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Posts Tagged ‘msn’

Zynga’s smash hit FarmVille is about to reach a new audience of future tractor riding, crop harvesting fiends. Today, the company announced that FarmVille will now be featured on MSN Games, Microsoft’s casual gaming portal. This marks the first time that a Zynga game will be featured on a full-fledged gaming site. And it’s only the first step: Zynga says that more of its games will be appearing on MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger in the near future.

Unfortunately it looks like you’ll need either IE or Firefox to get this working. Which is just stupid, given that FarmVille works fine on just about every browser out there when you play it on Facebook. We’ve asked Zynga why this is (it almost certainly has something to do with the way MSN Games is set up).

Zynga has made no secret of its desire to expand its games beyond Facebook.com. In November, the company launched a dedicated web portal at FarmVille.com, and it’s doing the same thing for other games as well. Of course, the games still pull in a user’s social graph through Facebook Connect, but by deploying these games outside of Facebook proper, Zynga can get more control over the gaming experience (in the case of its own websites) and gain greater distribution (in the case of deals like this one). And Zynga still has 75 million users playing FarmVille on Facebook every month.

In honor of the launch, MSN Games has skinned its site with a FarmVille theme.

The biggest U.S. music service on the Web in December was Vevo, a new entrant which is a joint venture between Google, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music. Dubbed the “Hulu of music videos,” Vevo attracted 35.4 million unique visitors in December, 2009, putting it above the 33.1 million visitors who went to MySpace Music, according to estimates put out today by comScore. Considering that Vevo only launched on December 8, that is a pretty good showing.

A closer look at the numbers shows, that nearly all of that audience came from YouTube, which hosts a Vevo channel. Of the 35.4 million visitors which comScore counts for Vevo, 32.6 million (or 92 percent) are attributed to YouTube. In one fell blow, YouTube has helped to push MySpace Music from the No. 1 spot.

Not only does this illustrate the distribution might of YouTube, but it also shows how professional content is still hard to beat, even on YouTube. The Vevo channel is already the most viewed channel on YouTube, with nearly 13 billion views across all Vevo and all of Vevo’s sub-sites, which include the individual artist channels for Lady Gaga, Kings of Leon, Timbaland, and many others.

Here are the top ten music services as measured by comScore in unique U.S. visitors for December, 2009. The only real startup is Jango (No.7), with 9.6 million, but the comScore numbers include some lyric sites it also owns. ToneFuse Music, No. 8, is almost entirely a collection of lyric sites. Rhapsody rounds out No. 10 with 6.5 million (Last.fm would be No. 11 with 6 million).

Top U.S. Music Services On The Web (in unique visitors, December, 2009)

1. Vevo: 35.4 million
2. MySpace Music: 33.1 million
3. AOL Music: 29.7 million
4. Warner Music: 23.4 million
5. MTV Networks Music: 20.4 million
6. Yahoo! Music: 16.4 million
7. Jango Music Network: 9.6 million
8. ToneFuse Music Network: 8.3 million
9. MSN Music: 6.6 million
10. Rhapsody: 6.5 million

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Aggregate Knowledge, a provider of display ad optimization solutions, has closed a Series C financing round of $9 million led by OVP Venture Partners. Also participating in the round are Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, DAG Ventures, and original existing angels.

The San Mateo, CA company markets a platform, which it says is patent-pending, that provides marketers and agencies with tools that enable them to personalize “audience-centric” advertising campaigns in real-time and with a minimum of effort, using machine-learning algorithms.

The extra funds, which brings the company’s total investment to a healthy $34.5 million, will go to building and executing on the platform and business. Aggregate Knowledge historically competed directly with Strands, Loomia, Directed Edge and others, but it has recently moved away from powering product recommendations for e-commerce vendors to a more general technology proposition for the online display ad industry as a whole.

Aggregate Knowledge, led by CEO and founder Paul Martino, is said to currently have 26 employees.

Lucinda Stewart, managing director of OVP Venture Partners, will be joining the company’s Board of Directors as a result of this investment. Also spotted on the company’s website section on its management: Chief Revenue Officer David Jakubowski, former GM adCenter & Search Strategy at MSN / Microsoft.

