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Posts Tagged ‘indie’

MySpace Records, the indie record label that’s a joint venture between the social network and Interscope Records, is going through some changes. Not to be confused with MySpace’s popular MySpace Music free streaming portal, MySpace Records is a small record label designed to help promising new artists get early exposure. Earlier this evening, LA-based radio station KROQ reported that MySpace Records may have been disbanded. We’re hearing from multiple sources that that isn’t entirely accurate: A handful of people were let go from the label’s small team, and the label’s GM Jay Scavo has returned to Hollywood Records. But all artists currently signed to MySpace Records will remain on the label, and the partnership with Interscope remains.

That’s sure to be good news for the label’s artists, which include Pennywise and Nico Vega. The label has also previously featured a handful of artists who were eventually promoted to the main Interscope label, including Kate Voegele and Mickey Avalon. However, while the current artists are safe, we’re hearing that the direction of the label and its future structure are still up in the air.

When MySpace Records launched, MySpace planned to leverage its then-recent acquisition by News Corp to turn the label into a jumping off point for hot new bands (former CEO Chris DeWolfe was quoted as saying they’d get the bands into Fox movies and TV shows). Obviously it hasn’t performed as well as everyone hoped, but MySpace has still managed to help kickstart the careers of quite a few well known bands. Likewise, its MySpace Music site continues to perform well despite MySpace’s slowdown in other areas.

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Back in 2008, we wrote about a startup called NewsCred, which looked to help identify the most trustworthy news sources using a combination of community voting and algorithms. That didn’t really take off, so the company is now heading in a new direction: it wants to help users build their own custom online newspapers in a matter of minutes, offering a professional-looking site tailored to include the content you’re interested in. And using NewsCred premium features, you could potentially create a combination news aggregator/opinion site in the same vein as The Huffington Post.

Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.

We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted.

NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks.

NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).

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Indie music discovery service OurStage decided to fill me in on how well they’re doing as a startup in the difficult online music business, and I was quite amazed to see how much they’ve progressed over the years. On a financial level, the company has fantastic prospects; they expect to hit profitability sometime next year if all goes well. That should sound like music to the ears of their investors: OurStage raised a healthy $17 million in Series A when they started out in 2007 and went on to raise an additional $3 million in Series B earlier this year.

OurStage says it intends to double the amount of financing for the Series B round, which would bring the total investment put into the company to $23 million by the end of 2009.

Since launching publicly back in April 2007 the company has been steadily attracting users to join its service, which enables people to discover new independent artists, rank and share music with others and communicate directly with upcoming singer/songwriters and bands. Thanks to viral growth in combination with dozens of partnerships with music festivals, radio networks and media companies like AOL/WinAmp, OurStage is currently nearing 1 million registered users. The company has also managed to sway 95,000 artists into joining the platform, and in combination with the strong user base they currently receive about 3 million unique visitors on the site every month.

So how do they monetize the service? By focusing on three good old revenue streams that seem to work well for them: sponsoring, advertising and data services. The latter I think is interesting: OurStage is beta testing a service called TRAViS (shorts for Track Validation Services) that is currently being used by divisions of four major record labels and will be publicly launched in Q4 2009, and expects to add some more services targeted at industry professionals soon.

Somehow OurStage has also found a way to get close to running a cash-flow positive business with classic advertising (powered by ad platforms like MTV Tribe, AOL’s Platform A and IndieClick) and sponsorships from major corporations like MTV2, JetBlue, Radio One as well as notable artists like Bow Wow, Busta Rhymes and John Legend. According to the company, ad revenues alone have grown tenfold year-over-year compared to the same period in 2008.

Not enough to impress you? Maybe the startup’s board of directors will convince you the company is onto something great here: it includes a former CMO of Yahoo!, David Moore (founder and Chairman of 24/7 RealMedia), the founder and CTO of Maven Networks, the former Chairman and CEO of Interpublic and since last month, former Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Don Lenner.

