Here's a short list of the best resources, numbers, visualizations and more that we've found around the web. Hope you enjoy them!

- To start off, want to feel the hype of the World Cup 2014?

- Here's the World Cup 2014 in Numbers (in less than 2 minutes).

- Would you love to visit Brazil's stadiums from the comfort of your own home?

- Big fan of football? The FIFA Weekly has EVERYTHING!

- Finally, want a summary of the matches, teams, locations and groups all in one place?

That's all for now. Stay tuned to Streema as we'll be covering more news about the World Cup 2014!

The Streema Team

One phrase from a very known Latin American country goes like this: "there are 40 million national team coaches here". This in a country that has a population of 40 million! So, you can guess that as the final list of 23 players came out yesterday, there were millions of fans around the world that disagreed with their respective national coaches. Even when the preliminary list of 30 players came out a few weeks ago, there was controversy.

As for the players themselves, there has been talk around the web about the awesome ones that have been left out in the successive series of cuts. Here's just a short list that would make one cry... Ashley Cole (England), Carlos Tevez (Argentina), Kaká (Brazil), Mario Gomez (Germany), Nasri (France), Radamel Falcão (Colombia), Ever Banega (Argentina), Jean Armel Kana-Biyik (Cameroon), and Luke Wilkshire (Australia), to name a few. Of course, this is in addition to those players that aren't coming to the World Cup because their teams didn't qualify - again you will be missed Zlatan!

With less than 10 days left until the start of the tournament, you must be wondering where to watch the World Cup games on internet TV or how to listen to them via online radio. As we mentioned recently, we had a small announcement to make regarding the World Cup. Get ready as there is now a section specifically for World Cup 2014 Radio and TV at Streema, where you can watch live games on TV or listen to each match via hand picked radio stations. Check it out!

The Streema Team

Hi Streema Fans,

The moment we've all been waiting for is right around the corner! Less than a month left before kickoff, all over the globe people are getting ready for the FIFA 2014 World Cup. The Copa do Mundo is arguably the biggest sporting event in the world and it will be held in Brazil which is arguably the country with the most hardcore soccer fans in the world - quite the combination!

It is true that the World Cup Qualifiers produced some surprises - you will be missed Zlatan! - we can all agree that this coming Copa do Mundo will be one of the most exciting ever. Plus, this is the first time in 64 years that Brazil has held a World Cup, the last time being in 1950.

In this edition, it's likely that Ronaldo and Messi will be vying for the top scorer title, but also Neymar, Samuel Eto'o to Didier Drogba, to name a few household names, will likely not be far behind. And while the popular saying "With age comes wisdom" will be repeated during the event thanks to some of the veterans present, we also have some young guns like English players Luke Shaw (18) and Raheem Sterling (19), among the youngest in this event, coming for the first time to the World Cup.

Anyway, we didn't want to finish this post before giving you guys a heads up that something related to the World Cup 2014 is coming at Streema. Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Today we wanted to share a little feature that we developed a while ago for our desktop users, but that very few know about: Player Shortcuts.

We humans love to be productive, so when new hardware or a piece of software solve a problem for us, we feel reaaaally good. Many times something is beautiful or awesome, but other times it's more about speed and efficiency: something that could have taken days to do, is now done in just hours; something that could have taken hours now takes minutes; and something that used to take seconds, now only takes milliseconds. And the last one is the case we want to share.

As you might know, many of the Radio Stations listed in our directory display their Now Playing information. So now, with these Player Shortcuts, instead of using your mouse, we've enabled:

• The ← → arrows of your keyboard to browse that info.
• The spacebar plays (or stops) the audio.

Check it out!

We're also now considering the ↑ ↓ arrows for increasing and decreasing the volume. Would that be useful? Please let us know!

Bear in mind this feature may not work in every browser, but we can assure it does work in Chrome, Firefox and IE version 8 and above.

Stay tuned!

The 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!

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

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/

If you have a smartphone or tablet and have tried our mobile web in the last few weeks, you might have noticed some big improvements.