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Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.

Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million).  Google News is the orange line in the chart above.

These numbers do not include general search for Yahoo or Google, where even more people find their news. For instance, WSJ.com gets about a quarter of its traffic from Google, all told, and former BusinessWeek.com editor John Byrne pegs Google’s traffic contribution to BW.com at 45 percent, “up from less than 20% in 2006.”

Do these numbers mean that traditional news sites should lay down and die or whine about how unfair life is when reader loyalty can no longer be taken for granted? No. As Byrne himself points out:

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers,

He suggests that people trust Google more for unbiased information than news brands. The value of news brands are diminishing and being replaced by more straightforward search. Brands are about relationships, whereas search is about transactions. A deeper look at the data bears this out. While Google News has more visitors on a global basis than CNN.com, people spend a lot less time there. In November, visitors spent nearly 2 billion minutes at CNN.com versus 840 million minutes on Google News. CNN generated 1.8 billion pageviews, while Google News produced 656 million.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google News and Yahoo News both have many more individual country sites than CNN or the New York Times. So they have an advantage when comparing global visitors. In the U.S., Google News is still smaller than both, with about 24 million monthly unique visitors compared to 50 million for both CNN and the New York Times sites. (See chart below). Yahoo News has 44 million, so there is still hope left for traditional news sites. As I’ve argued in the past, Google doesn’t control the news, it exposes it.

What news sites decide to do with that exposure and use it to build longer-lasting relationships is up to them.

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The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of Ustream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming.

Apparently, the way these streaming apps work is using a restricted API (a screen capture API) to get around the fact that Apple doesn’t grant them access to the video APIs for live capture and streaming. But Apple has suggested that it will no longer enforce protecting this API and in the future should open more that allow for live video streaming.

Also interesting will be AT&T’s reaction to this and other apps like it. Though they’re unlikely to say anything in defiance of Apple, they can’t like the idea of live streaming video apps being approved en masse. AT&T has indicated in recent weeks that that massive use of data on the iPhone was an issue that was leading to data degradation.

Note: While Qik has had an iPhone app available in the App Store for a while, it previously did not allow you to live stream from your phone. This new version will. There was also previously an ad-hoc version of the app, but that method of distribution was very limited. Again, look for the new version shortly it will be labeled version 4.40.

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Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman.

Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about Shopkick which is scheduled to launch in 2010: they aim to bridge the gap between the mobile phone and the physical shopping worlds.

In the meantime they are launching CauseWorld, “the first mobile application that let’s you do good deeds simply for walking into a store.” The application should be available on the iPhone appstore later today. Android is coming soon, along with more mobile platforms.

CauseWorld app users earn “karma points” when they walk into stores and check in with their cell phone. No purchase is required at any store, and karma points can be redeemed nine predefined good causes. Big brands like Kraft Foods and Citi (both are on board) then turn the karmas into real dollar donations to those causes. Food for poor families, water in Sudan, trees in the Amazon, etc. are examples of the causes.

Here’s how it works: Like foursquare and gowalla, you open the application on your phone and see local businesses (instead of showing everything around you, CauseWorld only shows businesses that you can check into for karmas). Enter the store, check in, and get the karma points offered to you. Once you’ve collected enough karmas you can donate them to a variety of causes. And, of course, you get badges for various activities.

Kraft and Citi are donating $500,000 during the initial test of CauseWorld, and the company says it’s likely that more donors will come on board soon. For now businesses that get the extra foot traffic are paying nothing at all. Although I’m sure Shopkick will be sending reports to those businesses letting them know how many people they brought into their stores. In the retail world, people mean conversions, usually 25% – 90%, depending on the type of store (nobody walks into 7-11 or a supermarket without buying something, but less people buy something at Best Buy).

I applaud the charitable aim of CauseWorld, but I also note a brilliant business plan – finding ways to get people to step foot inside a physical store. If I was Gap or Nordstroms I’d pay right now to distribute karmas to users of the app for coming into the store. Heck, I’d love to buy a big pile of virtual karmas and include them at our events for people to grab and distribute.

The wonderful thing about the service is that big corporations have an incentive to donate more to charity. They get regular people to choose where that money goes, and lots of brand impressions along the way. The folks at Citi and Kraft are brilliant for jumping on this early.

