Cloudspeakers provides an overwhelming music experience

Written on 30th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Chris and Adriaan Bol, twin brothers, from Cloudspeakers. This is an open music community, founded in November last year. They aggregate links to reviews, (legal) music (videos), and news. The whole music mash-up is backed by a social network where users can show their music taste. Or a lack of it.. Although I doubt those people would find their ways within Cloudspeakers, as the service oozes pure love for music. This can cause a somewhat overwhelming experience, as the site is completely stuffed with lists to music outlets. So be prepared for that.

The musicfreaks-only site recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) Veronica Holding.

Chris and Adriaan have found a cool way to answer my questions, as they quote from songs. Click on the quotes to see the music videos on YouTube.

How did you come up with the idea of Cloudspeakers?

“”It’s all like a dream. No, better.” (from Collapsing at Your Doorstep by Air France)
Before Cloudspeakers we were in doubt. Some basic questions were asked. Which way should I go, the emotional or rational path? In Cloudspeakers we saw an opportunity in which both sides came together. With the start-up of Cloudspeakers we realized our dream of combining arts with science. (more…)

aggregate, cloudspeakers, denmark, five questions for start-ups, music, Netherlands

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Surchur: perfect for a quick news check-up

Written on 19th May 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The design is hideous, yet the user interface is just fine. The news sources are limited, but their selection is actually pretty good. I’m talking about Surchur, a site that gives you an one-page overview of results from different search engines and services like Delicious, Digg, Google News, Technorati, Flickr and Amazon. As the before mentioned names suggest, you can search through pages, news, pictures, video, and products.

It’s an easy-to-use meta search engine which is perfect for a quick news check-up about a certain subject. For example, when I started this article, I tested Surchur by looking up articles about the service itself. This gave me a neat overview of the bloggers – like Emily Chang – who had already shined their light on “the latest, the greatest”. When I hover over the results, a handy overlay pops up with some more information.

An improvement would be a browser plugin, so users don’t have to browse to Surchur before they can start searching. Another idea would be a suggestion box, so users can tip the team behind Surchur which search engine they miss. I for one, would like to see a Wikipedia and LinkedIn box. But first of all, let’s work on that design, shall we?

aggregate, metadata, metasearch engine, News, search, surchur

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The perfect lifestream is a simple one

Written on 22nd February 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

I recently started working on a personal blog, just to aggregate all my online content in one place. So let’s say that we meet for the first time and you want to know what I’m doing, I can just tell you to surf to one spot where all my work is presented.

During the designing process, I soon faced the problem of integrating all these services like Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Del.ico.us etcetera etcetera. How can I aggregate all those different types of content without turning my blog into widget paradise?

The answer turns out to be simple: use an escaloop badge. It’s nothing more than a feed aggregator that presents the content in a clean and simple way. Just like the visualization of the service:

Escaloop is a personal side project by German Yahoo coder Carlo Zottmann. I hope he supports his side project with a pretty solid server, since escaloop might get a bit more popular than he thought it would.

By the way, if this article brought you in a lifestream-state-of mind, check out this useful lifestream post on ReadWriteWeb.

aggregate, escaloop, germany, howto, lifestream, tool

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