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Posts Tagged ‘imeem’

Over the weekend at the MidemNet music event in Cannes, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage to talk about the current status of the struggling company. During his keynote interview with Billboard editorial director Bill Werde, Van Natta stated that MySpace was showing an increase in unique visitors for the first time since the middle of last year. In fact, Van Natta said that according to comScore data, MySpace visitors grew by 7 percent between November and December. That may sound like great news for the site, but it may be misleading: many of these new users may have simply been redirected users of Imeem.

MySpace completed its acquisition of Imeem on December 8, and the music service was promptly shut down (Imeem was out of money and its music licenses were expiring). As soon as Imeem shut down, MySpace redirected all of its traffic to its own music site.  Now, we can’t tell exactly how many users MySpace gained from these redirects, but according to comScore MySpace saw a jump in 4.7 million unique visitors in December, which is about the same as what comScore was measuring for Imeem in previous months (it had 4.6M in October and 4.4M in November).  Again, we can’t definitively say how much of MySpace’s growth was due to Imeem, but it’s likely that it represented a substantial portion of it.

To be fair, Van Natta and MySpace aren’t exactly out boasting about their improved traffic stats — Van Natta’s comment was in response to a question that was posed to him on stage, and he followed it up by saying, “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here but it’s good that the numbers have stabilized and we hope this will continue”.

It’s worth pointing out that while MySpace’s uniques have stabilized after big drops last spring and summer, it’s unclear if the number of page views the site receives has stabilized (see the comScore graph below).

I’m just going to take it.

That’s right, Comcast. This is me, waving my white flag. I’m not going to complain to you any more. Why did I even try in the first place? It’s like trying to erode Mount Rainier with licks. So from here on out, I’m just going to take it. All the outages, all the fees, all 20 levels of customer service. Who was I kidding, anyway?

Last month, MySpace finally completed its deal to acquire troubled music startup Imeem. Unfortunately for imeem fans, the service shut down as soon as the deal was completed, redirecting them to a MySpace Music splash screen. MySpace was subsequently trashed by outraged users who wanted their playlists back. Today, they’re getting what they asked for: MySpace has just sent out an Email to imeem users, informing them that they’ll be able to restore their playlists using a new import tool. We’ve confirmed with MySpace that the feature is now live.

The process is simple: users enter their imeem Email address, hit “Import Playlists”, and will find their imeem playlists restored under the “My Music” section of MySpace Music. The playlists will behave as normal MySpace playlists do, but will be labeled to indicate that they originated from imeem. The process should be seamless for most users, but there are a few caveats: MySpace won’t be able to restore songs where there are differences between the imeem and MySpace music license catalogs. MySpace says this won’t be an issue for most songs, but didn’t have an exact percentage for how much of the catalogs overlap.

It’s worth pointing out again that MySpace didn’t really have anything to do with the shutdown of imeem — it would have shut down anyway as its licences expired and money ran out.

Here’s the Email message being sent to imeem users:

We’re happy to share that we’ve recreated your imeem playlists on MySpace Music. We spent a lot of time and effort to make a home for your music on our platform. Beginning today you’ll be able to access your playlists. Here’s how:

1) Access your playlist by clicking here: http://www.myspace.com/music/import-playlists. You will need to be logged into MySpace. Click here to login or signup for MySpace.

2) Enter your imeem e-mail address.

3) Click import and we will retrieve your playlists.

4) Upon completion, your playlists will be stored in “My Music,” our playlist management tool. All playlists can be identified by the name “import_[yourplaylistname]”

This process isn’t perfect and while we expect most of your content to have migrated from imeem to MySpace Music, we appreciate your understanding if any discrepancies between the two music catalogs affected your individual playlists.

If you have questions, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home.

Thanks,
The MySpace Music Team

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In the two weeks since it acquired imeem in a firesale, MySpace has been met with waves of frustration from outraged users who blame the company for shutting down the troubled music service. MySpace didn’t really have anything to do with imeem’s sudden shutdown (it would have closed shop anyway), but most users don’t care — they just want their imeem playlists and free streaming music back. Today, MySpace is reaching out to these disgruntled imeem users to let them know that their playlists will soon be restored, brought back to life with free streams from MySpace Music.

