Posts Tagged ‘sweden’

Today, during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a country.”

Ek made the statement when asked why Spotify chose to use a P2P model, rather than centrally store all of its music in one place and stream it from there. Ek noted that if they were to stream from one UK datacenter, they’d consume all the bandwidth. So instead, they leverage the power of the Internet to get their users to help them stream to other users.

Ek also said this was primarily the reason that Spotify is a native application, rather than a web app. P2P streaming is a bit more complicated than streaming from one source on the backend of things, obviously.

When asked why Apple (which of course, runs the largest music store in the world, iTunes) doesn’t use the P2P method, Ek said that was the “million dollar question.” He then speculated that they will move more towards Spotify in terms of being in the cloud, and having a subscription model.

Ek noted that Spotify is now in six countries and has over 320,000 paid subscribers. That’s up from 260,000 the last time they mentioned it. Overall, they have some 7 million users now. And yes, that’s largely without the U.S. where the service only exists in a very limited closed beta as the company negotiates with the labels for music rights.

In its relentless push to turn YouTube into a profit center, Google is trying anything it can to pump more advertising into the billions of videos people watch on the site. Now it is automating the way that Flash overlay ads can be created and displayed on YouTube videos. Through the self-serve Display Ad Builder in Google AdWords, mom-and-pop businesses can now create Flash overlay ads as easily as they can create display banner ads and place them in YouTube videos.

Overlay ads have been around for a long time on YouTube and other video networks. YouTube constantly refines the types of overlay ads it shows, but many of the small businesses which typically advertise on Google AdWords don’t have the tools to create Flash overlay ads. Now Google is providing them with templates, much like it does already for banner ads.

As of last October, YouTube was showing ads on more than one billion videos a week, which was roughly one in seven videos. YouTube wants to open up all of its video inventory to advertisers large and small. Today’s release is the latest move in that direction.

At what point will there be too many ads and will consumers ever backlash? Already I find those persistent pop-ups and overlays to get in the way of the videos I am trying to watch, and I don’t find them particularly relevant. Flooding YouTube with even more of these ads may be good for its bottom line, but viewers are not going to like them.

I’m here at the last keynote of SXSW, where Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is being interviewed by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk. Ek will likely be revealing some new announcements about Spotify during this interview. I’ll be live blogging my notes below.

Van Buskirk kicked off the keynote by asking how many people in the audience had used Spotify, leading a significant portion of the audience to raise their hands. This was surprising, because Spotify is only widely available in Europe (you need a beta invite to use it in the US). Ek then took some time to walk the audience through the streaming music service if they haven’t used it before (see our extensive past coverage if you need a refresher).

Q: What drove the initial decision to make this an application as opposed to something in the browser?
A: There are a few things that applications are better for. In our case, we think that applications are better for swift music playback. What we see is that people tend to spend a lot of time on Spotify because it’s so swift. They tend to replace their media player with Spotify, because they notice no difference between playing a song locally (some have even remarked that it’s faster than playing it through iTunes).

Q: Let’s talk about the licensing realities. Spotify is available in Europe. How will the model work in America?
A:There could be slight changes. A year and a half since launch more than 7 users, only in six countries. What we’re working on is the next gen of Spotify. We’ll never be content to just have an app. There are a lot of things we want to fix in Spotify. We tend not to take the ‘release early, often’ approach. What we’ve been working on for last 6-8 months is next gen of Spotify. How to make it more connected. Easier sharing and management of music. We’ve realized people spend a lot of time on Spotify and they tend to manage their music with Spotify.

Q: Which platforms/devices are most exciting?
A: Three years ago if you wanted to develop for mobile, had to support 3-5 major mobile os’s. Long lead times. That shut out all this innovation. More recently, application devs can get the application on phones. We look a lot at bundling with devices. Mostly not for revenue possibility but more for pre-installs. With exception of the iPhone today, most of the other handset manufacturers lack a good media player. Historically hard to get music to other phones if you had in iTunes.

Q: Let’s talk about the business side of bundling. If someone is paying for cell phone bill, they can check off something to get Spotify, seems like easier decision. How has that been going in Europe?
A: We have two mobile operators working with us many more to come. If you go into any Telius store in Sweden, you can go in and pick out a smart phone that comes preinstalled with Spotify. 3-6 months included. Incredible takeup with that. One of the key things Spotify is pushing is that people listen/share to more music than ever, more diverse artists. People will still buy music they love, but vast majority of music they just want access.

Q: We’ve heard services like Spotify people say “oh no we’re not going to buy music any more”. The idea of geting people to play a monthly fee, that seems promising. Why would someone buy something?
A: I think we’re going that route. But we find that music I really love, I tend to want to buy it. Not necessarily a plastic disk, but a special edition for an artist I really like, I’m more than happy to pay $100 for a box set with a t-shirt in it, liner notes. Another person may be willing to pay for a live edition with extended tracks. Or pay for a live concert experience. The reality of the music industry today is that there isn’t one biz model. It’s about figuring out how to use downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing, all these things. I don’t think streaming music is stream.. with Spotify people label us ‘free’ music. But people pay, either with time (adverts, which are targeting), or actually paying for the service.

