Social audio sharing service SoundCloud is announcing its “next” version of the service during a press event in San Francisco. We last told you about the company when it hit 10M users in January of this year.

The new version of the site, dubbed the “Next” is in private beta starting today.

SoundCloud allows anyone to upload audio of any type, including music or messages to share with your friends or family. You might be familiar with the service if you’ve ever listened to our Daily Dose series, as it’s our player of choice.

The service calls itself the “leading sound platform in the world” and it’s growing at a rate of 1.5M users a month. SoundCloud currently has 15M users, including celebrities like Snoop Dogg and John Mayer.

The company says that it wants to “Unmute the Web”, by making the recording of the sounds in daily lives as simple as possible. Its users tell SoundCloud that they want more sounds and features, and the company is dedicated to doing just that.

Here’s what you can expect from “Next”:

- Redesigned profiles
- More sharing options, including “Re-posts”
- Real-time notifications
- Continuous play, so you can explore the site and still listen
- Sets, so you can create lists of sounds to keep for yourself or share
- Revamped “personal navigation search with real-time indexing”

“See More. Share More. Hear More. Find More.” is the tagline for SoundCloud Next.

This site is a complete overhaul, and performs very “app-like”. It’s also blazingly fast to navigate using keyboard shortcuts.

Seeing a demo of how powerful the “Re-post” option is, I can tell you that sounds on the service are going to go super viral faster. It’s very similar to a retweet on Twitter, or a re-post on Tumblr.

The service should be available to everyone within the next few weeks. The decision to launch “Next” at such an early iteration is because SoundCloud wants to get as much feedback as it can from its dedicated users.

You can request early access by visiting: http://next.soundcloud.com

Alexander Ljung (founder/CEO) and Eric Wahlforss (founder/CTO) fielded some questions and I asked them how influential mobile devices were in the re-creation of the SoundCloud site. Both said that the tablet browsing experience and the ease of recording voice on a mobile device were a big part of what has gone into Next.

If you’ve tried to use your iPhone for tethering using “unconventional” means, meaning that you don’t want to pay your service provider extra fees, you’ve found that it’s nearly impossible without jailbreaking your device.

Once in a while an app sneaks onto the App Store for tethering, usually disguised as a “random number generator” app. Without fail, Apple gets hip to the app and removes it from the store.

One of the apps that got the heave-ho treatment from Apple was iTether, created by the folks at Tether.com. The company provides tethering apps for Android and Blackberry users, and have announced its re-entrance into the iPhone (and iPad) world today. Here’s what Tether’s CEO Tim Burke had to say:

It was clear from our initial application iTether, there was enormous demand within the iPhone ecosystem. It was unfortunate that Apple decided to remove our application, only 20 hours after we launched. However, this caused us to innovate. Our underlying patent-pending technology behind Tether for iPhone is unlike anything on the market.

The underlying technology that Burke references is a web-based application built completely in HTML5.

Here’s a video of the app in action:

The cost for the service is $15 for the first year and $30 for every year after that. That’s a pretty small cost compared to what AT&T will charge you for tethering.

I’ve not personally heard of anyone losing service for tethering, but you could quickly become one of the 5% of users who get throttled on AT&T’s network for excessive usage.

So much has been said about HTML5 and the new innovations that surround it. For a lot of people, it signals an end to Flash and a time where all browsers will finally follow Web standards (I’m talking IE). For others, it’s a new tool to play with that empowers browsers and re-imagines the possibilities of Web apps.

Of course, all of these claims can’t happen with HTML5 alone. You’ll need CSS3, JavaScript and plenty of other technologies to make these ideas a reality (plus talent), but I’m fine with HTML5 getting the spotlight.

If you’re like me and eager to get in on all the hot, standards compliant action, you’re going to need to know where to start. The following links are for everyone from beginner to expert, and should shed some light on the subject of HTML5 and the innovation and talent that is starting to surround it:

HTML5 Boilerplate 3.0

We just wrote about HTML5 Boilerplate earlier today, and it’s worth a second mention. It’s a wonderful learning tool as long as you realize that what you see isn’t required, but recommended.

➤  HTML5 Boilerplate 3.0

Chrome Experiments

Chrome’s set of experiments that test the browser’s limits are very well-known, but continuously impressive. They should give you a starting point as to why so many developer communities are embracing this quickly evolving technology.

➤  Chrome Experiments

Mozilla Hacks

Mozilla Hacks is Mozilla’s own Chrome Experiments for Firefox. It highlights the “leading edge stuff that people are doing with Firefox and the open Web.”

➤  Mozilla Hacks

IE Testdrive & Blog

IE has come a long way since the days of IE6. I’m proud to say that the possibly most hated browser of all time (by developers) is now highly embracing emerging standards and has invested heavily in the likes of HTML5.

IE has and will continue to have a massive marketshare, so it is certainly worth taking a peek at what the team is working on!

➤  IE Testdrive and IE Blog

HTML5 Rocks

HTML5 Rocks features an awesome set of tutorials and resources for HTML5 as an emerging platform. “Whether you’re a mobile web developer, an enterprise with specific business needs, or a serious game dev looking to explore the web as a new platform, HTML5 has something for you!”

