Shared by Peter
Blev helt plötsligt ett nytt måsteköp till varje rum.
Great news for Europeans and those few U.S. users of music streaming service Spotify. Sonos, creator of the super cool (my descripton) S5 music player, is announcing today that users will soon be able to listen to streaming Spotify music through their Sonos devices. That means users will now be able to listen to music files stored on any computer in their home as well as Spotify, Rhapsody, Napster, Deezer, Pandora and other services.
U.S. users still have to wait for Spotify to launch here, of course, or find another way to access the service. On the upside, Sonos says their iPad controller app will be hitting iTunes sometime soon. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that we've closed our Series A investment round. We’re thrilled to have put together a syndicate of investors who will help us take BankSimple from idea to reality. Leading the round is First Round Capital, IA Ventures, and Village Ventures. We'd also like to thank Jerry Neumann, SV Angel, Nauiokas Park, and everyone else who has supported us through this process. We’ll be announcing the angel investors involved in this round once we’ve closed with them all.
This financing is a critical step towards taking BankSimple live. With money in the bank (no pun intended), we can finalize launch plans with our partner financial institutions. We’ve been carefully examining the operations of these potential partners to ensure that they’re financially sound and technologically agile. With this process coming to a close, we look forward to announcing our premier financial institution partners soon.
Our next step is to get our first cards issued. The card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) don’t issue new cards during November and December so that they can manage the rush on holiday gift cards. Assuming we can get our cards issued before this blackout period, we’d like to do a “friends and family” test later this year. That test will help us iron out any technical issues with our partner integrations and provide us with essential feedback.
Once we’re satisfied that our initial service is stable and secure, we’ll begin bringing on customers who signed up for an invitation (in order of invite request date, of course). To encourage people to flex our systems early on, we’ll be rewarding active customers with additional invites.
We expect our service to remain invite-only for the immediate future. This invite system allows us to control quality and costs. Our goal is nothing less than stellar customer service, and to achieve this goal we need to regulate the number of customers as we train and staff our support team. Once we’re sure we can provide the best possible experience to everyone, we’ll drop the invitation requirement.
In the meantime, we love hearing from you. While our development team is working hard on preparing our product for launch, your emails and input can help shape our roadmap. We have exciting plans to address many of the pain-points that you face from your current banks. We’ll continue to share more of our plans as we approach launch.
Shared by Peter
Nu ska de äntligen börja livesända apple eventen igen och nattens rykte är att just streaming kommer vara det heta för det här eventet och att TV-serier ska gå att se för 99 cent styck. Får de in film och musik där också så kan både Spotify och Voddler ligga risigt till. Undrar hur mycket techbloggarna förlorar på att Apple streamar eventet själva. Förlorar Apple själva också? Är det bra för deras PR-maskineri?
Shared by Peter
Hoppas att Ben Huh får köpa loss Reddit. Skulle bli riktigt intressant.
It’s no secret that social link sharing community Reddit isn’t singing the praises of its corporate parent Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2006. Earlier today the two sparred over running ads in support of California’s Proposition 19, and Reddit has previously written about the shortage of resources that Condé Nast is willing to provide. Now Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger network, is offering to take Reddit off Condé’s hands.
In a letter published by The Daily What (a part of the Cheezburger network), Huh writes that he’s offered to buy Reddit before privately, and he’s now making it public. From the post:
Condé Nast, I’m publicly offering to buy Reddit.
Hi TDWers, I’m Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19’d to notice). I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:
I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.
Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.
Cheers,
Ben Huh.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- When Facebook launched its version of location check-ins "Places," it seemed to put Foursquare, with its endearing badges and mayorships, in its sights. But Foursquare's founder and CEO, Dennis Crowley, thinks his location-based game app will survive "Places" and thrive as more people get accustomed to sharing their locations.
Shared by Peter
Rockstarkultur är något jag snöat in mig på på senare tid och undrar varför svenska startupfigurer sällan räknas som rockstars. En bloggpost om det här kommer att komma snart tror jag. Dags att börja skriva igen. Har ju tid nu medan jag har semester.
Are UK startups being let down by the British media? While the country’s new rock stars, artists, actors and filmmakers are frequently celebrated and encouraged by the press, our startup talent is often ignored completely.
