Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 10th June 2009
16 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
The founders of Last.fm have resigned. In a blog post today Felix Miller, Richard Jones and Martin Stiksel announced that “After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins.”
Last.fm has had a rocky road to where it is today. Starting out as a music community site in 2002, it incorporated Richard Jones’ Audioscrobbler project for recording and charting users’ listening habits in 2005. The early days of the service were marred by regular database crashes and users lost listening data on several occasions. (more…)
Written on 24th March 2009
16 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Last.fm, the popular internet music social network, have announced they will be requesting users from outside the US, UK and Germany to begin paying for the service.
Users outside of those three countries will be required to pay a €3/month subscription fee, nothing that will be break the bank, but a price all the same.
The good news however is that the subscription is only for users who want to stream music from the site via their ‘radio’ service. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free for everyone.
The reasons aren’t clear, however international licensing fees appear to be the most obvious motive, already leading other startups such as Pandora abandoning the outside-of-US market. Although pleased, I am definitely intrigued as to how/why the UK and Germany have been excluded from the subscription model, especially considering YouTube’s recent move to block all music videos from YouTube UK.
Written on 11th March 2009
5 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Last.fm have released a neat little tool called Boffin which aims to turn the music on your computer into your own personal categorised radio station.
The desktop application scans your music collection and automatically categorises/tags that tracks based on Last.fm’s now established knowledge base.
Once it has completed the scanning which takes between 5-30 mins (depending on the size of your music collection) you’ll be able to select one or tags from your database of music and hit play. For example, you may be in the mood for a little chillout hiphop, so you select “hiphop” and “chillout” followed by “play” – pretty straight forward.
Last.fm have made clear that it “strictly a tech demo” so expect is to be very basic at the moment. However, I wonder whether this would have been better integrated into itunes itself so we could at least rate tracks for example.
What’s cool? Well, it works well and has already found tracks of mine that I love but didn’t know I had. I love the basic concept of being able to select multiple tags and it feels great to be able to be able pause tracks unlike Last.fm radio online (!). Also, using last.fm’s official desktop app – you are able to “love” tracks but there isn’t a built in “love” option in the app itself.
All in all, it’s a start and definitely gives you an decent alternative to iTunes “genius”.
You can download the application for mac or windows here.
Written on 9th March 2009
1 COMMENT
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Last.fm’s chief operating officer Spencer Hyman has left online music service Last.fm we have learned. Hyman joined in early 2006 where we has coordinated international business, ecommerce and advertising deals for the startup, now owned by CBS.
Hyman was previously MD in the UK for international venture capital firm Copan, also Retail Director for Amazon in Europe and Sales and Marketing Director for Hasbro Japan.
Hyman is also on the board of advisers of established startups such as LinkedIn.
There is no word on the motivation for the leave but we will update this once we have more information.
Written on 23rd February 2009
15 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Techcrunch posted a story on Friday claiming Last.fm ‘may’ have given the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) a stack of user data. “So?” you say. Well, the RIAA could technically detect which specific users had listened to unreleased tracks, with particular reference to the U2 upcoming album which has recently been leaked.
In response, a Last.fm spokesperson told Techcrunch that to their knowledge no data had been made available to the RIAA.
Richard Jones , a co-founder, then commented on the blog post saying:
I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.
Russ Garrett, a Last.fm systems architect also categorically denied the rumor in a Last.fm forum:
“I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it. Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I’m concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up.”
(more…)
Written on 21st December 2008
6 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The British tech scene is one of the most vibrant around. Although some companies, like Last.fm, have been facing difficulties – I keep seeing positive news coming from the United Kingdom. Here’s how I stay in touch with the geeky ladies and gents across the Canal.
1. Zee’s news flashes and updates
My co-editor Zee M. Kane reports from London daily about the ups and downs of his fellow Internet entrepreneurs. The concept of day and night seems irrelevant to him. Whenever something interesting happens – like a revolutionary new Twitter feature – he’s there to immortalize it on The Next Web.
