Sinds afgelopen weekend heeft Hattrick een eigen radiostation. Het is nog in ontwikkeling, maar ik wil jullie de stream niet onthouden. Binnenkort hoor je doordeweeks de lekkerste hits voor op het werk en in het weekend de feestmuziek zoals je die ook in onze kroeg hoort. De stream draait overigens bij radionomy, een service die het mogelijk maakt radio uitzendingen te plannen en gratis te streamen. Enige ‘adder’ is wel dat er per maand 200 uur naar het station moet worden geluisterd, dus ga vooral je gang!

Luister hier naar Hattrick!

The message coming from the radio industry is clear: Terrestrial radio is in trouble financially and things will get worse before they get any better. Many of the country’s largest national broadcasters are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) announced that Q1 2009 was the industry’s worst quarter ever in terms of ad spending.

“Internet Radio Makes Waves,” a new eMarketer report, predicts the radio industry will see double-digit losses in ad spending this year alone, with terrestrial radio bringing in $14.5 billion in ad revenues in 2009, a drop of 18% from 2008 levels.

Internet radio stations, on the other hand, are positioning themselves to take advantage of the shift in dollars. Even in this tough economy, Internet radio is growing ad revenues year over year and is one of the fastest-growing online media categories. Attractive demographics and a connected audience will prove increasingly appealing to advertisers as they look for fresh channels to reach consumers.

ZenithOptimedia reports that in 2009, advertisers will spend $260 million on Internet radio and another $28 million on podcasting for a combined total of $288 million, up 28% from 2008. By 2011, that combined figure will reach nearly $394 million.

Though Internet radio listeners are still relatively few, millions of Americans already listen to radio online from a desktop computer, laptop or mobile phone. Arbitron and Edison Research reported in April that 42 million Americans ages 12 and over tuned in to online radio in a given week, up from 33 million in 2008. That boosted current listener rates to 17% after being mired in the range of 11% to 13% in recent years.

For marketers, the rise of Internet radio means more-targeted advertising and a more educated audience with higher income and a greater chance of being employed. Mobile will bring still more opportunities by offering streaming radio on the go via phones and other connected portable devices.

Internet Radio Fastest Growing Online Media

Gilles Bindels heeft voor z’n Radionomy een nieuw rondje kapitaal opgehaald: 1,5 miljoen euro astemblieft. Ik lees nergens van wie hij ze gekregen heeft, misschien wel van ons. Morgen eens uitzoeken.

Radionomy is trouwens wel een cool concept: maak je eigen radioshow online, met grote bibliotheken waarin je muziek en jingles kunt plukken. Ik vond het alleen een beetje farfetched toen ik het de eerste keer zag, maar da’s nu toch al bijna een jaar geleden. Straks nog eens checken.

>> Lees op TechCrunch: Radionomy Doubles Funding For Custom Internet Radio Platform.

What is a webradio?

A webradio, ( or e-radio, Internet radio, net radio, …) is a radio available on Internet, so accessible everywhere in the world. This broadcasting service involves a streaming medium that offers listeners a continuous stream, but they don’t have any control on it, just like a normal radio or television. So, a webradio is related to streaming and there is a difference with podcasting which is about downloading. Most of the time, an e-radio is linked with a traditional radio station, but they also could be Internet-only radio stations, which are independent. Those can cover any types of information : sports, news, talk, music…

Simulcast

The word “Simulcast” is a mix between simultaneous and broadcast. For a radio, it means that programs are broadcasted in more than one medium ( most of the time two) at the very same time. So, a television broadcasting can be sent out at the same time on television and on radio, BBC is an example of that. But it also could be a normal radio station diffusing on FM and Internet at the same time, just like the well-known radio classic21 (Belgium) does.

It also allows the broadcasting on FM and Am at the same time.

Radionomy ( Belgium )

What is Radionomy ?

The word ” Radionomy” is a mix between radio and autonomy. Radionomy results from the meeting of 4 Belgian people belonging to the world of mass media and advertising, It allows Internet users to create their own web radio for free.

How does it work ?

Radionomy offers it’s users more than 60 big libraries plentiful of music from all kinds, jingles, and other editorial contains. So, users can pick up what they want from theses libraries and put it on their radio.

Novelty : users can also diffuse their own creations ! They can record their own successions, reportages, interviews and podcasts in order to create a real radio news, and after, they can put it at other users’ disposal.

