JackThreads Gets an iPads App

SoundCloud Drifts to NY The orange-and-white audio platform announced the opening of offices in New York this week, declaring that they find the city "similar to Berlin" in that it’s "not trying to replicate what’s going on in The Valley." SoundCloud has also taken on Dan Gerber, the former National Director of Strategic Partnerships at Pandora, in order to look after brand revenues following his work at The Grammys. No word if he’ll organize Taylor Swift-style digs at rivals Spotify and Songza.

Aereo Reveals New Pricing Structure Controversial live TV streaming company Aereo unveiled a new payment plan for customers that allows access to most features for as little as $8 an hour. The purveyors of tiny antennas said the pricing plan "requires no long-term commitment and eliminates the previous annual and day plans," referring to it as "streamlined." The move is accompanied by a commitment to offer full service amenities free for the first month commencing May 15. Aereo's CEO stated that, "We looked at our data and it was clear, consumers want a more simple approach to pricing," mentioning nothing about undercutting the network giants they’ve so angered.

SideTour Adds BlackJack Wiz Experience maestros SideTour let slip that one of their own employees, a veteran card counter and Blackjack player, has started offering tours of his own. The staff member, Brian Cotlove, "spent six years making a career playing blackjack in casinos around the world." Perhaps a trip to Atlantic City is in order for the SideTour team?

BitPay Expands The BitCoin world’s PayPal has grown with the inclusion of Bitcoin core-developer Jeff Garzik and CFO Bryan Krohn. As BitCoin prepares to be used in up to 50,000 stores, the payment site says that Mr. Garzik’s new position will "allow him to work full-time on Bitcoin, BitPay, and related open-source projects to benefit the Bitcoin community."

Fiverr Hires Former Cuban Council Co-Founder Following the buzz around Google’s acquisition of legendary design firm Cuban Council, it can now be revealed that co-founder Michael Schmidt has made the move to Fiverr, the online services marketplace. Schmidt, who was responsible for Evernote, Bad Religion and the Rdio app, amongst other things, will now be their new front end architect, building and managing the Fiverr design team.

Pheed Launches Android App Feisty young social media upstart Pheed, used by the likes of Miley Cyrus, continues to vie for the big leagues with the launch of an Android app. The site, which is essentially a mashup of every other social media, believes it will "double in size over the next couple of months due to the new Android market," according to CEO O.D. Kobo.

Soundcloud CEO Mr. Ljung (Photo: Twitter.com)

SoundCloud Busts Out Of Beta At this point, SoundCloud is basically the audio version of YouTube. A private-beta version of the site launched earlier this year called Next and the newest version integrates a bunch of those social features that the company hopes will help its users discover new music. “From today, ‘Next’ is now simply SoundCloud,” said Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud in a press release sent to Betabeat. “It’s a platform for people to discover new, original music and audio, for creators to build audiences, and for everyone to share what they hear whether online or on mobile.”

The company claims that users now post over 10 hours of music and audio every minute while reaching over 180 million people. That’s a staggering 8% of the entire internet population, every month. On December 6th, mobile users will be able to enjoy reposts, updated mobile search, and UX updates on both iOS and Android SoundCloud apps.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It Online dating site HowAboutWe is now partnering with AARP to launch a new dating site for 50+ adults. Although millenials might find it the concept hard to swallow, it has potential to be one of the biggest sites out of HowAboutWe’s 32 partnered sites. The 50+ demographic is a huge growing dating demographic because of a huge increase in the divorce rate for people over 50. Hey, everybody needs some love!

Remember, Remember, The Facebook Of Last December Timehop, the app that reminds you of all the social media memories you made in your not-so-distant past, has a bunch of updates dropping in its latest update. You can now share pictures from your camera roll in your Timehop feed. First Foursquare checkins are now integrated into your memories too. Just when everyone forgot you were once mayor of Tom and Jerry’s…

You Must Be This Rich To Ride Free Valet, the travel membership site that offers you rewards and guides for $199 a year, told Betabeat over email that it's now in more than 52 cities and more than 100 hotels. They've offering free rides to the airport until February 1st for members staying at any of their New York hotels. The deal is also being offered to New York members who are on their way to stay at a Valet site somewhere else.

