Henrik Berggren was a developer of the growing SoundCloud site (working on the API) and now works at Doberman in Sweden.

Henrik Berggren

SoundCloud

T: One thing everyone wants to know about is SoundCloud..Could you describe your involvement, how you came into the project, how did this project start, who funded the development, how is it doing now?

H: Well I was first involved with it..first of all it’s founded by two Swedish guys, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung. They are both old schoolmates of mine, we went to the same University and I met them a few years back. They were interested in the web and they have been doing development for the web for some time, and so had I, so it was really a good match from the beginning. We started discussing how frustrated we were with MySpace - I was DJing a lot at the time, Eric is an old producer, and Alex has done a lot of film music and stuff. They had this idea of creating Flickr for music, basically. A place where can share music easily, MySpace was really bad, and there were some other projects but none of them were as good as Flickr is for photos.

SoundCloud

They started the company in Stockholm but after a while they moved to Berlin. At that point I decided to stay in Stockholm because I was a year behind them in school. So I decided to stay on and finish my Computer Science degree but then ended up going down next summer and wound up staying 9 or 10 month instead, working on their API. I lived in Berlin for 9 or 10 months basically and moved back to Stockholm a year ago almost. But interesting stuff has happened since then.

They have grown a lot, they were funded from the beginning by some business angels in Berlin and then I think last spring they raised a big round of funding from a British VC firm called..I can’t remember then name...I think it was 2.5M Euros or something like that. They are doing really really well and I stayed on..I’m not employed with them anymore but I am in close contact with Eric and Alex and another guy named Henrik who is now the chief of their API because I have developed a lot of services on top of their platform. I have always considered their platform to be the most interesting thing about the site because I’m not a musician or DJ anymore, I’m kind of an Internet guy and think there’s a lot of stuff you can do with a musical platform as good as SoundCloud is.

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We saw Yong Fook’s Sweetcron, and decided to add a SignalFive Stream (http://blog.signalfive.com/stream/). Basically, Sweetcron is an RSS feed aggregator with a social networking bent. You add the feeds you want to track, such as your Twitter, blog, Vimeo account etc., and Sweetcron puts them all on a single page, called a Lifestream. When you log in to the admin panel, you see a Dashboard, showing the most recent items in your stream:

The sweet thing about Sweetcron is that it’s written in CodeIgniter, so it’s easy to maintain and customize. It uses a MySQL database with 6 tables (to store feeds, options, tags, users, items and tag_relationships, or tag-to-item mappings). The application is straightforward and simple, just the way we like it. Here’s a screenshot of the Options page:

With Ping.fm on the one hand, and Sweetcron on the other, you can cover a lot of your social networking generation and aggregation needs. If you like Sweetcron and need help installing and configuring it, take a look at Chris Coyier’s tutorial.