// Read Zee’s articles
2. Mike Butcher’s in depth-analysis.
Ain’t no party like a party with Mike Butcher. Other than that, this former New Media Age magazine and The Industry Standard Europe editor never hesitates to provide some deep insights on the start-up activity of the Brits. If he must, Butcher even goes on Sky News. Whatever it takes to spread the tech word, Butcher will do it.
// Browse to TechCrunch UK
3. Watch Techfluff
It buzzed around in the Le Web venue. Supposedly, there was this cool British girl asking A-listers cheeky questions (She even dared to refer to Arrington’s buttocks – how brave is that?). Even my co-editor Boris was fascinated by this whirlwind blazing through one of Europe’s “hottest” conferences. Host Hermoine Way’s fame will probably go beyond Le Web, as her show is just plain fun to watch. Here’s episode three:
// Watch Techfluff
Written on 6th October 2008
1 COMMENT
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Do you like looking at photos? Who doesn’t? Especially when they are beautifully made! So far, browsing photos has been quite boring, no matter which photo website you chose. Most of them have a linear browsing style which isn’t fun if you just want to look at pictures (if you browse for other purposes, like finding pictures for your website or buying, then the linear style is more appropriate).
I’m guessing that many readers use StumbleUpon. It lets you browse websites in a random manner and leaves room for plenty of surprises. Last.fm offers the same type of service. People like surprises, right?
Introducing Photoree, the Stumbleupon for photos
Now the same concept is applied to photos by a service called Photoree. The Romanian service was launched in December 2007 and founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Racovitan (other services he established: Colegi.ro – the Romanian version of Classmates.com sold to Neogen.ro, Ghidoo.ro – a social bookmarking service like Reddit, Cafeneaua.com – an online discussion community). He’s one of the Romanian Internet pioneers creating several other services which were among the first in Romania at that time.
The service is bootstrapping so far and has several thousands users a day. But if it takes off more clearly then probably they should look for financing to grow it.
The photo selection
Photoree has a recommendation engine based upon your personal settings. Once you are registered you start rating pictures and the engine starts to learn your taste. It needs about 100 ratings before figuring what you like and don’t like and displays pictures accordingly.
At the time of this writing, it has over 1,000,000 pictures indexed in its database and most of them come from Flickr (using the Flickr API). Almost all are under a Creative Commons license so you could use them if you want. The owner plans to add other images repository sites like Zooomr, PicassaWeb, Devianart and maybe others as long as those sites offers an API.
Open up, please
One drawback of the service is that you can’t do anything unless you are registered. It would be better if they opened up a bit and let people explore without the need to register. They could also implement a cookie or session based recommendation system, which would eliminate the need for registration for that session. This could give a boost to their number of visitors. You know, it’s nice to get a sample of what you might buy..
The selected pictures are very beautiful (most seem to be HDR pictures which not everyone will like). I don’t know why, but during the period of time I had to rate 100 photos (you can’t escape that) only landscapes and women pictures were recommended to me. Is this a universal behavior of the service or the engine just guessed my taste :)? A look at the online forum proves that I was not the only one who was getting this selection.
Nudity can be turned off if you desire and I think they could serve more diversified genres, besides just landscapes and women (could become boring after a while).
Even a 100 votes is not enough
During the learning period the engine keeps notifying you about how many times you have voted (you can skip some photos but the pop-up notifier will show up after a while). After you vote 100 times these notifications hopefully will go away (Oops! Even after 100 votes that pop-up still didn’t go away ot at least to come less often).
