The Next Web

Best useless iPhone app ever: sound-recording RjDj

Written on October 12, 2008 – 3:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

So it’s Sunday, but that doesn’t mean much for Internet entrepreneurs. Just like Jason Calacanis wants, we spend too much time in our office. But there’s room for fun too. Just now, for example, Robert Gaal showed me the coolest useless iPhone app ever, RjDj.

This iPhone gimmick records sounds from your environment with the iPhone headset mic and remixes them in a playback loop, randomly adding delay, echo effects, and taking certain parts of it.

Involuntary MC’s

I went outside with if for a bit and walked a couple of blocks. Listening to the music the RjDj app produced which was a completely different experience that the regular iPod one. The street noises became part of the music I was listening too, which sometimes can be simply amazing. I’m telling you, a Spanish tourist scared the hell out of me by talking a bit too loud. An ordinary pedestrian turns into an involuntary MC.

(warning: this can cause weird situations, as I started to walk really close to other pedestrians to record their conversations)

There’s a free version with only one “scene” (which isn’t too good compared with the others). The $3 version has six “scenes”, of which the “Loopinger” is my absolute favorite.

Here’s six-minute video demonstration

Where’s the hype?

It actually surprises me that there hasn’t been a RjDj hype, as everybody here in the office is absolutely raving about after the first experience. Yet if you look at this Technorati chart, you’ll notice a buzz is absent. Let’s see if we can get something started here (don’t forget to stumble)

Posts that contain RjDJ per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I hope you like that post!

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iphone, iphone apps, Jason Calacanis, rjdj, robert gaal

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Social software service Wakoopa gets second financial injection

Written on June 2, 2008 – 10:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The guys from our sponsor Wakoopa had a great weekend. Beers, champagne and euphoric tweets dominated the last couple of days for CEO Robert Gaal, CTO Wouter Broekhof, and senior developer Menno van der Sman. How come?

Wouter, Robert, Gert-Jan Bennen (DCIF), Coen from HenQ, Menno & Barend van den Brande (BBV)

Well, these three fellas traveled to Rotterdam last Friday to sign an incredible stack of papers with Big Bang Ventures and HENQ Invest who gave Wakoopa a second financial boost. The Wakoopians will use this money for attracting a Ruby developer, interface designer, desktop developer and some international partners for further expansion.

It has been a year now since Wouter and Robert started their social software service which can be best described as the Last.fm for software. They’ve attracted 30.000 somewhat geeky early adopters and tracked 250 million hours of their software usage. That valuable data says a lot about the future of software, so it isn’t that surprising that Belgium Big Bang Ventures and Dutch Henq Invest have funded Wakoopa.

big bang ventures, funding, henq invest, menno van der sman, robert gaal, wakoopa, wouter broekhof

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