A week from today Cloudbrain will be packing our bags and heading north for the Affiliate Summit East 2010 conference.  We are hoping to meet some of our great affiliates and connect with new ones.  If you are going to be there, come find us!  You can learn more about becoming and TidySongs affiliate here.  You should also follow us on Twitter (we are super cool): Daniel, Kelly, Jenn, Kyle.

(That’s a picture of us testing out our new booth in the office…)

Say hello to Mya – our summer intern for 2010.  Mya is a senior at that other school down the road where she is majoring in communications.  She’ll be writing, blogging tweeting and doing market research for us.  We just got the first blog she’ll be working on up and running: Traveling With Music.  Mya is good.  Seriously.  I don’t know how we find these people.  You should follow Mya here.

Today is Becky’s last day at Cloudbrain.  She is headed to Berlin to continue a career in journalism.  Some newspaper-of-the-future is going to be lucky to her writing for them.  During Becky’s time here, we launched TidySongs – for which Becky created all our multimedia marketing content – as well as several marketing campaigns including Save The Songs.  This has been a great year, due in no small part to Becky’s amazing gift of communication and charm.

Thanks for everything Becky.  We’ll miss you.

Rumors! Hype! Steve Jobs! Giant iPhones! The End of Newspapers! Ebooks! Pizza!

What: Watch the Apple Announcement with Cloudbrain
When: Wednesday 1/27, 1pm-2pm
Where: Cloudbrain Office (above Christian’s Pizza on the Mall)

The entire tech world is freaking out about the rumored Apple iTablet / iPad / Giant iPhone supposedly being announced this week.  It’s like nerds waiting for Christmas.  There is a lot of discussion concerning whether or not this device, if it exists, will change books, newspapers, magazines and publishing the way the iPod and iTunes changed music.  If it does, this could be a really big deal.

Cloudbrain (because we’re cool like that) will be watching the live blog this Wednesday at 1pm and we’d love for you to join us.  We’ll order some pizza and beer from Christian’s downstairs and ring in the dawn of a new era together. Also, hanging out at lunch is fun.

UPDATE: Wow! Lots of excited people out there. The more the merrier.  Twitter or email us if you are planning to come so we know how much pizza to get… (@cloudbrain)

As part of our Save The Songs campaign, we built the Challenge – a fun Twitter or Facebook-based app that will scan your iTunes music library and give you a report card.  It’s fun.  You should try it here.

We formally broke in the office this weekend with our annual Christmas party – complete with Cramer Photo party booth.  Check out all the pictures.  Merry Christmas!

After months in development, we have finally launched SaveTheSongs.org.  It is a (get ready for buzzwords…) viral social media marketing campaign for TidySongs.  We had a ton of fun putting it together and now that it is up we’re learning a lot more.  Let us know what you think.

Great short (3:53) video from Eric Ries on building a technology startup. The main point: How can you really know what you are building is something people want?

We are working on something cool.  I’ll tell you about it later.