Windows Phone 7 Mobile Acceleration Week

This week, in preparation for the Fall launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft invited Soundtrckr, Loopt, Ustream and 10 other startups to come out to Mountain View and work on our WP7 apps. Covering everything from coding and design to marketing and strategy, "Mobile Acceleration Week" kicked everyone's development process into high gear, and marked the official start of the countdown to launch. We're pretty psyched about the platform, and think you will be too. More news as development progresses…

Soundtrckr 1.8 Available in the iTunes App Store

Soundtrckr 1.8 is now live in the iTunes App Store. Built for iOS 4, this update lets you run Soundtrckr in the background while you use other apps, and makes sure that you won’t drop songs when you move from wi-fi to 3G. There’s also a shorter delay time between tracks, plus miscellaneous bug fixes and performance improvements designed to make your listening experience as smooth and easy as possible. 

One of the big ideas behind Soundtrckr is bridging the gap between your personal music library and the content you stream from the cloud. Whether you’re at the desk or on the road, you should have immediate access both to the music you love and to reliable sources for music recommendation. Together, Soundtrckr and iOS 4 give you just that – any music, anytime, anywhere. 

Bill Callahan Gets Bookish

Singer-songwriter, artist and all-around Renaissance man Bill Callahan is getting his Nick Cave on. His recently completed novel Letters to Emma Bowlcut will be released on July 20th through art-media powerhouse Drag City, publisher of Ian Svenonius' excellent 2006 essay collection The Psychic Soviet.

Jonas Woost on Music and Location-Based Tech

Here's Jonas Woost, former head of music at Last.fm. Check out his 5 minute breakdown on how smartphones and 32 satellites in medium Earth orbit are bringing music back to its local-ist roots: 

http://www.youtube.com/v/Hw91DSDNkSU&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Internet Redux

A couple weeks ago web security guru Barrett Lyon published a great piece about Internet Protocol (IP). IP is basically the way the Internet works, a set of rules for communicating information from one machine to another. Lyon's argument – echoed by IP developer Vint Cerf – is that IP was and indeed still is an experiment, never intended to become "the infrastructure for all of society." 

Lyon offers a number of reasons for this conclusion, ranging from security and privacy to routing intelligence and "enculturation". It's a really interesting essay (and provides a great primer for tech journalist Joseph Menn's recent book Fatal System Error, a freaky tour through modern cybercrime in which Lyon prominently features). 

Obligatory Thing About the Exile on Main St. Re-issue

OK, so there is almost nothing to say about this record that hasn't been said on every website, radio station and late-night talk show on Earth, so we'll do the short version: The Rolling Stones' re-upped re-issue of Exile on Main St. is definitive and necessary, and the 10 additional tracks are just as good as everything on the original. Get this one, if you've got the extra riches. 

http://www.youtube.com/v/C8qgryKckNE&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Electro-house from Daniel Grippi of diaspora*? Yes!

So the diaspora* project pretty much blew up last week, getting press everywhere from tech blogs to the New York Times. In case you weren't paying attention, the basic plot is this: 4 NYU students decided to bunker down for the summer and build a decentralized, privacy-aware social network that's the spiritual antithesis of Facebook. They posted their plan on micro-financing site Kickstarter, asking for $10,000 and 3 months to get the job done. So far they've raised $181,866.  

The students are Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and judging from this recent exchange with Luis Villa, they just might have the chops to pull it off. 

So OK, this is what everyone knows. BUT – did you also know that said Daniel Grippi happens to be a pretty kick ass electro-house producer who goes by the name of Telemakhos (which we at soundtrckr, devout Classicists/Hellenists all, just love)? Well, he is! And you can check out some of his stuff at Last.fm. Not sure how long it's been since he updated his page, but we'll dig around some more and see if we can get our hands on his latest…

Post-Hack Day Party @ Pier 38 (w/ music!)

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Post-Hack Day Party @ Pier 38 this weekend! The music was great, the beer was strong, and the company was fascinating (you are all working on some amazing projects, we're very excited to see the results!)

Extra thanks to Elissa, Paul and Matt @ The Echo Nest for co-sponsoring the event and for just being cool people in general, plus to Badmammal and Terbo Ted for providing the tunes, and to Kyle & crew for sorting out sound and lights.

We hope you all had fun, and will definitely be doing more of these this summer. In the meantime, you can check out some pics of the event on our Facebook page, and here's the night's music in full:

Badmammal Live @ Music Hack Day:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=74c80e" url="http://soundcloud.com/badmammal/badmammal-music-hack-day-set"] badmammal music hack day set by badmammal

Terbo Ted Live @ Music Hack Day:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=74c80e" url="http://soundcloud.com/terbo/terbo-ted-music-hack-day-pier-38"] Terbo Ted – Music Hack Day @ Pier 38 by terbo

Soundtrckr on the MobileBeyond Podcast

Brian Prows of MobileBeyond published a nice piece about soundtrckr today, complete with an audio interview of founder/CEO Daniele Calabrese (and a choice photo of Daniele chilling out in his second home, which is a plane). Please enjoy, and thanks to Brian for the good words!  

Live at Digital Hollywood

Digital Hollywood starts today in Santa Monica, CA. The conference and trade show focuses on the intersection of entertainment and technology, and soundtrckr’s own Daniele Calabrese will be speaking tomorrow afternoon along with Stephen Jackson, Jason Henderson, Michael Schade, Jennifer Cooper, and self-styled “Mayor of LA” Matt Story. The event will be live-streamed via ultralivetv and AT&T Intelligent Content Distribution.