SoundCloud, the Berlin-based open platform for audio sharing on the web and mobile devices keeps making noise. During the past six months it’s grown from 1 Million to 2 Million users, having attracted both Snoop Dog and Justin Bieber as customers. To keep up with its fast growth in order to become the leader in audio hosting and sharing, as to establish its US presence and the San Francisco office, it needs more fuel to execute. The rumors of raising new funding ($10 Million) were confirmed today, and we can congratulate Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson and Index Ventures with Mike Volpi for joining the SoundCloud journey together with its prior investor Doughty Hanson Ventures.

I’ve been a fangirl of Soundcloud since its private beta, and long before Spotify Social came along, SoundCloud had been my home for music discovery. Citysounds.fm is still one of my favourite apps, perfect to discover new music from different cities. And now, with the new updated iPhone app, I finally get access to my SoundCloud favourite tracks list streaming nicely on the background. What. A. Relief.

Something tells me that my perfect world scenario, where I can check-in and discover the best food, music and places recommendations all in one isn’t that far away in the future…

Record Your Tunes, Sounds, Talks And Thoughts On The Fly

While doubling its user base, SoundCloud has also been busy developing its latest feature, The Record Button. With the new updated iPhone app with recording and instant upload and sharing features, SoundCloud makes sure you can easily capture and share any audio where ever you are. Like YouTube is for video. Alexander Ljung, Founder and CEO of SoundCloud, cleverly demoed the app in action at LeWeb’10. (Reminder: Just make sure you always have the latest update not to lose any precious sounds coming your way.)

Not an Apple fangirl or boy? There’s an Android app for you. When the new Mac App Store launched for two day ago, so did the SoundCloud Desktop app for Mac, placing itself as steady number 8 on the top 12 list.

With the Record button on both the desktop and mobile devices, SoundCloud now takes the leap into the space of audio sharing platforms such as Audioboo and Cinch, a service frequently used by Robert Scoble when interviewing people.

API Is The New Marketing and Product Development Model

Besides from being one of my favourite startup entrepreneurs, Eric Wahlforss, Co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud, is also a person I enjoy to listen on stage. I had the pleasure of moderating Eric’s session “SoundCloud’s API Learnings“ at Disruptive Code developer conference back in September. With over 100 third party developer apps, Eric and his team have a deep understanding on how to empower, as the value of being empowered by, third party developers. It’s no co-incidence that Music Hack Day unconferences were started by SoundCloud. If you’re running or building service online, this is the presentation you can NOT afford to pass in order to understand why open API is the future model of marketing, product development and should be part of your core business.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

In the era of social networking and democratization of the web, connecting with ones customers and audience on an emotional level is becoming ever so important and crucial for businesses.

Using video for digital storytelling has shown to be effective, but it has been, and still is, a bit of a mystery land and non-option to many companies due to high prizing and technically advanced solutions, combined with the requirements on high video quality.

23 Video from Denmark, Europe, or as Robert Scoble puts it,” the country that nobody visits!”, has just finished its international launch tour with a mission to make own videosites accessible to everyone. Everyone should have one, and everyone should be able to afford one. With over 200 running websites and paying customers, 23 Video is now going global offering 100 partners in 15 different countries.

23 Video has already been called for the WordPress for video by the tech savvy media, allowing one to get started by swiping a credit card, choosing a design and a domain name. With a self funded team of ten, 23 Video is taking up the fight against competitors like Brightcove and Ooyala, who combined are good for $145 Million in funding.

Case Study in Building Product and Launching Internationally

Moreover, 23 Video is a great case study on how to build a product and launch internationally in a very competitive landscape.

1. Solving real problems: Listen and Learn

Get early adopters and customers and work together with them to get feedback. Go hunting for feedback. Show your product to everyone you think might benefit from it. Listen, digest, and focus.

When I first met with the co-founders Steffen Tiedemann Christensen and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal for a year ago, they were doing a feedback demo tour in Stockholm. I remember writing:

“23 Video is determined to kill that mumbo jumbo and difficulties surrounding setting up ones own web-tv channel”

One quick look at the feature list tells that it’s exactly what the team’s been busy with during the past year.

The team have been breaking down every possible barrier to entry there is for a small business to get started with online video. How about features like one price and no limitations, or as to quote Thomas:

“Why have limits, we believe in empowering instead of limiting users”.