Here’s an interview I recorded with Cyriac last week about the company:

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Microblogging startup Plurk took note of Microsoft’s apology, in which the software company took responsibility over the blatant rip-off of the startup’s design and code for a competing service in China.

Microsoft was quick to blame a third-party vendor for cutting a few corners here and there when developing the beta service (MSN Juku), and promptly yanked it off the Web.

The company said it felt ‘disappointed’ in the vendor that worked together with its MSN China joint venture and said it would be reevaluating practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.

But as far as Plurk’s concerned, that’s not where the story ends.

Just moments ago, Plurk published an official response to the public apology on its blog, saying it still mulls taking legal actions against the Redmond software giant. Microsoft, Plurk alleges, assumes responsibility but doesn’t offer accountability.

In the words of Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon:

We are currently looking at all possibilities on how to move forward in response to Microsoft’s recent apology statement. We are still thinking of pursuing the full extent of our legal options available due the seriousness of the situation. Basically, Microsoft accepts responsibility, but they dont offer accountability.

…

This event wasn’t just a simple matter of merely lifting code; Due to the nature of the uniqueness of our product and user interace, it took a good amount of deliberate studying and digging through our codes with the full intention of replicating our product user experience, functionalities and end results. This product is later launched and heavily promoted by Microsoft with its multi-millions marketing budget.

Meanwhile, Plurk keeps getting heaps of promotion because of this whole ordeal.

Irony much?

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Microblogging startup Plurk may not have become hugely popular in these parts, where Twitter rules the lands, but it has been making strides in Asia. Recently, the fledgling company has gotten a feared competitor in the space with the launch of MSN Juku in China by the local Microsoft subsidiary, in a country where Plurk has notably been blocked since April this year.

But the software giant may well have cut a few corners here and there to get their service up and running, and has seemingly turned to outright theft of code and design elements of Plurk to launch in a hurry.

The design of MSN Juku sure has the same looks as Plurk, as you can tell from the screenshots below. But according to a blog post by the microblogging startup, there’s more going on than just design inspiration:

- Microsoft China officially launched its own microblogging service, MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub, some time in November, 2009.
- The service’s design and UI is by and large an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system. (see screen captures below)
- Some 80% of the client and product codebase appears to be stolen directly from Plurk! (see evidence below).
- Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with MS on this service.

As a young startup, we’re stunned, shocked, and unsure what to do next and need your support and suggestions.

Piggybacking off a similar service’s design is one thing, but effectively going in and steal code? MSN Juku looks too similar to be a coincidence, and Plurk most certainly provides some really good evidence of code theft in its post to bargain.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to get their side of the story and will update when we hear back.

If this is what we think it is, though, shame to Redmond.

(Thanks for the heads up, Amir)

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ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).

After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com. And we took notice.

The best way to check out what ZURB had to say about our homepage design – which has been live since Summer 2008 when we did a major redesign for the second time – is to visit this full-page screenshot, where you can hover over their notes to see what feedback the team had to give.

Apart from the visual aspect, the Notable page also allows you to check out the code, content and SEO elements of a website, and you can download the whole critique as a PDF straight from the app without the need to register.

Just for the record, we agree with nearly everything the ZURB team had to say about our homepage design, both the good and the bad. No design is perfect, but we like to think we’ve struck a good balance between making it as easy as possible for readers to check out our content, while giving advertisers valuable real estate that doesn’t interfere with the editorial.

We’re committed to making the experience even better, so note that we are currently working on an entirely new template and design for TechCrunch.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime, do let us know what you think about the current design.

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We’ve seen in that past year that Hulu gets testy about their video content being used on other sites or platforms, with Boxee and TV.com both forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications. Now startup Rippol is facing the same fate.

Rippol just publicly launched their video discovery sites at yesterday’s Real-Time CrunchUp, which combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting video content.

