The Streema Blog

Early last week we posted that we were working on a Song Information Aggregator.  Well, we got so excited that we decided to work on it a whole lot more and… we’re proud to announce that our initial DEMO of the feature is now available on both our website and Facebook applications!!

We wanted to give our blog readers a sneak preview of this feature, which is now live, but will not be widely promoted yet.  So, when you are listening to a radio station that displays the name of the song on our player’s screen, just click on the name of the song and we’ll take you to the DEMO.  To quickly try it out, here are a few stations that have easily accessible* song information:

- Power Hitz: Top 40 - Hip Hop - Rap

- 181.FM Rock 40: Rock - Adult Contemporary

- ETN.fm Progressive Channel ETN2: Electronica - House

In addition, once you’re on the Song Information Aggregator page, you can search for any other “Artist - Song” by using the search box on that page. For a quick example, click on any of the following songs:

- Lady Gaga - Just Dance

- Metro Station - Shake It

- AC/DC - Back In Black

And for those of you that are interested in the tech stuff, the development consisted of integrating YouTube, Twitter, and LyricWiki APIs.

We really think we can improve this much more, so please send us all the comments you may have about it. Bear in mind this is only a DEMO, so you might find some (or many) things that don’t work as expected. Hope you enjoy it, and as we’ve said, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

* Not all the radio stations in our directory may have this feature working - for more information, please, check our FAQ #4 .

Hello Streema Fans!

We wanted to let you know that yesterday morning we reached 5,000 “Fans” on our Facebook application!  Yes, FIVE THOUSAND. :) Looking back we also realized that approximately a year ago, we posted that we reached 500 fans. That’s a 10-fold increase! This deserves a high five!!!  (no pun intended)

Now that we’ve given ourselves a nice pat on the back, it’s time to get back to work and add another “0″ to the number. So, this is our challenge: 50,000 Fans by November 2010. That might not be easy, maybe almost impossible - but hey, what’s life without trying for the “almost impossible” things. At the end of the day it depends of all of us!

Once again, thanks for being part of Streema.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Hi everybody,

For those of you that tune in via our Facebook application, a few weeks ago you likely experienced severe loading problems.  The problem appeared to be on Facebook platform side, and unfortunately, we have to say that we didn’t receive all the assistance we needed to solve it as soon as possible.

But the good news is that we’ve took the opportunity to make huge changes in how our application interacts with the platform - in other words, all the stuff that you can’t necessarily see but that keep the application running!  These changes now make our application less susceptible to these platform issues, but one downside of this is that in order to upload this new version as soon as possible, we had to temporarily disable our “Recommendations” section and a few small features.  But be patient, we’ll be back with it as soon as possible. :)

With this new upload, we also took the opportunity to include other things we were working on previously, such as the new pop up player we announced a couple of months ago.  This popup was designed using the style of our Streema.com website, which means that it hides the Windows Media or the Real Audio players, but keeps the play/stop and volume buttons.  Bear in mind, though, that you’ll still need to have these two media players installed on your computer!  See our FAQs for alternative media players.

As you might imagine, this launch was not prepared with all the care that we would’ve like, but at least our application is now up and running again!  If you find any bugs, please feel free to report them.

Anyway, thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

So, we just rolled out a new version of our player this week and wanted to make a quick announcement about it!

Before we let you in on the details, we wanted to say that rather than “seeing” the change, you’ll actually experience the difference.

Essentially, when tuning in to a radio on Streema…

• No matter which Operating System you have: Windows, OS X, Ubuntu (or any Linux related)…
• No matter which Browser you are using: Internet Explorer 7.0/8.0, Firefox 2 or above, Safari, Chrome, Opera…
• And no matter which players and plug-ins you’ve installed: Windows Media Player, Real Audio, Flash, etc…

… our new player will find the best player / plug-in combination for your computer.  And our new algorithm is much better than our previous one!

What does this mean for you?  Simply put, you’ll be able to tune in to a greater number of stations than before.  That makes us very happy.  :)

Anyway, hope you continue enjoying your favorite radio stations, and more than ever, your feedback with this new player will be welcomed.  Please, if you find anything not working properly, let us know!

For those Facebook users out there, this new player will be rolled out on our Facebook application (Streema Radio Tuner) over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, check out what’s cooking below!

Yes, we’ll soon be changing the design of our Facebook application’s popup player.  If you are also one of our website users, you’ll notice that the new player has the same style as the one on the Streema website.

