Written on 15th April 2009
0 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Swedish/German startup SoundCloud is a service dedicated to helping music professionals share music online.
We covered the company whilst in private beta in June of last year, the site has since generated a fair bit of buzz and with almost 100,000 registered users it looks like they’ve got something going for them. Today comes news of a €2.3 million round of investment courtesy of Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and according to TechCrunch, the deal also involves Stefan Tirtey of Doughty Hanson joining the company’s board of directors.
At it’s core, the site is a social network of Music professionals, from musicians to producers right through to label executives. The backbone of the service however is it’s music sharing capabilities, providing a slick and simple way to share audio amongst members and keep track of who has listened to what.
Amongst many useful features, users with access rights can leave comments attached to specific parts of a song. Songs and playlists can also be made public and embedded in websites as you can see below.
A fabulous creation sampled from Twitter client sounds, this is a fun and funky track called TwitterTronic. It’s a musical creation of @aerostart and @ourielohayon and it’s rumoured to be a feature of The Next Web Conference coming up in Amsterdam in just over 2 weeks time, with its many twitter-inspired conference format and interaction innovations.
The Next Web talks with Tim Bray at Future of Web Apps, London. Tim gives us some tips for the tough times ahead. He knows that even if he’s wrong, we should listen.
I was kicking off my daily late-night feed reading as usual, by firing up Netvibes and opening up a bunch of blogs in new tabs, when a computer voice started reading a post from ReadWriteWeb out loud. Besides scaring the hell out of me, it took a while before I realized that the audio snippet actually came from this post on Center Networks and not RWW.
The article teaches us that Swiss-based Dixero has just raised 1,5 million euros for their feed-to-audio conversion technology, bringing their total funding to 3 million euros. Allen Stern from CN embedded a conversion as an example, which started playing automatically. So my first advice for the company if they want to put their fresh funding to good use: loose the autoplay feature, and loose it fast. Having said that, let’s take a look at what Dixero does.
Based in Zürich, Switzerland, Dixero enables you to aggregate your favorite RSS feeds into channels and ‘vocalize’ them, so you can actually listen to blog posts while you’re busy doing other stuff, or download them as podcasts for when you’re on the road (it works on both computers as mobile devices). There’s also some pre-defined channels users can tune into, e.g. the Technology Channel.
Dixero lets you choose between different voices (one male, two female) and lets you categorize blogs into multiple channels. There’s of course also a social component, which lets you share audio clips with your friends easily.
The current voices sound a bit creepy to me, much like HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (”Would you like to play a game of chess?“), and I know it’s a service that I won’t be using myself because I don’t see any added value that would improve my blog consuming experience in any way. But the voices are being worked on, according to the company, and who knows if I’m missing something here that you find incredibly useful for you. If that’s the case, be my guest in the comments and explain why you dig Dixero.
You might have read about this on Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch UK: Hobnox, a Germany-based start-up that aims to become the next big thing for people in the creative industries. It’s an online music and video platform where users can watch, connect, collaborate and create. Co-founder David Noël sent me an invite so I decided to give it a shot, as his plans sounded very ambitious. What struck me the most when testing the service were the über cool flash-based audio and video Noxtools. I’ve made a screen shot of the audio Noxtool to give you an idea:
Once you’ve figured this tool out it’s possible to upload your masterworks to a personal library. You can then create a playlist that you can publish to the stage for everyone to see. There are also three Channels which are maintained by Hobnox’s own editorial team and streamed in high quality. This team is screening the work of the community to find some hidden talent.
It’s an original concept, yet I’m afraid it’s not original enough to function as a closed platform. To me it sounds like MySpace on steroids. The only part of the service I haven’t seen on the web so far are the super sophisticated Noxtools that bring the music and video editing to the browser. Therefore, the guys from Hobnox should work on integration with other services. I don’t feel like starting another blog, I’d rather import one. Same goes for pictures (Flickr), movies (YouTube), songs (MySpace), and calendar (Upcoming). If you want to show your ‘old work’ on Hobnox you’ll have to upload it all over again, or link to it from your blog.
I’ve e-mailed David to ask whether this will change or not. He replied: “Good point. We plan to add API’s to sync with other services but they haven’t been created yet. We’re still working down the list of features. Users can simply upload their content into a Hobnox profile.”
They’d better hurry, since David also told me Hobnox will launch a rather impressive marketing campaign this summer, aiming it UK, US and main-land Europe. “We will start a contest in the early summer with which contestants can win a 25K€ artist development package. We are also looking for other means of directly approaching creative people. Bar camps, trade fairs, events etcetera, all centered around music, film, and culture.”
Hobnox is one of the coolest start-ups I’ve seen lately – the design, high quality Web Tv and Noxtools certainly make an impression. If they take the walls of their garden down, I’m sure they can attract the creative crowd they’re aiming for.
Written on 15th April 2009
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Swedish/German startup SoundCloud is a service dedicated to helping music professionals share music online.
Written on 30th March 2009
Written on 28th July 2008
I was kicking off my daily late-night feed reading as usual, by firing up Netvibes and opening up a bunch of blogs in new tabs, when a computer voice started reading a post from ReadWriteWeb out loud. Besides scaring the hell out of me, it took a while before I realized that the audio snippet actually came from 
e between different voices (
Written on 7th May 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