Less than a few hours after Rippol launched, the startup’s co-founder Aaron Crayford received notice from Hulu that the video embeds on Rippol from Hulu were in violation of the terms of service which state that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. While Rippol says that they won’t place ads in the videos or around the videos, Hulu says that the single fact that Rippol plans to make money from the entire content service violates the TOS. Instead, Hulu offered Rippol the ability to us its site map, which is a feed that links back to Hulu for video playback. Don’t embed, says Hulu. Link instead. Here’s the email notice:

We saw that you launched today. We want to notify you that you are using our embeds in violation of our terms of service which state specifically that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. As such we will plan to block embedding from your site by 12/4. Typically we disable embedding immediately but given that you just launched, we want to give you some time to transition.

In the place of the embeds, we can offer you is a site map feed that links back to Hulu for video playback and includes several useful pieces of metadata in a feed. It includes video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, video type, duration info, season number, episode number, air date, expiration date, in addition to the video link on Hulu.com.

It is updated every few hours: http://www.hulu.com/video_sitemap.index.xml

When Rippol responded that they will never put ads in or around Hulu content, Hulu responded:

Ad placement would be more relevant to the “non-commercial” part of the TOS vs. the “personal” part. While you may not plan to place ads near our content, Rippol is a commercial business in the sense that you plan to make money from the content service you create. Thus our content on your site is being used for commercial purposes, even if it is indirect (i.e. you attract users with Hulu content but only monetize other content).

Note we are not singling out Rippol as we have transitioned other premium video aggregators to our site map feed.

Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It also looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. Naturally, some of the TV shows and movies that surface on Rippol are from Hulu.

Boxee encountered a similar issue in February. Boxee’s software package converts computers, Apple TVs and other popular products into media centers, and integrated Hulu content. But this ended abruptly in February when Hulu’s studio content partners demanded that Boxee take down all videos pulled from from Hulu. TV.com suffered a similar fate when Hulu pulled the plug on content earlier this year, although CBS Interactive, which owns TV.com, vehemently argued that they were within their rights to stream Hulu content.

The thing is that Rippol, and perhaps other video sites like Boxee, may be willing to enter into a distribution agreement with Hulu with regard to embedding content. In Hulu’s note to Rippol, the representative stated that “the only way for a company to legitimately embed our videos the way you do is to enter into a structured distribution relationship with us. However, we are currently entering into these very selectively.”

When Hulu axed the Boxee integration, CEO Jason Kilar wrote in a blog post:

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

Our mission to make media dramatically easier and more user-focused has not changed and will not change. We will not stop until we achieve it and we are sober in our assessment that we have such a long way to go.

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners’ — and even the entire industry’s — challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it’s a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

Even before Hulu launched the site had announced partnerships to embed content with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo. The site also has a partnership with Comcast’s Fancast . And the site also recently launched the ability to watch some video content its video content on its Facebook page.

It’s clear the Hulu is at the mercy of of studio content owners who are calling the shots on partnerships and who should be allowed to embed Hulu content. Kilar is correct in saying that Hulu’s strategy of limited partnerships is not a win for users. But the other party left out here are the developers and startups, like Rippol and Boxee, which are crating innovative and useful products that provide a creative way to watch their videos and even drive traffic to Hulu.

When Hulu was announced in 2007, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that Hulu would aim to have “ubiquitous distribution.” The press release issued at the time said that Hulu “will actively seek agreements with a variety of additional distribution partners.” The release also stated that each “distribution partner will feature the site’s content in an embedded player customized with a look and feel consistent with each site, making the offering organic to each destination.”

Clearly, when Hulu was announced, the ambitions were to have many more partnerships to distribute the site’s content. But all signs have pointed to the fact that Hulu and its content partners are simply not open to startups and smaller sites who have new innovations to video consumption. Frankly, it’s disappointing for the developer community as well as consumers.

In the meantime, Rippol’s Crayford says that most of Hulu’s content is available on the content owners sites, which means Rippol will point crawlers to a lot of different domains instead of Hulu, which is tedious (TV.com does this).

When we asked Hulu about the Rippol situation, they responded:

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been told our folks are in communication with Rippol on how to possibly work together.

The basic policy on our embeds is that we do not allow sites to host the entire Hulu content library without a formal distribution agreement. These agreements are evaluated on a case by case basis with the involvement of content owners. Alternatively, we provide a video site map to allow publishers to link to our videos.

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