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News, insight and tips from the social web.
The Hoop blog covers the evolving digital landscape, social media, mobile communications, content marketing and also includes 5 top finds and Fish on Friday. Feel free to make comments.
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Startups of the week #18.1 »
The Internet has given the music industry a hard time. However, BandCamp look set to revolutionise the old ways of major label domination by putting the power in the hands of the artists.
1. BandCamp
The internet has changed music. No longer are our spending habits dictated by grumpy music journalists and overbearing major labels. Services such as MySpace allows users to find and stream bands for free, discovering new music every day if they wished.
However, to purchase music and merchandise you still had to succumb to the powers that be. iTunes did disrupt the music industry by demanding a one-price-for-every-song system, but ultimately it just became another music industry elite. BandCamp represents a change to the rules, giving power to the artists, with the ultimate winner being the fans.
Co-founder of Oddpost, later becoming Yahoo! Mail, Ethan Diamond set up BandCamp back in 2008. Since then, the company has added Automatic (the company behind Wordpress) CEO Toni Schneider to the board.
On BandCamp, musicians and independent record labels are in control as they can chose how much to charge. Of course, BandCamp take a cut but it is quite fair. At first, BandCamp will take 15% but as soon as you make anything over $5,000, it drops to 10%. There is also an option to allow users to name their price, which could be zero.
BandCamp stood out from the crowd in 2010 when quirky musician Amanda Palmer made $15,000 in 3 minutes from BandCamp sales alone. Since then, usage has grown and the site reported $1million in sales for December 2011.
With MySpace having become almost unusable and Facebook relying on streaming platform Spotify, BandCamp is giving musicians and fans the chance to cut out the middle man and benefit each other.
Categories: Startups of the week
Tags: e-commerce, Music
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Startups of the week #17.2 »
Opinions attract and divide. Discussing what we believe can turn strangers into life-long friends and vice versa. New social media platform Amen encourages users to put their opinions online.
1. Amen
Everyone has that friend that loves to make objective statements about subjective topics. "This app is the best time-waster ever", "the iPhone is the worst phone ever" and "The Hoop blog is the best blog ever." Of course, most of these statements are highly debatable (except for the Hoop one). It is this type of conversation that Amen want to encourage.
When on the app, you are faced with a stream of statements made by friends and other users about the best and worst of movies to music to reasons for lazy people to run (Zombies!). You can chose to agree with the statement with an "Amen" or you can disagree (Hell no!) and add a rebuttal. The statements are black and white but with enough users collaborating Amen is able to create a greater understanding of the grey area by aggregating opinions into lists.
"Amen is an app for creating and sharing opinions about the extraordinary things in life."
Having recently received $2.9million investment in Venture Rounding funding headed by Index Ventures - which includes one of Hollywood's most active investors, Ashton Kutcher - Amen asks users to post the best and worst of everything.
Amen is also packed with experience. CEO and co-founder Felix Petersen had previous success with his startup Plazes, which was sold to Nokia back in 2008. Joining him is Caitlin Winner (Plum, Nokia) and Florian Weber - a man sometimes referred to as Twitter's forgotten co-founder.
Officially, there is only an iPhone app [iOS] available for the network, but there is Amenoid, an unofficial Android client [Google Play]. Unfortunately, this has still not been enough encouragement for anyone other than app addicts to sign up. In fact, of the only two friends I found on Amen, one blogs for UBelly and the other Gizmondo.
Simply put: Amen is the best app with not enough people on it.
Categories: Startups of the week
Tags: conversations, Startup
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Startups of the week #17.1 »
Ironically, advances in digital technology have allowed people to make their photos look vintage using services such as Instagram. Now you can produce the same results for your videos with Viddy.
1. Viddy
After the Facebook buyout of Instagram for a cool $1billion, it has never been more popular to retro-fy your pictures. At the same time, the tech world are keeping their eyes glued on Zuckerberg's activity to spot another headline grabbing purchase - even though he said there wouldn't be one.
[Image from Forbes]
So when the Facebook CEO uploaded a video of his dog Beast on Viddy [iOS], the internet community became a lot more interested. However, Zuckerberg is not the first high profile name to be using the one-year-old video service with many celebrities having already signed up, including Snoop Dog, Bill Cosby and Linkin Park.
The company, started by JJ Aguhob and Brett O'Brian who worked together on XDrive and PluggedIn, has received $36million backing from investors, including GreyCroft Partners (Klout), Battery Ventures (Friendster, GroupOn) and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
Viddy is gaining huge popularity, and quickly. The service recently accumulated 5.5 million users in only 11 days, and added Shakira, Jay-Z and Will Smith to the list of aforementioned investors.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Alan Patricof of GreyCroft Partners seemed shocked by the growth of the app, currently boasting 26million users.
(Viddy is) growing so fast, I have to keep refreshing to get myself up to date. I could swear I spoke at some place a few weeks ago, we were at 4 million.
Viddy is incredibly similar to Instagram in many ways - part of the appeal of the service is its simple usability and ability to create stunning short videos. Of course, there is also the added feature of social networking, with users able to follow each other, 'love' people's videos and comment.
In fact, Viddy is so similar to Instragram that we can't help but wonder where the boundaries lie with intellectual property, especially with the word "lawsuit" becoming a digital buzzword. However, at the moment, Zuck doesn't seem to mind.
Categories: Startups of the week
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Startups of the week #16.1 »
While most social networking sites connect you to people you (might) know, CircleMe links you to new like-minded users and places, so you can rediscover yourself.
