SoundCloud Reaches 10 Million Users
SoundCloud has just announced it has reached 10 million users. SoundCloud is a music startup currently in Berlin, but its roots lay in Sweden where its two co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are from. We've covered the music service in the past as well a couple of times and they've definitely been one of the more interesting startups in Europe in the recent months. Just a few weeks ago the company closed a, reportedly, $50 million finance round.
SoundCloud Scores A $50 Million Round
Soundcloud, the Berlin-based startup founded by Swedes Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, has reportedly received a $50 million investment led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers including participation by GGV Capital. TechCrunch has estimated the round to be around $50 million, but Soundcloud did not confirm the round size in their press release about the investment.
Visualize Your Music Online With APEXvj
APEXvj started off as Simo Santavirta's side project late last autumn. Being a lead web developer by profession at FWD Helsinki, Simo does realtime graphic coding as a passion. Experimenting once with sound spectrum data and Pixel Blender, he ended up creating the first prototype of APEXvj, a tool that visualizes music online. After connecting the service to SoundCloud through their API, Simo thought he's onto something and decided to develop the application further. With the help of a colleague and an Art Director Jani Länsimäki, the concept was clarified and the application got a visual identity. APEXvj was launched in December 2010.
Registrations Now Open For Arctic15
We've just opened registrations for Arctic15, both the startup competition as well as the tickets. While doing so, we've also announced our first speakers to the event. We'll be constantly updating the site during the run up to the event, so there are bound to me continuous announcements of new speakers and partners. We're very excited to be working on this and hope you will enjoy attending it!
Thinglink Partners With SoundCloud
Thinglink today announced that they have partnered with the Berlin based SoundCloud to enable embedding of sound files to images. Thinglink has grown its clientele over previous months and hired new people on board. At the same time, SoundCloud has become one of the most interesting music startups in Europe with its growing user base and service offering.
Thinglink's technology enables users to create more meaningful images. Thinglinked images are tagged with links and information a user is able to see when they hover their mouse over the image itself. The technology is in use by Finnish media companies such as Nelonen and Aller Media.
Week In Review: It Shall Be Released!
This week was all about the releases, new products, versions, and, er, some employees. Swedes-in-Berlin based startup SoundCloud launched their App Gallery, and we pronounced it good. Unfortunately, Sulake's release was in the form of 28 of their employees. Hopefully, when their Facebook application starts to take off, they can hire everyone back.
There were releases coming from the financial and government worlds this week too. The Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish Ministries' collaboration known as the Nordic Game Program awarded a total of 3,000,000DKK (400,000€, 4,200,000SEK, 3,300,000NOK, 73,000,000ISK) funding to 8 winners to develop innovative games. The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association released a manifesto demanding a tax exemption for startups that fund their operations from their own profits and are owned by the entrepreneurs themselves. Lastly, one of the very few investment banks left on the Earth, released a huge report on the future of the mobile internet, and we "filleted" it for you as best we could.
Finally, in a MUST SEE video for all European entrepreneurs, Mårten Mickos releases his hard won wisdom on challenges that are in the way of building world’s biggest anything
SoundCloud Launches App Gallery, Take Notes
Music and audio sharing service for artists, SoundCloud, today announced the launch of their App Gallery, "a nice home for all the apps using the SoundCloud API." In the process they are demonstrating how startups can develop thriving application ecosystems without the "get rich quick" motivation that drives many developers to create for that other app store.
We've all heard it before, at events, camps, or pitching sessions - to be really successful in the consumer web you have to be a platform. But how do startups, even a funded startup with a rapidly growing user base convince a critical mass of developers to spend their precious time coding for them? In particular, why does a handful of Swedish guys who moved their company to Berlin just because the parties are better, think they can build a dynamic App Gallery?
Spotify And SoundCloud Winning At The Europas
The Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, were held last night in London, UK. Nordic and Baltic countries had a rather strong representation among the nominated startups and consequentially took home no less than 5 out of 15 categories. But these five wins did not scatter around just any startups. Four out of the five were taken home by Spotify and the fifth one belonged to SoundCloud, which has also its roots in Sweden just as Spotify does.
So Sweden truly lead the Northern European pack and really were an example to the whole Europe: Spotify not only took home 5 wins, but more impressively won Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009, Best Startup Founder(s) and Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) as well as was given the The Europas Grand Prix award by the 19 expert advisors, which included some industry movers and shakers and which I had a privilege to be included in (consider this as my disclosure). SoundCloud on its part won the Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA).
Listen To Blogs - Blogs Turned Into Podcasts With Real Voices
Listen To Blogs is one of the online services created during the 24 Hours Business Camp held in January this year. The service was literally developed within 24 hours with no sleep by Henrik Berggren, David Kjelkerud and Eric Wahlforss. Listen To Blogs is today run by Henrik and David, Eric having the role of an advisor.
Both Eric and Henrik are part of the Soundcloud team, and so is ListenTo Blogs built on the SoundCloud API, using Google AppEngine and Twingly.
Listen To Blogs is exactly what its name suggests - a way for you to listen to your favourite blogs, as podcasts. You don't even have to have your own blog, you can just pick any of your favourite blogs and turn it into podcast using your own voice.
This is where Listen To Blogs differs from other similar services, it uses real voices, is crowdsourced and free. There are quite a few number of services offering conversion from text to speech, TTS, but so far I've only come across ones using variety of digital voices. PimpMyNews with a paid iPhone app is one of the popular ones, but to quote Mark Hopkins from Mashable, they're “fun for 10 minutes”.
SoundCloud Made The Big Dream A Reality
SoundCloud, a music and audio sharing service for artists, has been gaining momentum and rapidly growing their user base since the launch of the service last October. They have gone from 20,000 users to 100,000 users in a matter of six months.
Not only have they grown fast, they also just raised €2.5 million (roughly $3.3 million) in about 4 months. When we met SoundCloud at Le Web last December they were just starting to talk to VCs. Just last Thursday they signed the papers for the €2.5 million, which should give them a run way of roughly two years.
It also seems that SoundCloud is all the rage at The Next Web Conference and one of the hottest startups present based on the number of interviews co-founder Alex Ljung is doing. I talked to Alex at the venue about SoundCloud and the experience so far. He told me about the process of raising venture capital in the current economy, what they want to do with the money and how it all got started with SoundCloud sometime in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden.
SoundCloud In LeWeb
We interviewed Eric Wahlforss in LeWeb Paris about their startup SoundCloud. It's an interesting company and not your average music startup as they build tools for artists to share that music. SoundCloud has recently moved to Berlin from Sweden and the impact of that move is also covered in the video.
Check out the Cloudplayer here and follow the company in Twitter here.
