Last.fm, one of my favorite online music recommendation and
listening services, today announced a website relaunch. The London-based company has
added four new features: Events system (e.g. concerts), Free MP3s, Flash player
radio, and a Taste-o-meter. Last.fm hopes these new features, plus the
re-design, will make it easier to find and share music - as well as being turned on to
the latest live music in your area.
The Last.fm team sent me some quick stats about the site:
Last.fm connects to a lot of things in the online music ecosystem, which is part of its strategy to support "the iPod economy." According to the press release:
"Built as an open source platform, Last.fm is designed for support on all media players including iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, xBox, TiVo, mobile phones, Slim devices, Launchcast, Yahoo Music Engine and even Pandora. Listeners can link their media players to Last.fm to share songs, statistics and playlists with the Last.fm community. Last.fm’s scrobbling function pays attention to what users are listening to—not just what is listed in their library—and suggests artists, people, and concerts based on their musical preferences. You can even post charts and listening habits to your blog or MySpace and have Last.fm update them automatically. Select a chart from a variety of user-submitted styles or customize your own."
A little about the new features. The Flash player radio is significant, because it means no download is necessary to use Last.fm. When I first started using Last.fm a year or two ago, I had to download a desktop app. But because Flash is all but ubiquitous on the Web, new users can start using Last.fm straight away. This will surely drive usage up for Last.fm and also an online media application is one of the best ways to utilize Flash. (note: the player wasn't working when I tested it)
In other acquisition news today,
Techcrunch reported that Condé
Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, has acquired Boston-based Reddit.
I pinged Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about this and he confirmed to me that
they have been acquired, "for an undisclosed sum".
Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July we noted that Reddit was integrating its software into Slate.com, the venerable Webzine currently owned by Washington Post. The reason was to give Slate readers "a new way to find and discuss its best content." I'm assuming Reddit will be similarly integrated into Wired.
Slate.reddit is populated automatically via Slate.com's RSS feeds - so there are no manual submissions, as on the original reddit.com. All that Slate readers need to do is vote and comment. Back in July I asked Alexis what led to the Slate deal:
"Alexis told me that "the relationship with Slate began when their articles started popping up on reddit shortly after we launched last June." That was followed by numerous other front page stories on reddit, at which point emails were exchanged between Reddit management and Slate."
At that time he told me there are some other similar white label projects in the works. Well looks like Wired has gone and bought the whole company, instead of just licensing the technology!
Also check out our Personalized News: A Market Overview post, which went into detail about Reddit's technology.
News this morning that JotSpot, a favorite Web Office contender of mine, has
been acquired by Google. I've spoken to co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus several times over the past
year or so and have found him to be one of the most eloquent people on the topic
of Web Office. Here's what he wrote this morning on the Google
blog:
"As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google's scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people."
See also the post on JotSpot's blog. To me, JotSpot is a company that 'gets' the Web Office, as evidenced by my interviews with Joe. In terms of their product, what started out as a wiki company slowly but surely was morphing into a Web Office suite contender this year. Back in July, JotSpot released its 2.0 version. It was described by Joe Kraus at that point as "wikis meets Microsoft Office". The upgrade enabled JotSpot users to collaborate on different types of "office-like" products. Its spreadsheet product, Tracker, was integrated into their core wiki product - along with calendars, File Cabinets, Photo Pages. In the October release of JotSpot, more apps were added to their application gallery: group directory, forum and To Do Lists.
US analytics
firm Compete, a company formed in 2000 by Bill
Gross of Overture fame, has quietly released a new search engine and at the same time
opened up some of its analytics data to the public. What's more, there is an e-commerce
component that displays special shopping deals next to search results. I spoke to Compete
CEO Don McLagan and other members of his team today to find out more...
Formally Compete was a Web statistics firm that provided analytics services to private customers - similar to Hitwise and Nielsens. So this move to offer search and associated analytics tools is designed to increase their collaboration and community on the open Web.