Q: Are you going to start filtering ads by mood (e.g. if you listen to down tempo music).
A: We want to figure out a lot of things based on how people listen to music. Can figure out mood, brand preferences. We see that from CTRs, if you listen to same music and are from the same place who tends to like a certain brand, there’s a high likihood you will too. Ad model is getting better every month. But this for me is not about free vs paid music, it’s about a model where there’s a free music element and a paid one.

A: Tech savviness at labels is increasing, now more people that love music and know the digital space are working with labels and artists.

Q: How do indy artists get music on Spotify? On ITunes you can submit paperwork. You’re different in that approach.
A: The way to get on Spotify today is we have a bunch of aggregators we work with. Main reason we’ve wanted to work with aggregators is that they tend to understand format/structure. We get quality control, picture, bio, etc.

Q: Are we done with DRM?
A: If you look at Spotify, it has DRM associated with it. We want to make it so that there isn’t really any announcement what’s DRM or not, we can protect and give users flexibility you want.

Q: Let’s talk about Spotify of the future. How do we get to point of ‘music like water’.
A: I see that’s sort of where we’re heading. The music industry needs that happen. I think music and tech are aligned for the first time. We’ve had a lot of proprietary standards, trying to figure out how to get music on a BlackBerry phone vs. getting it on iPhone vs set top box, radically different. We need to open platforms.

Q: With regard to Twitter/FB. Are you thinking of integrating sharing functionality into Spotify?
A: We’re looking at integrating some social aspects. I think genres are non-sane. What classifies rock, or neo-pop, etc. Spotify is quickly approaching 10 mil tracks. How do you manage that? Search is one solution, but isn’t optimal way of discovering new content. We won’t be another social network. We never believed in being our own social network, we’re working with existing social networks.

Q: With your playlists people have read/write access, can delete entire thing, what are you doing about that?
A: Looking from tech angle. We support version updates. One way to solve that is that you can step back in history and go back. What we don’t have is user privilege on playlists. We think Twitter/FB will figure out those privileges, and will use them.

A: I think the total rev matters more than actual conversion rate. But we do want to make sure there are a number people are paying for Spotify and that will grow. We’re making a lot of progress. We’re in six countries, now well in excess of 320,000 paid subscribers. Last time we mentioned a fig. it was 260,000. 100 million playlists. 7 million users. People spend a lot of time on playlists. 30% of all playlists are albums (albums stored in collection). People say album is dead. I don’t agree. I think there’s a lot to develop there.

Q: Let’s talk about P2P element.
A: It was a key decision, and one reason we’re a native app. Helps offload bandwidth. P2P actually helps Spotify and users, it will take tracks on your friends and coworkers on same local network and stream to them so it’s faster. “We’re consuming more capacity than Sweden has as a country”. If we had to stream all the data from our UK center, we’d consume all the bandwidth.

Q: Why isn’t Apple doing this?
A: That’s a million dollar question. I think they are. I’m just speculating on this. Apple is very interested, we’ve had iTunes store. They’re understanding this is more to subscription model. They understand it’s going more to a cloud based model. I don’t have any magical insight into Apple.

Q: Let’s look at Spotify on this phone. I wanted to show this cool device. Sony Ericson X10 mini. Out in US in next couple of months. It’s an Android phone. We’ve installed Spotify. Now demonstrating the app. Has a spotify widget.

A: Over the next couple of weeks a lot of features coming in to Spotify. I hope from them moving in a more steady direction. We are listening to what users are asking us to do.

Q: US Launch? Also China?
A: The most important thing for us when it comes to US launch is that we want to build the best possible product we can and get all ducks in a row, partnerships with next gen of Spotify. Sort out publishing which is a huge task. Here you have to strike deals with almost 5000 publishers. Big thing for us is working on next gen of Spotify and getting that out there.

Q: How many plays equals one dollar?
A: Depends on the type on contract with the publisher/record labels. We share the rev we bring in. You can’t really equate to ‘per play’ we look at all our ad rev. Creates a bucket. For instance how do you account for a purchase of a song. There is no easy answer to your question. Over time our ad revs are growing, number of downloads growing. Amount of rev we bring in is growing.

Q: How are it working to convince American label that not everyone needs to be a subscriber for it to work.
A: This is the world’s biggest music market. We have potential reach of 170 mil people in Europe. America has much more. People spend more money in America. The whole industry is looking more and more about new opportunities. At the same time CD sales have been in decline, nothing online has been able to counter balance that decline. I think people are looking at how we can support Spotify, how do we ensure that people don’t stop buying CDs.