Refreshing to hear this type of update from an Internet startup these days.

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Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, founded in 2005 with the goal of helping people and businesses easily access and share information from anywhere. Box.net is now used by millions of individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide.

There’s now a lot of buzz debating the business model of “Free” with the release of Chris Anderson’s new book. Most of the conversation has focused on free media and free consumer services, but ultimately the effects and expectations of free in our consumer lives will begin to emerge within our business lives. Today, there’s no shortage of examples of free or “freemium” business software, from commercial services (37Signals, PBworks, Google Apps) to open source (Mysql, SugarCRM), yet, there’s still a great divide of SaaS solutions selling their software with an “older” format (Salesforce.com) and even some with a really old model (SharePoint). Simply judging by the relative market caps of companies pursuing each model, no one in SaaS has built up a substantial enterprise business yet with the model of free or freemium alone. Mysql only got to $50M in revenue before it was acquired, and the majority of freemium enterprise service providers are still in the tens-of-millions range, with few exceptions.

Mark Cuban brings an interesting point to the debate: when you live by your free service, you die by your free service. There’s certainly merit in this argument if your business model is an advertising model based on pageview volume alone or if you’re holding up solely because of venture capital. When your uniqueness and flavor dries up, so may your users, and thus your revenue and funding. This was generally Mark’s concern when we introduced the free version early in 2006 (he was an early investor in Box, with no current stake): Why would people ever pay? How do you avoid just eating up a ton of costs with no revenue to supplement? What about when someone else comes out with a version of your service that’s also free with more bells and whistles? How will you remain competitive?

To put one main argument to rest, we’ve learned that there is no business model in Free alone (duh), while there may just be a large business model in Freemium in time. There are a few reasons why the freemium model has enabled new software products to grab significant market share while also build a strong enterprise business in the face of dozens of startup competitors and giants like (both free and pay). This model allows you to surface your service to a much wider customer base (cross vertical, geography, function) and learn from and efficiently attract all types of users onto the service. And - more significantly - maintaining a free version of your service for a single user or small group is a very efficient way to get users to eventually actually pay for your product: customers can quickly try out your service without a lengthy sales pitch and users with limited requirements can get by for free, but recommend the business version to their company when the time is right.

Take a look at Google Apps for a great example of this model done right. You can use as much Gmail and Calendar as you want as a single user or small group, but if you want the real business version on your domain, it’s time to pay up (see their 15,000 seat Genentech deal). Instead of spending large amounts of money on marketing that tells people about a product, create a community of free users and create evangelists in the process. It also helps avoid the risk of competitors coming in and undercutting your costs - fun fact: when in a sales “bake off,” Box.net loses the largest amount of deals to ourselves, not to another service.

Let me emphasize that in case you missed it: Not everyone will find the same value in your product or service. For those that don’t, why not keep them as users and turn them into evangelists?

Freemium allows the actual consumer of the technology to make decisions in an unprecedented way: if the product doesn’t solve their problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. Instead of focusing primarily on the purchasing party (often an IT or department manager), the model is inverted, with more power being put in the hands of the end-user of the technology. Onerous contracts and deep sales relationships don’t keep them there. This means your product has to rock, and it has to constantly be asking and answering the same fundamental question: are we providing the best valuable possible? If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay.

Freemium is also great strategy for products that have high switching costs - why not allow me to start using a free version, get hooked, and begin charging me when I hit a threshold of activity? Every day, in our own business, we have to make budget decisions on new software which can ultimately hold up the purchase by months; whereas if we were able to start using the product immediately we’d quickly hit a usage threshold, and we’d be more convinced about the solution at the point of purchase (no more buyers remorse). Instead, we end up doing a price bake off between multiple solutions, and whoever has the better sales rep and “story” essentially wins. What if Salesforce.com gave you the first 100 contacts for free, then you start paying once you need more? Once my first 100 leads are added into SalesForce, I’m not going anywhere else. If your service offers true ROI once implemented, why not let me implement it for free and charge me once I achieve some success? These strategies will reduce the sales friction of any service, allow businesses to be more competitive, and expand the potential market dramatically.

