Written on June 23, 2008 – 12:11 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the past few months, I’ve seen a specific start-up keep popping up: SecondBrain. It promised me to aggregate all my content in order to organize life 2.0. “Yeah yeah”, I thought, “Seen it, been there, done that - never worked for me”. So my attention went to one of the other twenty start-ups that are brought under my attention on a daily basis.
But last week, I received an invite from another blogger and Boris sent me a press release about the beta 2 launch of SecondBrain. So I decided to give SecondBrain a second chance (quite a corny line, uh?). Turns out that I might actually use this service. Why? Well, it does a really good job synchronizing the majority of the Web 2.0 services - from Flickr to Digg and from Wordpress to Google Docs - ALL your content in stored in one huge media library. For some reason, this gives me a safe feeling. I have it all stored in one place, like a giant bookcase with my photo albums, video tapes, books, articles, and lots of uh.. bookmarks.
Apart from the safe feeling, in the end - that’s just personal, there are more advantages, particularly in the field of organizing:
- SecondBrain generates one tag cloud for all your online stuff.
- You can create collections, regardless of file types. This is easy for reference.
- There’s a rather solid search engine.
Founder Lars Teigen has told Mashable that SecondBrain focuses on organizing your content first, after that, they’ll add the unavoidable social layers. The new features of Beta 2 prove his point: the navigation has improved, you now have 1GB for personal file uploads and, ok, there’s a share function.
Personally, I don’t need a social touch to SecondBrain. For that purpose, I use the services with which SB is synchronizing. I just want to look up all my saved content about my favorite band, hobby, or travel destination - just like a real bookshelf.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 23, 2008 – 10:31 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When you’ve read the interview with Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard a couple of weeks ago, you know there’s a huge shift in music going on. The early adopters don’t download music anymore, but listen to it on the web. These Last.fm lunatics and MySpace maniacs all ask the same question: why would we wait for a download to finish? They want to listen right a way. In this changed music landscape, people also prefer a different, faster, and better way of sharing. Well guys, welcome SoundCloud.
Founders Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung
This Swedish/ German start-up allows you to share your own music with friends, fans, and possible fans - your could - and has made quite an effort to make this process as easy and intelligent as possible. No more cluttered emai boxes with large files, but a clean and good-looking place where your tracks are gathered. When you’ve used the - very smooth - uploading tool, you can publicize the music by using the embeddable player (there’s a Facebook button as well). Then, the fun part starts, at least, I hope it’s fun for you.
Your cloud can start fine tuning your music, literary, as it’s possible to put comments on a music time line. No more endless conversations about where that strange little sound is, just put a dot there. I think music fanatics have enough material here to have fun for at least a week.
Is it all sunshine at SoundCloud? Well, for the user, the answer is almost yes. There’s one thing though, I wonder whether your music library will be open. Can you download your tracks when you’ve accidentally lost your collection?
Apart from that, the main challenge for founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss seems to be the business model. How will these guys make money? The service is in private beta, and so far, I can’t discover any features that would grant these two Sweeds and their team any money. Though they probably will receive some high bills for data usage. I’m sure the angel founding they received in 2007 and 2008 will help to get them started, but I wonder how long they can cope with the - unavoidable - popularity.
However, they’ve got their corporate image, user interface, and killer app all pretty lined out, so I think I just have to trust these guys business instinct. Will you? Give it a shot and grab one of the fifty invites.
Written on May 28, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swedish start-up Squace has introduced a new way of browsing the internet on your mobile. They’ve developed a service that allows users to browse without typing. Instead of a list of headlines, Squace shows a grid of little squares.
Each square is linked to a Web service such as a newsfeed, web site, game or widget. When you hover over one of these squares, a pop-up revealing the connected content and share feature appears. With a click, users open a new page with the desired content. According to the founder, Aage Reerslev, it’s a “game-changer”.
He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.