We Like To (Watch Them) Move It Move It Yesterday, Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, kicked off its "Innovators on the Move" series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. The first video in the series features the wedding planning tool, Lover.ly, founder Kellee Khalil. Lover.ly is moving into a brand new New York office and the video chronicles the move.

Innovators on the Move: Kellee from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Etsy Goes Full Mobile Etsy has officially released an Android version of its mobile app, after last week's launch of the company's iPad app. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Etsy said that nearly a quarter of its mobile web visitors come from Android devices all over the world. To celebrate the occasion, you should buy yourself this Android mascot cookie jar.

Big Money To Nice People Google is trying hard to tip the scales more toward good than evil. The company has just launched the Global Impact Awards, which honors nonprofits using technology to tackle problems. The inaugural recipients include a $5 million gift to charity: water, a $5 million prize to Donors Choose, and $2.4 million to Givedirectly, a much younger company than the others.

Lose That Basic Black Jackthreads and designer Adam Gianotti have just released the new collection of their line, Viveshirt. The team has also just put their fall collection from their line Goodale on sale. There's a lot of French terry in both collections and some perfect pieces for that "fancy hoodie" look.

Tweeters Be Shopping Some of those absymal Black Friday stats may be misleading. While IBM reported that 0.34 percent of all online sales over Thanksgiving weekend came from social sites, Jirafe, an ecommerce analytics platform found much higher numbers. Using their unique analytics, the company found that 1.27 percent of sales come from social sites like Facebook and Twitter. A key difference between their analytics is that Jirafe looks at the social media profiles of shoppers. Say for instance a customer buys a product after clicking through from a tweet featuring a new deal. Jirafe can track this data while IBM only looks at ads.

Consumer Cash Flow Consmr, a mobile app that provides ratings and reviews for products, announced earlier this week that it has secured $565,000 in seed funding. The round was led by Lerer Ventures with participation from IA Ventures and MESA+. In a press release sent to Betabeat, CEO Ryan Charles said, “Consmr is well positioned to mobilize the wisdom of the crowds and extend it to everyday product decisions.”

Internet edition. (Photo: MTV)

In recent days the FTC has announced a crackdown on a particularly pernicious type of scheme: Scammers who call you up, out of the blue, purporting to be from "Windows Technical Support." They tell you your computer is lousy with viruses, talk you into giving them remote access, then charge you hundreds of dollars to "fix" it.

If you're computer savvy enough to be reading this blog, you'd probably see right through this nonsense, but you're not the target audience for this scam--it's your unsuspecting, eBay-loving Nana.

Every now and then, though, they call up someone who's a little more cognizant of how security works. For example, last week Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson got a call from one would-be scammer and played him for a solid 15 minutes. But Mr. Anderson lacks the true soul of a troll. It was up to an anonymous technophile who calls himself ”Ted” to go all out, keeping his scammer on the phone for two hours. The last 43 minutes of their little chat are now available on SoundCloud.

As Ars reports, in the course of their discussion, Ted drags his feet with excuses about difficulties involving his Windows 95 PC, his CompuServe account, his AOL account, and his Mosaic browser. ("That's a web browser, right?" replies the increasingly frustrated "tech support" guy.) Every now and then, Ted pretends to have problems with his Internet connection, playing and replaying the sound of a modem dialing up and, at one point, blaming the cat for knocking the cords out of the wall.

All the while, he assures the caller that he's taking this very seriously:

"I want this machine to be secured, for sure," he said. "And I don’t want my machine being dangerous, for sure, I mean that would be bad, that would be very bad, I don’t want it to be bad, I want it to be good. I’m a responsible Internet user, I don’t want to be some of these hacker types that infect the Web and stuff like that."

Imagine that said in a sort of anxious, existentially distraught Woody Allen whine.

It's very amusing, but we hate to think what happens when Ted uses his powers of trolling for mischief, rather than for spamming the scammers.

