What do you do after successfully going into public beta? Well, you party a little, you sleep a little, and maybe take a peek or two at what the press says (Wired, Associated Press (via Washington Post), Xconomy, Gamasutra, etc). My favorite bits from the last week:

from Wired: “When we won our first track after performing well in a DJ game, we were thrilled even before we heard it. This is an intriguing way to get people excited about music, because it encourages active listening.”

from a personal blog: “The final takeaway that Loudcrowd leaves in your memory, is that there’s a party going on at the site, whether you are there or not, and if you want a little.. take a visit. That’s a powerful feeling to have after just using a site once.”

But before we get too caught up in all the positive hooplah, it’s time to remember that this is essentially the starting line. Sure, there’s another game coming in a month, and new playlists that will go up regularly, but there are also huge sections of the site we have yet to put online. How do we add group coordinated play? How do we take advantage of how much you guys seem to love stamps? How can we give users more control of the experience? How should we manage when there are multiple playlists at the same time? How can we expand the music selection but maintain our vibe? And how do we continue to add all the depth we have planned while making it at least 50% easier to understand for new users?

Just glad to have you all along for the journey.

Its been a crazy few weeks here at Loudcrowd …we’ve been building up our private beta for eight months, and we’re right about to release!  I for one have been zonked getting together our new playlists-can’t say who just yet, but trust that they’ll be featuring a slew of new tracks and rarities. It’s going to be a few more days of burning the midnight oil, but then off to South by Southwest to sweat it out and party down.

A bunch of Loudcrowders will be down in Austin to show off our new improved site, so naturally we are throwing a killer party We’ll be celebrating our release with the Rock You Shamrock party- headlined by Kid Sister, Datarock, and Hey Champ, 3/17 at the Speakeasy.

We’ve got some VIP passes to give out, so send an email to sxsw@loudcrowd.com that you’re coming to the event, and we’ll enter your name into the drawing.

Here’s our full schedule for those lucky enough to be joining the SXSW festivities:

3/13-3/21 Play Loudcrowd in the hallways of the Austin convention center, come see us near the ScreenBurn arcade
3/13-3/21 Hang out with us at the PureVolume house. every. night.
3/17 Our CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, speaks on the topic “Are Games the Next iTunes?” – 10am (seriously, you can do it then go back to bed)
3/17 Party with Loudcrowd at the Speakeasy

Come say hello if you’re there!

—Fucci

We had Governor Deval Patrick in our offices on Friday playing a little Loudcrowd and talking startups. In case this becomes a trend, we’ve decided to start a Facebook group called, “Politicians playing Loudcrowd.” Hey, you never know.

You’ll be happy to hear that the Governor, besides being all buddy buddy with the new President, also does fairly well at dancing for random college kids online.

For all of you in the private Beta, we’ve got an update that will make the perfect stocking stuffer to fill your long winter days. So come on by and check it out!

Tracks Page and dB

With this release, you can now collect songs that you can play for everyone to hear, it’s our jukebox for everyone.  As long as a Guest DJ isn’t currently playing, you can queue up your song and include a shout out which will show up at the top of the page in the “now spinning” area. These tracks will drop as sweet loot from the dance game and you can make the request from the new “tracks” page.  You’ll have to spend some dB to make the song request, but you can build up plenty of it by playing.

Performance Improvements… Seriously

We’ve done some work on performance in the past, but this time around we went a little crazy re-doing much of the front end of Loudcrowd.  We started with a complete retool of our site to take better advantage of the features Django has to offer.  This should elminate some weird behaviour that happened from time to time on the old version.  We also tore Flash a new one and drastically increased perfomance in the dance game, which includes a massive reduction to the memory footprint.  Don’t believe me? Look at this graph!

As an added bonus, we’ve added a sweet trippy effect to the dance floor (see screenshot at the top of this post).  Get into the groove enough and you can see it for yourself.