Although the statistics are impressive, I’m not totally feeling this new way of browsing yet. Especially when it comes to news, I prefer to see a list of headlines. It’s quicker for me to scroll to list like this than to hover over a dozen squares. Yet the sharing function does gets me excited. With a few clicks, my friends receive the content I want to show them. Also, I can easily bookmark interesting pages. But of all of this is only worth it if my friends join. How can I lure them into the world of Squace? Maybe they would come and check it out if I could put a widget with my shared Squace items on my blog. Solutions like these will help Squace to become viral. There’s your new top priority, Squace team.
Written on April 21, 2008 – 8:39 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Our white suits work. Alex Pachikov walked up to me a few minutes ago, asking what the overdressing was about. I’m glad he did, as he’s the director of Evernote, a promising start-up that made me enthusiastic the second Alex showed it on my Mac. The uber-stylish and modern design expresses what the service is about: creating a visual notebook to memorize anything you stumbled on.
Alex Pachikov from Evernote.com
You can do that by downloading their desktop and mobile app. Make a picture or a screenshot and sync it with the website - where you can look up the notebook. You can then use it as one big library of things to remember, but I think Evernote also functions perfectly as some sort of mood board. I used to have an ‘Inspiration’ album in iPhoto, yet Evernote will definitely replace this. Especially as your notebook is available off line as well.
Also digging the idea already? It’s getting better. Since we’re at an altsearchengines meeting, there must be some link with searching here. Well, there is, and not just a mediocre one. You can search within the notebooks as it recognizes text in images. Even handwriting! For example, when I search for San Francisco in my notebook, Evernote finds a screenshot of a Google map I’ve made and highlights the terms:
They don’t offer any syncing with other services like Twitter yet, but Alex told me they will soon start working on some API magic. Although he did tell me that Evernote isn’t that much about sharing and more like a personal service: “It’s your second memory”, he said.
Well here’s some good news for you: we have fifty private beta invites for your memory! Digg this post, leave a comment and I’ll personally email you a link to the sign-up page of Evernote.
Written on February 25, 2008 – 2:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Hey you, new review service Blippr asks you something:
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gosh, it’s really annoying I can’t organize all the media I’ve encountered over my brief years on this little planet known as Earth…”?
I know I did, I even started a blog once to write short reviews about all the cultural stuff I had done. After three reviews, the blog died a silent dead. Now the time has come for me to reconsider whether I want to organize my media or not. This time with an awfully-named new service.
Blippr has another advantage compared to the blog, since it also allows users to recommend each other new music, films and other types of media by either writing short reviews or rating them. ‘Not another social network!’, I hear you say, and it’s exactly what I thought. But the founders of Blippr claim that it will function within the context of your social network. You know the deal: Facebook apps and all.
However, we’ll have to wait a while, since the service is still in private beta. They’ll launch the sharing tools when they go in to a public beta. It will look something like this:
![the grand tour: discover - blippr [beta]](http://img.skitch.com/20080225-nkjhespij1anfxc9mwpxgjfp4a.jpg)
I must admit, I’m writing this article on the basis of their well-designed tour. I’ll definitely give it a shot when it’s in public beta, so I can start organizing my media again. They offer me three lists:
- My sphere: every time I ‘blip’ - or dig for that matter - something, it goes on this list. So this is basically my archive.
- My queue:
Paul David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, will love this, since it’s a list to keep track of media you want to see, hear or read in the near future.
- Wish list (or: Blippr’s money machine): show Blippr the money! Their business model is of course generating money through sending people to Amazon to buy all the media their friends recommend. I can put the stuff I want to buy on this list, which makes it also a useful list for my friends during the holiday season.
One thing though, my friends have to be on Blippr then. That’s the danger of starting a service like this, it only gets interesting as soon as the people you like are on it as well. My advice for the guys of Blippr, you’d better start thinking about how you gonna make this service at least as viral as NotchUp.
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