We are preparing to release the all new, completely different, super-awesome FixTunes version 5 and are looking for volunteers to help test. This will be a free upgrade for all current FixTunes customers, so don’t worry if you want to buy the current version. We are looking for both XP, Vista and Mac OS people that can test the new FixTunes and give us some feedback. If you help us test and provide usable feedback (good or bad) we’ll give you a couple of free purchase codes (to share with friends) for your trouble. We are only looking for a couple of dozen testers and will try and get a variety of system setups.
If you are interested, please email testing@cloudbrain.com and include details on your computer and how roughly how many songs you have.
When browsing real estate websites online, ever wish you could look at pictures around the neighborhood rather than at the pictures that are just of the front of the house (and carefully selected by an agent for the best angle)? Maybe look up and down the street to make sure there is a dump or a grave yard next door?
We’ve begun rolling out a solution to this at CurbPlaces.com: Street Pictures. Now, when you zoom all the way in on the CurbPlaces map, little camera icons will appear throughout the neighborhood. Clicking a camera will bring up 360 degree pictures of the area. Try it out. We’ve started with Downtown and the City and our slowly making our way across the map (as fast as our intern can ride his bike carrying a laptop, digital camera, and GPS device…)
(Yes, we know Google is doing this as well. But we couldn’t wait until they got around to photograph little ol’ Charlottesville. So we went ahead and did it for them. Thank you very much.)
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…
We are preparing to release the all new, completely different, super-awesome FixTunes version 5 and are looking for volunteers to help test. This will be a free upgrade for all current FixTunes customers, so don’t worry if you want to buy the current version. We are looking for both XP, Vista and Mac OS people that can test the new FixTunes and give us some feedback. If you help us test and provide usable feedback (good or bad) we’ll give you a couple of free purchase codes (to share with friends) for your trouble. We are only looking for a couple of dozen testers and will try and get a variety of system setups.
Now that its beautiful outside we’ll (Cloudbrain) be trying to spend some time hanging out on the Downtown mall 
Kevin Kelly at