Mr. Noël (Photo: SoundCloud)

SoundCloud, the agreed-upon poster child for Berlin's burgeoning startup scene, has been making aggressive moves here in the New World over the last year. So it came as no surprise when the company reached out to let us know that three users from "The city of Brooklyn/NYC" (so it's come to this!) had fared well in the second annual Community Fellowship competition.

The local winners are a motley crew: Amy Costello of Brooklyn won support for her new investigative podcast, TinySpark, which focuses on "the business of doing good." Nadia Wilson, also of Brooklyn, submitted a project called "From Hear to There," about travels across the city. The third winner, Jonathan Mitchell (not a Brooklynite, but a Manhattan-dweller) wants to reinvent the radio play with his show The Truth.

We reached out to David Noël, SoundCloud's head of community and the man behind the program, for a bit more detail about what went into the selection process.

The whole idea, he explained, is to "showcase the breadth of how sound can be used in many different ways." In other words, it's a goodwill-fostering way to model the type of content the SoundCloud team would like to see on the platform, and perhaps inspire users to new heights of creativity. (No mean goal, that.)

So, for example, they wanted to be sure to include an instance of storytelling, and an instance of investigative reporting, and so forth. Even better: replicable concepts. Mr. Noël pointed to one fellow, who proposed to create audio tours of Detroit, which might in turn inspire SoundCloud users in other cities to create their own versions.

SoundCloud's aim, he told us, was to select "a broad variety of ways sound can be used for many different objectives. And hopefully then, through that, trigger ideas and trigger creativity from other people to really start thinking about sound as a powerful way, an emotional way, to express themselves."

This is actually the second year the company has handed out the fellowships, but the first year there's been an open call for applications. Last year the process was a bit more haphazard, Mr. Noël admitted to Betabeat. The team spotted several SoundCloud users doing interesting projects, so rather than dole out piecemeal support, the team figured, "Why not just create a fellowship around it and really formalize it?"

SoundCloud has now grown to 20 million users, and has around 50,000 people joining every day. Consequently, Mr. Noël told Betabeat, "we've seen many more use cases emerging, and we wanted to really scale it out." Hence the call for entries, which garnered 184 submissions. A panel of judges then helped whittle the list down to the 15 finalists.

"Originally we wanted to select 10, but we had so many great ones that we added five more."

The U.S. is one of the company's largest markets, and it's growing--hence the strong showing by applicants based in the States. "If you combine all major European countries, it's almost on par. But the U.S. is really a strong growth market."

Well, they've clearly got a headstart on Brooklyn.

Mr. Wahlforss, left; Mr. Ljung, right.

Wilkommen! This is part two of Betabeat's new mini-series, Die Startup-Szene, a peek at the up-and-coming tech hub of Berlin, Germany. We sat down with entrepreneurs from three leading young companies here in the city that is only very, very occasionally referred to as Silicon Allee.

SoundCloud is many things: near-infinite audio hosting platform, sweet dubstep remix discovery site, and recording app; its founders believe they are adding the dimension of sound to a too-quiet web. "Sound as a sense and as a medium is missing on the web," spectacled cofounder Alex Ljung told Betabeat. Berlin DJs and clubs are quite taken with SoundCloud; browse events on beatguide.me, for example, and every music listing is dotted with cloud icons. Ask a Berlin entrepreneur which startups to pay attention to, and SoundCloud is the first name off their tongue. So when Betabeat started planning a trip to Berlin, we knew there was one stop we'd have to make. We wanted to see where the aural magic was made. And we wanted a t-shirt.

Betabeat met the founders of SoundCloud at an afternoon rendesvous in the Janis Joplin conference room, which contained a bright orange beanbag on which Mr. Ljung was reclining as well as a Rubrik's cube the size of a dog. For a music startup, SoundCloud's office decor is surprisingly verbose; quotes printed on letter paper were taped up in a line around the walls: "Objectivity is the view from nowhere," attributed to the philosopher Thomas Nagel; "The violent and righteous are hard of hearing," attributed to German writer Gunter Grass. One conference room was called "T.S. Eliot," because Mr. Ljung likes T.S. Eliot. Of course, a poster of Kurt Cobain watches over the adjacent office bullpen.