The great news is that because software distribution and sales models are adapting with the times, the number of people that can now access and afford your product has gone up exponentially in the past decade. Given the fact that we can now develop and deliver software much more easily and cheaply (distribution over the web vs. hardware and software sales), and thus reflect these cost improvements onto customers, we can now go after much larger or harder to reach markets more efficiently (small businesses, for instance). With the right product, reaching 10 million potential business users and customers is now trivial. Imagine doing that 10 or 20 years ago. And with an addressable market in the millions of users, it becomes a lot more practical than ever before to make a meaningful business just selling to a subset of that base.

So what to take from all this? Here are some quick lessons we’ve learned from “Free” in the enterprise:

• Free is not a business model, it’s a marketing and distribution tactic. Don’t forget this, and don’t get distracted into thinking otherwise.
• Free is not an excuse to make a lesser product, in fact it forces you to make a better product or no one will ever pay.
• Free will expand your market size and scope instantly; make sure you’re prepared, and make sure you can survive and thrive if only a subset ultimately pay you.
• Freemium works when you know who will want to pay for the service and what extra bells they will pay for. This can be based on usage thresholds, ROI achieved, more features, better support, etc.
• Freemium also works because larger businesses have specialized requirements that they’ll pay for: more security, more users, better management, etc.
• Treat free as an advantage - learn from all those new potential customers of your product, pay attention and allow niches to emerge that you can sell to.
• Lose customers to yourself, not your competitors

This discussion certainly isn’t over. We’re going through a major sea change. It happened to music, it happened to consumer services, it’s happening to newspapers and publishing, and it will happen to business software. The business models are changing. It means software businesses will need to be innovative and adaptable, but ultimately you’ll survive if people want what you have to offer, regardless of the price tag. Of course there will always be room for premium software to be pay-only, just like we still expect to pay a premium for a variety of content in the “real” world (movies, research reports, education, etc); but, for mass penetration the reality is Free and Freemium will you get there quicker, faster, and with less friction along the way. If that’s what you’re looking for, then it’s just up to you to figure out the actual business model if you want it to last.

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And you though self-pubished books were all rubbish. Author Boyd Morrison sold two books, the first one called The Ark , to Simon & Schuster.

Read the original here: 
Indie Kindle author lands book deal

Sense of Fashion is an Israeli startup that aims to be a marketplace for both Indie fashion designers to sell their designs and for consumers to be able to access clothes made by aspiring designers. The site also serves a social purpose—it lets any user create a fashion homepage of sorts where you can add photos of what you wear your favorite clothes and designs. Designers can create storefronts on this platform as well.

The site has ambitions to be more than just a marketplace for new and interesting fashion. The site hopes to connect shoppers, designers and trendsetters. Designers can tap into a potential customer base of users who have created their own fashion pages and users can influence designers by commenting on designs and fashions posted on the site. Users can also interact with other shoppers on the site. For example, Sense of Fashion has a “Fashion Emergency” feature that allows you ask friends to vote and choose which item of clothing looks best on you.

Sellers can operate e-commerce on Sense of Fashion via Paypal. The site takes a 3% sales commission on all sales and charges designers an undisclosed listing fee as well. Launched in 2007, Sense of Fashion has received seed funding by VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, Ori Levy and other investors. Sense of Fashion is an interesting way to combine social networking, fashion, and retail for the Indie design space. I can imagine aspiring fashion students and design connoisseurs will find the site particularly appealing. FashionSpace has a similar concept.

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If you own an iPhone, chances are you have at least one Twitter client on it. And while everyday seems to bring new ones into the App Store, at the end of the day, Tweetie always seems to be the one that I go back to. TwitterFon, Twitterriffic and most recently, TweetDeck, all are worthy challengers, but I find each of them lacking in some regard. Usually, it’s either speed or simplicity. Tweetie seems to be a perfect combination of the two. But a new app, Birdfeed, may be a little more perfect.

