Most people probably don’t stick around social music service SoundCloud’s site to ogle its design, but apparently the team felt there was plenty of room for improvement.
To that end SoundCloud, who not long ago raised a $50 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, officially pulled back the curtains on their handsome new interface in San Francisco earlier today. → Read More
These days, it seems SoundCloud is the player to beat in the music platform space. It’s been called (among other things) the “Flickr for audio” or the “YouTube for audio.” Evidence of this lies in the fact that the company raised $50 million in January at a $200 million pre-money valuation — they must be doing something right.
Instead of competing with SoundCloud, Official.fm is taking things in a slightly different direction. Today Official.fm launched a new music sharing and promotion platform that aims to become the only music platform that professionals will need.
→ Read More
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.
→ Read More
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
Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has added Soundcloud integration to make it easy to add the Flattr button (and start receiving payments) to any SoundCloud player, including those embedded anywhere across the web. Interestingly, SoundCloud already has an existing arrangement with Flattr competitor BuySimple.
Flattr’s support for SoundCloud follows a similar recently announced tie-in to Twitter, which makes it easy to tip somebody’s Twitter account with real money, although who on earth would pay for my nonsensical tweets, I’m not so sure. But it does bring into focus the company’s strategy to become a sort of ‘Like’ button but with real money, even if post-launch Flattr has slowly and perhaps stealthily begun to deviate from its more altruistic and slightly idiosyncratic payment model into something more mainstream. → 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
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
tunesBag, an Austrian music sharing startup that has been around for quite some time, has just raised €250,000 through a government fund and an undisclosed investor. The platform itself is, like many others, a cloud-based iTunes where you can sync your local music library via the cloud to a variety of devices. But the startup has recently added a nifty feature that lets users connect their Dropbox account with their tunesBag library, making the service effectively iTunes-meets-Dropbox.
Through tight API integration, this works well and lets users sync all of their tracks to Dropbox so that they can be streamed. The question remains how many people are actually using Dropbox as a music storing and sharing service with the arrival of many other cloud-based ‘locker’ services dedicated to music. → Read More
ThingLink, which provides tools to let users embed links into images, has partnered with SoundCloud to add audio as an option.
The idea is that those who work primarily in audio – musicians, bands, sound designers etc. – can now include images in their work, perhaps as part of a promotional campaign, flyer or as album art work. But also, given SoundCloud’s recent pivot to become a more mainstream audio sharing platform, ThingLink could be used to annotate or add voice notes or background sounds to any photograph in all sorts of use cases, such as a memorable family photograph, for example. And because the SoundCloud link is embedded into a ThingLink image, that audio interactivity travels with the image, meaning it can be shared on social networks. → 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
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
San Francisco, CA
