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
Archive for the 'Cloudbrain' Category
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
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…
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!
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.
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.
Coming on the heels of the Anderson PR War, Bokardo has a great article on the difference and implications of private vs. public identities. What if everyone had to attach their real name to every comment and review they left around the Internet?