The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘circumstances’

I was hoping this wouldn’t happen, but I knew it would — it’s the danger of an always-on, always-connected society.

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Amazon puts Orwell e-books in the memory hole

After two years of uncertainty, Pandora’s future has finally been secured.

For those not familiar with what was going on, basically the streaming rates for Internet radio were in danger of being raised to levels that would have made it very hard for companies like Pandora to stay afloat. But a resolution has been reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tells us.

“Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Conrad says.

The key part of the resolution involves SoundExchange agreeing to a 40-50% reduction in the per-song-per-listener rates. In exchange, Pandora is giving up a 25% share of its U.S. revenue. This agreement runs through 2015.

But Pandora also had to give up a little more. Because the rates agreed upon are still quite a bit higher than other forms of radio, the service is going to have to put limits in place for users of its free version. Apparently, this will only affect 10% of the user base, as it’s basically just anyone who uses Pandora over 40 hours per month. If a user hits that wall, it will only cost them $0.99 to go unlimited for the remainder of the month. Seems fair.

Users of Pandora One, the pay version of the service, will continue to have unlimited listening.

I asked Conrad if this 25% kickback will effect Pandora’s stated goal to be profitable by next year. “It’s a great outcome. Expensive, but I think we can still be profitable next year. These are workable rates,” he says.

Find the rest of the details in the email below.

Many people played a role in getting here. Pandora listeners provided support in extraordinary numbers in Congress, and a group of reasonable and constructive voices on the label and artist side of the table at SoundExchange helped forge a middle ground that, while perhaps not meeting all of our aspirations, still represents a thoughtful and reasoned outcome under the circumstances.

The deal we’ve crafted is an industry-wide solution for all “pure play” Internet webcasters. The core of the compromise is that SoundExchange has granted a 40-50% reduction in the per-song-per-listener minimum rates in exchange for us giving them a 25% share of our US revenue. The deal extends through 2015 and has special carve outs for the so-called “Small Webcasters.”

While we feel this is a substantive victory, the revised royalties are quite high – still much higher than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora. In any given month, a listener who hits this limit can then opt for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month for just $0.99. In essence, we’re asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable–the same price as a single song download. Alternatively, they can upgrade to
“Pandora One”, our premium version which offers unlimited monthly listening in addition to its other benefits.

Q2 was our best quarter to date and dramatically exceeded our plan both in terms of user growth and revenue. Mobile adoption continues to be very strong with uptake on the BlackBerry looking like it will meet or exceed iPhone levels. Still, the unresolved licensing issues have hung over us like a dark cloud for two years. It’s a great feeling to have the road cleared of that obstacle.

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Former AOL Digital Chief and founder of startup incubator Launchbox Digital John McKinley’s mother fell ill recently and McKinley turned to the web to find answers on how and where to seek care for his elderly parent. McKinley found a distressing lack of resources that helped adults find the right care providers for elderly parents. He found that many of the existing services were targeted towards the care providers instead of the consumer, with services often focused completely on making sales commissions off of connecting seniors with care facilities. And McKinley found that none of the existing services offered a user-friendly web interface to find customized care. McKinley vowed to create a portal aimed towards the consumer and today, is officially launching OurParents, a free elder care matching service, focused on assisting adult children with aging parents find the right care solution that meets the parents’ and family’s health care needs.

OurParents’s transparency is derived from the site not making money from any matches that take place via the site. OurParents aims to provide an unbiased service that helps families sort through the decision of whether in-home care, a senior community, assisted living facility, nursing home care, or hospice care is best for their elderly parents. And the site does a lot of the fact-finding work for you.

OurParents offers descriptions, services, photos, quality ratings, price info, etc. for over 65,000 care providers and allows consumers to filter search results by location, cost, quality, distance and special requirements. Among the site’s features that are particularly useful to consumers when assessing a senior care facility are free detailed reports about each facility, which includes access to the Medicare ratings, detailed audit findings, community data, and information about nearby hospitals and clinics. Users can also access provider information such as real life stories about a provider, news stories, bankruptcy filings and nursing home abuse allegations.

OurParents includes a tool called the Care Options Advisor, that lets a person describe the circumstances about a senior citizen (health, age, priorities, etc.) in an entry form and be guided to the type of care options that make the most sense to consider. Once users pick a provider that they are interested in, OurParents will contact the care provider for the user. OurParents currently doesn’t advertise on the site but plans to make money from paid services the site plans to offer users in the future, including insurance and health related products.

Enurgi, which was acquired by health care provider Univita earlier this year, provides a similar service, but Enurgi is targeted toward connecting the elderly with home caregivers, a small segment of the elderly care population. And Energi took a cut of transactions that took place via its site. Because it’s completely free, OurParents is sure to be a popular destination for adults looking to find unbiased and detailed information on care for elderly loved ones.

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Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation.

At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.

Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)

Apparently, after going down Friday afternoon Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again 45 minutes after the notice was published and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night.

There’s still no 100% certainty that Seeqpod has in fact permanently closed shop. In fact, MP3 Newswire in a post says it has been in touch with Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks yesterday and that he reportedly stated the company is merely moving servers. Furthermore, MP3 Newswire quotes Franks as having said that the company is in acquisition talks with a “large media company that was a competitor to Apple”.

This could of course be a well-considered strategy to let people know it’s up for sale at all (which under the circumstances, would not be much of a surprise), hoping to squeeze a deal out of say, Sony or RealNetworks. In case this is all just talk and an acquisition never happens, things are not looking too good for Seeqpod, who despite the fact that it claims not to host any files on its own servers has become the target of multibillion dollar lawsuits by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.

The company has raised $7 million from undisclosed angel investors to date.

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Walden International, an international venture capital firm headquarted in San Francisco but with a strong foothold in Asia, has invested S$2 million - Singapore Dollars - (approx. US$1.35 million) in Brandtology. The company, which has its headquarters in Singapore but boasts more offices in China, Malaysia and Australia, provides business and brand online intelligence services out of specialist-manned ‘Command Centres’.

Despite its military-sounding name, these centres actually help Brandtology customers make ‘timely and informed strategic decisions’ based on an advanced online conversation tracking system, which mines blogs, forums, micro-blogging services etc. for opinions, aided by specialists who monitor the system for clients around the clock.

Brandtology in a statement said it will use the fresh capital to further expand its services in North Asia, where it sees most opportunities for growth.

The investment in Brandtology is the first to come out of the early-stage fund Seed Ventures IV Pte., a $13.3 million venture fund Walden International set up as a vehicle for small-scale financing rounds. The firm’s funds total over US$1.9 billion in committed capital.

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