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Posts Tagged ‘its-investment’

Back in December 2008 Reevoo looked like it was running out of time. The UK-based B2B customer reviews site hunkered down on staffing amid pressure from the downbeat economic climate in an attempt to play out its investment from Banexi Venture Partners and Eden Ventures. Partner revenue was coming in but its crowd-sourced reviews were invisible on Google and it was, in my opinion, treading water.

Well today it looks like CEO Richard Anson’s slow burn strategy has paid off. Reevoo is announcing new partners for its service which supplies genuine, post purchase, customer reviews for European e-commerce sites. But the lack of an open API remains a gaping hole in their strategy.

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How bad are things getting for music streaming startups? We knew that imeem was on the verge of shutting down before getting a last-minute cash infusion from some of its investors, but an SEC filing from Warner Music adds some more details about exactly how dire imeem’s situation is, as well as that of another music startup, Lala.

Warner Music Group, an investor in both imeem and Lala, thinks they are no longer worth much, if anything at all. It wrote down its entire investment in imeem and half of its investment in Lala in the most recent quarter. As detailed in its 10Q report filed with the SEC, it took a $16 million charge to write down its investment in imeem, and an $11 million charge to write down part of its investment in Lala, plus it took another $4 million charge to write down a bad debt from imeem which it never expects to collect. That comes to a total of $33 million down the digital music drain.

The reason imeem is in such dire financial straits is because of the crushing payments to music labels it has to dole out for every song streamed from its site. It has renegotiated its deals with the labels to pay on a revenue-per-user basis instead of per stream, and Warner’s filing hints at why it had to do so. It appears that imeem had simply stopped paying those per-stream fees, which would explain the $4 million in bad debt. And that was just for one quarter for one label. No wonder imeem nearly ran out of cash. It had to stop paying its bills.

According to comScore, imeem’s U.S. traffic has come down about 25 percent off its peak last July. As of March, 2009 it was at 5.3 million unique visitors in the U.S. and 24 million worldwide. In the perverse world of music streaming licensing, the bigger your audience, the more money you lose.

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Stupeflix is a French startup which has come up with a radically new way of creating, processing and editing online video. On the face of it, Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. If that sounds like Animoto, then you are right, but there are key differences under the hood which make Stupeflix totally different and potentially of much greater value. And I don’t say that lightly.

Where Animoto and Stupeflix completely diverge is in their approach and business model. Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupeflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application and as a demonstration they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.

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Outsourcing projects to freelancers comes naturally to small service-oriented businesses. But juggling multiple time sheets from different contractors and managing projects from a variety of freelancers can be a hassle. Collaboration between freelancers and small businesses is key in order to managing projects efficiently.

FreshBooks, a Toronto-based invoice startup, is adding a new networking feature to its software that allows freelancers and small businesses to work with each other directly within the program and share this information freely. Through the “Contractor” feature, FreshBooks users can create and share client projects across FreshBook accounts, with multiple users able to access different accounts. Formerly, FreshBooks users couldn’t collaborate on projects across the Internet.

Of course, there are privacy issues to managing a project online. Businesses may not want to show a contractor the markup rate they are charging for services to a client. FreshBooks maintains that you can share certain information (like invoices, time sheets, billing) but also keep privileged client information private on the network.

The Contractor feature also facilitates real-time project tracking, giving businesses visibility into a contractor’s progress on a project. FreshBooks, which we reviewed here, lets you create invoices, time sheets and estimates within the browser. FreshBooks has free and paid plans and has served 700,000 users since its launch in 2004. The startup has steadily added useful features to its billing service over the past few years, including benchmark reports on aggregated business data, an open API, and data mining from users. Competitors in the online billing space include BillMyClients and Blinksale.

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