July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The audio-sharing network SoundCloud, which allows users to share not just music but any audio recording — from company earnings calls to cat impersonations — has just launched a new version, “Next SoundCloud,” at LeWeb in Paris.

“Sound will be bigger than video online,” said CEO Alexander Ljung.

VentureBeat once described SoundCloud as “the biggest music startup you have never heard of.” Since then the company landed a reported $50 million in funding and expanded to touch 180 million users (via web, mobile, and partner widgets) a month, an impressive eight percent of the entire online population. One of SoundCloud’s latest users is the White House, which releases Barack Obama’s key speeches and other content via the site.

The Berlin-based company has long wanted to make sound the sixth sense of the social graph. Flipboard, for example, is using SoundCloud to add audio to its content. SoundCloud’s founders are convinced that sound has the potential to be bigger than video, since we listen to it while doing other things, and it’s much easier to create than video. Ljung talked about how he receives sound recordings (rather than the more traditional photos) of his cousin’s new baby.

Human beings derive richer layers of meaning from a voice than from a written sentence. The background sounds when you call someone give you an instant impression of their situation. “If you want to stop being scared when watching a horror movie, you mute the sound. Sound is the emotional carrier,” Ljung said.

Next SoundCloud adds new discovery features like algorithmic recommendations (“Related Sounds”), curation, and reposts. Reposts are similar to Twitter’s RT feature and are a way to amplify the voice of creators. When you join Soundcloud via Facebook, the service will automatically detect what music and sound creators you like so that you can follow them on SoundCloud as well.

At the core of the service is the Soundcloud waveform; a visual representation that allows listeners to add comments at any point in the recording. It was initially developed by Ljung and co-founder Eric Wahlforss as a way to share a piece of music with someone privately and get feedback.

Wahlforss was an artist creating music, while Ljung was a sound designer for TV and films. “We had both been tech geeks all our lives and were really into the whole social web movement around the time of Flickr. But there was no Flickr for music. There was nothing built for artists,” Llung told me. SoundCloud started off as a set of tools for professional and semi-professional music creators. It’s now the standard way for many DJs and music makers to send and receive music. The Berklee College of Music, one of the premier music schools in the world, runs its online courses entirely from SoundCloud.

The startup world may be obsessed with pivots, but SoundCloud has grown from a tiny Berlin startup to a large company without fundamentally changing its mission. “We want to unmute the web,” Ljung told me in an early interview. “We think the web is very silent at the moment.”

SoundCloud was founded in late 2008 and has raised roughly $66 million in funding. It has 160 employees.

A month after cleaning its inventory of services like iGoogle and Google Video, Google is at it again with another round of app cuts.

The most surprising member of the latest set is Listen, the podcast app that Google introduced in 2009. Google’s reason for the move is simple, if a little odd: Android users have so many options for podcast apps that it didn’t make any sense to keep updating Listen. It also probably didn’t help that the app was well-known among Android users for being a bit unpolished. So maybe it won’t be missed much.

The timing of the move is a bit funny, since Apple just released its own standalone podcast app in June. Still, it does suggest that Google could add some podcast features to its Google Music app somewhere down the line.

Two of Google’s other cuts are less consumer-focused: the collaboration-focused Google Apps for Teams and Google Video for Business. For users of the latter app, Google is moving videos over to Google Drive, which offers similar functionality.

Last, Google is shutting down an unspecified number of its less popular company blogs, shifting content to other, more frequented ones. So no big loss there, either.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple has added a full-fledged application for podcasts to the iOS App Store to make it easier for people to find and organize content from podcasters around the world.

As we described previously, podcasts are prerecorded audio (sometimes video) programs that you can listen and watch across various devices while online or offline. The format became successful on Apple’s watch because the company created a dedicated section of the iTunes Store for podcasts. In the latest versions of iOS, users have been able to access podcasts through the “More” tab on the Music app. But now with a stand-alone app, listening to and finding new podcasts becomes much easier.

It’s entirely possible that Apple will remove podcasts from the Music app. The new app will also likely hurt already existing apps that organize podcasts such as Downcast, Instacast, and Podcaster 5.

The Podcasts app’s full set of features can be viewed here:

• Enjoy all of your audio and video podcasts in a single app.
• Explore hundreds of thousands of podcasts including shows in over 40 languages.
• Try the innovative new Top Stations feature to find new podcast series in a variety of topics, including arts, business, comedy, music, news, sports, and more.
• Browse by Audio or Video podcasts, or see what’s most popular in Top Charts.
• Tap subscribe for your favorites and automatically receive new episodes for free as they become available.
• Stream episodes or download to listen while offline.
• Skip forward and back using simple playback controls.
• Turn on Sleep Timer to automatically stop playing a podcast while listening in bed.
• Share your favorite episodes with friends using Twitter, Messages and Mail.
• Optionally sync your favorite episodes from iTunes on your Mac or PC.
• Sync your episode playback for seamless transition between devices.

Take a look at the gallery below for more looks at the app for the iPad and iPhone:

One of the big changes in Apple’s iOS 6 beta is the confounding disappearance of podcasts from the iTunes app. But we now have an idea of where they’re going.

Starting with the rollout of iOS 6 this fall, Apple plans to offer a standalone app just for podcasts, sources tell AllThingsD.

Podcasts are pre-recorded audio programs that you can listen to both on- and offline.  Apple is largely responsible for taking the previously-unknown format and punting it into the mainstream, as the “pod” in its name shows.

If the report is true, Apple’s upcoming app (which will probably be named something apt like “Podcasts”) is likely to strongly resemble Listen, an Android app that lets users search, suscribe, and stream podcasts from one interface. Similar apps like Downcast and Stitcher already exist for iOS as well.

A standalone podcasts app wouldn’t be unprecedented for Apple, which has created dedicated apps for videos, music, and iBooks.

While the podcast change will greatly simplify the process of finding and subscribing to podcasts, creating a standalone app could limit the number of eyeballs hitting lesser-known podcasts. It all depends on how Apple handles it.

Either way, we’ll know in a few months.

Photo: Microphone/Shutterstock