We’ve known this was happening for a while now (MySpace even tells users who visit imeem.com that their playlists are being migrated), but it now looks like the site is taking a more proactive approach to keeping its users informed. This is probably what it should have done from the start, instead of suddenly pulling the plug on its API and redirecting all imeem traffic to MySpace without any prior warning. But at least your imeem playlists will live on, which is better than nothing.

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Video language learning website EnglishCentral recently raised a total of $3.5 million, according to an SEC filing. Part of that funding was $1.38 million from a previous convertible debt round, making the amount raised in the current series A financing $2.1 million. EnglishCentral is backed by Google Ventures and Atlas Venture. The fact that Google Ventures was the lead investor in a seed round last October was reported, but the amount invested was never disclosed. Based on the information in the filing, it is possible that that the seed round was in the form of the $1.38 million convertible note and is now converting into equity with the additional $2.1 million investment.

The filing does not say who the invested in the new round, but Rich Miner of Google Ventures is listed as a director of the company. Google Ventures is Google’s venture arm which launched last April with an initial $100 million and can invest in pretty much anything, although mostly it’s been putting money into clean tech startups.

EnglishCentral is a language tutorial site which uses popular videos from movies, news clips, and other categories to help people around the world learn English. Students watch a captioned video, and then try to repeat the phrases by speaking into a microphone and recording their attempts. Speech-to-text software tries to make sense of their pronunciation and gives them grades for accuracy, which they can track over time. The video tutorials are free, but the site also connects language students with tutors, and presumably takes a cut of any resulting fees.

We have contacted both EnglishCentral and Google Ventures for clarification on the details of the funding and will update if we here back.

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Online music services have had a bad few weeks. Imeem got bought by MySpace for next to nothing, Lala got bought by Apple for something ranging from a little to not-very-much. Spotify continues to be a no-show in the U.S. But at least one service, Pandora, appears to be doing quite well for itself.

The service has announced that it surpassed 40 million registered users earlier this month. That means the service had doubled its size in 2009. And it’s adding 600,000 new registered users a week now. Even more remarkable is that half of those new users are coming from mobile devices. And of those, the iPhone continues to lead the way with 10 million Pandora users of its own. That number has grown some 400% this year.

These good numbers follow the news earlier this year that Pandora had officially been “saved” after reaching an acceptable deal with the music companies for the royalty rates they have to pay. Pandora, unlike the other music services mentioned above, is much more of a radio service in the traditional sense of the word because you can’t pick exactly which song you’re going to listen to. But a proposed rate hike, which almost went into effect, would have severely hampered Pandora’s ability to survive as a business. Instead, with the new deal, they expect to be profitable by next year.

And that certainly seems possible given that Pandora is now apparently accounting for 44% of all Internet radio listening hours, Ando Domestic Ranker and their own internal numbers confirm. And they have great demographics to serve up ads to. Amongst 18-24 year-olds, Pandora has twice as many daily visitors as Hulu and ESPN, according to comScore. That said, the more music Pandora streams, the more they have to pay, so they need those ads to be effective. But that seems to be the case.

And while you might think the surge in mobile usage might be bad for Pandora which relies heavily on the ads that blanket its website, number indicate they have been able to monetize these mobile users as well.

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AdWhirl is a mobile advertising service that allows app developers to easily switch ad networks without being a hassle to the end users. They were acquired by the ad network AdMob back in August, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing what they do. And today, they’re making their offering even better by open sourcing the whole thing.

With the new AdWhirl iPhone SDK, developers can now customize which ad networks they’d like to use, rather than being forced to include them all. This can significantly cut down the size of app, the company writes on its blog today. But the open sourcing of the project means that developers can now also use ad networks that weren’t previously supported by the service, and can let other AdWhirl users how to do the same. AdWhirl notes that developers currently using the service won’t have to change a thing to accomodate this new SDK.

The other announcement today involves their AdWhirl Server. This the the backend infrastructure that makes the whole system work, not only serving up the ads, but allowing users to monitor statistics. AdWhirl says it has redesigned this server from the ground up and it’s now using Amazon Web Services EC2. And beginning today, the company is providing the code so that developers can run their own AdWhirl servers. The move to EC2 should allow running their own servers to make it easier to scale as well, they note.

You can find all the new code on Google code.

Earlier this month, .App/Ads launched its own open ad platform.

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It’s been nearly a week since MySpace Music closed its acquisition of some of the assets of music service Imeem and redirected imeem.com to music.myspace.com. MySpace took a lot of heat for the sudden shutdown of the Imeem service, particularly the API.