➤  HTML5 Rocks

HTML5 Please

HTML5 and CSS3 have come a long way, but many important features are still risky to use — that is, they aren’t supported by all browsers. So if you’re eager to take advantage of the shiny new toys available to you, you’ll need to know which elements and styles are fair game, and which will cause a catastrophic mess. This is a problem, HTML5 Please tries to resolve.

➤  HTML5 Please

W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

➤  W3C – HTML5

HTML5 Doctor

HTML5 Doctor features an impressive and clean element index. It’s a highly useful, quick reference of elements that are new or have been redefined in HTML5

➤  HTML5 Doctor

Move The Web Forward

“You love web standards. You want to give back to the community. Curious about where to start? We’re here to help.”

➤  Move The Web Forward

For more on HTML5, check out TNW’s Design + Dev Channel!

Thanks to HTML5 bundled with either CSS3 or Javascript, developers are starting to put more of their code on the client-side rather than making people install plugins like Adobe’s Flash does. However, according to the infographic below from gaming site One More Level, not all popular game makers are making the jump yet.

Why you ask? Most likely it’s because HTML5 is currently only supported by 40% of web browsers, while Flash is supported by 99% of them. Even though HTML5 provides an increase in performance for gamers and requires fewer CPU cycles, it’s not quite “there” yet.

Popular Facebook game creator Zynga is tinkering around with both technologies, with its most popular game Cityville available in Flash, and its second most popular game available on HTML5 and Flash. It looks like the company is doing a bit of A/B testing and seeing how users react. Companies who are eying a move to HTML5 will do so because of the cross-platform capabilities of HTML5 as well as support for mobile. You can’t play a Flash game on an iOS device though, remember?

You can find a full size version here.

Created by: One More Level

You can view it in its full glory here, and marvel at the zero image, 3,395 lines of CSS and 335 lines of Javascript version of the iPhone 4.

You can even click the home button, slide to unlock it, and shut it off with the power button.

The fact that all of the features of the phone and design of the icons were done without use of images is astonishing, and impressive. Well done!

I met with one of Tudou’s founders, Marc van der Chijs, now CEO of Spil Games Asia, for coffee and a chat in Spil’s offices in a converted warehouse beside Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek.  Originally from the Netherlands, Marc first came to China in 1999 as a senior controller for Daimler-Benz’ China operations. He left Daimler-Benz soon after to work as an independent consultant.  Marc was unable to discuss Tudou’s upcoming IPO during our meeting because of the public filing.

Instead, our chat focused on Spil Games and the issues that all web startups have with monetizing their sites. We also discussed Marc’s work as an Angel Investor, with Shanghai based technology startups.

Spil Games

Spil Games are one of the world’s leading online gaming companies with 47 websites running fully localised content in 19 languages and serving over 4000 games to upwards of 130 million unique visitors per month. Their games target web and mobile users. Marc explained that, while most of their existing games use Adobe Flash they are now creating their games in HTML 5 to enable them to reach the broadest possible audience and allow them to run on Apple iOS devices reaching a significant proportion of the mobile market. He can envisage a time when HTML 5 takes over as the predominant platform for web and mobile gaming.   Spil are actively promoting the technology with others  by a HTML5 game jam that they organized together with Google in both Hilversum and Mountain View.  So far, most of their titles are single player but, with the rise in social gaming, especially on the mobile platforms, they are finding their output in those genres increasing.

I asked Marc the question on the minds of all web startup developers, how do you monetize your sites? Marc responded, that, at Spil Games, with 130 million visitors per month, advertising revenue is clearly a significant income generator, however, there are many users who ignore advertising, or indeed, don’t even see it. The real growth in monetization is in micropayments and advertising within games. Many game fans, once hooked, are willing to make a small payment for a level up or to buy some item within a game. Micropayments for in-game upgrades are not yet the largest income generator for online games but it is a growing slice of the pie and could soon overtake banner advertising as an income source.

The trick, of course, with all web content, is to “keep it fresh” that means update daily and, for games sites, introduce at least one new game every week. Otherwise, your readership and members are not going return.

Angel Investing

I first came to know of Marc van der Chijs through his Twitter account @chijs. On his twitter profile he describes himself as an “Angel Investor” I wasn’t entirely sure of the distinction between angel investors and venture capitalists so I asked Marc to clarify for me. The distinction as very simple, Venture Capitalists are usually companies where Angel Investors are typically people who may not have as much to invest. However, the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, especially with the emergence of Super Angels, Angel investors who have larger amounts of money to invest.

Marc continued, that he focused his investments on local Shanghainese technology startups but that he had reduced his investment activity recently, mainly because there were simply too many companies approaching him, but, also because many local startups are focusing on the Chinese market only instead of taking a broader global perspective.

One local startup that Marc has invested in that he does believe can have a global impact, although he was quick to point out that he is also a co-founder, is unitedstyles.com, a personalized kids online fashion site that will go live (in beta) on November 15th.