Link with web 2.0

Create a webradio with Radionomy is as easy to do as a blog! Thanks to this equipment, each Internet user is now able to create his own radio and can determine the content, the music, jingles, … This is a supplementary tool for Internet users to express themselves the way they like, and they can have a feedback about that through their own blog or websites.

So everybody can be a journalist for a while… or more !  

Sources :

www.wikipedia.com

www.youtube.com

www.radionomy.com

www.blog.radionomy.com

www.webradio.fr

http://www2.radionomy.com/music-dance-radio

Next week the Web 2.0 community will turn its eyes on TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam. If so many of the right people come there, there must be a good reason : Kevin Rose (Diggnation will be made there), Robert Scoble, Nova Spivack (Twine), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), Scott Rafer (Mashery, MyBlogLog, Lookery),…

An important part of the event will be the startup competition : 24 companies presenting themselves in 5 minutes (that will be 300 seconds sharp). Currently, 22 companies are known, the last 2 will be choosen by the community early next week. Let’s have a short look at some of these startups (in alphabetical order) :

1. andUnite : a German startup with the powerful idea of connecting people that do similar searches on search engines
2. Backbase : the providers of a robust Ajax framework (3 million copies in 80+ countries)
3. Bemba : Dutch startup, providing a button allowing to share any content with your network
4. Beezbox : out of Paris, they enable companies to engage with their communities on social networks
5. ConfNetwork : a tool to facilitate networking at conferences (premiering at TheNextWeb)
6. CoComment : a strong swiss startup that materialized the “commentosphere”, an underlooked component of the blogosphere
7. eBuddy : based in Amsterdam, their browser based chat & messaging service allows millions to connect to MSN, AOL, on the web or on the mobile (recently raised €6.5M funding)
8. Empressr : Ajax/Flash based web presentation company out of New York (they’ve been out for a while)
9. Fav.or.it : plays in the RSS aggregator category, with a twist (or two), allowing to post comments without leaving the window, and to cut ’slices’ of what is of interest to you
10. Fleck : based in Amsterdam (and with an overlap with TheNextWeb people), brought the social dimension into the browser
11. Goojet : manages your mobile “spaces” ; has won LeWeb3 startup competition and raised a €2.3M ’seed-round’ (now this starts to sound US-style)
12. Hoera : under construction at the time of going to (word)press
13. Introniche : facilitates cross-promotion between niche sites
14. Lookery : an ad network for Facebook and social networks, using (anonymized) profiling data ; has raised $900K seed round (and more) from prominent investors
15. Netlog : this belgium-based company would be a heavyweight by European standards : >30 million registered users, it is sometimes compared to a “european facebook”
16. Radionomy : french and belgian team, wants to revolutionize the online radio, by allowing anyone to setup one
17. Symbaloo : with a name that sounds crafted by Kipling, this startup is a new iteration on the “personalized home page” trick
18. Twingly : this links the blogosphere to traditional media (and back)
19. uberVU : a Romanian startup that aims nothing less than “manage all your content and all your conversations in one place”
20. Wakoopa : tracks and shares application usage on your desktop, has been compared to Last.fm and Alexa for desktop apps
21. Wauw.fm : allows to transfer and process the media files of your PC to make them available on your mobile
22. Webnode : web-based website builder and manager
23. ZiLok : last but not least, winner of the public award at Plugg, this company pitches itself as the “eBay of rental”

So it looks like it will be a hot and contrasted show among all those startups, demonstrating that the European web 2.0 scene is alive and kicking. We will profile some of them in more detail.

And also wait anxiously for the last 2 candidates…

The Plugg.eu conference was held yesterday at the posh Plaza Hotel in Brussels. Most participants would agree that for a first edition, it was a success, and that organizer Robin Wauters managed to put Brussels on the web 2.0 circuit, alongside London’s FOWA, Paris’ LeWeb3, and Amsterdam’s TheNextWeb.

Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research gave us some facts and figures about the European social demographics. Her study splits the public depending on their degree of involvement with social media (“participation ladder”) into Creators (10%), Critics (19%), Collectors (9%), Joiners (13%), Spectators (40%) and Inactives (53%).