Anyway, just wanted to give you a sneak preview.  More new cool stuff is coming soon to our Facebook application, so stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We’re really - and we mean REALLY - excited to announce something that will be the beginning of a “before and after” moment in Streema’s history:  from now on, you will be able to see the name of the song that is currently playing.  This has been heavily requested by our community - and to be honest, to be able to finally show it to all of you it is unbelievably awesome!

So, how does this work?  It’s pretty simple to explain:  many radios stations offer this information in all sorts of different ways, sometimes via the stream, sometimes via their website.  What we do is figure out how to grab that information (which is many times not easily available) and then we’ll display it both on Streema.com’s player (check the screen shot above) and on our Facebook application’s popup player.  Here’s a quick sample of radio stations for which we will show the song information:

- Power Hitz, Hits from the U.S.
- NME Radio has THE best Alternative Rock in the U.K.
- Slow.fm plays Slow and Ambient music
- Roots Rock Reggae with classic reggae in Jamaica
- Deepinside - DJ Sessions if you want go Electronic ;)

In addition to most of 1.FM, 977, Sky.fm, 181.fm, AVRO, and M2 channels - check them out!

By the way, do bear in mind that we currently have this feature only for a reduced number of stations, but believe us that we’re working hard to eventually have this for as many stations as is humanly possible.  : )  In the meantime, you might want to see our directory ordered by availability of song information!

Is that all?  No Sir!  On our Facebook application, you’ll be able to update your Facebook status with the song information.  Also, keep an eye out because we might have something similar on our website Streema.com in the not-so-distant future.

Where else are we going with this?  We’re not sure yet, but we’d love to hear directly from you about this.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we are!

And more than ever… stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We wanted to let you know, in case you still haven’t seen them, that we added ads to our Facebook application just a few days ago.

In particular, we’ve added two type of ads:  one on the canvas of the application (check the screen shot above) and a small one on the popup player. The ads that appear might not be most interesting for now, but we are trying different ad networks in order to show the most meaningful and interesting ones.  We also hope that you find some of them entertaining.  :)

As always, we want to know what you think about this, so don’t hesitate to send us your feedback.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

It’s been three months since we launched our Facebook application for Pages, and we are really happy with the results! To understand our joy, we’ll let you know of a few Pages on Facebook that have added our application.

To start off, a few very known radios, such as Air 1 in the US, Radio Deejay in Italy, and Radio 1 in Slovenia have added our application to their pages.

In addition, a lot of popular radios as well: RTI from Slovakia, RMX from Mexico, WACK 91.1 from Trinidad and Tobago, The Rock from Florida (USA), Radiodiva and Radio Bari, both from Italy. All of them added our application.

Also, a lot of electronic stations also have our app, so if you like Drum and Bass, check out Nu-Perception; for Trance, Planet Citizens; and for Chillout, Buzzoutroom.

Another popular group of Pages that have added our application are universities. To mention just two: in Israel, Kol-Hacampus; and in the US, WPUNJ’s Alumni Association from New Jersey.

Finally, DJs, Bands and other types of pages also have the Streema Radio Tuner for Pages.

We want to specially thank all these Page owners for letting us create a radio listening experience on their page. And, of course, we also want to thank the more than a hundred fans that support the application. : )

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS - Sincere apologies for not mentioning all the Pages that have added our application. If you’d like to appear on our next post about this topic, please let us know.

Hi everybody, we’re back with some good news!

Lets start with some history. Back in the old ages of 2008, Facebook announced that it was going to launch a profile redesign. At Streema, we researched all the implications and developed a bunch of new stuff we thought our users would like: the Profile Tab was one of them.

To our pleasant surprise, the Profile Tab has been very popular amongst our users, so we thought it would be great to continue improving it! In the same way we did with the old Profile Box, your most listened radios will now appear. In addition, given that many radio fans and owners wanted to make one station stand out on their profile, you will now be able to “Feature” it. To do so, just go to our application, then to the Profile section, and follow the steps - you’ll be featuring a radio on your profile in less than a minute! Check out the screen shot below.

Also, remember that one of the best ways to share that radio is also to recommend it to all your friends. ;)

Okay, enough for now! If you haven’t added the Profile Tab yet, just go to your profile, click on the More Tabs menu which is displayed as a “+” (plus sign) and then select “Streema Radio Tuner”. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Today we’re celebrating that we’ve reached 500 “Fans” on our Facebook application - this deserves a high five!!!

Among our hundreds fans, we have people mainly from these countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela; and we also have fans from: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Grenada, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and the Virgin Islands. This means we have fans from 50 countries… only 142 more to go! :P

As always, and now more than ever, we encourage you to continue sharing, recommending and enjoying Streema!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team