Founded in 2007, SoundCloud provides a Web-based platform that is transforming the way music is shared. Over 250,000 customers — including artists and other music professionals — already rely on SoundCloud to send, receive, and distribute music. Based in Berlin, Germany, the company employs 12 people.

European music sites are revolutionising the music industry, not least with their eagerness to open up their data with APIs.

We will be running a Hack Day independent from, but working with the companies at the forefront of this movement. We hope you'll be able to join us.

We will be sorting tickets out soon, to be on the list of people who would like to attend then drop your details into the register page.

When: 11th - 12th July 2009

Where: Guardian Offices

Sign up now HERE 

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage. Sysomos Inc., one of the world's leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter's growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of people who identify themselves as social media marketers, 65.5% have never posted an update
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

"We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter's use, growth and demographics," said Nick Koudas, Sysomos' co-founder and chief executive. "While Twitter's growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter."

This is an interesting report that has been produced from 11m+ profiles on twitter data and characteristics of its users, for the full report and to download then go to http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/.

Its interesting that the media hype has increased the user base but again that has then increased the amount of people doing nothing, thus it is still the top 30% of the users who are generating the traffic and making it look like there is more activity, whilst an interesting fact is more than 65 of the so called social marketers have never even tweeted !!!

Go and read it now, a great concise set of data points that dismisses some of the hype this year over the user base and activity around Twitter.

http://blog.soundcloud.com/2009/01/29/faster/

So Sun is great at making clever hardware and software, glue it together and it works, but its our partners that deliver and deploy this, so Ive been working with Every City since last summer, they are a Startup Essential member, and have moved to a Sun/Solaris infrastructure through their own decision. What really makes a difference is their personal focus, by being part of the community, they understand the pain points and how to solve the problems that exist, and this shines through so much with SoundCloud. So a big massive thanks to Every City for listening, and deploying a solution that is flying, at a price point the startup can afford and also buying the beer for startups as well..