Posts Tagged ‘soundcloud’

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Facebook to Set Final IPO Price Later Today (CNN Money)
Facebook’s long road to an initial public offering is coming to an end. Late Thursday, it will fill in one last piece of the puzzle: Its final IPO price. Mashable On Wednesday, Facebook announced that an extra 84 million shares will be added to its stock pool for sale. The extra shares will come entirely from insiders and early investors, according to the AP. Reuters But investors who want Facebook shares when the No. 1 online social network goes public later this week may have lost the opportunity. TD Ameritrade and Fidelity’s brokerage arm both stopped accepting orders of Facebook shares as of Tuesday evening, according to representatives for each of the companies. CNET Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who is simultaneously becoming one of the richer and more reviled people around, wants to set the record straight. Saverin, who is now a citizen of Singapore after renouncing his U.S. citizenship, said his decision has nothing to do with taxes. Forbes All eyes are on Facebook this week in the lead-up to the social network’s initial public offering, but Google did all it could to steal back a little bit of glory on Wednesday. One of the biggest pieces of news was the search company’s addition of “Knowledge Graph” to its core product, a way to find answers without ever clicking a link and leaving the search results page. Read more

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Facebook is Getting its Own App Store for All Devices, All Platforms, All Prices (VentureBeat)
Facebook is launching a new App Center, “a place to find social web, desktop, and mobile apps” — and not just Facebook apps. The App Center will bring Facebook’s 900 million users all the best in iOS apps, Android apps, web apps, mobile web apps and even desktops apps. Facebook Developer Blog Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps. This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com. CNET The challenge, for a platform like Facebook, is that it has to build a store on top of other existing stores. It is especially tricky to build on top of the Apple App store, which remains the only legitimate channel for users to get apps onto iOS devices. AllThingsD Ironically, on Wednesday, the company submitted another amendment to its S-1 filing to the SEC, further outlining its weaknesses in the mobile realm. The company’s daily active users has grown fast over the past year. But the corresponding number of ads delivered isn’t matching the pace of the daily-active-user growth. CNN Money Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg won’t be the only one collecting billions from Facebook’s initial public offering: Uncle Sam and the state of California are also poised to cash in big. Tax collectors will be taking a giant bite out of the paper millions that thousands of Facebook employees will soon gain. The average tax hit: $1.1 million per employee. Read more

SoundCloud co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung announced in a webcast today that the community for musicians and other sound creators is testing a new Web app that mimics the collecting and sharing functions of Pinterest and Tumblr, but with sound. “And it’s gorgeous!” he said.

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Facebook Offers Rollout Begins, Delivers Local Deals Direct to Your News Feed (The Verge)
The system allows local businesses to use their Facebook pages to promote themselves direct to their customers, sending freebies and promotions straight to users’ news feeds. Gizmodo Following the huge success of services like Groupon and LivingSocial, it was only a matter of time before Facebook got into the business of deals. AllFacebook If anything, the greater novelty isn’t the rollout of offers, but rather the acquisition of Tagtile. Inside Facebook According to Tagtile’s website, its service “helps local businesses identify and engage their customers to increase revenue.” Read more

When a social network draws people from all over the world to one destination, someone has to be waiting on the other end to shape millions of users into a unified community. Enter the community manager. In a recent interview, SoundCloud community evangelist David Noël explained what a community manager does, how to give an online community a presence in the real world, and when to get the other departments involved in the process.

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We’ve covered Instagram plenty of times as the service has improved and won awards over the last few months — its quality filters combined with dead simple interfaces make it one of the best photo apps around.  Well, at the 2011 Music Hack Day Boston conference, Johannes Wagener and Katharina Birkenbach combined it with SoundCloud to create StoryWheel, and it’s pretty cool.

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SoundCloud, a platform for recording and sharing music online, has just completed a round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from GGV Capital.  The dollar amount was undisclosed, but according to the press release, the funds were raised to allow for further expansion and scaling for mobile and international markets. TechCrunch believes the amount is $50 million and that “SoundCloud’s founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are gunning to do what YouTube did in video, but for audio.”

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Even though the rest of the web has moved on from Myspace the site is still the go-to network for a great many musicians, maintaining relevancy with bands that use it to easily track fans, set up (and publicize shows) and host music, photos and news in a single place. The problem is that, as so many superior social networks have been set up, Myspace has become dated and lost its appeal for the general public. A new service, the recently launched Headliner.fm looks to reinvent music-based social networking by streamlining Myspace’s best ideas and combining these with great, original features.

The premise of Headliner.fm is simple: help artists get in touch with each other so they can more easily form networks and share fans. While this sounds like it shouldn’t be anything revolutionary, as someone who plays in a band, it’s an extremely welcome tool that should, if properly advertised, become a mainstay for indie artists seeking to promote their work.

Headliner comes equipped with many useful features. The meat and potatoes of the service — getting an artist heard by networking with similar musicians — is handled through integrated linking to social mainstays like Twitter, Facebook and, yes, Myspace. By taking advantage of a Hootsuite-styled posting system, Headliner users are able to queue up news and releases, allowing for timely promotional announcements of shows, fresh material and more. Artists have to approve of one another’s posts as well, meaning that it’s in the best interest of Headliner.fm members to filter out unnecessary, spammish messaging in order to keep their profile attractive enough for potential listeners to pay continued attention to.

The entire system runs on the virtual currency of “Band Bucks”, a kind of points system that rewards interconnecting with others. Band Bucks are earned by helping to promote other artists and can be spent on asking others to spread a message in turn. This system is a simple but intelligent way to keep the whole network under control while providing ample reward for artists who invest time and energy in getting the most out of the service. Combined with in-depth analytics that allow users to monitor how their music is being received (for instance, checking the number of times their songs have been re-posted on Facebook walls), handled through a deal between Headliner and SoundCloud, the site seems to have thought of most everything that aspiring artists could want from a new social network.

Such a sound foundation makes Headliner.fm well worth paying attention to for both casual audiences and musicians. The ability to so easily discover and/or network with similar acts while simultaneously promoting music is something that hasn’t been properly offered by another social network to date — and this may be all that Headliner needs in order to become popular. We’ll have to wait and see how the site develops over the coming months in order to really say whether or not it’s a success (initial user figures look promising) but, if nothing else, the concept and execution is exciting enough to already deserve praise.

Check out Headliner.fm at its official site for more information or visit the company’s Vimeo page for a quick demo reel of the service in action.

Tumblr has traditionally had a problem with MP3 embeds: you could only do one at a time.  Thanks to a new partnership with SoundCloud, that’s changed.
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