The list continues with all the goodies like HTML5, API, distribution across all platforms, SEO friendly, own ad serving (partnership with Videoplaza), and access control in case you’d be into paywall solutions, to name a few.

2. Build your fanbase

I can not stress this enough: Involve people early on in your product. You will need ambassadors to help with feedback on the product development, spreading the word and making those important connections and recommendations. For example, do a feedback tour like 23 Video did.

3. Educate

To disrupt an industry and behavioral habits is normally a long process and never simply done just by introducing a new technology. Sure, both luck, timing and a great product is needed, but foremost, it’s about hard work educating and enabling both the customers, and their customers.

23 Video has been working with tutorials, workshops, as securing and educating partners to fully utilize the product. How easy the platform and tools might be, one still needs help and inspiration to produce the content.

4. 100% Human

23 Video is all about the people, for the people.

“23 Video is just a tool: it takes humans to make the most of it. Instead of automated responses, you will have your very own contact person to help you out.”

Many companies today are struggling to humanize their brands to be able to meet the increasing customer demands regarding transparency in customer service and company communication.

5. Launch with help from your fans

Everyone can throw a launch party: hire the works, invite “important” industry people, potential customers and press (no guarantee for show up), but as at most of the times, it’ll end up being yet another launch party soon to be forgotten, without having created none whatsoever connection or relationship with the brand itself.

Or, you can launch in smaller scale, inviting few special people recommended by your fans and trusted peers to create something that sticks. Instead of spending lots of money on eyeballs, spend time with people. 23 Video did that by having team of four doing informal launch dinners in San Francisco, London, Hamburg and Stockholm, finishing back at home in Copenhagen. Be creative. Be a person and socialize.

Watch Robert Scoble’s in depth interview with co-founders Thomas and Steffen of  23 Video.

More reading on digital storytelling on Bub.blicio.us.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

If you’re at the South By Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival this year and you haven’t had a chance to swing by the Circus Mashimus lounge, I suggest you do. It was a smash hit at last year’s SXSWi and I’m happy to see Mashery CEO Oren Michels and team are back at this year’s SXSWi.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is not only a great place to grab free coffee in the morning while you check your email, and then beer and popcorn in the afternoon; but it’s the place to be to talk mashups and visit with the Mashery team and its customers and sponsors to learn how to get more from your data by opening it up to developers.

Mashery offers customers a flexible, secure and effective way to manage their application programming interface (API) programs. Offering developers open APIs is an ongoing process from performance and security to registration and provisioning, so having a way to manage it all is critical to the success of an API developer program. And nowadays it’s all about the apps and giving information to customers in new and creative ways, and in the manner and places that they want it, so having an efficient API management platform, such as Mashery, can greatly contribute to the success of an API developer program.

Mashery has an impressive list of customers from Best Buy, Netflix and Etsy to CafePress, among many others. Best Buy, with its Best Buy Remix, and CafePress are sponsors of this year’s Circus Mashimus lounge, so swing by and grab a coffee or beer (depending on time of day) and check out the cool mashups being created by developers and how it’s all managed easily through Mashery.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is open from 9:30AM-6:00PM through tomorrow and is located on the first floor in room three near the Screenburn Arcade in the Austin Convention Center where SXSW is being held.

And check out Bubblicious Reporter Alison McNeill interviews with Oren Michels and Best Buy’s Michele Azar from last year’s Circus Mashimus at SXSWi 2009.

SXSW: Interview with Best Buy’s Michele Azar

SXSW: Interview with Mashery CEO Oren Michels

Twitter released a new Terms of Service today. You probably got an email about it, and they covered it – in brief – over on the Twitter blog.

The basics are just that you own your own tweets, although Twitter can republish them (since that is their purpose), they’ve left the door open for advertising, spam is bad, and there are specific guidelines for use of the API. The summary from their blog is

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.

SPAM—Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we’ve been operating under for some time.

The two things that stand out to me are that I have ownership of my tweets, which heads off the whole Facebook TOS Privacy fiasco, and that Twitter is leaving the “door open” for advertising. By doing this, they’re allowing themselves to take their time deciding what advertising/sponsorship option works best for them.

What are your thoughts on the new TOS?

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Yesterday, Biz Stone announced on the official Twitter blog a new initiative called Project Retweet. Like many Twitter conventions before it, retweeting has become a popular, user-created way to share tweets across tweetstreams. Twitter has decided to integrate retweet functionality into the application itself.