The main analytics product being offered is called Snapshot, which does Alexa-style comparisons between websites - as well as additional metrics such as 'trust'. Indeed the new Compete is similar in nature to Alexa, in that it collects data about website traffic and makes it available to the public. However Compete (unsurprisingly) says that its data is superior to Alexa's, because it uses more than just a toolbar to collect it. Compete gets its data in the following ways:
Compete currently has more than two million members - and this is growing as new users download their toolbar and Compete expands its data collection, via ISP relationships and the other methods mentioned above.
As with Alexa, there is ranking, pages/visit, avg stay and comparisons (up to 3 domains in total). There's also a People metric - an estimate of unique visitors to a site.
Written by Vishal Sharma and edited by Richard MacManus
Richard's
intro: Australia is a country of 20.75 million people, 14,663,622 of whom are
Internet users according to a
Nielsen//NR report from August 2006. That gives Australia an Internet penetration of 70.7%,
which is about average for the Western world. Not as high as New Zealand's though - we're
at 76.3% (I had to point that out). A little while ago I asked Martin Wells from Tangler
what the web 2.0 scene is like in Australia. He told me that development is great,
but surprisingly small for such a typically tech heavy nation (it has produced the likes
of Looksmart, Atlassian, Seek, MYOB, Micro Forte, Radiata, EServGlobal and Netcomm). He
also told me that Australia has a large and skilled technical workforce, and has a good
history with software and innovation.
I always associate Australia, in a business sense, with large and powerful media companies. But Martin told me that so far adoption of web 2.0 techniques within the big media companies has been relatively slow. Personally, I know that News Corp and now Fairfax is active in this area - e.g. check out News Corp's blogs and the social media links at the bottom of some news stories. But perhaps it's more of a 'bubbling up' activity from some business units within those big media companies.
Other than a few exceptions (such as TVP and NEO) Australian VCs are too conservative and have little knowledge of Web 2.0 and Internet business models. For this reason a number of Australian startups - like Omnidrive, Touchstone, PodCast Network and others - are actively looking for VC funds in the US. The Bulletin recently ran a story explaining more about this.
But enough from me. Let's jump into Vishal's list of top Aussie Web 2.0 apps, which is an update of his previous post...
As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service - according to this Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan to launch an advertising-supported Internet television shortly. Said to be just a month or two away, the service will enable "people with professional content" to put it up on the Web for users to download for free. The code name for the project is "Venice".
In related news, Brightcove is ramping up its long-awaited Web TV service. Today they launched the Brightcove Network, which lets content owners release their own "commercial Internet video channels" for free and generate revenue through advertising and video download sales. To accompany this news, Brightcove also launched today a new video advertising network, the ability to offer video downloads for purchase or rental, plus a new-look portal for consumers. Brightcove has also partnered with AOL to get a wider distribution.
As Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire said in the press release, this is "the beginning of the Internet TV era".
Techcrunch has more on the Brightcove story. See also Read/WriteWeb's post last night about YouTube competitior Metacafe, which has just released a revenue sharing program.
Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally
from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are
on a sliding scale and based on 'views'. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up
from there - e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a rating of 3.00 or
higher (maximum is 5.00) to qualify for payment, of which Metacafe notes: "this tells us that
the viewers like the video." What I liked best about this scheme though is that the users
retain ownership of their videos - the license to Metacafe is a non-exclusive deal.
However the users must own the rights to the video to begin with and there are some content guidelines which the
video must pass (e.g. must be family friendly).
There are already Metacafe users who have earned over $1000 - the top earner so far is a user called Reel Stunts who has earned $23,215 (as of now). That was earned from a single video, called Matrix - For Real.... It's a 3 min 41 sec camcorder video of a University student doing gymnastics - pretty amazing athletic ability, but there's nothing that special about the video. However it's been viewed 4,642,700 times, so has earned big bucks.
"Why on
earth does the world need another search engine?", asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that
website, as John Battelle's
Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital
and print ads in major newspapers - New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle
Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture 7-5 Today.
