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!

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…)!

After what was perhaps the most intense coding sprint (or marathon) I’ve ever been part of, Henrik, David and I launched Listen To Blogs about 5 minutes before the deadline of the absolutely great 24 hour business camp event yesterday. The idea came from Henrik, who wanted a way of listening to blogs in podcast format that didn’t have anything to do with dull text-to-speech.

The solution is a crowd-sourcing site where anybody can upload a podcast version of any blog post. You can use the platform to upload audio versions of your own blog post, or simply try your reading skills by recording an audio version of your favorite blog. On the site you can then tune in to the podcast feeds from any blog on the web. This is me reading “Our Desire for Backchannels” from this blog, for example.

To build this site in 24 hours we used no less than two clouds (AWS and Google) and three great services (Twingly for blog metadata, SoundCloud for audio hosting, App engine for application hosting). It’s pretty mind-boggling to think about the amount of computers involved in making all this work so smoothly. And what does it cost? $10 for a domain…

You can read more about the project here and vote for us in the 24HBC competition here.

I’ve been writing earlier on this blog about how music is moving to the cloud. Here’s something on that note: Henrik and I have spent the last few weekends building an iTunes-like music player that runs in the browser (currently not in IE) and uses the SoundCloud API as its music source.

The Cloud Player let’s you save playlists to your Google Account, and you can share them with your friends as well. Here’s a playlist with some electronic favorites of mine.

The Cloud Player is built on jQuery, SoundManager 2 and Google App Engine, and it’s open-source and forkable on Github.

UPDATE: We’re on Ajaxian.com!

I’m proud that I actually spoke german throughout the whole music panel I attended in Hamburg recently. Here’s some video proof.

PSFK präsentiert: checkdisout #1 Music is Okay?! from Matthias Weber on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Here’s the whole panel on Vimeo

I’m travelling a bit these days. Last week London (AWS event slides), this week SIME (We won a price!), and next week there’s a music panel in Hamburg which I think could be very interesting (Here’s a pre-panel interview).

I’m currently in London meeting labels, startups and music people. Yesterday I did a short presentation on SoundCloud at AWS startup event where I talked a little bit about our infrastructure also. On request, here are the slides: