Interview with Soundcloud’s Alexander Ljung: How streaming, apps & APIs made our year
midemblog caught up with Soundcloud’s co-founder Alexander Ljung at Paris’ internet conference LeWeb in December 2011, to assess the year when the audio startup reached 9 million users. He answered the following questions: – How was 2011 for Soundcloud? – How many users do you have now & are you profitable yet? – Streaming has gone… mainstream in 2011. Are you thinking “we were right all along”? – Do you have a favourite Soundcloud artist success story from 2011? – As an open API advocate, how do you react to developments like OpenEMI? Ljung notably commented that Soundcloud as a platform now has 250 applications, including an automatic transcription with a service called SpeakerText, or simple music distribution via Tunecore. Though he wouldn’t single out specific artist success stories in principle, Ljung admitted to being impressed by cases of artists taking advantage of the internet as “a bi-directional medium…” so you can have things like artists like Imogen Heap or 50 Cents asking their fans to contribute to their music. Soundcloud will once again be strongly present at midem 2012, with Dave Haynes, the company’s VP of bizdev, co-organising the second midem hack day. More on tech at midem here: www.midem.com
Categories: MIDEM Tags: Alexander, APIs, apps, Interview, Ljung, made, Soundcloud's, Streaming, Year
Kermode Uncut: My Top Five Films of the Year
www.bbc.co.uk/markkermode. Hard to believe it’s a year already but here’s my list of the very best films of 2010 that you can count on one hand.
Categories: The French Riviera Tags: each, Fashionable, festaviles, film, French, held, Resort, Riviera, Year
Kremlyovskaya vodka celebrates FTV’s 10th Year Anniversary
Fashion TV Presents Kremlyovskaya vodka VIP Party to celebrate FTV’s 10th Year Anniversary during the MIPTV, Cannes Arpil 2007
Categories: MIPTV Tags: 10th, anniversary, Celebrates, FTV's, Kremlyovskaya, vodka, Year
Kermode Uncut: Cannes 2010 Day 4 – So what’s good this year?
On a diet of about four films per day including Mike Leigh’s Another Year, Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, the cultish possessed car tyre movie Rubber, Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Talll Dark Stranger, and Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom, I can’t argue that most food groups aren’t being served this year, but who is looking like Chef of the Cannes kitchen at the halfway point?