When you first boot it up, you may think Birdfeed looks a little sparse. But there’s a lot behind this simple design, it’s just tucked away, so as not to clutter the main experience, as so many apps do. The main Birdfeed screen consists of your Twitter timeline, a button to load newer tweets, a button to compose a tweet, and a button to your account — that’s it. Clicking on any tweet in your timeline will load it on its own screen and from there you can easily see that person’s profile, reply to that tweet, favorite it or forward it (retweet it, post a link to it, or mail a link to it).

But it’s the button that takes you back to your account that leads you to all of the tools you’re accustomed to on many Twitter clients. There’s a “Mentions” area, a “Direct Messages” area, and a “Favorites” area. You can also view your profile, your tweets, perform a search, or jump to a specific user. On a user’s profile page within Birdfeed, there are also some cool tools. At the bottom, you’ll find a “Services” button. Clicking on that pops up a menu which allows you to automatically scan that user using DoesFollow (a service that tells you if a user is following you on Twitter), Follow Cost (which tells you how annoying a user is to follow based on number of tweets), Favrd (which tracks interesting things on Twitter), and Twitter.com (to show you their actual profile on Twitter).

Another couple nice features that Birdfeed highlights is the threading of direct messages in a way that looks like the SMS (and one day, MMS) messages area on the iPhone. And the app bookmarks where you last updated your Twitter timeline, so that when you load the app again, you don’t have to scroll through past tweets to remember what you haven’t seen. And yes, there is multiple account support.

Birdfeed has really whittled down its Twitter client to just the essentials. But it does so in a way that makes perfect sense. As the developers put it on their site, “We’re as proud of the things we left out as we are of the things we put in.” As someone who is a huge fan of keeping things simple, I wholly approve that message. But as great as the simplistic look of Birdfeed may be, it’s the speed that is arguably even better.

Whereas an app like Twitterriffic can often take in excess of 10 seconds to load up with you tweets, Tweetie typically takes about 3 seconds. But I’ve found Birdfeed is able to boot up and load new tweets in about one second. The reason for this is that the app does local caching. And not only does this allow it to load faster, it also allows you to view tweets even when you’re not connected to the Internet. I just put my iPhone in Airplane Mode and web back through over several hours worth of tweets, seamlessly.

So, are there any downsides to Birdfeed? Yes. The biggest one for many users will be its price: $4.99. While many users opt for clients that are free (TwitterFon’s free version is a nice option), Tweetie sets its price at $2.99. But System of Touch (yes, from the Tears For Fears song), the team behind Birdfeed that consists of Buzz Andersen and Neven Mrgan, have plenty of experience developing for the desktop side of things, and consider a Twitter iPhone client much more of a challenge than a desktop version. As such, they note in a blog post that, “because we put a lot of sweat into producing a polished, Apple-caliber application, we feel Birdfeed is worth $4.99.” Fair enough.

Another downside is that the all-important “Mentions” or “@replies” are not just one-click away on Birdfeed like they are on Tweetie. Instead, they are two clicks away (back to the main screen, and then into Mentions). But, Birdfeed features an indicator (next to your name on the button to go to the main screen) to let you know if there is a new mention or direct message for you to view.

Another feature I’m not thrilled with is that it uses chat bubbles as the default view for the timeline. While I think these bubbles are fine for Direct Messages, they take up too much space in the main screen, where I prefer to see as many tweets as possible without having to scroll. Tweetie gives you an option to have a straight-forward block-style look, Birdfeed does not.

Birdfeed has only been available for one day, so it’s too early to declare it the new de-facto iPhone Twitter client. But I will say that it’s closer than any other app has ever been to dethroning Tweetie, in my mind. It’s so good that I’ve already moved it onto my first page of apps on the iPhone, just to make sure it gets a fair shake against Tweetie. We’ll see what I’m still using in a week, but I suspect is may just be Birdfeed.

