Echolot

Hobnox.com: What We've Been Cooking

In an earlier post this week, I mentioned Feb 28th to be the kick-off for our closed beta with hobnox.com. There are two more weeks to go and I’d like to share with you what will be available behind closed doors when we start.

The company info on our site says this:

Hobnox is an online entertainment and rich media publishing platform, uniting broadcast quality web media with cutting edge community-enabling technology. We combine the best of current web entertainment with the newest technological possibilities of the internet to create new fascinating opportunities for both artists and audiences.

In short: It’s a platform built by creatives for creatives. People working at Hobnox include music & film producers, DJ’s, musicians and even an sculptor. 

Hobnox will provide browserbased tools for media production, community functionalities tailored to the needs of creatives and editorial-led webTV channels for distribution of your media.

The first two tools: Audio Production and Live Broadcasting

Audio Production: Remember the legendary Roland drum machine TR-909 or the TR-303 synthesizer with built-in sequencer that paved the way for electronic music in the 80ies? Well, our great engeneering team has spent the last months  building flash-based replicas of those machines in a very intuitive and fun way. One thing that you might see at a lot of rock shows are the tiny effect pedals that guitar players all over the world use. The leader in this area is the US company Boss. Here too, we´ve created some replicas (Delay, Flanger, Modulation, etc.) to combine them with the drum machine and sequencers. The fun part here is, that you can arrange cabling by dragging and dropping the cables from one device to another. The devices are positioned on an endless virtual “table” (basically your browser), you can drag all devices around the way you like, zoom in and out, turn the lights on/off. That´s the start. The team will continue to add more devices and functionalities. The goal is to develop a full webbased audio production studio. 

Here’s what this precious looks like:

Live Broadcasting: After 06/07 seemed to be the year for video hosting services and mass market penetration of online video, 2008 looks like to be the year for live broadcasting. We’ve seen services like Justin.tv, Mogulus and recently Yahoo! Live emerge in the past months. On the other side, there have been numerous attempts to broadcast live concerts through the web (James Blunt, Missy Higgins in the US and Jan Delay in Germany). Hobnox will provide a live tool that lets you choose your content from different sources: your own media library, the Hobnox library and up to three live sources (cameras, webcam). Arrange your content in a “source-line” and brodcast live to a pre-defined audience (everyone, your contacts, just you). You’ll have the option to automatically save your show to the Hobnox Stage for everyone to watch on demand after you´re done.

Community: Besides the standard features (profile, friends/fans/connections, blog, etc.) our community will try to stimulate collaboration on a basis of projects: As a user you can create countless projects within your profile, grant access to users that you think could contribute to the project. Example: You have the guy doing the beats sitting in California, the guy doing overdubs in Berlin and the singer in Australia? Access your project section and upload your stuff, download it and communicate, just the three of you. Or invite more people to join the project.

Channels: We have four channels so far covering three areas: Music (EU, US), Film and All things “Street”. Those channels are produced by our own editorial teams in Berlin and Boston. At launch, we will present a new channel navigation that lets you add the content to a playlist or to your favourites, to your blog or profiles by embed codes. Our editorial teams will be watching the acitivity on the Hobnox Stage and be on the lookout for talent out there in order to feature upcoming artists on our channels. 

So yeah, that’s basically what we’ve been doing for the past several months. I guess it’s not exaggerated to say that I am super-excited to see the first reactions of beta users we give access to the site in two weeks.

Let me know if you want to be part of the beta an I’ll hook you up. (noel.hobnox AT gmail DOT com) 

Update: See the blogpost of André Michelle, our Head of Flash Development