When SoundCloud moved to Berlin, the startup scene was much different, Mr. Ljung said. Everything was "the German version of this" he said, referring to Germany's infamous reputation for producing American clones. "Now it's like, we're doing this and we're launching internatioanlly... people have more unique ambitions with what they're doing," he said. Now, people associate Berlin with innovative, consumer-facing startups with precise and beautiful design, Mr. Wahlforss said, noting that he was surprised at how quickly the perception changed.

Over the past four years, SoundCloud has emerged as arguably the most visible web 2.0 startup out of the burgeoning Berlin startup scene. SoundCloud has more than 80 employees in its Berlin office, which is in an art gallery-studded neighborhood in the highly accessible center of the eastern part of the city, Mitte, an area popular with startups. (SoundCloud, which has raised about $83 million and has revenue from premium accounts, also has an office in San Francisco, an office in London and a "lone ranger" in L.A.) The employees add up to 25 different nationalities among them, said cofounders Mr. Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, who themselves moved from Stockholm, Sweden to start SoundCloud. The diversity of the staff, pretty typical of startups in cosmopolitan Berlin, contributes to the company's international visibility. Its high profile is also bolstered by heavy integration with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and especially Tumblr, with whom SoundCloud enjoys mutually fawning respect. SoundCloud's founders also gave a shoutout to New York-based Hype Machine.

SoundCloud's founders have only recently gotten used to their prominence. "I think it's because there is a microcosm in SoundCloud," said Mr. Wahlforss, who is lanky and was dressed in a hipsterish, bright blue sweater evocative of Charlie Brown. "We embody the contemporary spirit of Berlin. It's a city of great music, great creativity. It's a little bit punk."

"In the beginning, it felt a bit weird," Mr. Ljung said of SoundCloud's relatively new status as Berlin startup role model. "Like, who are we to give advice about stuff?" But the cofounders now reserve Sundays for meetings with the myriad Berlin entrepreneurs who seek their guidance, and they find they're able to help new entrepreneurs at least avoid a few of SoundCloud's early mistakes.

The startup scene is still very new, the cofounders said, with many cells and pockets that are just recently starting to meet up with one another (through Meetup.com, of course, as well as Gidsy and coworking spaces like Betahaus and coffee shops like St. Oberlholz, one of SoundCloud's early headquarters). Mr. Wahlforss subscribes to both the NYC Startup Digest and the Berlin Startup Digest, he said, and recently he's noticed the number of events in the Berlin version is reach parity with New York. "It's more like a tabula rasa, clean canvas situation," Mr. Wahlforss said, more like Silicon Valley in the 60s. "It's punk, it's art, it's tech," Mr. Ljung agreed.

Berlin's scene still lacks venture capital infrastructure, according to most people in the startup scene. There is one VC firm, Early Bird, which moved from Hamburg to Berlin because there was "no point in being anywhere else," the cofounders said.

Mr. Ljung gave us a quick office tour on the way out, and we glimpsed orange cloud-shaped lamps, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis on the bathroom doors, and the Johnny Cash conference room (the "finest," according to Mr. Ljung).

"We don't really live in a country. We live on the Internet," Mr. Ljung said. "The idea of countries is secondary."

For the uninitiated, Headliner.fm is a social media recommendation tool that helps acts like Diddy, Akon, and Maroon 5, all of which have signed up for its service, to connect to new fans with a simple proposition: letting one artist recommend another to its fans on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace (yeah, yeah, we know, but music was the only thing it was ever good for).

Using an incentive system called "Band Bucks"--here's where it gets more complicated--Headliner.fm levels the playing field between larger and smaller acts. The more you promote similar musicians, the more Band Bucks you receive. Those can then be cashed in to have larger acts like Weezer or T-Pain, also members, to promote you on their social media page. But artists only agree to recommend each other about 15 percent of the time, which helps make their recommendations more trustworthy.