But the fact is that MySpace didn’t shut the Imeem service down. Imeem’s creditors and the music labels did. If MySpace hadn’t done the deal Imeem would have shut down anyway. The company was just out of cash and options, and the wheels had come off the car. For the most part the press now gets that MySpace had very little to do with the shutdown, and has settled down.

Imeem’s 16 million monthly visitors apparently haven’t gotten the message, though, and every couple of minutes one of them fires off a frustrated message on Twitter. One example just a few minutes ago, in the image above: “Imeem, one of the best music sites, died, destroyed by MySpace.” Another: “RIP imeem, I will dearly miss you…All the more reason to hate myspace. They sold out on Dec. 8th.” Users are particularly upset about losing their playlists, something MySpace has said they’d work hard to transition “as quickly as possible.”

It’s not exactly the warms hug MySpace probably thought they’d receive when they stepped in and saved as much of the Imeem service as they could. And with the benefit of hindsight some basic communication to Imeem users other than the shock of a redirect to MySpace Music might have been a good idea. Like an email to users telling them what was happening, for example.

But the result is the same. The demise of Imeem had nothing to do with MySpace, and whatever parts of the service do live on will only do so because MySpace stepped in to buy some of Imeem’s assets. The hard part, of course, is getting that message to those 16 million pissed off users.

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Last month we broke the news that MySpace was acquiring music service iMeem, and that an agreement had been signed between the two companies.

All of that was accurate, including the $1 million fire sale price. But despite reports to the contrary, while the deal was signed it never closed (which explains why MySpace hasn’t announced it).

Sometime between signing and closing some problems came up in due diligence, we’ve heard. Specifically that some of the hard assets that MySpace was acquiring, hundreds of servers, were leased rather than owned. Meaning that MySpace couldn’t buy them.

The two sides have feverishly been renegotiating the deal, say our sources. At this point a deal may still be done in the next day or so at an even lower price than the $1 million. Or the deal may be terminated altogether (we’re hearing it’s likely some sort of deal will still happen).

It’s also always been unclear exactly how much capital iMeem raised to fund the company. We’ve tracked just $25 million in announced or leaked deals on CrunchBase. But we’ve heard the total is much closer to $80 million, including debt and pre-paid royalties to music labels. It’s clear that those investors aren’t seeing any return at all on that investment. Users, though, are still hoping the service lives on under MySpace.

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The first time you go surfing, it’s a pretty significant achievement to just stand up on the board and ride a wave. Most people never leave their stomachs, or when they do, they fly face first into the wave. Google Wave, it seems, is not entirely dissimilar.

On its Google Wave Blog today, the company announced a very significant milestone for the young service: A million invites have been sent out. The single biggest complaint about Google Wave so far has been the lack of access to it as everyone who wants to see what all the fuss is about. So Google has opened up the floodgates today and apparently let in everyone who previously requested an invite (though they are still requiring the invite request here). But a million invites is hardly a million users, and certainly not a million happy riders.

After a huge amount of hype following its unveiling at Google I/O, some amount of backlash for Wave was inevitable. But many Wave users still can’t quite figure out what to use the service for. My main problem with it right now is more of a chicken-and-egg one. During my busy days, I never remember to open up Wave, and there is no good notification method that you have new Wave messages, so I skip entire days without visiting. And then when I do, I’m too overwhelmed with what I’ve missed. And even if there was a good notification technique, that in some ways defeats the point of the service. Ultimately, I think Google Wave is something I’d like to have open all the time, as I see it as a new potential variety of communication for the web. And if I have it open, I don’t need another service, like email, to notify me about new messages. But I don’t have it open all the time now because usage among people I know is too sporadic.

Luckily for the Wave team, they have Google backing them. If Wave were a startup, they’d likely be in some trouble right now trying to figure out how best to position themselves. But with Google’s resources, Wave can take its time to find its audience, and most importantly, to let developers build things on top of it. “Although we are opening up access a bit, do remember that Google Wave is still only in its early preview phase,” the team notes today for the umpteenth time. A very early preview with a million plus invites sent out; that’s a pretty impressive early preview.

While Wave finds its way, it has been the source of some great comedy on the web. There have been sites dedicated to pointing out what Google Wave is easier to understand than. And there have been videos using it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. And also the Declaration of Independence. And then others are using it for the opposite reasons: Like to hunt down killers.

[photo: Universal Pictures]

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