Invites

Have some friends that want to get into the Beta? Now you can earn invites and send up to 5 at a time to your friends using Facebook. Now when you say, “I know a guy who can get you into the club,” you’ll be talking about yourself!

We can probably all agree that T-Pain says it best in Kanye West’s “The Good Life”:

Is the good life better than the life I lived
When I thought that I was gonna go crazy
And now my grandmamma ain’t the only girl calling me baby
And if you feeling’ me now then put your hands up in the sky
And let me hear you say hey, hey, hey, ooh
I’m good

It’s in that same spirit that the guys from Conduit Labs will be gathering at The Good Life on 28 Kingston St. (near the Downtown Crossing T stop) on Election Night, Tuesday, November 4th.

If you’re in the Boston area come join us on the second floor in the vodka lounge at 7pm where we’ll be getting our drink on to some televised election returns.

With any luck the networks will call this race when west coast polls close at 11pm, and we’ll be able to look back at these last eight years of thinking we were gonna go crazy and just say right along with T-Pain: Hey, ooh, we’re good.

New update for you guys hanging out at Loudcrowd. There are some obvious things that you’ll notice right off the bat and some behind the scenes stuff that we’re really excited about too. It’s not ready for everyone yet, but if you’re in the Beta read on about the new stuff below.

New Music and Guest DJ Support

First off, we’ve added some great new tunes (if we do say so ourselves) and we have a whole bunch more that we are just about ready to unleash.

We’ve also started getting the site ready to host what we’ve been calling “Guest DJs”.  In the a couple weeks you will be able to login and dance to hand crafted, limited-play music lists and win special exclusive loot to commerorate the occasion!  More details will come as we get closer to our first Guest DJ appearence.  But basically – if you like things that are awesome, you will love these.

Social stuff – New Start Page and Whispers

Next time you log in to Loudcrowd, you’ll be greeted by our fancy new start page.  This is a great place to catch up on the latest happenings in Loudcrowd and will evolve over time.

You’ve asked for greater chat support, so for this release we added the ability to continue whispering outside of the dance game. Now you can pop out the whisper dialog from private chat, and continue your secret whispery conversation on the feed (that vertical bar on the left of the screen where all the song info pops up).

Technology! – EC2 /Multiserver Support

The internet is a pretty wild place with all sorts of magical things, like Amazon EC2. You can create virtual servers on the fly for however long you need them, for as long or as short as you like. Freedom! Getting all of our systems up and running EC2 took a lot of work but has enabled us to be able to handle a huge range of server load, have test environments that are exactly the same as our live ones, and save a fair amount of cash on operating costs – so we’ll have more funds to spend on sweet new features… and maybe also a few burritos. We gotta eat sometime!

Misc

Also, notice the groundbreaking new ability to adjust volume. There are also some new sounds in the dance game,  and a few performance tweaks. More coming soon, and your ideas are always welcome at GS.

Hello internet! Billy here.  For those of you in the Loudcrowd alpha we wanted to give the lowdown on what’s been updated recently. We are constantly adding cool new music to keep things fresh, but it’s probably worth a blog post when we add self-esteem restoring options, like freeing your internet persona from being forced to be hipster-rail thin. Cause hiptsers come in all shapes and sizes! Anyways, if this sort of blog post is useful, let me know through our new Support page (I’ll explain what that is below) or just leave a comment and I’ll make sure there are plenty more updates in the future.

Performance Tweaks

We’ve received some really great feedback from all you alpha Loudcrowdians (Loudcrowders? Loudies? Peoplewithexcellenttasteinwebsites?) and a frequent issue has been running the site smoothly on some machines. We’re doing some really cool stuff like 3D rendering in Flash, which isn’t particularly well suited to handling memory. In this last update we fixed a bunch of memory leaks and added some tricky stuff to increase your overall client performance.  We definitely have some more work to do in this area, but things should run a lot better now.