To start off, we've finally added the same station playlists we had on our desktop app. Try it out! In addition to the Now Playing information we already had, you'll love seeing the station's recently played songs. 🙂

You can also enjoy a more personalized experience. Now you can create a list of presets by favoriting any station you'd like. Additionally, we decided to add your recently played stations for ease of access. Yes! This means that there's a page that better reflects your personal taste. 🙂

The best of all, we've improved the overall experience - you can listen to a station while browsing our entire mobile site. As soon as you tune in to a station, you'll notice a player at the bottom of the screen that will go with you anywhere on our site. That's probably our favorite new feature!

Additionally, we've improved a few other aspects of the experience:

- Added a menu with quick access.

- Created a default list with local radio stations.

- Improved the algorithm for selecting "related radio stations".

While we're at it, here's a sneak peak into what's coming soon:

- Adding an icon to your homescreen, starting with iOS.

- Sign up and Login features for saving your Favorites forever - and of course, bringing your Desktop Favorites too. 😉

- Compatibility improvements for Blackberry and Windows Phone users.

We've come a long way since we launched Streema's initial mobile web version back in 2011. However, we still think there's much more to do and we'll keep you updated with what's coming.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

If you are a frequent user of Streema.com, you may have seen brands promoted on our website. Today we want to talk about that: Advertising.

Streema's business model is based on advertising, that means we develop and maintain our application, content, infrastructure and support with the sponsorship of third-party products and services.

That might not surprise you, after all, most of the web works that way, a few good examples are: YouTube, Google, Facebook and most of the newspapers. And that makes sense, since the Internet is a communication medium, and media connects people with people, people with things (brands and services), or just things with things. 🙂

Now, Advertising, as with every business, may or may not be well executed, you might have come across many websites where ads are nonsense or simply annoying. In many cases, they even confuse the users, promoting useless products or announcing that the user has won some kind of prize - when we all know that wasn't the case. As we've mentioned in previous blog posts, at Streema we want to assure the best listening/watching experience, and the ads on our site are part of that, so we have been working to block ads, advertisers and Ad Networks that do not enhance that value. If you ever run into those types of ads on our site, please let us know so that we can continue improving your experience.

We work with AdSense, one of the biggest Ad Networks in the world, which has a really strict policy with advertisers. AdSense has been very reliable for us and in addition it also let us understand, with the help of Google Analytics, the behaviour of our users. AdSense's job consists mainly in targeting relevant ads to the user, which is mostly based on: the geographical location of the visit, the content of the page, or what have been searched or browsed before coming to Streema (for certain users).

One important thing to mention is that if you are an advertiser that wants to advertise on Streema.com, whether on our desktop or mobile websites, you should sign up with AdWords or with one of the AdSense Certified Ad Networks. To learn more about how these ads work and how to advertise on Streema, please go to: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/152693 .

That's all for now, we hope this has helped you to better understand how our application works as well as how we pay our bills. 🙂

If you'd like to share an idea with us about this or want to inform us about a confusing or misleading ad, please send us an email to info at streema dot com. Thanks!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Following the improvements we mentioned in our previous blog post, now we're back with more news about our player - after all, Streema is about playing radio and TV. 🙂

Before we start, something important to mention is that, as we've explained before, Streema does not provide the streaming service, but rather it provides the platform for tuning in to stations. However, in many cases we're not able to play a radio or TV station because there's a broken stream or because we don't find compatible players. Here are some figures to explain that better:

For our Radio Desktop users*, last month (August 2013) 70.3% of them were able to play a radio station, while that number was only 57.6% a year ago (August 2012).

*These figures do not include external players - if they did,
the percentage of successful tune ins would be much higher.

To do so, a big part of the work was fixing and updating thousands of streams. Additionally, we have also improved how the plugins work as well as the number of plugins supported - for example, last year 13.4% of our users couldn't play a station because a of plugin compatibility issue, today that number is only 6.1%.

As you might know, a plugin is a software that allows, in our case, to play a station in your browser, so part of our job is to find plugins that will make the audio and video work on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

All this has been the result of both testing and measuring better as well as understanding the behavior of our users. Thanks for listening and watching!

Hopefully in the not so distant future we'll have a chance to share some data regarding mobile as well as TV.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team