Today's announcement has to do with Headliner's pro account, the startup's only revenue stream for now. For the next six months, SoundCloud users who sign up through the App Gallery get 100,000 Band Bucks, three months of its Pro Account for free, and a entry ticket to its Band of the Month contest, where acts like Pitbull, Maroon 5, and Panic at the Disco pick a winner and then recommend the band to their fans.

Betabeat got Mr. More on the phone to talk why everyone's so hot under the collar for SoundCloud, why they didn't want artists to shill out their fans, how Justin Bieber fits into all of this, and the view from Silicon Beach.

How did you hook up with SoundCloud?

We were one of the technology companies that built on their API, I think they have 200 developers, maybe more at this point. If you go back and look at what SoundCloud is: YouTube for music would be a really great way to understand it. They’re a big audio platform. We liked their product so we went and build this app and we were notified by SoundCloud that we were one of their top-used applications.

Which number?

I could tell you, but they don’t want me to.

Top ten?

Oh, it’s above the top ten. This is how we got to the partnership deal. If you’re the number [redacted]-used application, doesn’t it make sense to partner in a way that’s a little more substantive than passively being listed in your gallery? SoundCloud is such a huge company. They have all these different types of sound applications that are not necessarily about marketing new music. But most of their seven million users are artists or DJs and people that are uploading music there to share with other business professional and also share with their fans on Facebook and Twitter. It seemed pretty logical to us that at that point when someone makes a new, fresh track, why don’t we offer them the opportunity to share it with a wider social circle? [Our app is] shown to all their artists who have more than five tracks on there and its been doing really well.

It's popular because most SoundCloud users are artists?

Yeah, we got to it organically. Artists are keen on artists recommending other artists. There's a value because it’s not really passively shared. The way our platforms works is that you have to ask another artist to recommend you to their fans. The artist completely has the ability to say, "No. I will not do this. I will not recommend you to my fans because you’re not a good fit." So we have a highly-curated artists base--almost 90,000 artists now-- and if  you send a recommendation request on our platform, only 15 percent gets approved. Artists are being very picky about what they’re sending.

Is it really the artists themselves? Is it Weezer picking it? Or Weezer’s publicity manager?

Well, with the bigger well-known artists, they have companies and people who manage their screen names. But T-Pain, who we work with all the time, manages his own Twitter stream. From what I can tell you, that’s T-Pain. And he was a sponsor of our artist of the month contest. It was absolutely him who picked the artists, because we talked to him. That’s not always the case with larger artists. But digital media is so important to them now, how these artists talk to their fans—even if it's Britney Spears, I can’t believe that she’s that naïve that she completely lets people create a voice for her. Even if she’s not doing it, she’s involved in the curation process.

How does the platform work?

So if you’'re a rock band in New York—we have over 80,000 artists, tens of thousands of rock bands in New York—you can create a post that you want to share, as though you were posting yourself, then you send that request to the artist that you pick. Those artists can view those requests and they go through them and curate them. The average small artist on our platform has over 5,000 fans [on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace]. So if you do that 15 times. . . 15 times 5  . . .  I’m horrible at math . . . I believe that is, oh God, 75,000 new fans you will reach? Instantaneously, effectively, organically.

So they agree to share it, where are they seeing it? Weezer recommends your band and you see it on Weezer’s Facebook page?

Correct. If there was no Headliner, there’d be no platform to do this, but you could go pester all these bands yourself. You could phone them up, spank them, pester them on Facebook or Twitter and ask them would you recommend me?

How are you monetizing this?

We have a freemium model, most of our platform’s free. We spent a long time—over six months—thinking about an incentive platform to give artists who recommend each other  a fair trade. Artists have been cross-promoting each other for years, it goes back to the days of Motown when they went on the Motown Review together or more currently you’re looking at Eminem introducing 50 Cent and Dr. Dre introducing Eminem. Or really currently Justin Bieber being introduced by Usher.