I tried to turn off the nudes but it seemed not to work (I also unsuccessfully tried to change the Current Method of showing pictures). Maybe I still have to make up those 100 ratings so I can do whatever I want after that…this rating it’s a bit of a burden, I should be able to browse pictures without any conditions if I want that. After all, it should be fun to get surprises, right? They could have a Surprise Me! page with totally random pictures being shown. Another idea is to display the number of votes I have done in real time on the browsing page so I don’t have to view the Stats page or wait for the notifier to tell me. Now, I’m just thinking about usability. Other than that, the layout is simple and clean. You don’t get lost in tons of options.
The service has very crude social networking options (no profile pics, no personal details, no sharing with friends, no messaging). You can only add a user as a contact. Sometimes the loading can be slow (I don’t know if they use some kind of caching system but if not then they should – caching the next 5 images for example and that requires some kind of prediction calculation based on what the user voted so far).
Make it more viral
Overall, Photoree could be a good service, but it still need some more work to reach the status of StumbleUpon. I hope the developers will improve the site and make it more viral (send a picture or a bunch of pictures to a friend, send emails invites to friends using the address books from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, make it more social, etc). Otherwise, if they don’t move fast enough, somebody else with a better and faster execution could take their place.
Written on 26th August 2008
1 COMMENT
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 Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.
How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?
“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)
Written on 29th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Summer in the City by Joe Cocker, Coldplay’s Clocks, and Loser by Beck are essentially all purple songs, they’re just from different decades – according to Rockola.fm. This Spanish site gives the whole “music to suit your mood”-thing a new boost by combining several factors we’ve seen separately on other sites before. It combines the color factor from Guitarati, the year factor from Yamelo, and the similar artists factor from Last.fm.
So you start by clicking somewhere in the colorful circle, or by typing in your favorite artist. Your semi-personal radio station then starts blasting away. Don’t worry about making the wrong start, as you can always correct Rockola by giving a thumbs up or down for a certain song. Along the way, Rockola will learn about your taste. I personally hate it when an algorithm claims that it can determine what my music taste is, I don’t even know what I like myself. But hey, maybe this promise does work for you.
It’s recommended to sign up, as this gives you access to a tagging feature, unlimited listening time and a share option. Well, thank you but no thanks, Rockola is a fun way to explore new songs, but I don’t see it becoming my main source for new music. For that, I stay close to an old friend, owned by CBS.
Written on 23rd June 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When you’ve read the interview with Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard a couple of weeks ago, you know there’s a huge shift in music going on. The early adopters don’t download music anymore, but listen to it on the web. These Last.fm lunatics and MySpace maniacs all ask the same question: why would we wait for a download to finish? They want to listen right a way. In this changed music landscape, people also prefer a different, faster, and better way of sharing. Well guys, welcome SoundCloud.
Founders Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung
This Swedish/ German start-up allows you to share your own music with friends, fans, and possible fans – your could – and has made quite an effort to make this process as easy and intelligent as possible. No more cluttered emai boxes with large files, but a clean and good-looking place where your tracks are gathered. When you’ve used the – very smooth – uploading tool, you can publicize the music by using the embeddable player (there’s a Facebook button as well). Then, the fun part starts, at least, I hope it’s fun for you.
Your cloud can start fine tuning your music, literary, as it’s possible to put comments on a music time line. No more endless conversations about where that strange little sound is, just put a dot there. I think music fanatics have enough material here to have fun for at least a week.
Is it all sunshine at SoundCloud? Well, for the user, the answer is almost yes. There’s one thing though, I wonder whether your music library will be open. Can you download your tracks when you’ve accidentally lost your collection?
Apart from that, the main challenge for founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss seems to be the business model. How will these guys make money? The service is in private beta, and so far, I can’t discover any features that would grant these two Sweeds and their team any money. Though they probably will receive some high bills for data usage. I’m sure the angel founding they received in 2007 and 2008 will help to get them started, but I wonder how long they can cope with the – unavoidable – popularity.
However, they’ve got their corporate image, user interface, and killer app all pretty lined out, so I think I just have to trust these guys business instinct. Will you? Give it a shot and grab one of the fifty invites.
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 