It’s not ready yet. In fact, first was the announcement and the release of a draft API to developers. Twitter wants to get everyone on board and work out kinks. Soon, it will be rolled out to a select number of users, and after testing, a site-wide roll-out.

The biggest difference is in appearance. It’s not a small change – in fact, I think it will take many users a bit to adjust to it. The new feature shows the original tweets in their entirety on the timeline of anyone following the retweeter, whether or not they’re following the original author.  I know, that’s confusing.

Let’s say that I’m following @briansolis and you’re not. You are following me, however. If I retweet one of @briansolis’s tweets, you’ll see HIS tweet in your timeline. Underneath that retweet, it will say retweeted by @writetechnology so you’ll know it’s a retweet. Retweeting will be an option you can turn off in your Twitter setting.  Here is a screenshot of the entire process.

You may also notice that there is a Retweet section in the sidebar. I’m not clear on whether that displays what I’ve retweeted, or my own tweets that got retweeted.  Regardless, this is a fundamental difference in how Twitter operates.

The retweeting will include

• Hovering over a tweet will give you options of Retweet or Reply
• Retweeted items appear as original tweets followed by a small link (Retweeted by @writetechnology)

I’m not completely sold on how this operates yet. Perhaps it’s because applications such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck have such simple ways to retweet. I sort of feel like Twitter is overcomplicating something easy. Sure, I don’t want to have to cut and paste to retweet, like I do on Twitter.com, but I don’t have to do that in most of the third-party applications out there. The apps do it for me.

Additionally, this method of retweeting disallows the ability to comment directly within the retweet. Sure, you don’t get to comment much, but you can still make some sort of commentary.

What are your thoughts on the potential retweeting changes coming to Twitter? How do you think this will affect third-party developers, many whom already integrate a different method of retweeting?

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

And in the News-That’s-Not-Twitter stack, we’ve got some interesting stuff. Top of the list is that DocStoc has come rushing out of the Beta gates. DocStoc first launched at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September 2007 and has since raised $4 million from several different investors. With the shedding of the Beta tag, they’ve also added a new look and some new features.

New Look
DocStoc now has a full-time content editor whose sole job is to make the front page look rather awesome and timely. The new page has a blog-type feel to it and includes that day’s featured documents and links to outside news sources.

DocCash

You can now make money from all those documents that you upload. Docstoc has partnered with Google Adsense to create DocCash.  Now when you upload documents to Docstoc, you can share 50/50 in the revenue whenever someone clicks on one of the Google Ads on your documents.  DocStoc allows you to associate your current AdSense account with your DocStoc profile and the DocCash program is completely opt-in.

API Release
And rounding out the new features, DocStoc has now publicly released their API. If you’re a developer, you can now access the data on DocStoc for your apps, including access to the document library, proprietary previewing technology, and search results. Some pretty cool apps could be built. DocStoc sent along a list of some of their partners, which include PR Wire and the intriguing Firefox plug-in MashLogic.

This is all great news for DocStoc. Of course, as document sharing gets more popular, they’ll run into the same copyright issues as everything else. I read a NY Times article the other day where several famous sci-fi authors were upset at finding their works on Scrib’d, a similar document sharing service. Hopefully that full-time content editor can also police the copyrights. It will be interesting to see where that road takes us in the next few years.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo we caught up with ooVoo, a company that enables people to connect, collaborate and communicate in real-time through online video. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Tom Herman, VP of product marketing at ooVoo, about their core products and their new open API that allows developers to build customized applications and widgets for use within the ooVoo platform.

ooVoo enables people to have video chats with up to six people on camera and another six people by audio, as well as screen-sharing capabilities. ooVoo competes against more established players such as Logitech’s SightSpeed, and is an alternative for businesses who cannot afford the higher end solutions such as Cisco’s TelePresence.

Developers interested in building a video app on the ooVoo platform should participate in ooVoo’s developer contest where he or she can win $2,500 by building a creative video widget and embedding it on their personal or company site. Video is a powerful medium and it’s one more way to communicate with readers, viewers, customers, partners, colleagues, etc. Check out our interview with ooVoo:

In addition to ooVoo, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed yesterday’s video, watch our highlight reel and stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with MindTouch.