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Google Hopeful Of 2010 Launch For iTunes Rival Despite Lack Of Signed Label Deals

jos — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:45:40 +0000

We all know Google Music is coming , it’s just a question of when – and what it’ll look like, of course. According to Reuters , Google hopes to launch the service as early as December 2010. Citing unnamed ‘people familiar with the matter’, Reuters says Google’s VP of Engineering Andy Rubin (which we likened to a Steve Jobs-caliber product fanatic in the past) is spearheading talks with music labels on plans for a digital music download store and cloud-based song locker service, which he hopes will see the light of day before year’s end. Only thing that could get in the way of a pre-Christmas debut: the company has yet to sign a single licensing deal with the music labels, those same sources told Reuters. It’ll be interesting to see if Google can get some of those deals signed in time for the launch of Android 3.0 , code-named Gingerbread , which is expected to come in the fourth quarter of this year. Perhaps writing Santa a letter will help? We recently broke the news that Google had hired well known music attorney Elizabeth Moody to assist them with negotiations with music labels and other rights holders for their upcoming iTunes rival. Needless to say, such negotiations aren’t exactly a walk in the park. Each major label has different goals and strategies for digital music, and people in the know we’ve spoken to in the past say it’s nearly impossible to get them to agree to terms that will make a streaming music service viable. In particular, they tend to disagree over how long a free trial period might last, and whether or not a credit card from the user needs to be on file before the trial starts. That’s not to say the industry isn’t excited about Google’s imminent entry into the digital music arena. As good as Apple’s iTunes , which just got a new, social-network enhanced version with the launch of iTunes 10 earlier this week, has been for them, executives at the major music labels have long considered Apple’s immense stronghold in the field an issue. Surely, they welcome competition from a rival the size and reach of Google, as the iTunes Music Store has cemented itself the king of the hill over the years, accounting for approximately 70 percent of all digital music sales in the United States. Dependence on a single player isn’t exactly the industry’s vision of a bright future. One label executive, who asked not to be named, told Reuters as much: “Finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform. What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.” Another unnamed label executive expressed more caution despite his or her optimism, stating that Google lacks a track record in “selling stuff” (which is true). It’s also worth questioning if Google’s entry in the digital music space leaves much breathing room for smaller, innovative startups to compete and maintain viable relationships with the music industry. With Apple, Google and Amazon fighting for every penny, it’ll become even harder for the likes of Spotify , Rdio and MOG than it has already been so far. Which, to be clear, isn’t to say none of them will thrive or attract sizeable audiences – I just wonder if they’ll be left battling for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie rather than grow into giants themselves. CrunchBase Information Google Andy Rubin iTunes Information provided by CrunchBase

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Google Hopeful Of 2010 Launch For iTunes Rival Despite Lack Of Signed Label Deals

Twitter Now Over 145 Million Users, Almost 300,000 Apps

Administrator — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:37:52 +0000

When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn’t even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem. The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference — which was only this past April. Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams: Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients) 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience 78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one app m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14% SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8% Lastly, he throws in that Twitter’s Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has “exceeded our expectations.” No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

Um, Where’s Twitter For Android On Twitter’s Top 10 Apps?

bestcbstore — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:06:38 +0000

This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter’s own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen. I’ve confirmed with Twitter that this isn’t a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That’s incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was. Even crazier, it’s behind third party clients TwitPic, TweetDeck, Echofon, UberTwitter, and even Google Friend Connect! Obviously, Twitter downplays that in the post (and by downplays, I mean, doesn’t mention it), and instead only mentions Twitter for Android in the intro to say that it “launched a new version this week.” Remember, “new” is the best tactic to get people to try something. So why is next to no one using Twitter for Android? Twitter won’t say. But I suspect it may have to do with the awful experience of trying to find apps in Google’s Android Market. Twitter for Android is by far and away the best client for the platform — but you’ll note that none of the other popular Android Twitter clients made the cut either. So perhaps Android users just don’t like using Twitter? That’s probably not the case. Remember too that a lot of the newer Android phones come with custom skins that often include Twitter functionality without the need for a separate app. Still, for browsing tweets, Twitter for Android is much, much better. People should be using it, but they’re apparently not. Update : One other thing undoubtedly at play here: Twitter for Android only works on Android 2.1 and later. Again, that’s largely an Android issue as fragmentation is preventing people from upgrading. More : Twitter Now Over 145 Million Users, Almost 300,000 Apps CrunchBase Information Twitter Android Information provided by CrunchBase

Record Numbers Pinging Ping.fm Thanks To Apple’s Ping

Administrator — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:59:40 +0000

An interesting beneficiary of Apple’s launch of music-oriented social network Ping —social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year). Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping, ” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results. Le Meur declined to reveal the exact number of accounts created but he did say that the number of accounts created was three times the normal rate in a given day. Apple actually licensed the name Ping from the golf company, as PING owns the trademark. CrunchBase Information Ping.fm Seesmic Apple Information provided by CrunchBase

