The Streema Blog

Today we want to send out a quick update about three user experience improvements we’ve released:

Search

We’ve improved our radio directory search using Indextank, an outsourced search service for web applications. This should provide faster and better results when you search by radio, city, country, etc. on Streema. We’ll soon be releasing other features, such as: Faceting and Autocomplete. Consider this is a recent implementation and might need some fixes, it’ll keep getting better. :)

Radio Streams

As part of the process we started a couple months – which we mentioned in a previous post – the streams of thousands of radio stations in our directory have been fixed. This should definitely result in a better user experience, because there’s nothing worse than trying to tune in a radio and not being able to listen to it. We want to continue working on this area, so please, help us by letting us know when a station doesn’t work.

Radios without Stream

You’ll find our directory has many stations without streams, this is either because the station doesn’t stream online, it doesn’t work, or we don’t have it stored in our database. For those stations, we thought it would be great to provide our users with similar options to listen, so in case you click on the “play button” of any of those radios, a message offering other streaming stations will appear. We want to specially thank Emiliano Castaño who has given his good advice on building this part of the user interface.
Disclaimer: this is a feature we are currently testing, so you’ll probably won’t see it every time you visit Streema.

That’s all for now, we hope you enjoy these improvements. :)

Stay tuned!

The 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. :D

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We’re back and we wanted to introduce you to our friend “Dr. Streema”. :)

Dr. Streema is the gentleman you’ll find every time Streema is either on “Maintainance Mode” or an Error 500 appears – the latter means when our server is aware of encountering an error or is otherwise incapable of performing a request.

The design was made by our friend Agustin Di Luciano. In case there are any artists out there that are interested, Agustin used a regular pencil over white paper (90g) first, followed by India ink. He then “handpainted” on an iPhone with ArtStudio’s app and retouched it on Photoshop – yes, you heard right, it was painted on an iPhone! You can check out more of Agustin’s collection.

That’s all for now, say “Hi” to Dr. Streema – and “Goodbye”, because we hope you never need to meet him!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

At Streema we are building a place where people can listen to their favorite stations. In addition, we want to create a platform where people can connect with other people who listen to radio.

Lately we’ve been thinking hard about this. What does radio listening on a social platform really mean? “Social” is something that has always been talked about, and specially recently with Google+, but social applied to radio not so much. Changing that is one of the reasons Streema exists.

Now, it’s easy to say all of this, but very hard to do it. So, how do we make this a more social platform? How should we connect people? We’d love to hear what you think. For example, today you can see what your friends listen to, you can see what users listen to which stations, you can write wall comments on station profiles, even write reviews… but what else would you like to do on our site?

Two of our elite code monkeys in a resting session (we let them listen to radio) – check the complete photo collection.

With this blog post we want to hear from you… and ANY idea is welcome, the crazier the better. If we just get to implement even one idea that can make Streema a better social platform, then we’ll be happy!

One thing that differentiates us from the rest of the radio websites is that we want to connect people that listen to radio and would love to take that to a level that no one has done before. Thanks once again for your help. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

As we did last year with Haiti’s earthquake, this time we want to call out to the Streema community to help Japan.

About two months and a half ago an earthquake hit Japan and it was the fifth largest in history. Shortly after, a tsunami struck the eastern coast of the country, causing a whole lot of destruction.  There was a lot of buzz in the media about it and many governments, organizations, and individuals were inspired to help.  However, now that the media is giving the Japan disaster less attention, we still wanted to let everyone know that it’s always a good time to lend a hand, so we’ve summarized a few options below!

Donating

Given Japan’s geographical location, donating funds is one of the most effective ways we can help as individuals.  You can find a very complete list of organizations in this NYT article, but we highlight three where you can donate in a few steps:

Japanese Red Cross Society

MercyCorps

WorldVision

Informing

When these disasters affect such a large area, it’s difficult to find and connect people.  If you are searching for someone or know any information about anyone who is missing, you can use a tool that Google has developed to search or submit information about missing people.

Volunteering

From the research we’ve done, unfortunately there is no simple way to contribute as a volunteer in an organization or on “the field”. However, you can spread the word about what people CAN do – the way we are doing right now – and we invite you to do it too!  :)

As we did before with Haiti last year, we want to bring this to your attention because it’s still never too late to help Japan.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: By the way, here are some maps and sattelite images that are really worth checking out.

Finally finally finally we are opening The Streema Store we announced in December 2010. We’re extremely excited about this, not only because we’ll finally have the chance to get a Streema-branded t-shirt or mug for the first time, but even better, all of our fans will be able to get the official and authentic Streema merchandise. ;)

To start off we are offering T-Shirts for men, T-Shirts for women, Sweatshirts, Mugs, Mousepads, Aprons, Glass Steins and Bags. However, we would love to hear your suggestions for any product or design you’ll like to have.