The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones pondered this in a blog post yesterday. Would the launch of Flipboard this week, he wondered, have been so successful if the company was based in the UK instead of Silicon Valley? Probably not; because, as Rory’s post notes, the British press is simply more cynical than media in the USA. This is probably because British people in general are a cynical bunch and entrepreneurship is often not given the respect and support it perhaps deserves.
What’s so frustrating here is that there lots of fantastic UK startups that could be massive worldwide if only the influential tech writers in Silicon Valley paid attention to them. Audioboo, ScreenReach, Picklive, Mendeley and Betable are just five that spring to mind who are doing fantastic, innovative work that’s on a par with Silicon Valley’s output. While they get written about by a handful of British publications, they don’t really get a look-in Stateside, where there are more than enough homegrown companies to write about.
There’s absolutely no reason why American tech writers shouldn’t be able to cover British startups. It’s just as easy to chat to a company thousands of miles away as it is to someone who lives around the corner. Although I mainly cover the UK beat at The Next Web, I write about startups from around the world. If an interesting Canadian app (for example) comes to my attention I’ll get in touch with them and write about them because they excite me regardless of where they come from.
While American writers often ignore the UK, those of us who live there can do our bit to help our startups get wider exposure.
- If you’re in the media: If we can support our country’s new bands, artists and actors with positive press where it’s deserved, we can do it with startups too. That’s certainly what we try to do at The Next Web, while others like TechCrunch Europe also play a big part in flying the flag for the UK technology scene but in my opinion, others need to join us. Far too many tech blogs and news outlets barely touch homegrown talent, preferring to concentrate on ’sexier’, and often well-established, US companies.
- If you’re not in the media: You can do your bit too – talk about your favourite UK startups on Twitter, in the pub or at work and spread the word worldwide. Your support could really help them get noticed.
As we’ve noted previously, the opening of TechHub in London should give UK startups a place to work together, bouncing ideas off each other and making the entire ecosystem much more fertile. Elsewhere, accelerator and mentor schemes like Seedcamp and The Difference Engine are growing in popularity and are helping make the UK startup scene healthier.
I’m not saying every startup is worth writing about; some are more newsworthy than others, but those that are are doing original, interesting and innovative work should be encouraged and given the exposure they deserve – just as if they were rock stars.
Original title and link for this post: It’s time to start treating UK startups like rockstars
Shared by Peter
Intressant ämne om framtidens musik. Produktionen kommer bli mer plugbar än vad den redan är och mer kommer att hamna i molnet. Ser verkligen fram emot de kommande musikapplikationerna som kommer att komma. Sen är jag nyfiken på hur ipaden kommer att påverka framtidens musikproduktion. Riktigt spännande.
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Edward James Bass, editor of Audio Silver Lining – an online resource and blog covering cloud based and collaborative music production.
The last few years have seen the emergence of online music production services and tools such as Indaba, Audiotool and Soundation that offer artists and producers the chance to record, edit and mix tracks from within their web browsers rather than using installed applications.
Aside from being incredibly impressive and a lot of fun I feel this new technology offers some considerable benefits for music makers of all levels. Here’s a few of the more prominent ones…
Collaboration
As is the case with all cloud based applications collaboration is a key feature here. Since some existing online music production services have built strong communities around their services, the process of finding and communicating with musicians and producers to work with has become a fairly positive experience.
Admittedly questions have been raised about potential IP issues if a track ever gets commercial success but there is a strong argument for the fact that working via these services allows a means for artists to better track who contributed what and constantly monitor and review the terms of their working agreements.
Work anywhere
Having a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that is no longer physically tied to a specific machine is a potential winner for bands and artists on the move.
Not merely does it offer the chance to easily record and edit demo tracks from just about any location with connectivity but also a low value online backup of material. Finally that lost laptop no longer means a great lost album.
Try before you buy
The free signup and simplified features of online DAW’s and sequencers like Indaba, Audiotool and Soundation gives those who are new to music production the opportunity to try out recording, mixing and synthesis without having to shell out in advance.
For the Myspace generation already used to incorporating technology into their creative process this will likely prove to be less of hurdle than to older producers who are tied to their expensive desktop tools.