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Record Numbers Pinging Ping.fm Thanks To Apple’s Ping

Reddit Diggs Traffic Surge, Prepares For Expansion

jos — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:41:44 +0000

It’s all hands on deck at Reddit this week. In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office). The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it. However, there’s no time to bask in glory, as the number of page views rises and the press rolls out headlines like, “Backlash Continues For Digg as Reddit Steps in and Reaps the Benefits,” “Report: Reddit Ready To Defeat Digg‎,” and “New Digg Sucks? Reddit All Over Digg FrontPage Now!” No, for the four-person engineer team, it’s time to roll-up their sleeves and crank away, to keep the site afloat (no easy task) and create the next whizz-bang features to keep Reddit’s enlarged user base happy. On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video above. Highlights: -Slowe says they first noticed a spike in traffic on Sunday night, as activity increased in Australia. By the close of Monday, Reddit saw 850,000 unique visitors, that number increased on Tuesday, with 900,000. Traffic has continued to hover around this level, with roughly 13 to 14 million total page views per day. -Self-serve ads are up 30% since Digg 4′s launch. Overall ad sales have been growing roughly 5% per month, Slowe expects monthly sales to increase 5 to 10% for the remainder of this year. Subscriptions are also up, currently Reddit has 10,000 subscribers. -Their prayer for more resources is finally being answered. They are currently in the process of hiring one new employee, but hope to have enough cash on hand to hire two full-time employees by year’s end. -On Digg’s fumble, Slowe says: “I think the biggest complaint from their community has been that they feel marginalized…The only advice I would really give them…they haven’t been as communicative as they could be…Our only currency really is trust and candor and so if you treat your community like adults they’ll behave like adults.” -On that whole Proposition 19 debacle: “Once the dust settled everything was just fine nobody’s been fired, everyone is perfectly happy. The main problem was that it was all happening very fast. It went from a blog post from the Prop 19 guys to a full blown community revolt on Reddit in about an hour… One of the problems with trying to be candid at all times, is that sometimes private political arguments end up public…we could have been a little bit more graceful in the handling of that. -On the next feature for Reddit: “Our UI is not particularly friendly…we’d like to work on some tools to make it more friendly…another thing that’s been big is that its not necessarily clear off the bat that Reddit is customizable we have a whole bunch of communities and they all have different bends and you can subscribe to different communities…I think that’s not necessarily clear from a first look.” CrunchBase Information Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase

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Reddit Diggs Traffic Surge, Prepares For Expansion

This Spam Infographic About Spam Infographics Makes My Head Hurt

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:53:55 +0000

Buzzfeed , the Huffington Post of Internet Memes, today wins the more meta than thou award of the decade for making “An Infographic Backlash Infographic” an infographic inspired by the tragic tale of a guy whose job it was to game Digg back when Digg had enough traffic to make it worth gaming. Okay Buzzfeed, just because you understand recursion, doesn’t mean you have to rub it in our face all the time. Aside from the Greyhat SEO tricks, your anti-infographic infographic and the post that inspired it are actually just describing successful web-writing and content creation . It’s like…there’s a reason people are clicking on it. From the Digg gamer’s playbook, which is really interesting if you care at all about how people used to build website traffic. “Spam other sites with it too for bonus points. Email large blogs, etc. to try to get them to run with it too.” From the Buzzfeed “community manager,” in our Tips inbox today: Thought this might be up your alley – a couple of days ago someone posted on Reddit about how he been paid to game Digg and other influential sites by creating infographics (those goofy, badly designed images with stats and pie charts called “everything you ever wanted to know about boobs” that keep turning up on content-sharing sites) and then loading them with keyword-spam embed tags once they start spreading. today, we posted an infographic about how the system works: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographics and within a few minutes, dozens of new fake accounts were created on our site to defend the practice. the whole thing is pretty fascinating! Well I do find it fascinating … But wait, didn’t you guys just tell me I shouldn’t link to infographics? Fortunately the Spam infographic has some helpful suggestions for what to do when you’re in this kind of a situation. “If you do include a link to a spam infographic include a no follow tag in the html.” Which is exactly what we did. Thanks guys! Hi Jonah

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This Spam Infographic About Spam Infographics Makes My Head Hurt

