Think, Eric, Think!

I clearly remember my first contact with Wired. It was when my father bought me an issue for my 15th birthday back in ‘94. I remember the smell and the colors as it happened only yesterday. I even remember which issue it was–“The Spew Issue”. Back then I didn’t understand much of what I read actually–this was a new world opening up. The colorful, mesmerizing world of California tech-hippie culture…

Ever since then I’ve come to love Wired, and I try to read at least the main pieces of every issue.
And today, almost 15 years later, I’m excited to say that things have come full circle and we are in the online edition with SoundCloud! (And we’re in the current printed issue as well, in another article…)

So thanks Wired for all the inspiration over the years and for a great piece on SoundCloud today!

Via Henrik

Jyri showed me a new “search engine” that just got out of private beta, called Wolfram|Alpha. I put “search engine” in quotation marks because it’s actually much more than that. It’s really clever natural language parsing combined with a reasoning engine that seems very powerful. The goal of Wolfram|Alpha is to make all the world’s knowledge not only searchable but also computable. Quite a formidable challenge, but only seeing these first steps makes me think this could be possible.
Check this screencast if you don’t believe me…

This is a pretty big deal.

Seriously, we need better filters!

I’m really happy for all the good press we’ve gotten already on our first larger round of funding. Here’s Dave, our man in London, delivering a quite concise description of what we do and where we’re going for Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies:

Dave from Soundcloud from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

P.S. Also please vote for us for over at the Webby Awards!

A couple of days ago we had two of the coolest New York based music startups–The Hype Machine and 8tracks–guest working at our office. Moot from 4chan snapped this great picture (we’re all trying hard to form the shape of the SoundCloud logo…)!

(A late April Fool’s joke by Opera)

Web developers, rejoice! Keep it up now MS and add my rounded corners in the next release, you can still restore harmony to the universe!!