You can find Birdfeed in the App Store for $4.99 here.

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Checking a few indie game blogs, I ran across some excellent-looking games coming out soon for PSN and XBLA. These micropublishing platforms have been extremely good for the indie games community, which is thriving. It’s also good for us gamers: for instance, I just finished Zeno Clash and it was extremely refreshing.

See original here: 
CrunchArcade indie game preview roundup

YouTube announced today new measures it is taking to more prominently feature and broaden the range of content available on the site from studios including Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, the BBC, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, National Geographic. The site will now feature a new ‘Shows’ tab in the YouTube masthead, which will allow users to browse through television content by genre, network, title, and popularity (sounds like Hulu, doesn’t it?). The site now features thousands of full TV episodes, as well as hundreds of movies. Some videos will be available in HD.

At this point the majority of content will come from older TV shows and movies - series like ‘Party of Five’ and ‘Married With Children’, not the current seasons we’ve been seeing on Hulu. But more deals are in the works, and I suspect that barring a disastrous response to YouTube’s premium content we’ll be seeing newer show in the next few months. The site is also refining its search options, making it easier to separate the new premium content from the user-generate videos the site has become famous for.

Finally, the site is announcing a new advertising product called “Google TV Ads”. The product allows advertisers to place TV-like commercials (including pre within the new premium content offerings on the site. From the press release:

We’re excited to announce the beta launch of Google TV Ads Online. This is a new feature of Google TV Ads that lets advertisers place commercials into the ad breaks of TV programs watched online. It works in the same way as Google TV Ads: advertisers can target specific programs and select their cost-per-thousand (CPM) bid. Based on their targets, budget and bid, ads are inserted in the same program breaks that were designed for advertising when the programs first aired. (Ads may also be shown “pre-roll”, before the program begins, or after the online presentation of the program “post-roll.”) And like Google TV ads, we provide advertisers with measurement tools that give greater insight into how their ads perform with users.

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McKinsey & Company released a report, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” yesterday that claims that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study also says that while cloud computing is optimal for small and medium-sized businesses, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. Virtualization is the optimal way to go, says McKinsey, and by implementing virtualization in-house, corporations can reduce costs when factoring in depreciation and tax write-offs. Virtualization, which McKinsey says can boost server utilization to 18% from 10%, lets you treat one machine like many, by carving the servers into many virtual engines, so that software can maximize power from one machine and add scalability. Not only is this cost-effective for companies, but cloud computing takes advantage of virtualization.

The report makes some thought-provoking points but neglects to address a few key trends that are occurring in cloud server services. Innovation is rapidly changing in the cloud. The space is still very much a work in progress and big cloud computing services, like AWS, Google, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, are regularly coming out with different products. As these companies throw their hats into the “cloud computing ring,” AWS will face increased competition in the market and could cause prices to go down to fight for market share.

Amazon’s cloud computing services, in particular, are constantly evolving. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). Most recently, Amazon added a web-scale data processing engine with Amazon Elastic MapReduce. (It is a framework for accessing data stored in file systems and databases). It allows developers leverage Amazon’s cloud computing power by creating applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel.

The next generation of enterprise apps is already begun to be written with the cloud and virtualization both in mind. At that point, it doesn’t make much sense to do it all through conventional data centers, when you can optimize through other services and get the best of both worlds. And many large companies currently use cloud services for a segment of their data storage, and also utilize and virtualize in conventional data centers.

Microsoft recently announced Exchange 2010, a new suite of Microsoft Office-related products, are designed to be deployed and managed servers on-premises or from the cloud. Microsoft’s Azure OS, which is expected to be rolled out in the fall, can host these office-related products in the cloud. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to speculate that in the not to distant future, Microsoft will integrates the on-premise storage and Azure storage together, thus allowing companies to tap into both utilities in the same application.

The report seems to hype the cloud costs and understates the rapid changes in cloud market conditions and resultant innovation and price cutting that will take place in the near future.

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