlin-based startup SoundCloud, which is slowly moving from a music focused site to one where anyone can record and share audio, launched its iPhone app recently. It’s now dropped the Android version and it’s available in the Android Market now, for free. There is no significant difference with the iPhone app which we reviewed here. → Read More
If you’ve created music playlists using iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube, We Are Hunted, Winamp, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, or even if you’ve simply scribbled a list of your favorite tracks in a notepad file, you need to check out Playlistify soon. The basic, solid premise of the service is to let you enjoy your custom-made playlists anywhere you like.
I was looking for an excuse to write it up anyway, and now they’ve given me a decent one: they’ve added a new feature that lets you convert your music playlists into Twitter lists. → Read More
Like most of you, I too LIKE Facebook, and ever since my last TechCrunch post (How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages), I’ve been exploring and trying to find new ways to improve the creation process of a Page. This time, I’d like to focus on a how-to for the musicians among you. → Read More
SoundCloud has just announced they have hit a million users. It followers their deal earlier this year with The Hype Machine, but it’s clear this is a startup that is scaling globally now from its base in Berlin.
The audio sharing site that’s geared towards those who work in the music industry is an online audio platform which lets musicians collaborate, promote and distribute their music via widgets and apps. It’s been variously described as a “Flickr for audio” or a “Vimeo for audio”, but whatever it is, it’s clearly got the kinds of tools and distribution platform which is winning both the hearts and business of artists. → Read More
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage. → Read More
I’ve fiddled with the beta version a few times before, but I’m happy the Vienna, Austria-based startup is now ready to release its eponymous service, Play.fm, publicly so I can finally tell you about it, too. Yes, it’s another online music startup, but worth a second look if you want my opinion.
Here’s how the young company pitches the service (it’s hard to categorize in a short summary):
“PLAY.FM sets new standards for on-demand streaming radios: the beta version transforms the largest audio database of DJ sets and live recordings into an intelligent platform with various possibilities of participation.”
Ok, that didn’t really help either, so let me give it a shot. → Read More
