Category: Community

2014 Highlights at Streema

Posted on by Streema Team

2014 has been an exciting year at Streema. It flew by really fast and, before it ends, we wanted to share some of the highlights that made this year so special for us.

Simple Radio Launch: Probably our most important announcement was the Simple Radio launch, only in iOS for now. Android users, don’t despair, great news coming very very soon!

FIFA World Cup: We covered the 2014 World Cup with more than 10 blog posts and a customized event microsite, all of which generated some interesting results.

Streema.com Redesign: We started redesigning our entire site early this year, and one of the most challenging parts were the radio station profiles – in case you’re interested, here was the method behind the scenes.

Infographics: We also started developing infographics, to add a little quantitative research as well as color to our blog. Additionally, the first infographic we did for the World Cup was shared a lot around the web. So far we’ve done 4, and there are more coming. 🙂

Experiments: There were also projects we developed and experiments that we carried out, such as the map showing the location of radio listeners around the world.

And of course, there were also some initiatives we started a while ago but we didn’t announce until this year, such as “Everyone does Customer Support” and “Streema in Multiple Languages”.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the read.

Happy holidays and see you in 2015!

The Streema Team

We. Humans. Fools.

Posted on by Streema Team

It’s April 1st, but this is not an April Fools joke.

The truth is that we really haven’t written anything for the past few months and that’s not funny. We feel bad, shame on us fools.

We’re fools for failing and forgetting. We’ve been busy, but that’s no excuse.

However, we’re also fools for being so human, so human we smile, cry, enjoy, and even laugh at GIFs like these:

 

I want these two in my team!

 

Hi girls, please play the part that says… #not

 

That should be more than a quadruple, right?

 

We hope you enjoyed them as much as we did, us fools. 🙂

Happy day!

Everyone Does Customer Support (at Streema)

Posted on by Streema Team

Today we wanted to share a practice with you that we started in mid-2013 and has been doing great at Streema.

First, a short story that may sound familiar…

There was once a young company that wanted to grow quickly. This company learned that, to build things fast, many times it was better to just focus on as few activities as possible. And with such a focus and lean operation, there was only a small amount of resources dedicated to things like Customer Support. As a matter of fact, the Customer Support team was a very thinly stretched operation (one person, very little time) that addressed the questions, concerns, and in some cases, even complains of the users. 🙁 Then this company grew to a point that they could have more people dedicated to Customer Support and be able to actually “support” many more user issues. That company was Streema.

Around 6 months ago, at Streema we reached a stage where we could choose to move a little slower in one area, to move faster in another, and for our users – at least those who write us – it has been a great change good. 😀 So, by the end of August 2013, we – the two people who did Customer Support at Streema – proposed to have a “Everyone Does Customer Support” policy, which consisted in having all the members of the company dedicate one hour every two weeks to do support – ranging from the intern to even the CEO.

These were our main goals:

1) Understand and empathize better with our users.

2) Develop tools to make better our support experience.

3) Add a stronger customer orientation to our company culture.

We’re not going to say it was easy but it has been a great success so far and the results were above expectations. At the beginning there were many questions about how to answer user inquiries, or how to use the tool, but with time and patience we really took our support culture to the next level: not only have we’ve been answering customer issues better and faster, but we’ve also had to ask some of our developers to not dedicate too much time on customer support. :S

Just as a side comment, when it comes to Customer Support tools, we happily recommend Desk to manage your support – with the flex hours option you can add as many people as you need and only pay for the time doing support.

And finally, as you can imagine, if you send an email to info@streema.com or you use our help center contact form, you’ll reach any of us. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS. If you want to read more about this topic, check out the following articles:

Whole Company Support with Nick Francis

Humanity is Required

Don’t Keep Customers Waiting

Happy Holidays!

Posted on by Streema Team

This is just a very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very (we cut it here because if not it wont be very) short message to wish all of you a…

Happy Holidays!

See you in 2014. 🙂

The Streema Team

PS: Yeah, we’ve written better “year end” blog posts, we know it: blog.streema.com/2011/12/24/happy-holidays-from-streema/

Some thoughts on Radio

Posted on by Streema Team

Sometimes when we explain to people what we do, we hear a reaction such as: “Ahhh, broadcast radio… isn’t that industry going downhill, specially with all those services such as Pandora, Spotify…”. In this blog post we would like to give our point of view.

