Via Springwise, a site which tracks new consumer trends, comes Guitar Affair.
They rent you a guitar; anything from an Eric Clapton Signature Stratocaster to a St Blues 61 South – Red Clay.
* Join
* Select and Reserve
* Receive
* Enjoy
* Return
That’s it. Over on the Springwise post two happy customers have left favorable comments – any of you know them? Seems like a really good idea.
keith
While we are waiting for Fintan’s report from the Guitar Festival in Clonakilty this weekend this photo came in from a friend of mine who lives in Stockholm. It is of the Twang guitar store.
Keith
Over in the Irish Times (a national daily here in Ireland) Gordon Smith wrote a great piece on us today.
The link to the article is here. Some extracts:
A NEW Irish-based social network hopes to help guitar collectors find out whether their battered Strat was once gripped by Rory Gallagher, or whether Jimmy Page’s fingers ever danced across the frets of an old Gibson Les Paul.
The company has just completed follow-on investment to the tune of €80,000, and Colm Lyon, founder and chief executive of Realex Payments, will assist the company as an adviser and investor. Mr Lyon is highly regarded in the online payments industry. His company processes billions of euro for companies such as Aer Lingus and Virgin Atlantic. Gerry McQuaid, the former commercial director of O2, is a non-executive director.
The site will use a “freemium” business model, where many services will cost nothing, and other exclusive features will be available only to paying subscribers. Data from the US suggest the conversion rate to paying users is between 3-8 per cent of a site’s total audience, Mr Bohanna said.
DbTwang’s backers also have plans for an ambitious “guitar genome project” to build up a database on as many guitars in existence as possible, so that collectors will be able to check the origin of any instrument through the site.
It is great to have the vote of confidence from our latest investors and advisers – that support goes a long way to giving us what we need to build a place and a service which you as our users will enjoy.
keith
They want you in Clonakilty, Co Cork 
This coming Saturday 19th September the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival are attempting to break the world record for Largest Ensemble Guitar Performance.
Head over to their website for more information and to sign up. Fintan from dbTwang is planning to be down at the Festival for at least one of the days – leave a comment here if you want to meet up with him.
keith
Since 31st August we have seen the status quo maintained with Gibson still the largest block of guitars by far.
New brands since then include La Patrie, Taylor, Yamaha and Ibanez.
If you are not registered for the beta and would like to try in out in a couple of weeks time go to www.dbtwang.com and leave us your email address.
keith
A couple of months ago we were introduced to Neal McCullogh from Northern Ireland who does wonderfully detailed illustrative work.
He has just launched a range of prints on Etsy and asked us if we would help to promote them. Yes
keith
Another stat from the emails which were clicked on in the first batch we sent out yesterday is where people went through to.
That tells me a couple of things. First is that a lot of people receiving the email did not remember us. Hopefully that will no longer be the case! Secondly Facebook use in this group may well be higher that Twitter – that has an impact on how we use the various networking options.
keith
We sent out an email newsletter last night to everyone who had signed up for the beta. We had 3 Spam complaints – which is an indication (I suspect) that the 3 concerned had put their email addresses down so long ago that they had forgotten all about us. I am about to email each of them individually and apologise to them.
Of the people who opened the email MailChimp (the service which we are using) gave us the following geographic analysis.
It reflects our use of English as our sole communication language together with the known clusters of guitar owners in the UK and USA.
keith
dbtwang is a social network where you can share and protect your guitars.