1. CircleMe
People you may know. People to follow. How many times have Facebook, Twitter and other social sites tried to connect you to more friends. Always more friends. It's as if you aren't using the platform properly unless you are constantly adding more people. The problem is that usually 'friends' are discovered through mutual connections and imported contact lists. While many people do find old friends this way, most of the time it is cluttered with people you definitely don't know or would rather not reconnect with.
So what defines friendship with others? Why do we like the people we do and why do we want to engage with them? More specifically, what defines us? What is it about our self that forms our personality and differentiates us from some, while attracting others. CircleMe believe that it is all down to what we like.
CircleMe was created by Cascaad, a company dedicated to making the social web more 'personal and relevant'. The 12 strong team based in Milan and London have currently raised $15.5million from Innogest Capital. The team includes founder Erik Lumer - who also co-founded Internet TV service BabelGum - and CEO of CircleMe Giuseppe D'Antionio, an ex-Googler and teacher of a digital communications class at the University of Milan.
By importing your 'likes' and information from Facebook, Netflix and FourSquare, CircleMe helps you connect with everything you like and, in turn, yourself. Your profile is not about what you say, who you know and what you look like but rather what you love. With this information, CircleMe can then point you to people with similar tastes to you, helping you discover new things to like, or 'Circle'.
You can also geolocate your Circles with the iPhone app [iTunes], showcasing where you like to read a certain book, listen to a favourite song or watch the best new movie. This also benefits the people who trust you as, when they pass that certain place, a 'Plant alert' will notify them that one of your Circles spots is near by.
We like the idea (geddit) but think the site is a bit complicated and note it doesn't have many users to date. However, with a bigger community, CircleMe could be the new way we discover everything we love.
Categories: Startups of the week
Tags: Facebook Likes, Social media
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Startups of the week #15.2 »
Digital communication tools like Skype, Facebook and Twitter allow us to communicate instantly across the world. However, a new iPhone app gives users the private platform to share messages between your loved one all day. It's like they aren't 10,000 miles away.
1. Pair
Even with the internet, long distance relationships are hard work. My partner - who is currently in Australia - and I have been apart for nearly five months. Because of the large time difference, Skype has been reduced to only an hour a day and Facebook chat proved to be pretty useless, especially when on the go. There were times when we felt completely detached from each other's lives. Then Pair hit the app store.
Pair is a new and private platform for couples, especially those in long distance relationships. With 50,000 downloads in its first week, it looks set to be one of the next top apps. This is amazing as it contains no potentially viral content, which other social networks thrive on. Pair is just two people sharing their lives with each other, and no one else.
We had a problem. We had just moved to Mountain View, but our girlfriends were still in Canada. We tried using text message, and Facebook to stay in touch, but we really felt like there should be a better way to stay in touch with our partners. We realized that we were sending over 90% of our messages to a single person using tools that were designed to send messages to everyone you know. There didn't seem to be a better way. So we made one :)
Currently only on iOS devices [iTunes], this intimate network allows a couple to leave videos, pictures, drawings and "thinking of you" nudges. When the couple are on the app at the same time, they can live draw together and "thumbkiss", a virtual intimate moment where matching thumbs prints will make your screen red and vibrate.
Created by developer Oleg Kostour, Pair has received investment from Path's Dave Morrin as well as founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington. We would consider that an incredibly smart investment, as the company is now worth around $10million dollars. Not bad for roughly three months work.
While it all may sound incredibly cheesy, Pair has proved to be so popular that even single people want in on the action, with PairMixer allowing users to 'pair-up' with other random singles. The fact is, people are going to post sappy messages on social networking sites... wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to see them.
Categories: Startups of the week
Tags: Mobile, Pair, Startup, Y Combinator
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Startups of the week #15.1 »
Facebook may have made birthday messages arbitrary but Swedish social gift app Wrapp aims to put the giving back into special events.
1. Wrapp
Thanks to Facebook, I never forget a birthday (except for when they briefly moved the events section). I have been able to wish people I haven't seen or spoken to in months, or even years, many happy returns. This convenience can spawn laziness and apathy, as saying happy birthday to a friend becomes a part of the daily routine. It has become even easier now you don't even have to leave your news feed to post on their timeline.
Happy Birthday (enter friend's name). Have a good one x
Happy Birthday (enter other friend's name). Wish I was with you x
These are just two of many templates of saying happy birthday to a friend. It's a nice thought but ultimately, it's just robotic and mechanical. Birthdays used to be about giving to a friend or loved one. It didn't even matter how much you spent, because it was the "thought that counts". Now, however, we don't even think when typing away at our friends wall.
This is all about to change as (free) social gift app, Wrapp, on iOS [iTunes] and Android [Google Play], allows you to post gift cards, many being free, to peoples Facebook walls which they can then redeem at the store using their smartphone, like a voucher. This means that for birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries or even just wanting to celebrate a loved one, you can specialise and give them something they can actually enjoy.
The Swedish company are currently having a lot of success, being a huge hit in their home country, the App has now launched in the UK and has received over $10million in backing [CrunchBase]. The first instalment was for $5.5million in Series A funding led by Atomico. The venture capital firm's backing, formed by Niklas Zennström, has led the Skype co-founder to join Wrapp's board of directors. He was later joined by LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, who became Wrapp's second investor, with $5million, through Greylock Partners.
However, there are more experts behind the scenes as well as the co-founders, which consist of Hjalmar Winbladh (Rebtel and SendIt) and Spotify founding CTO Andreas Ehn. This experience will be vital as the company gets ready to launch in the U.S, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Asia and more.
Not only is this exciting for social media users as they are able to share gifts with friends, using either the set amount from the voucher or adding more, it's particulary attractive for the companies themselves as Wrapp offers businesses a chance to engage with friend to friend marketing.
Categories: Startups of the week
Tags: e-commerce, facebook
