Cloudbrain

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?

We are working on a new ultra-secret website that will essentially be a “gossip blog” focused on night life and hanging out at UVA. If you area UVA student, like to write and are interested in gossip, style, going out, hanging out or fun - contact us, we would love to here from you. More information can be found here: Writers Wanted

Last weeks First Annual Cloudbrain Christmas party was a huge success.  Thanks to everyone that made it out.  Happy Holidays and have an awesome New Year!

The Facebook freak out continue,s but hidden in the midst of it is a shining example how great PR and how to run a company right. Nate Weiner got his blog post to the cover of Digg.com with the story of Facebook’s new ads invading his privacy on the gaming webiste Kongregate. He lamented the lack of control given him over his personal data and explains in the post how to block Facebook ads using a Firefox extension.

But the real news is in the first comment. The CEO of Kongregate was the FIRST POST, apologizing to Nate and explaining how his company was going to fix the problem. The comments that followed contained many a impressed shout-out and thank you to Kongregate for a fast and fair response.

This is how to treat users and get customers to love you. Well done Kongregate.

So the Interweb is freaking out about the new Facebook Ads today. Facebook’s plan is to change the face of “brand advertising” by turning your friends in to marketers - the old idea that a trusted recommendation from a friend is the best advertisement.

The problem is, this works with only a very small number of brands. Most products and brands are commodities, are marketed poorly or are just plain bad. People use them because they have to, but don’t recommend them because of a lack of: Love. I highly recommend Kevin Robert’s Lovemarks book in which he explains what seperates a traditional brand from a “lovemark” - Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy (the same components in a good relationship). My guess is that Facebook’s new system will quickly show the world which products are simply “brands” that no one really cares about and which are “lovemarks” that people are passionate about. While different people have different products that they love there are a lot of products that are either 1) Loved by Most (i.e. Apple) or 2) Loved by no one (i.e. Sprint).

Of all the thousands of products and brands I interact with, there are only a few that I love enough to actually talk about: Apple, Sandals Resorts, Google and Bodos Bagels. I already passionately recommend these to my friends.

My advice to would-be Facebook advertisers. Stop and first check to see if you are a “lovemark” (do you have a passionate follow already?). If not, don’t get on Facebook. Build some love first. Facebook is in real danger of flooding users with recommendations for products that no one really cares about.

UPDATE: There’s some great commentary on this idea over at BroadStuff.com.

Techcrunch is reporting on the soon-to-be-released advertising additions to FaceBook: namely, their Project Beacon which will allow third-party stores such as Amazon.com or Orbitz to publish stories to your FaceBook Newsfeed whenever you purchase something (like a book or plane ticket).  For example:  Someone might purchase FixTunes and then a message would appear on the news feeds of all their friends: “Daniel just purchased FixTunes.  Click here to see it”.

This is great news for advertisers and e-commerce sites.  The news feed already serves as an excellent tool for virally spreading information (look at how fast the Stephen Colbert group formed), and knowing that your friend purchased a product is about as good an endorsement or review there is.  We would definitely be excited to integrate this into FixTunes.

That said, from a user/consumer perspective, I’m not sure how this will play out.  I am already starting to feel like my Facebook News Feed is starting to resemble my email inbox - full of spam.  Not spam in the viagra-nigerian-dictator form, but spam in the form of somewhat useful information that I technically asked for but don’t have time to care about.  I’m already overloaded by notes on all my friends changing relationships, adding pictures, getting hungry, joining groups and so on.  What they bought may just be too much.  Could this be the beginning of the end of Facebook?

If you are a graphic designer living near or around Charlottesville, Richmond, Harrisonburg etc., we are looking for you.  Cloudbrain has a number of upcoming projects and we are looking for one (or more) graphic designers that can help with everything from the creative, conceptual design phase through final layout.  No coding necessary - just hip taste and mad Photoshop skills.  If you are interested, send a link to previous work / portfolio to jobs@cloudbrain.com.  Additional questions are also welcome.