The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘artists-looking’

International music star Shakira is taking a new approach to releasing her latest music video: she’s doing it through a live stream on Ustream, which will be emedded on her Facebook Page. According to Sony, this is the first time an artist has used the platform to debut a music video (Updated: Sony is wrong. Chamillionaire did it first, see below). Shakira (and her managers) are keen on the idea because it allows her and her fans to interact with each other in real time — something that’s not practical on TV, where these videos have been making their debuts for decades. The stream will start here on Monday at noon, PT.

The live video/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we’ve recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert using LiveStream, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu.

Update: Looks like Sony was wrong. As our commenters point out, Chamillionaire was the first to use Ustream for the debut of his music video, Good Morning (which you can watch here). As we saw at TechCrunch50 he’s definitely ahead of the curve with regard to web services, so it’s no surprise that he was first.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Last week we gave away a TwitterPeek device on a whim. It turns out giving stuff away for free is popular, so we’re going to keep doing this every Friday until we forget to keep doing it. Up this week was going to be a shiny new pair of Facebook cufflinks. But at the last minute Sonos stepped in and is generously offering to give one of our lucky readers a $399 Sonos ZonePlayer S5 all-in-one wireless music system.

Want it? It’s yours. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Sonos is generously donating the device and covering the shipping costs as well. If you aren’t lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the S5 for $399 here.

More details on the S5 in the demo video below. You can also read more about it on CrunchGear.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

SGN has just given us a peek at Skies of Glory, its upcoming dogfighting game for the iPhone that’s the followup to its hit game F.A.S.T., which was released last June. That app proved to be a run-away success, pulling in over a million dollars in its first six weeks of release. Skies of Glory takes the gameplay that made F.A.S.T. a hit and builds on it, adding much improved graphics, more missions, and a World War II setting. The company is targeting an early December launch date.

Here are some of the details;

• Battle up to three human opponents around the world or up to seven locally over Wifi connection
• 10 Campaign Missions to complete (Battle over Britain or the Pacific)
• Skirmish Mode, including single player Teams, Free For All and Capture the Flag.
• 100 missions to perform in Training exercises.
• Players will be able to buy planes and equipment via in-app purchases
• Initial launch is the beginning, with more campaigns, planes and gear to be available over time.
• Bluetooth support to play with friends (in addition to the Wi-Fi support)
• Supports Jukebox, in which the player can listen to their library of music throughout all of their air combat battles.

Aside from the gameplay and graphical enhancements, Skies of Glory is making another big change: it will be free to download, with in-app purchase options for new planes, eqipment, and more. F.A.S.T. intially launched at $9.99 — a pricepoint that would be perfectly reasonable on most platforms, but is relatively high on the App Store. The app still did well regardless, but having any upfront price presents a major hurdle to getting new users on board.

But things have changed a lot on the App Store since F.A.S.T. launched. First, Apple started allowing in-app purchases with its iPhone 3.0 update, which lets developers sell virtual goods from within their apps. Initially developers could only do this from paid apps though, so SGN wound up dropping the price of F.A.S.T. significantly but was unable to switch to free. However, last month Apple made the surprising announcement that it would allow developers to offer in-app purchases from their free games — a change that will have a major effect on the App Store (see my interview with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar for more on that). Expect Skies of Glory to see a lot of downloads, which SGN surely hopes will turn into plenty of microtransactions as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0