The Live Search promotion site also quotes Battelle from his book The Search: "Search is at best 5% solved--we're not even in the double digits of its potential."
That's something that Google no doubt agrees with. Google's execs are regularly quoted as saying search is far from a solved problem. Take this Marissa Mayer quote from a recent InternetWeek article:
'As successful as Google's search engine is, Mayer feels it could be better. "Search is superprimitive," she said. "It's disappointing that it's not advancing as much as we had hoped."'
I imagine 5% is about equal to "superprimitive".
Dominating the Web Tech world this week was the release of the Firefox 2.0 browser. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch extensively - including an interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products), a product review of the new browser, a review of the Firefox 2 Recommended Add-ons and a post on how Mozilla plans to market Firefox 2. We also published what turned out to be a somewhat controversial Web Browser Faceoff - the comments got a bit fiery (pun intended)!
Another interesting launch this week was the Adobe Digital Editions Beta. As we noted in our post, the digital reading market is hotting up in late 2006 - Adobe's product follows on from the recent launch of the Microsoft-powered NY Times Reader, plus Sony recently released a beta of its much anticipated Sony Reader. While it may not be as sexy as the battle of the music players (iPod, Zune, etc), the digital reader market may well be be just as big and profitable in a few years.
Here at R/WW we are especially interested in truly innovative web products, that potentially meet a mass market need. I'm currently reading a book called The Google Story, by David Vise (I've already read John Battelle's book on the same subject), and it's fascinating to think that in the late nineties Google was building a highly innovative product - yet they struggled to find a market for it, because portals were all the rage then and search was viewed as almost a commodity at the time.
I'm not suggesting that we've discovered the 'next Google', but I always look for web technologies and products that are truly innovative and could be disruptive. Examples from this week included:
You may not have heard about any of the above products yet, but keep an eye on them because they're all solving real-world problems in a unique way.
We continued our popular International Web Apps series, with a look at Sweden's top web businesses. Once again, the comments are just as informative as the post (written by Bjorn Fant).
Speaking of Google, we wrote about Eurekster's Reaction To Google's Eureka! Moment. More positively about the Mountain View company that everyone loves to buzz about, there was an interesting Google re-org rumor doing the rounds. Google will have one global account director per large account and they will push different types of ads (CPC, CPM, CPA, etc) over all media channels - search, mobile, video, audio, etc. I heard even more whispers that this is in fact going to happen, after we published our post.
To end the week, there was news about Pluck shutting down its RSS Reader. Our theory is that this makes consumer RSS Readers a dead market, which most people seemed to agree with.
That's a wrap for another week! Roll on the new week...
The Pluck RSS Reader is shutting down, according to a message posted on the Pluck website:
"All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line."
Current Pluck users have until 1/5/2007 to export their data into another RSS Reader.
It's interesting they put the following rose-colored spin on why they're exiting the consumer RSS Reader market:
"The good news is that RSS reading capabilities continue to develop across the web. You can get them by default in all of your favorite browsers, and RSS-based news reading capabilities are rapidly being baked into your favorite web sites..."
...ahem, not to mention Microsoft is integrating RSS into Outlook next year, Google will probably have Gmail integration soon, and Yahoo has MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail for feeds.
I'm afraid to say that consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless - the real business is white label and enterprise solutions. So Newsgator for example is well positioned. And Bloglines and Rojo both got out while the going was still good, via acquisitions. Although it must be said that niche RSS Readers will still have their place - for example FeedDemon (owned by Newsgator) will continue to get an adequate number of subscriptions.
But as a standalone company, it's no longer possible. Consumer RSS Readers are a dead market now.
Trevor Jonas: "To say I now regret recommending Pluck to so many friends, colleagues and everyone within Bite would be an understatement."
Randy Morin: "Pluck was one of the first great RSS readers. It competed for awhile with NewsGator but the entire product-line became very buggy over time. The end of an era. RIP!"
