echolot

Hey everone. I am moving. From Vox to Tumblr. Nothing more to say. Make sure to update your feeds. I am outta here.

My new home: http://echolot.tumblr.com

Thanks to Bijan for the tip. Have been a loyal follower of Nada Surf since their early records. They have the full new album "Lucky" available to stream on their MySpace profile. Favourite songs far: "Whose Authority" and " Beautiful Beat".

Paul (Hi Paul!), who started to blog about the same time that I did, moved from Vox to Typepad. Read his last post on Vox about his motivation (exceprt: "I will continue blogging there as VOX stinks and doesn't allow you to export your previous blog posts").

I feel kinda same about Vox. Initially, I thought it was a great service with the nice templates created by contributing users and the easy set-up, upload interface of media and the great name (Vox, like the world´s best guitar amps) etc. What I HATE: You have to have an account to post comments which really is a barrier of (entry) communication for a blog. That´s nothing new. Lotsa people think the same about that.

So I started another easy-to-use blogging platform with another slick interface: Tumblr. You can find me here.

Will switch between both of them. We´ll see. At Tumblr at least, I can import my Vox feed and enable cross-posting.

Thomas pointed that out on his Facebook profile: Blogmesite.com is a product of a french company called Ibernatus that (among other things) creates widgets for entertainment clients (record companies, bands, etc.) that are super easy to reblog or repost in your social network profile (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster). Just get the code and embed within your blog/site/profile. Really cool. Ibernatus looks like they´re the french PANORAMA3000, a similar Berlin-based new media agency specialized in solutions for the entertainment industry. Hobnox and PANORAMA3000 work together pretty close. Literally. They´re in the same building.

Here´s what it looks like:

You can also browse through their other ecards/widgets right in the thing.

Blogmesite

TV on Sunday´s sucks. It really does. Choose between a quiz show with z listers and a crappy german subbed Hollywood flick. Nope, won´t do it. Rather check the iTunes store for new releases or browse the MySpace music pages on the quest for some new songs or bands to like. And look what I found:

Matt Costa´s new record "Unfamiliar Faces" - just bought it on iTunes. Matt is on Jack´s label. Yes, the Johnson one. But this time no laid-back surfer/bonfire stuff. Rather poppy folk. I like.

From there I headed over to Spinner.com.  Really nice music site (though affiliated to AOL). They have a category I rss-feeded right away: MP3 Of The Day. Look what I found there:

The Presets: My People (D.I.M. Remix)
Caroline: All I Need (Owen Vallis Mix)
Mezzanine Owls: Snow Globe
Say Hi: Northwestern Girls
The Whigs: Right Hand On My Heart
Tyler Ramsey: Ships

Honorable mentions (unfortunately no full MP3´s anymore, therefor MySpace links):
Brooke Miller - World On A Whim (a more country-esque Rachael Yamagata)
Soft - Higher 
Yoav - Beautiful Lie
West Indian Girl - To Die In L.A.
InnerPartySystem - Don´t Stop

Thank you Sunday. You´ve been good to me. See you next week.

We just released the first of many features produced by KenFM and Joern Hendke (Ken Jebsen ist the Radio Fritz radio host and probably the fastest speaking radio host in Germany) on Sly-Fi.com called Gitta Spitta. Behind Gitta Spitta is a group of inmates of a Berlin juvenile penitentiary producing rap music. It´s a really interesting first piece with a profile of one of the group members. He´s 23 and has been in prison for 3 years. It´s true, authentic and honest.

Watch the first piece below or head over to Sly-Fi.com: (sorry to English speaking folks, it´s in German)

Currently reading Ronald Cohen´s new book "The Second Bounce of the Ball". Ronald is the founder of venture-capital and private-equity big shot Apax Partners (who has about $20 billion under management). Great read so far, gives me a boost of motivation in the process of fixing our market entry strategy. Not only an absolute must-read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship and VC/PE but also for people trying to figure out how to turn risk into opportunity as the subline of the title says. Thanks to my dad for the gift.

The Second Bounce of the Ball

Ronald Cohen

YEAH. Our developers in Cologne are awesome.

Be sure to nox yourself by creating your own E-Card here. Four different styles available: Pimp, Hippie, Girly and Metal.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of you. Hope to see you in best shape in 2008.

Peace out, yo.

Ecard

We´ve seen a bunch of web services offering live streaming appearing in 2007. Amongst them Justin.tv, Ustream, Kyte and Stickam to name just a few.

Techcrunch just announced a $15 million financing round for Kyte that included Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ and brings them to a total of $17,25 million in cash. Sounds impressive.

Looks like 2008 will be the live year in webbernet.

This was announced throughout the day on "Spiegel Online" (that I believe is the most read online news site in Germany): Live streaming of the Cologne show starring Jan Delay, a famous german funk singer.

I actually got the chance to check it out and I must say that the quality was great. Some hick-ups here and there but all in all pretty good sound and image/streaming quality. No full-screen option though. User interaction through a live chat. Seemed pretty busy in there, I am wondering how many people watched the show. Will update in case I get the figures.

The company behind this live stream is called Livedome GmbH who provide on-site production, billing platform and streaming technology. The company responsible for marketing is Wunder Media GmbH. They´re both located in Munich.

Here´s a screenshot of the stream:

Jan Delay Live