Mark Zuckerberg Is On iTunes Ping — But Only One Is Real

vertical8 — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:50:51 +0000

Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple and Facebook are having a little bit of an issue at the moment. Despite launching with Facebook Connect integration yesterday, it’s now nowhere to be seen on Apple’s new music social network, Ping. And that’s too bad because even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed up to try out Ping yesterday, we hear. While Facebook Connect will no longer help you find Zuckerberg there, if you do a simple name search, there he is. Well actually, there he is twice. Hmm. Which one to choose? One has 46 followers, says he’s into “Dance, Hip-hop/Rap”, and has no picture. The other has 74 followers, doesn’t list musical preferences, but has a picture. So it’s gotta be the second one, right? Nope. As tempting as it is to think that Zuckerberg actually filled in his profile to say “It’s true, I invented Facebook,” this is a fake account. The one with no picture and less followers? That’s the real Zuck. He follows two people, Katy Perry and Bret Taylor. One of those is a famous pop singer, the other is Facebook’s CTO. I’ll let you sort that out. Who cares? Well, it’s sort of interesting that anyone can create a fake account of someone else on Ping. Sure, you need an iTunes account, but there are undoubtedly many people who have no interest in using Ping and are happy to create fake accounts aplenty. As another example, here’s The Beatles . No, it’s not the group (iTunes doesn’t play nicely with them, remember?) — it’s someone who made their name “The” and “Beatles” and put an album cover picture in there. These fake account could potentially lead to users who believe them getting tricked into making purchases that they think their idols recommend. Zuckerberg didn’t actually recommend Those Darlins, for example — Fake Zuckerberg did. Seems like there’s an identification system that could potentially help with this. Oh yeah, Facebook Connect. CrunchBase Information Facebook iTunes Information provided by CrunchBase

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Mark Zuckerberg Is On iTunes Ping — But Only One Is Real

In The Coming HTML5 Browser Wars, The Markup Should Remain The Same

Administrator — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:39:10 +0000

On Monday, Google made a big splash with a customized Arcade Fire video page that showed off all the cool things HTML5 can do, from video, animations and 3D rendering to gorgeous fonts and choreographed windows. It’s all cutting edge stuff as far as what is possible with a Web browser goes, but there is one very big problem. It doesn’t work so great in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead. I received the following message on Firefox: This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again. But wait, isn’t Firefox one of those “modern browsers” that supports HTML5 ? This isn’t the first time there have been issues with HTML5 compatibility. The problem is that HTML5 is so young that the standards have not been hammered out yet across all browsers. The markup language required to produce the same effect is different for different browsers. “The Arcade Fire thing . . . they are writing to the browser,” points out Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft general manager in charge of Internet Explorer. “They use proprietary Javascript.” HTML5 “done right,” he contends, would be using the same markup language across browsers. Seems reasonable. That is what the open Web is all about. It is why we have standards. But HTML5 is so new that we are getting flashbacks to the late 1990s with sites refusing to accept certain browsers. To illustrate this point, Microsoft has an HTML5 test page set up that changes the border around a block of text. Inside the block of text, it shows the markup code required to create different effects such as animating it or creating dots instead of a solid line. Here is what the code looks like in Chrome: And here is what it looks like in Firefox What’s wrong with these pictures? One takes 16 lines of code, the other takes four, and they are completely different. Even the dots that are created don’t match (Chrome’s dots are square). A different set of HTML5 code is required for IE9. ”We want to make the same markup work everywhere,” says Hachamovitch. ”If you have to write that differently for every browser it is kind of missing the point.” Microsoft is working with the standards bodies, as are all the other browser makers, but what is really needed is better definitions and a thorough set of reference examples for every possible HTML5 feature. It’s a lot of work. Eventually, we will get there. But until then, expect to see grandstanding about which browser does HTML5 better. When you hear that, just ask yourself, which version of HTML5 are they talking about. CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Windows Internet Explorer Firefox Information provided by CrunchBase

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In The Coming HTML5 Browser Wars, The Markup Should Remain The Same

Done Deal: HP Gets 3PAR For $2.35 Billion In Cash

user — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:00:13 +0000

It’s officially over. After Dell pulled out of the running this morning, HP has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data storage company 3PAR, for $33 per share in cash, or a value of $2.35 billion. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies. This morning, HP upped the ante with an offer worth $33 per share or $2.4 billion. 3PAR accepted HP’s bid and Dell withdrew.

Hot Or Not’s App Answers The Next Question: Close By Or Not?

admin2 — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:20:43 +0000

It was only a matter of time before this app came out. The folks over at Hot or Not have launched a location-based free iPhone app that will show you the hottest ladies and gents that are close to you. If you aren’t familiar with Hot or Not, the site allows you to rate pictures of girls or a guys (depending on your taste) on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a mindless site and game which has managed to gather a fairly massive user base. The app is fairly simple in what it does: it uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS technology to map out the hottest guys or girls registered on HotOrNot.com that are close to your location. Currently the site draws from a database of 4.8 million members. Hot or Not says that the app received more than 2,000 sign-ups its first day in the App Store. Last year, the startup also launched Hot Or Not War, which we covered here . Hot Or Not was bought by Avid Life Media in 2008.

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Hot Or Not’s App Answers The Next Question: Close By Or Not?