For now, a few things we want you to know:

• For the next 30 days, you’ll have the possibility to use a coupon: “streemalatepresent” that will give you a discount of U$S 5 to the orders above U$S 25.
• The products can be shipped to 213 countries, just bear in mind it could take over 4 weeks to get to places like Argentina, but they should arrive. :)
• In order to make an order, you cannot use your personal Streema account, that is because the e-commerce is managed by Printfection.

Last but not least we want to thank all the people who gave us super valuable feedback to make this possible – believe us when we tell you that clothes for women and aprons are not among our specialties! We also want to thank our friends who came to the photo shooting as well as Jochi for taking the pictures and the folks over at GoodPeople for lending us their skateboards.  Finally, thanks to Printfection for offering this useful, reliable and secure tool to design, sell and ship products.

That’s all for now – we’re looking forward to seeing you wear those t-shirts and drinking out of Streema’s glass steins around the world. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Here’s a neat little feature we recently released and wanted to let you know about: Radio Reviews.  Now you can rate and review any station on our site!

We uploaded this feature a few days ago and we’ve already noticed some interesting activity. Check out these examples:

• Caraibes FM - News and Talk from Haiti
• Radio Boas Novas AM - Brazilian and Gospel from Brazil
• KC Tunes - Classic Rock from the United States

That’s all for now – we look forward to seeing your radio ratings and reviews!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Soon soon very soooooon we’ll bring the present we promise!

We have some good news for our lovely users who are embedding (or will like to embed) the Radio Widget on their blogs, websites and social profiles: we redesigned the widget we launched last year!

Based on user feedback, the redesign mainly consisted of giving the widget a more lively and fresh look. Additionally, now you can customize the background color with the following options: Vintage Grey, Streema Blue, Freaky Fuchsia, Sassy Orange, and for the audacious ones out there… Yoshi Green. ;)

Go ahead and check it out for Fusion Radio Chicago:

FREE LIVE RADIO ONLINE

Fusion Radio Chicago

---

Grab radio widget | More radio

The redesign not only involved the Radio Widget for a single station, but also the Radio Badge for stations that don't have a streaming URL as well as the Radio Widget for multiple radio stations that appear on the right column of the Radio Station Directory.

As we mentioned in our previous widget post, that was a first version of the widget - so you can consider this the second one. We look forward to hearing from you and making new changes in the future, like offering more colors and even bigger dimensions.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Just in case you're wondering: if you have already embedded the previous widget, in order to get the new design, you'll need to copy and paste the new code.

PS2: With regards to the "surprise" we mentioned previously, we promise it will be on our next blog post! ;)

January has been a busy month for the team at Streema. In addition to our usual day-to-day work, we received a two-week visit from a group of students from North Carolina.

During the second and third week of the month, we worked with over a dozen students from Elon University. As part of their entrepreneurship class, they spent two weeks abroad, researching and developing cool ideas for our company, while visiting our local team in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  They split into three teams and, at the end of their two weeks, each team presented their recommendations on how to improve Streema’s service.

We especially want to thank Dr. Hodge and Professor Palin for bringing them, and of course, we also want to thank all the students for such great work!

Elon students and their professors at the Raleigh airport, coming back from their trip.

That’s all for now, see you on our next blog post. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Yes, we know we owe you a surprise from December, but please be patient and we’ll soon have the surprise ready for you!

It’s the end of the year, a time for reflection, wishes and projections. But before we get into that, we would like to talk about ”us” as a whole: people who listen to radio, people who express their ideas, people who develop features, people who report bugs, people who fix them… there are many of us and today we want to talk about us all.

YOU are the most important part of all this. Every day on Streema, you listen to thousands of stations, write comments on the station’s profile walls, send us loads of suggestions via the contact form and Facebook application, and even tweet about Streema!  Without you nothing would make sense.

WE have been developing this project since 2007 and we’re pretty happy to say it’s been a great journey. Streema has been a big part of our lives with lots of successes and failures. We’re still a small team (that’s why more than once we ask you to be patient with us) but the four of us are as committed as ever to make Streema a success.

Streema Team, from left to right: Juan, Martín, JC and Ricky.

WE are Streema and YOU are Streema. So, to all of the Streema fans out there: THANK YOU for being part of our journey. We wish you a great holiday season!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: We’ve got a little surprise for you in the works, but you’ll need to wait till early 2011 to find out. ;)