soundtrckr

Géosociaux 101

French film & music site lesinrocks.com does a nice overview of geosocial apps for mobile devices. Included are soundtrckr, foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Tweetsii, Gypsii, Toodalu and Plyce. 

(iffy English translation via Google Translate available here).

 

Final 10!

From an initial field of 250 startups, soundtrckr has been chosen as 1 of 10 finalists for the Mobile Premier Award in Innovation! 

As we mentioned last week, the MPAs are taking place during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the award ceremony will be held on February 15 at the Petit Palau of the Palau de la Música Catalana. CEO Daniele Calabrese and COO Ken Manning will be on hand to present soundtrckr to the judges and the public, and in the meantime you can check out what all the finalists are up to on this fun Twitter List. For direct updates from the MPA organizers, check out their Facebook Fan Page.    

We're honored to have made it to the finals, and hope to see you there!

Soundtrckr Nominated for MPA in Innovation!

Soundtrckr has been nominated for the 2010 Mobile Premier Award in Innovation! 

The MPAs are a big deal-- they're the world's largest and most prestigious competition for mobile sector startups, and their media partners include trendsetting giants like TechCrunch and Mashable. All nominees for the Innovation Award are selected by local chapters of the Mobile Monday network, so we're honored and excited to be recognized by our peers.

 

Equally exciting is that the MPAs are taking place at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a massive international event expecting over 50,000 attendees. 

Everything starts on February 15, in Spain, with all of the culture, food, nightlife, and general Mediterranean seaside ambiance that this entails.  

 

Until then, and as always, you can download the soundtrckr iPhone app here. 

primo in italiano, y ahora en español

Soundtrckr's journey through the Romance languages is proceeding apace with a quick shout-out from the good people at Seetio. Here's the whole page translated via Google, and here's our in-house intuitive edit thereof:

With soundtrckr, you can geotag the music you're listening to at any given time so that people passing through the same places can listen in on the same tunes. You can share your favorite music with your friends or with everyone, or check out what people are listening to in the area where you are. You can also create your own little "virtual radio station" where people can enjoy your favorite songs. It's a new twist to the ability to share music via mobile phone, which we love. [Seetio]

Thanks Seetio!

In other news, happy New Year! We will probably be making lots of Prince stations to prepare, and wish you all a relaxing and refreshing/quiet and contemplative/heedlessly debauched 2010 depending on how you get down.

Cheers to all!

Wired, Locational Awareness, The Law

Soundtrckr got a great write-up in Wired this week! The article, by Eliot Van Buskirk, shows us a little love and makes some salient points about the exploding mobile/geosocial marketplace:

The internet removed a sense of place from our lives by connecting people and content from everywhere, but location-aware smartphones are changing that by affixing tweets, pictures, business listings — and now songs — to specific real-world locations.

An exciting new iPhone app by Soundtrckr mashes maps and internet radio, letting listeners geotag stations and songs, and listen to other users’ stations based on location. It’s a simple yet powerful concept, which allows you to see what your neighbors (or people anywhere) are listening to, tune in, leave comments and become friends. [Wired]

There's also a couple paragraphs on the vagaries of music licensing law as it relates to on-demand versus streaming services. There are massive legal and financial distinctions here, all of which should be kept in mind when considering the changing landscape of the digital music market.

...internet radio services are relatively doing well because they enjoy far lower per-song royalty rates than on-demand music services — they’re closer to a radio than an encyclopedic iPod, so they pay less. (The difference between the two types of service is why, when people say Spotify will compete with Pandora, they have no idea what they’re talking about.) [Wired]

And when you start thinking about international expansion, these issues get even weirder. The fragmentation of the music market into national silos necessitates the renegotiation of licenses for each individual country where a company wants to do business. This is a major hurdle for socially-inclined music services, as it limits the sharing of content across borders and hinders the creation of a truly global user community.

In any event, with so many web-based music services being acquired by major media companies, it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out during 2010.

"Global Map of Social Web" from TrendStream

Adam Ostrow at Mashable shared a delectable infographic from TrendStream today. Besides being all pretty, it offers some surprising insights on Chinese digital internalism, Japanese early-adopterism, and the Twitter hype-to-reality ratio.

social media as a tool for peace

Despite their ominously Orwellian name, the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab is doing a very happy thing. Their Peace Dot Initiative uses new media technology as a tool for building peace, aggregating resources that facilitate friendship, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing across cultures. And while this seems a bit vague and blue-skied at first, their idea for how to do it is kind of neat:

The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com. At that page orgs share their work. At Stanford, we gather Peace Dot pages into a directory.                                                                                                                     -Peace Dot Initiative

This is a pleasantly decentralized way of doing things, particularly because it frees up participating organizations to tailor their contributions to the work they do best (plus allows them to design from their existing page and aesthetics). Thus, social networks like Facebook can highlight, graph, and encourage connections between people from seemingly oppositional backgrounds; non-profits like Khan Academy can distribute free educational videos to the kids who need them; and communities like SourceForge can collaborate on design and software solutions for a more livable world. All Stanford has to do is put them in one place and apply some useful filtration features.

A cool idea, and good to see. Whether it's crowdsourced diplomacy, geolocation apps, augmented reality, or location-based games, it's increasingly clear that digital media has crossed that last, long bridge back to the real world.