Max Niederhofer from Atlas Venture got us excited about the online gaming market, and offered four ways to build a 100 M$ company :

• build the world’s largest casual game (“Poke” on Facebook being the current leader…)
• build Europe’s digital distribution platform for games
• get micro-currency applied to gaming
• successful browser based MMOG (that one would have to be bootstrapped by its founders)

An entrepreneurs panel moderated by Colette Ballou offered insights by Rodrigo Sepulveda (vpod.tv), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (several startups, including Flock and TheNextWeb), Simon McDermott (Attentio.com), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo). Some highlights :

• markets are local by default ; it is important to find the right partners to help launch in other countries ;
• beware of cash flow : sales cycles tend to be really long, companies are often afraid of dealing with startups, and pay with long delays
• Rodrigo came up with some delightful analogies : starting a company is like having sex for the first time (you don’t have a clue) ; and setting up a subsidiary in Spain is like a wedding (with a long ceremonial by the notary)
• Andrej : people are key, take the time to find exceptional people for the initial team ; it will be the matrix out of which the company will grow ;
• Boris : the hardest thing is just to start ; get started !

The startup rally saw the presentation by 18 companies (2 had forfeited). Some projects depended on a quite technical platform, like Cellity, Floobs, MyOwnDB, Trutap… Other were mostly a nice idea, well put into form, such as HumanGrid, TVTrip, Mobiya. After seeing all of them, Alenty and Radionomy remained among my own favorite, truly “2.0″ in essence (some of the former still smelled a bit “web 1.0″, I won’t tell which).

The three finalists ended up being :

• Bragster : a platform for sharing “dares”, in a “Jackass meets Facebook and YouTube” fashion (and indeed one founder threw a pie on his co-founder’s face on stage)
• Viewdle : a platform for doing elaborate searches on videos (with a COO in a nice suit and tie, in complete contrast to the Bragster guys)
• ZiLok : a rental marketplace, started in Belgium, France, UK, US (and two cool founders as well, even without pie-throwing)

Viewdle won the Jury award, while ZiLok went away with the prize of the public. Two companies to watch ! (Bragster is already being watched by 800.000 unique visitors monthly)

The investor panel gathered Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Paul Fisher (Advent Venture Partners), Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp), Alexis Bogaert (Dexia Private Equity / Arkafund), moderated by Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK & Europe). Some points :

• Paul Fisher : eastern and central european markets are very hot ; so is the next wave of internet advertising ;
• Julie Meyer : a core group of people build companies counter-cyclically with the stock market, that’s a smart timing
• Reshma Sohoni : there are a lot more angel investors now ; start thinking internationally early on
• Mike Butcher mentioned “Enterprise 2.0″ as an area of interest for the future

The panel on the Social Web was very promising, with very competent people like Olivier Creiche (Six Apart), Matt Colebourne (coComment), Lorenz Bogaert (Netlog), Jan-Joost Kraal (eBuddy). I found the discussion only mildly interesting, with people agreeing that it was very important to offer fine privacy control (“I don’t want my mother /girlfriend to see that I’m doing this“). Brands and companies better beware of these new social venues, as put by Matt Colebourne :

the era in which you can control what people say about your brand is gone.

Still, François Petavy from Eyeka tried to show how brands can indeed try and organize the creativity that can spring up from a dedicated user community.

Rudy De Waele (from m-trends.org) delivered an insightful presentation on the future of mobile, citing dozens of new innovative startups.

As always, it’s also in the alleysides that we get to meet some interesting entrepreneurs and projects, such as : Rummble, MyID.is, or TripSay.

All in all, a pretty good harvest of new and exciting projects to share with you in the next days and weeks.

The Plugg conference starts tomorrow in Brussels. Among a few distinguished speakers, there will also be 20 selected startups presenting on stage.

Let’s have a look at a few of these :

• 123people.com : is an People search engine, that seems to be going after the same market as Spock, or ZoomInfo ; coming out of the Austrian incubator i5invest ;
  
• Radionomy : is a French / Belgian project that allows any user to set up his own private web radio ; complete with playlists, monetization, and tools ;
• Alenty : is a Paris-based widget company that allows your site to interact with its community ; a bit like MyBlogLog, but ‘hotter’ since it allows to rate which members are cool or hot ;

It looks like there are some ambitious projects out there. Of course, these short summaries don’t do them justice. Expect better portraits in the coming days !

Leo en Tendencias21.net que a finales de febrero una pequeña empresa belga, Radionomy, lanzará un interesante servicio que permitirá que cualquiera pueda tener su propia webradio en Internet, para emitir los contenidos que desee.

Qué es: Una webradio consiste en la exhibición de contenido auditivo, con las mismas características del medio radiofónico, a través de Internet y mediante streaming, es decir, directamente de una página web sin tener que descargar ningún archivo al ordenador (hacer clic y obtener).