Social streaming
Whilst its relatively easy to mix down a track and upload it to Soundcloud or Myspace it is still time consuming and stifles the ability to “share the moment” with your friends and fans. Embedded widgets for social media and websites allow instant streaming of new tracks to the masses. So far two services – Audiotool and Indaba offer this feature and some nice looking widgets too
Shaking up the market
The existing non-cloud DAWs have been somewhat feature-stale for some time now, not to mention slow with regards to addressing the opportunities of social media.
This advancement offers them the chance to re-invigorate their products by creating online or hybrid versions that offer all of the above features combined with the reassurance of an established brand.
Ableton has already taken a step forward with regards to collaboration by offering a function that allows its users to share tracks and control who accesses them via an online interface – its fairly likely other vendors will follow suit soon.
Will the Cloud ever replace music production software completely?
Currently some professional and home studio producers have a certain reticence to this bold new area of music tech and see cloud based apps as pointless, simplified versions of their own tools. Indeed it will be sometime before online DAWs and sequencers can fully match the capability of systems such as Pro Tools, Cubase or Reason but it is certainly not the impossible vision some have supposed – just a case of developing on a different platform from the standard one.
As ever, improving technology is the driver here – better connectivity both via standard broadband and mobile connections as well as the proliferation of devices that use cloud based operating systems and apps will provide an environment where online music production is likely to thrive due to better stability and access.
Ultimately though, neither the naysayers and doubters or those enthused like myself can fully predict the route that music recording technology will take in the future. What has surprised me recently however is that some seem to think it will remain the same at it is now and surely that’s the least likely situation of all.
Original title and link for this post: How the Cloud will change music production forever
Open-source software is at an inflection point in the enterprise. According to a survey by Accenture, more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increasing their investment in it this year, and almost 40% said that they expect to migrate mission-critical software to open source within the next 12 months.
The survey reflects a pattern that's best illustrated by Red Hat's most recent financial results. In the past year, its revenues were up 20%. All parts of its business are showing growth, with particular strength in middleware. The company signed the largest deal in its history during the last quarter. According to Datamation, Red Hat renewed all of its top 25 deals during the quarter at over 120% of their original value.
Sponsor
Accenture surveyed 300 blue-chip organizations in both the public and private sector and found that half of the respondents are fully committed to open source. That validates Red Hat own findings that that 88% of all companies that use open source will increase their investments in 2010.
Some of the other findings in the survey:
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, respondents cited quality and improved reliability as the key benefits to open source programs. A total of 70% cited improved reliability, and 69% said they are finding better security and bug fixing.
Cost is a huge driver. Of the respondents, 71% said they believed they could save in software maintenance costs. They also cited savings in total cost of ownership and development costs.
Companies still don't want to share their own open source projects; less than a third say they do. This may be one of the biggest concerns if open source goes in-house and isn't shared with the community. It's this sharing that gives open source its strength.
The public sector is lagging in the adoption of open source.
Senior management, training and insufficient open-source alternatives hinder further adoption. The biggest challenge is training. Half of the respondents from the public sector said training is a hindrance, compared with only 22% in financial services. Further, lack of senior management support appears to be a key reason given for not using open-source software. Those yet to make the transition also cite insufficient open-source alternatives compared to proprietary software suites.
Open source is on a trajectory to become dominant over the next 10 years. That's great news for companies like Red Hat, which are already seeing the upside in revenues that comes with open-source adoption.
Discuss
Dana Chisnell has done some research into what happiness is and how to design happiness into user experiences. According to Dana, there are three levels of happy user experiences:
- Mindfulness: The feeling of being paid attention to, that the designer is being considerate of our needs and wants.
- Flow: The feeling being of fully focused in a task to the point where we loose track of time.
- Meaning: The feeling of fellowship, making a difference and being involved in something bigger than yourself.
In the article, Dana gives example of sites that have accomplished to build these types of happiness into their designs.
Shared by Peter
Jag är lite nyfiken på den här filmen. Kan bli både hur bra som helst och hur dålig som helst. Inga förväntningar men jag ska se den.
A story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook. In theaters October 1, 2010.