Character Customization

Everyone wants to express their creativity, so of course we get plenty of feedback on being able to customize your character. We have a whole lot planned for this, but in this last update we gave you a sneak peak at what’s to come by adding support for various body build types.  Don’t worry, no matter what size you choose, you’ll still look sweet in your super tight jeans. Check it out by loggining in and navigating to My Profile -> Edit Character and messing around with the “Build” buttons.  On this same page we also added a link for those of you that ended up with a character of the wrong sex.  We no longer force you to stay as a man/woman, but be careful: if you switch genders you’ll lose all your sweet loot!

Support/Feedback

We knew we wanted to start a dialog with you all early to get feedback, ideas, and hear about issues you are running into. But forums are too chaotic for that purpose and a blog-box email form isn’t our style. So we’ve rolled out a support area powered by GetSatisfaction. It’s a good place for everyone to get together and ask questions, report problems and/or start discussions about Loudcrowd.  What’s really great about this all is that every interaction is out in the public and auto-organized, so everyone get’s to benefit from any discussions / troubleshooting that goes on. Check it out by clicking the Support link from the Alpha Loudcrowd page.  Create an account, login, and you’re ready to go. We’re not particularly happy with the strange re-registering you have to do the first time you log in, but we’re working with GS to try and get something nice and smooth.

Keep the ideas and emails coming and we’ll continue cranking away over here with much more to come.

It has been an incredibly exciting period at Conduit Labs lately as we’ve been in closed alpha for our first game. We’ve been busy watching our early users spend some amazing amounts of time seemingly enjoying themselves while we gather important feedback ahead of our full site rollout. We still plan to let our product do the talking when it launches (I can’t wait to share all the stats at a future conference), but in the meantime Dan Kaplan over at VentureBeat broke the news almost a week ahead of the piece about CIC in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. I’ve excerpted the parts about us below.

The Idea Factory

By Robert Weisman August 10, 2008
(Photographs by Jonathan Beller)

TONIGHT IS HUGE. It’s approaching 6:30, and most of the office buildings around Kendall Square have cleared out. But inside Conduit Labs at One Broadway, nobody’s going anywhere. A stack of pizzas sits untouched, growing colder by the minute. The staff is in that manic state of flux obligatory for a year-old start-up. About a dozen over-caffeinated engineers in T-shirts and baggy shorts are hunched around computer monitors hustling to fix software bugs in LoudCrowd, their multiplayer Internet dance game that’s been under development for five months.

They are young and burning with ambition. They have grown up playing with animated images on screens, and now they are eager to create their own. They fervently believe LoudCrowd will be the next hot breakthrough in Internet gaming, the platform on which high school and college kids around the world will want to cyberboogie during homework breaks.

Until now, only a handful of outsiders have ever seen it in action. So tonight’s session could answer the single most critical question for the company as it moves forward: Will its target demographic – rabid social networkers and video game lovers – spend 15 minutes on LoudCrowd without getting bored and straying to some other site? Because if they won’t, LoudCrowd is destined to be just another firework that never popped, one more cool idea for the Web that fizzled before it ever exploded. For every Google, YouTube, and Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of Pets.coms.

THE LOUDCROWD TESTERS EVERYBODY is waiting for, mostly students and college grads recruited on MySpace and Facebook, were supposed to have checked in about 20 minutes ago, but only one has arrived. The promised pizza sits in boxes on a leather couch across from a giant Xbox monitor with an exploding psychedelic screen saver. And the crew, bleary-eyed from their bug-patching “surge,” is growing hungry.

Nabeel Hyatt, the 31-year-old goateed Conduit chief executive who is wearing an unstructured army-style jacket, strides into the cluttered bay where he is running his fifth start-up. He scans the room, seeing mostly familiar faces. “One tester,” he says, disappointed.

“They’re on their way,” Dan O’Brien, the technology vice president whom everybody here calls Dan-O, assures him.

“They’re college kids,” another voice chimes in. “They’re probably picking up beer on the way.”