Cuánto: Todo esto será gratis. El servicio de Radionomy permitirá elegir contenidos de una vasta discografía (con un catálogo de más de 100.000 piezas musicales), legal a todos los efectos, así como introducir contenidos propios, como reportajes y podcasting (archivos de sonido y vídeo). El usuario sólo tendrá que ejecutar un pequeño programa denominado Radio manager para abrir su antena y empezar a emitir.

Cuándo: Una vez que este programa tenga integrada toda la información, funcionará de manera autónoma y sin necesidad de que el ordenador quede encendido las 24 horas, porque el servidor se ocupará de mantener el servicio activo durante un tiempo máximo de un mes.

Otras opciones: Existen otras herramientas en la red,además de la propuesta por Radionomy, para tener una emisora propia:

• Live365 ofrece a los principiantes sin muchos conocimientos previos contar con un emisora online trabajando con formatos MP3 y MP3PRO.
• SHOUTcast.  Para usuarios avanzados tecnológicamente. Desarrollado por los creadores de Winamp, programa que permite escuchar archivos musicales en el formato MP3, para montar un servidor propio.
• MyCaster. Permite que los oyentes accedan a una emisora privada con sólo conectarse a la dirección de Internet de los creadores del programa.
• Covert Live. Es un ejemplo de las posibilidades de la red para hacer más dinámicos los blogs personales con emisiones públicas de sonido.Permite publicar audio, vídeo e imágenes de forma instantánea, e interactuar con sus lectores. 

Qué mejora: Respecto a lo ya existente, Radionomy supone un salto cualitativo en la profesionalización de las emisoras privadas y libres de Internet, ya que no sólo ofrece la plataforma necesaria para la emisión de mensajes, sino que ofrece contenidos complementarios cubiertos por los derechos de autor y además permite ganar dinero a los que se decidan a poner su emisora personal en Internet.

Información complementaria:

Radio en Internet (Wikipedia)

Pon tu radio en internet (Maestros del Web)

Otros tutoriales en castellano (ABCdatos)

Radionomy, annoncé jeudi dernier, est un nouveau concept permettant à chacun de créer et de gérer simplement sa webradio. Jusqu’alors, diffuser sa musique et ses émissions sur internet était possible – via des outils tels que Shoutcast ou Icecast – mais couteux et fastidieux: il fallait disposer d’un serveur/hébergeur de flux, d’un logiciel d’automation, et bien sûr payer les droits musicaux à la SACEM.

Prochainement disponible en version beta, Radionomy prétend apporter une solution à ces problèmes techniques en proposant de choisir sa programmation parmi une banque de donnée de musiques, jingle, émissions ou simplement de soumettre son propre contenu. Le site proposera un logiciel qui simplifiera la gestion des playlist et la programmation horaire, et prendra en charge les contraintes de diffusion et de promotion. Radionomy se chargerait en outre de rétribuer la SACEM (en faisant le compte exact du nombre de diffusions de chaque morceau) et envisage même de rémunérer les créateurs de radio en fonction de leur audience; ces coûts seraient compensés par quatre minutes de publicité horaire imposées sur toutes les radios.

Il faudra attendre encore quelques mois pour pouvoir vérifier si la réalité est conforme au discours marketing. Le concept est assurément malin, et pourrait redonner un coup de fouet au monde des webradios ; reste à savoir si les annonceurs publicitaires suivront et si la qualité du contenu utilisateur sera au rendez-vous (on peut parier qu’avec le temps les meilleures webradio se distingueront de la masse et pourraient même devenir profitable).

La dimension communautaire semble pour l’instant se limiter au partage de contenus et de musiques. Il me semble que l’idée pourrait être poussée beaucoup plus loin. Il serait intéressant par exemple d’offrir la possibilité à plusieurs personnes d’animer une émission en simultané ou de gérer une radio en équipe. D’autres questions restent en suspens, comme celle du contrôle et de la “censure” éventuelle du contenu ou la dimension internationale du service (qui n’est – pour une fois – ni américain ni anglais mais…belge !)

Un projet à suivre, qui pourrait bien réconcilier annonceurs publicitaires, artistes en manque de présence sur les ondes FM, sociétés de droits d’auteur et webradios.

Pour en savoir plus, la vidéo de lancement de Radionomy à la Tour Eiffel: une présentation intéressante des principales idées derrière le projet.

Quatre minutes de pub par heure