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Now that its beautiful outside we’ll (Cloudbrain) be trying to spend some time hanging out on the Downtown mall hardly working working hard. Come find us. If the weather is nice, we’ll be Enoteca around 3pm (look for the laptops…). And: http://www.bostogo.com/fritops
We are looking to hire a Marketing Director. The primary responsibility of this role will be the marketing, advertising and promotion of our FixTunes product, though the position will be involved in developing marketing strategy for other products. If you know a talented, brilliant, creative person that loves marketing and wants to work for a fun Internet company in Charlottesville, send them our way. Job Description
We recently released a completely re-written Bostogo with the tag line “An Away Message For Your Phone”. Pretty much everything has been re-written and is brand-spankin-new. It is now even easier to find and “follow” friends, keep people up to date with what you are doing, update your current location and see who is hanging out where. Bostogo Groups have a lot of new features and you can even follow your favorite websites from within Bostogo. Check it out.
One of the original reasons behind creating CurbPlaces was due to the poor quality of other “big” Internet real estate websites. Most of them tend to ignore Charlottesville completely or have pretty poor search results when it comes to our area. Check out the difference between these two maps of the same area on CurbPlaces and Yahoo Real Estate. One driving principle of CurbPlaces is that you can’t make a good local website if you do it everywhere and try and be all things to everyone.
Kevin Kelly at Technium has a great brilliant post that every creator, artist and marketer should read. His general thesis is this: Rather than try and create that one mega-popular hit that millions of people will love, you should try and grow a club of “1,000 true fans”. A “true fan” is someone that loves what you create so much that they buy everything you sell, follow your blog, travel to see your shows, subscribe to your mailing list and buy the super hi-def remixed re-released box set. Kevin’s theory is that any singular creator can make a great living with just 1,000 true fans.
Seth Goodin has been pushing a similar marketing plan for years: focus on creating amazing products and fostering radically dedicated fans (through a pursuit of excellence, customer service, feedback and communication). The Internet, of course, now makes this all possible.
The great news for the marketer is that the “1,000 True Fans” marketing plan is very do-able (and measurable). Its very intimidating to stare at a product and wonder how you are going to get 5 million people to buy it. But 1,000 people? That’s doable. And measurable in a few dozen a week. You just need to put the right tools in place to be able to track who is a true fan and to keep them happy.
Sorry about that everyone. The site needed to be shut down for a bit so we could move things to bigger/faster servers. We apologize to those of you that have been using FixTunes for the last few days and experiencing slow song identifications.
As of 8:43pm EST, the new servers are fully online. However, due to some DNS propogation issues, some of you in various parts of the world may need to wait another hour. Again, sorry. If you continue to have issues, please contact us here.
Thanks for your patience while we make FixTunes better.
FixTunes is getting bigger, better and more popular! That’s the good news. The bad news is that to accommodate this growth, we need to move the FixTunes website and music database to bigger and better servers (if you experienced a really slow program over the weekend, you know why this is needed). Unfortunately, due to the current server set up, there is no way to do this without taking the website down for a few hours.
The website and server should be back up sometime Monday evening. The FixTunes application will begin working again at that point as well.We apologize for the inconvenience.
UPDATE (8:33pm EST): The new servers are coming online now. Everything should be working for all PC / Windows users right now. The Mac version should be online shortly…
A recent post on the CVillain blog mentioned us at being behind a new UVA blogging site gaining some recent press. Several UVA students, with help from Cloudbrain, launched a “gossip”-focused blog at UVA a few weeks ago. The desire was to explore social media and the changing face of publishing on the Internet - as well as to celebrate fun and social life at UVA. Thanks to some other, more scandalous, sites the blog has found itself in the middle of an interesting conversation regarding publishing, anonymity, privacy and appropriateness. We have taken the site down.
An article in Forbes lays out Christian Lindholm’s 8 Trends for a Mobile World that he sees happening in 2008. Among them he predicts: (1) A flood of bad touchscreen phones as companies try to copy the iPhone, (2) GPS becoming the new killer-app (he thinks 50% of phones will have it by the end of the year) and (3) The “Dawn of the Casual Computer” - the iphone in your pocket. Read the article. Its interesting.
Kevin Kelly has a great article out, Better Than Free, in which he lays out a framework for selling content in a world where copies are free: Music is free. Movies are free. Books are free (all on the internet, and all eventually, of course). How does one make money?
His thesis to is to give away the content and charge for the intangible qualities that cannot be copied and he lays out 8 categories: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability.
Great examples include the Greatful Dead giving away music and charging for concerts (embodiment), Red Hat giving away software and charging for training and support (personalization) and Apple/iTunes ability to sell music and movies because they make it so easy (accessibility and authenticity).
Is this the future of paid content? Are there other good examples of giving away the content and charging for the non-copyable qualities?