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.
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:
Compared to a lot (or more accurately - most) of german comedians and late night hosts, Stephen Colbert is a really funny guy. Over at Comedy Central they have a good bunch of video clips on demand. For free. No IP-mapping. One of the newest is embedded below. Favourite quote from that episode ("Hail to the cheese - Home State"):
"... on the "Plus" side, my body will stop to produce bright orange waste." - Stephen Colbert
Just had a really interesting chat with Max Niederhofer, Tech Analyst for Atlas Ventures in Munich. Max was the co-founder of myblog.de and seed investor for last.fm (acquired by CBS in 2007).
Max has pointed me to two interesting web services. Here is a quick round-up on two services that up until now I haven´t heard of.
First is Deezer (formely known as Blogmusik.com), a free music-on-demand service with a couple of hundreds of thousand songs available for free streaming. They´re business model is ad-based. The cool thing about Deezer is that you can create a embeddable widget for your site or blog with a playlist of songs you´ve chosen. Just typed in "Coldplay" and got over 50 Coldplay songs to stream for free. Cool thing that is. Deezer is based in France.
Second is Jaman. Jaman "is a destination for people to discover, enjoy and review movies from around the world. Jaman's Internet community is pioneering the social aspects of independent and international media."
Great to see a company that goes to independent film festivals like "Sundance" and offers an online distribution for 80% of the movies not picked up by the big distribution companies that solely aim to a mass audience in movie theatres.
What I don´t like: country restrictions. I mean c´mon people: The world has gone flat and internet is global. Do I have to wait for that specific movie to be released on DVD in Germany to see it?
About a year ago, I posted about not loving christmas songs. Still hate `em. What I do love: Stars from Montreal, Canada.
Missed the CitySlang/Cooperative Music showcase during Popkomm in Berlin, but luckily we got the chance to tape the show at Postbahnhof:
Here´s the show:
and the interview:
And here is the song I do prefer most right now
Spent the week-end in Prague with friends. Last time I visited was in 2004 and I already had a good impression of the city. This time was far better. Prague has become one of my favorite cities next to Barcelona and New York City. Such a lovely city with astonishing historical architecture and a good vibe. Managed to find two really really great restaurants thanks to local tips ("Cervena Tabulka" and "La Cartouche").
I´ve been a dedicated Firefox user for years now and haven´t had problems ever. Half a year ago, when I got my new MacBook Pro from work, I installed the Firefox 2.0 and had been using it until this week and I´m fed up. It kept crashing down several times a day. I am a heavy browser user and often have up to 6 to 10 tabs open. Seeing them crashing down makes my mood go down immediately. I googled the problem and read some blog posts about it. One post (I forgot where I found it) also mentioned that the Firefox 2.0 eats a huge amount of memory. I read a comment in the same post suggesting to use the Flock browser instead and I haven´t looked back since (well - that being just a couple of days) with no single crash.
Also - in it´s basic version, it has a great RSS reader installed that is much better than the one Firefox is offering it its plug-ins. And it has the "People side bar" where you can keep track of your Facebook profile and the one of your friends. Suggestion: add MySpace and I am a happy man.
Go Flock Go
Update: 14 minutes after posting it crashed using Google Maps. Dammit.