So cross-promotion really only works for really large artists and there has to be an incentive to do it. Like Usher basically owns 50 percent of Justin Bieber, maybe more. He owns his publishing, he owns everything that guy does. What happens at a label level nowadays is artists want to do this, but guess what, it never happens. They won’t even shout each other out through Twitter and Facebook because there’s no clear incentive to do it. The artists think it’s good, but the business people are saying, ‘Why would we do this?’

What we didn’t want to do was exchange [real] currency, so we created a virtual currency called a Band Buck. Say you have 5,000 fans, every time you recommend someone, you earn 5,000 band Bucks. The only thing you can do with those Band Bucks is request recommendations from other artists. And every time when you join the platform, if you have 5,000 fans,  you automatically earn 5,000 Band Bucks. It gives you a good enough incentive to make the recommendations fair, but not good enough to have people shill their audience, which is really important. We do not want artists shilling their fans. We only want recommendations that are really appropriate to their audience.

I still don’t understand what the incentive is for larger acts.

For larger acts it’s exactly the same. They all have a marketing need. We work with Pitbull and we work with Akon and Pitbull has the number R&B one record in the country, and he used our platform to market himself because he thought it was a very credible way by having other artists recommend him.

Even Pitbull and Akon--they’re going to need virtual currency?

Akon uses his band bucks all the time! To ask other artists to recommend him.

So they get a smaller act that’s more grassroots?

It’s not about a smaller act. Akon has 22 million Band Bucks, and we have over 90,000 artists on our platform that reach over 290 million fans. I can tell you right now 80 million of those fans that are not already his fans on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter like R&B music. Why wouldn’t he want to reach those fans? What’s his alternative?

So do you get any revenue from the SoundCloud partnership?

No, there’s no money changing hands. By definition our product helps usage on their platform because when someone does marketing on our platform, it includes the SoundCloud link in their status update. You can hear the track right there on Facebook. That helps their usage grow. SoundCloud wants to be the biggest nastiest cloud-based music platform. Ever. So our marketing execution helps drive usage for them.

You were saying you used to be in the music industry?

I did various things. I was a record producer, I was a songwriter, I also owned a music publishing company—Mike More Media. The biggest challenge is how do you market yourself.

Isn’t the biggest challenge how you get people not to pirate your stuff?

Yeah, but you have to create demand first. Why are people going to pay for things they don’t know about? It’s hard to discover new artists. There’s not really a great recommendation engine on any of these platforms. Pandora’s is the most interesting one, but they build the whole company around that.

Where in the city are you based?

We’re in Dumbo, which we love. We’re on Jay Street, actually, right overlooking the water. We love it.

So do you get together with the other Dumbo startups?

We do, all the time. In fact, one of them was sold to Facebook—my friend Sam Lessin’s company called Drop.io.

Do you hate it when people try to call it Silicon Beach?

No. [Laughs] What’s the matter with Silicon Beach?!

Mr. Nomad.

SoundCloud, the Berlin-based audio platform that keeps showing up at hackathons and partnering with various New York start-ups, is piloting a Community Fellowship Program--an effort to cultivate its community by bringing highly-active users to hang out in Berlin.

The delegate from New York? Edward Casabian, better known as the NYC Nomad, who has been crashing on couches in different New York neighborhoods and blogging about the people he meets for more than a year. So far he's been to 41; his goal is to do 52 of the 250-some neighborhoods in the city, one for every week in a year.

About a month ago, Mr. Casabian started using the SoundCloud mobile app to add an auditory element to his diaries. 

"It just seemed like a great platform for documenting my experiences," he told Betabeat last week. "There are many ways and means in which people are documenting projects in New York whether it's writing or photos or, you know, blogging, tweeting. For me, I think sound is sort of a unique medium ... When I think about some of the interviews I've done or sounds that I've recorded in the past, oftentimes it kind of takes me back or brings back a more vivid memory than any picture I've taken or writing I've done."

Mr. Casabian and his fellow fellows will be giving feedback to the SoundCloud team and working on their projects. Mr. Casabian flew to Berlin on Friday.