But the restless Hyatt, who started his first company in high school in McLean, Virginia, begins pacing, stepping over a Rock Band controller on the floor and passing a whiteboard plastered with Post-it notes. The company is a work in progress. Hyatt, a founder at the trendy consumer electronics maker Ambient Devices, has the entrepreneurial itch again. This time, he wants to fuse gaming and social networking to create a new kind of activity – and a new kind of business – on the Internet. And he’s convinced LoudCrowd is it.

Suddenly, the door swings open. Three more testers shuffle in. Showtime.

CONDUIT CHIEF NABEEL HYATT STANDS OVER one of the LoudCrowd testers, Lise Caldara, an 18- year-old senior at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School, who’s wearing a hooded sweat shirt. “What you can do for me,” Hyatt says, “since I don’t do a real good job of reading minds, is tell me anything that comes to mind – ‘This is cool. This isn’t cool.’”

Caldara puts on her headphones and listens to disco-style dance music and stares at a colorful background image as LoudCrowd loads. “I like the background. It’s awesome,” she says. But then she hesitates. “I don’t know how to start,” she says. “This looks cool. Very confusing, but . . . nice.”

Hyatt squints over Caldara’s shoulders at the computer monitor and watches her reaction. She peers at an animated scene of shadowy figures dancing and colored lights flashing. In the foreground, an avatar performs a series of programmed dance moves: air guitar, airplane bang, safe zone, slip and slide, thriller wave.

“Oh, I get it now,” she says. “Man, I’m really bad at this.”

Hyatt prompts her. “Click for dance,” he says.

“So I can dance with other people?” she asks. “Awesome.”

`Hyatt scribbles on a notepad as Caldara fumbles with the game. On the screen, words pop up: “Looking good. Now try dancing for someone.” Caldara punches arrows on the keyboard, trying to match the beat of the music. More words appear: “Damon catches your eye.”

Across the room, Conduit employees monitor another tester, explaining how he can win clothes, shades, hairstyles. “What did you win?” someone asks. “A hairstyle? What is it? A mohawk?”

Tester Brannen Huske, 25, a curly-haired employee of a nearby wireless start-up, sits ramrod straight. He creates a user profile for the male avatar with a green-and-white baseball cap stomping around on his screen. He chooses its skin and hair color. A succession of messages appears: “Jump around.” “Slip and slide.” “Guest 511 wasn’t impressed.” “You charmed Hula.”

Hyatt explains the game. “You pick a dance move,” he says. “You try to charm as many people as possible and pick the right people to charm.” A player whose avatar charms another’s gets points.

Huske complains to Conduit programmer Adam Conroy about a bug. “Essentially, what I’m trying to do is dance with the person who has the highest points,” Huske says in a tone of frustration. “But I’m not really sure why one person has more points than another.”

“It’s a usability issue,” Conroy concedes. “We don’t really make it clear enough. Ideally, you want people to just be able to sit down and figure it out right away.”

Conduit board member Will Kohler, seated at an empty desk, has begun playing the game himself. Within a few minutes, he’s offering suggestions to Hyatt. “You should let me preview what I’d look like in these cool sunglasses while I’m trying to earn them,” he says.

Hyatt nods. He’s clearly pleased about the way things are going. One hour after the testers got down to business, only one has left his chair for more pizza. The rest are absorbed in the game and showing no sign of tiring.

(full article at Boston Globe)

Today an award arrived at our office for winning the top 100 startups in the Northeast. We of course welcome the encouragement despite being a little uncertain as to the criteria of “top.” Since virtually nothing is known about us except our logo, we felt the award was best served to be given to the artists. We totally hope the awards keep rolling in when the products do.

We’ve got a small but representative contingent that will be at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco. Drop us a line if you’re interested in being hired, partnered with, or otherwise talking your way into a sneak peak demo of what we are up to here. Folks with high Rock Band ratings will be given priority, or course.

Email Nabeel, Damon, or Jason at our firstname@conduitlabs.com