David Noël’s Posterous

gtmcknight:

Texts From Last Night iPhone app is pretty sweet. (App Store Link)

This is like a drunk anonymous version of Twitter. And it’s fun. One more reason for me to get an iPhone. The list keeps growing.

Click here to download:

N3rhgmilRr24oez0dlhdvbJRo1.mp3 (6303 KB)

travors:

The Boy with the Arab Strap - Belle & Sebastian.

I’ve always found it difficult to get into the rest of their stuff but this song got me out of bed every morning one particularly grim winter.

Oh yes, thanks Travor.

Click here to download:

hojOXwhnqr237gvpvJPrfG4po1.mp3 (2765 KB)

Elliott Smith - Between The Bars

Missed Elliott Smith’ birthday last week. He would’ve turned 40 years six days ago. Below is a video of Metric’s recent version of the track (via Amanda):

Photo via Wikipedia

http://itsthemusic.tv/

New episodes of your favorite music shows everyday.

Tesla to open a store in Munich, Germany. It will be interesting to observe how they adapt to the German market.

They will either go the Jason Calacanis way and look for deep-pocketed Munich hipsters and sell roadsters only.

Or they could also introduce more grounded models that attract a wider demographic. Either way, interesting.

Photo via MontyMetzger’s Twitpic

Yesterday was my first offical day at SoundCloud. For the last couple of weeks, I was more or less in stealth-mode but already tapped into the depth of the technology and ongoing tasks several days a week. Now, it’s official.

I met Eric and Alex little over a year ago when they were getting ready to launch the first beta version of SoundCloud. While becoming friends, I’ve always admired the way, speed and focus they had in order to bring SoundCloud to where it is today. Many say it’s one of the hottest startups in Germany and Europe and I strongly agree. Here’s why:

Product & Brand

People love the brand, users love the product and many already pay for the service. It’s growing fast, we just passed 200.000 active users on Monday with loads of new users signing up every day. And this is only 10 months after official launch.

Execution & Team

The team (now up to 10 employees) has managed ‘to do a lot with less’, as Alex put it during an interview yesterday. At SoundCloud, everyone’s a maker rather than a talker. When you start, you just jump into the water and that’s how you learn to swim. There were no long all-hands introduction meetings or briefings but rather quick coordination talks, short Q&A’s followed by fast decisions and everyone’s back to work. There’s a great culture of togetherness, much laugther and it truly is a fun place to be. Every morning, for the first two or so hours, Matas puts up classical music for everyone to have a smooth start into the day.

Vision & Leadership

Flickr or YouTube for Audio, anyone? That’s right. SoundCloud is working hard on becoming the leading platform for music and audio in the world. Think of it as a control room for an artist, producer, label or blogger to receive, collaborate and distribute music across the web, the ground zero for a musician to get his work out there. Already, users and developers have found so many different creative ways to use SoundCloud and I’m excited to see what applications will be built on the API in the future. With developers around the world being the fuel to engines of many platforms, the future of our very own platform looks bright.

Alex & Eric are great leaders and are obsessed with the quality, functionality, ease-of-use and overall design of the product as much as user & customer satisfaction. To paraphrase one of Netflix’ company values I posted yesterday, both Alex & Eric inspire others with their thirst for excellence.

In this video announcing the deal between Amazon and Zappos, Jeff Bezos mentioned one thing that got stuck in my mind and that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. According to Jeff, the following is one of the major reasons for Amazon’s (and Zappos’ for that matter) success:

Obsess over customers

This is where my role comes in. As the ‘SoundCloud Evangelist’, my overall task will be to guarantee the highest possible user & customer satisfaction. While managing the day-to-day operations of Help/Contact/Support requests as well as engaging our users in our forums, my main goal will be to embrace the most important actors of SoundCloud: our users. Because simply put, that’s who we’re building SoundCloud for. There will be numerous ways we will do that, ranging from direct conversations to offline meetups and hopfully turn them into evangelists and product ambassadors too.

I’ve had the chance to work through a massive backlog of pro(-user) feedback in the past few days and you can’t believe how much fun it was to read all the praise, suggestions and constuctive criticism we’ve received.

Of course my tasks will also include the entire social aspect of our communication, code for Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, community management, our blog and whatnot, you know them all.

I believe that what makes a good evangelist is not the amount of followers or updates one has on Twitter or friends on Facebook, but rather how much time he/she spends being in contact and actually listening and reacting to the main currency a web service has: its users.

In the following weeks, we will define a strategy on how we will leverage the feedback and input gathered from co-workers, users (pro and non-pro), customers, bloggers, pundits & press for future product developments to be able to maintain the highest level of innovation needed to keep everyone smiling and at the same time shape the company’s success. If you’d like to be part of that, see my contact details below and get in touch.

I’m excited about this new challenge and are super-happy to be part of such a kick-ass team.

Get in touch: david@soundcloud.com, steaner on SoundCloud or @David on Twitter