SoundCloud says it will repeat the program soon and plans to put out the next call for entries in September or October.

Listen to the Nomad's recording of the 2 train pass by as Lindsay Dragan sings "Concrete and Barbed Wire" at the Columbus Circle subway station.

Concrete and Barbed Wire by thenycnomad

Smixx

Amazing new track from Corey Smith, aka Smixx, a musician, freelance iOS/WP7 developer and co-founder of Cardinal social music sharing platform. Smixx has been spinning tech raps for a while now, like "Developers feat. Steve Ballmer" and "One More Thing featuring Steve Jobs from WWDC 2011."

But start-ups are where Betabeat's heart really lies, so this track was the first to catch our attention. That, and @aplusk tweeted it out. Enjoy below the jump.

Takin' VC Money (Money Cash IPO's) by Smixx

Prior to joining SoundCloud, Ms. Weise worked at The OutCast Agency with a variety of  clients, including Salesforce.com, Bump, VMware and Jawbone.

Kristina Weise recently quit her job to work as the U.S. public relations manager at SoundCloud, a Germany-based social audio-sharing platform with more than 6 million users. After traversing Europe for several weeks, she will be based in San Francisco. Here’s her take on loving and leaving the Big Apple, and her initial thoughts on Berlin’s tech culture.

On a recent solar boat tour through the city, a guide stated, "The only thing slow in Berlin is the Spree River." He is right. There are four hundred miles of bike routes in Berlin and it seems like everyone is on one of them--zipping by you with grace and ease--not taking the lazier mass transit options. If there is one thing the Berlin tech scene has taught me so far, it's to be even more grateful to New York City for preparing me for this pace. For this challenge.

In all my years in New York City, I had never flagged down a Mercedes taxi. But there I was at Tegel Airport, trying not to laugh as I climbed over the leather seats, the new car smell captivating my senses. During the ride, I reflected on what happened the day before, when I was busy packing and writing my thank you/borderline love letter to New York City.

Upon exiting the cab, determine not to be intimidated by Berlin, a new job, a language barrier, graffiti-coated apartments or the fact that I knew not one single person in all of Deutschland, I marched up seven flights of stairs to my temporary apartment and unpacked. It took me back to my first studio in Tudor City and the total emptiness of unpacking my life and having no one in a 50-mile radius to with whom to celebrate the accomplishment.

Barely taking a moment to be impressed by the ultra-modern, eat-your-heart-out-Ikea-furniture, I immediately went to the office.

The SoundCloud office was in the middle of a finely-orchestrated developer dance with the sound of people swigging Fritz-Kola and Club Mate popping in the background. My new colleagues, all wearing oversize earmuff headphones, stabilized themselves on yoga balls and flew in and out of conference rooms toting Mac laptops. No one stopped to ask who I was. Everyone smiled and a few said hello, but always as they rushed past me to continue focusing on some unspoken goal. I wouldn't describe it as a maddening urgency, but rather one of complete focus and drive. There was a definite plan, I could see that, an intoxicating "if it's to be, it's up to me" current running through every single person who politely brushed by me. In fact, I almost felt guilty asking for the office manager for fear of provoking the beehive. (She was, by the way, busy coordinating plans for the second office space in order to accommodate the influx of new hires.) And this was only in the first five minutes upon my arrival at SoundCloud.

I am no expert. But in the Berlin tech scene, vivaciousness and ambition are so ingrained in their subconscious that they don't even realize when someone new is in their domain. It's this immediate assumption that because you're at the office, you've been hired to get something accomplished for the greater good--an unspoken trust. And in Berlin, it's a trust that most of your colleagues could explain to you in at least two languages, one of which will mostly likely be English.

The Big Apple has been one of the toughest 7-year training programs that has conditioned me to take on Berlin's tenaciousness, to adjust to this city in a mere two weeks, and to start a new life path without needing to be handled. But mostly, it's becoming increasingly evident to me that Berlin's tech artisans are toiling to get ahead of most U.S. and European cities--and not just in the time difference.

In Which I Love & Leave NYC by Kristina Weise