The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘mostly-centered’

The allure of building a business around user-generated content is fading fast. SplashCast, a company which launched two years ago around the notion of helping consumers put together videos, text, graphics, and music in embeddable broadcast “channels,” is discontinuing its original product. “Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave,” concludes CEO Michael Berkley.

And after failing to raise a B round of funding, he is now trying to sell the company. Instead of trying to make money off of user-generated broadcast channels, he is focusing on his newer Social TV product, which adds social features such as chat, commenting, and polling to professionally-produced videos.

The SplashCast product being discontinued was simply too complicated for most consumers. It was a full content-management system which allowed consumers to bring together videos with images, text, and sound. In a candid assessment of why it fell flat, Berkley says: “We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”

While more than 100,000 SplashCast accounts have been created, “only a few thousand” use the product regularly, he tells me. Partly, this is the curse of building a business which relies on the creativity of users. “Like so many other Web 2.0 companies,” admits Berkley, “we simply haven’t found a way to meaningfully monetize user generated content. Users are loathe to pay meaningful subscription fees. Furthermore, advertising on user-generated video content hasn’t played out—just ask YouTube.” If only a tiny fraction of users create anything worthwhile, you either need a whole lot of users to make that work or you need to be able to attract the most creative people to your product.

But partly, SplashCast also suffered from the curse of not keeping things simple. Berkley is taking that to heart by shifting the company’s remaining resources to making Hulu-quality videos more social on Facebook and MySpace. Berkley says SplashCast videos reach 5.8 million unique viewers per month and it streams 7.2 million videos. A full 90 percent of those streams come from only 25 SplashCast channels, mostly centered around network TV shows like 24 and the Simpsons or major label music artists.

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French startup Goojet is coming out with an updated version of its mobile content and services suite after getting some runway with the beta product it launched about a year ago, six months after winning the Le Web 3 startup competition.

At the same time, the company is announcing that it has raised its second round of financing to the tune of €6 million (approx. $8.5 million) after raising initial funding for the project back in December 2007. The total amount of capital invested in the company is now at a healthy €8.3 million. Like its Series A round, the money comes from Partech International, Elaia Partners and IRDI-ICSO. Paris-based VC firm Orkos Capital participated in the new round as well for the first time.

Moving around in Google Street View is not always intuitive. You always end up clicking aimlessly a few times before you can really figure out how to move about. Well, now navigating within Street View is easier thanks to the “pancake.” Google is adding a useful tool called the “pancake” to Street View on Google Maps that lets you travel to a new point within a photo panorama by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see. Google says that it has been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas. As you move your mouse within Street View, you’ll see the pancake, which you can move up and down a street and then click on a restaurant, road, building or object nearby. The pancake is shown as a circle on roads and a rectangle when following the facade of a building.

The pancake will transport you to the best view of an object in that direction. Google also says that the pancake will often show a little magnifying glass in the bottom right to indicate that double clicking will zoom in on the current image rather than transport you to a closer location.

The pancake also prevents you from getting lost. If you want to go back to the original view of the street from the pancake, you can hit the return arrow in the address box to get back to the previous location. Previously, you could only move backward and forward along a street to view the next panorama, so the ability to quickly zoom in from anywhere to various spots along a particular road actually makes navigating within Street View much less frustrating.

Check it out in the embedded interactive Street View below, or watch the video:

View Larger Map

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I’ve fiddled with the beta version a few times before, but I’m happy the Vienna, Austria-based startup is now ready to release its eponymous service, Play.fm, publicly so I can finally tell you about it, too. Yes, it’s another online music startup, but worth a second look if you want my opinion.

Here’s how the young company pitches the service (it’s hard to categorize in a short summary):

“PLAY.FM sets new standards for on-demand streaming radios: the beta version transforms the largest audio database of DJ sets and live recordings into an intelligent platform with various possibilities of participation.”

Ok, that didn’t really help either, so let me give it a shot. What Play.fm wants to be is a place where people can come listen to professionally produced DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions that are uploaded primarily by the artists themselves, targeting a mainstream audience. It’s not a place for users to upload or stream individual tracks or create and share digital mixtapes, but rather acts as a central hub where people can discover, stream and buy new music mixed together or recorded live by professionals. In turn, the uploaders get a comprehensive set of audience statistics and hopefully some visibility. This also opens up some interesting opportunities for labels, agencies, bookers and event organizers.

To a degree, you could compare Play.fm to services like SoundCloud and Fairtilizer, although those are targeted more to a professional audience at the end of the line as well, and are mostly centered around individual tracks rather than DJ sets or content recordings. Play.fm is also up against the plethora of websites that host and play DJ sets (mostly limited to one genre) in an online radio station style and usually based on a paid subscription service.

Non-uniqueness notwithstanding, Play.fm does a really good job at serving their target audience with an on-demand streaming catalog of over 12,000 DJ sets and live sessions already, and does a great job in offering a satisfactory user experience to listeners. The audio player displays sound bites in wave-form (again taking a page from services like SoundCloud), which means it enables the user to set time markers in order to identify and inquire about tracks he or she may not know yet, wiki-style. That makes the service incredibly addictive, at least for people like me.

Business model, you ask? Advertising, evidently, but also music retailing. See, each track that gets identified by Play.fm (1.4 million tracks so far) can be purchased via what the startup refers to as the Meta-Shop, which essentially pulls together pricing, track quality and purchase locations from 5 different online music shops, with 20 more on the way. Play.fm picks up a commission on all sales that are generated by people who click through to the actual online stores and complete the purchasing process.

Color me impressed, but do give it a whirl yourself and let us know what you think, too.

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MXP4, a startup that creates interactive tools that allow artists and producers to let listeners “play” and interact with digital music, has raised $2.7 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech Capital. The Paris-based company previously raised $6.5 million in funding from the same investors in 2007.

Launched in 2007, MXP4, which offers a digital format to music that rivals the MP3 format, lets users remix tracks, add images and video content, add music layers and more. The startup is also replacing founder and CEO Gilles Babinet (who will become the chairman of the board) with Albin Serviant, former executive vice president and general manager of Vivendi Mobile Entertainment.

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