First, when we think about “radio”, we think about a song, talk, show, or any content that is delivered live to everyone. While some services offer music or content on demand, radio is essentially the same audio content at the same time to everybody.

Right now there is trend called “customization” that technology and the web have spread widely, but we think that even in this context a live stream that anyone can tune in to has very specific value. Actually, it’s a way to “connect” people and makes us feel in community. Think about a song that is released for the first time on a station or when a popular radio DJ ask a tough fun question to a caller on live radio – that is a very unique experience.

Second, as we’ve mentioned before, radio is not only about music, there are also live shows, sport events, and talk shows of every type that you can imagine and even more: anime, astrology, art, children, drama, gaming, language, military, transport… and the list goes on. There are more than 70 non music genres containing radio stations that represent more than 30% of our directory.

Now, let’s get back to music. Everybody would think that most people discover new music through sources such as YouTube, Spotify, or any similar. However, recent studies suggest that people still choose radio as their first source for music discovery.

And now, back to content. It’s true, a big part of the traditional radio industry is still doing the same thing that it was doing decades ago, but there is a lot changing too and there are many people experimenting with new things, like new sources to fund and reach audiences. For example, the case of radio show “99% Invisible“, they aimed to raise $ 42K at Kickstarter (a popular online crowdfunding platform) and this month they raised more than $170K!!! This may or may not be a trend, although it’s certainly not the only one, and while it’s also true that not every show can easily raise the money to make it happen, this is for sure a great success story!

To conclude, without a doubt radio has its threats and its weaknesses, but we believe it also has its strengths and its opportunities. We hope Streema can help with these last two, helping radio to reach places it has never reached before and connect with its listeners in ways it has never done before.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

If you’re still interested on this topic, check this out: The Big Box Theory, or Why Radio Is and/or Isn’t Dead

Happy Holidays from Streema!

Posted on by Streema Team

Hi! It’s getting close to the end of 2011 and we can’t believe how quickly the last 12 months have gone by! This year has been a busy and rocking one for us, with improvements to our site Streema.com, our first steps in mobile, a growing community of users, and a growing team of awesome people.

Before the year is over though, we wanted to thank all of you that have been there with us – family, friends, colleagues, and of course, you, our community of radio listeners. Thanks for the support.

We wish you a wonderful Holiday Season and a great start in 2012 – see you in the new year!

Yours truly,
The Streema Team

PS: A small present from a man who knows to rock!

Building and Improving Streema’s Radio Database

Posted on by Streema Team

Ever since we started Streema, we knew we would need to develop a very large database with a lot of information about radio stations – and today we want to tell you a little bit more about how we build it. Essentially, we get our information from three main sources: our Community, an Automatic Aggregation System, and Outsourced Services.

Community

These are our users who every day request a radio station, report a wrong description or give us any feedback, for example. These users are, in many cases, the best source of quality information, because for example, there’s no one better than a radio owner to inform us which is the correct stream or the correct description of their radio station. They also take the time to let us know about a new genre, a radio acquisition or any missing information. We are really thankful to all of our users but specially want to thank Steve who has reported and helped us improve the information for hundreds of radio stations from Canada and the USA.

Automatic Aggregation System

Over the past decade, the web has evolved in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest ways is how information is delivered. At the beginning one of the most popular formats was RSS but recently Twitter and Facebook have replaced it in many ways. We’re working hard to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and other sources of information so that our users can have access to all of that via our radio profiles.

Outsourced Services

Not everything is so easy and fun, because sometimes neither our users nor any automatic aggregation can find the information we need for thousands of radio stations, so in those cases, we have to use other services and get help from other people. To do that, we use services such as Mechanical Turk and oDesk, where people willing to help us can find the information we need quickly, such as slogans, descriptions, telephone numbers, twitter accounts, or anything else we request. We want to thank all the people who have worked with us via these services, specially Teresa and others who are doing a great job at, for example, finding radio show information.

At Streema, we’re working hard today to build the most complete and comprehensive online radio platform, which mostly includes radio stations for now, but in the future will also have radio shows, hosts and more. We hope you help us to make it better and enjoy the journey too. 😀

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team