There’s a lot of talk today about how the Nexus One’s initial roll-out has been a flop. And while the numbers aren’t official, things do look pretty grim for the first Android device Google is attempting to sell itself. But Google is wasting no time answering its critics — indirectly — with the launch of a version of the device that will work on AT&T’s 3G network.

To be clear, this isn’t Google teaming up with AT&T on the device. Instead, it’s simply a second version of the Nexus One that works with AT&T’s 3G frequency, which is different than that of T-Mobile’s (the current Nexus One U.S. carrier). The original Nexus One does actually already work on AT&T, but only for 2G connections, so this new version will obviously be significantly faster.

With the new 3G frequency, the new Nexus One will also work in Canada with Rogers Wireless. And, as Google notes, “And like the first version of the Nexus One, it can be used with most GSM operators globally.”

Certainly, giving consumers more choices is always a good thing, but it seems that Google’s attempt to sell the phone itself is really the problem here. While it makes sense that phones, like most other goods (digital cameras, for example), should be an easy sell online, there’s also some thought that the Nexus One isn’t selling well because customers are so used to walking into a store and playing with a phone for a bit before buying it.  If that’s the case, the AT&T addition isn’t likely to help sales.

The right play here would be for Google to offer shoppers a full list of plan options for both T-Mobile and AT&T and let them decide which carrier to pick. Unfortunately, that won’t be happening here, because again, this new Nexus One is only being sold as an unlocked phone that can work on AT&T if you get a SIM card on your own (something which most consumers will never do in the U.S.).

Eventually, if Google can offer that list of options from all the carriers (including the CDMA ones like Verizon, which, yes, will require another version of the Nexus One), that could be enough to drive customers online to buy the phone (and has always been the Nexus One’s promise, in my opinion). This move today, won’t be. Also, with all the bitching about AT&T’s network by iPhone owners (though, again, it has been great at SXSW), why on Earth would anyone want to buy a smartphone to use on the network unless they absolutely had to (as they do with the iPhone)?

[photo: flickr/katybate]

This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup. His last guest post was an analysis of Twitter user data.

It’s no surprise that Chatroulette is the latest media darling. It has all the elements of a good story: technology, mystery, celebrity, and sex. If you haven’t heard of Chatroulette, this Daily Show segment is a good primer.

We were itching to study Chatroulette in a RJMetrics Dashboard, but no one seemed to have any good data for us to explore. So, we decided compile the data ourselves by leveraging Chatroulette Map, some scrappy programming, and a passionate tech community. We soon had detailed data on 2,883 Chatroulette sessions that tied users to geography, gender, appearance, and more.

Here are a few highlights from our findings:

• About half of all Chatroulette spins connects you with someone from the USA. The next most likely country is France at 15%.
• Of the spins showing a single person, 89% were male and 11% were female.
• You are more likely to encounter a webcam featuring no person at all than one featuring a solo female.
• 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. 1 in 3 females appear as part of such a group. That number is 1 in 12 for males.
• 1 in 8 spins yield something R-rated (or worse)
• You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity

How We Did It

Thanks to RJMetrics, the analysis was easy. Getting the data, however, was a bit of a challenge. The good news, however, is that a roulette wheel is the statistician’s best friend. The central limit theorem tells us that a large set of random observations allows us to draw high-confidence conclusions about the underlying data set.

We started our process at Chatroulette Map, an awesome new site that plots screenshots from random Chatroulette sessions on a map.

It’s a little-known fact that anyone you chat with on Chatroulette can determine your IP address using a program like Wireshark. Chatroulette Map uses this IP data to geolocate and map random chatters on their website (along with still photos from their chats).

Chatroulette Map is also nice enough to expose all of its data points to anyone who clicks “View Source.” Right in the raw source code of their homepage is the image URL, latitude, longitude, city, state, and country of every chatter on their map. As an added bonus, the file name of each image is a UNIX timestamp of when it was taken. Jackpot. (Note: we tried contacting the creators of Chatroulette Map to participate in this story but did not receive a response.)

Once we had photos, times, and locations, we needed data on what was happening in each chat photo. We coded up a quick webpage that displayed a random photo from the data set and asked some basic multiple-choice questions about that photo. These included questions on age, gender, and what the person in the photo was doing. We coded up the backed so that a photo wouldn’t be taken out of rotation until two votes from different IP addresses provided an identical set of answers.

We posted the link to Hacker News on Saturday night. In under two hours, we received 10,770 photo assessments from 1,012 distinct IP addresses. Every photo received a corroborated profile. We had our data.

Five minutes later, the data was loaded into a hosted dashboard on RJMetrics and returning the results you see below.

Caveats

Before we get to the data, we should point out the uncontrolled inputs that could be skewing these results:

• We know nothing about how Chatroulette matches up chatters, and we act on the assumption that pairings are truly random.
• We know nothing about the methodology used by Chatroulette Map. If they excluded data points for any reason or did not sample randomly, our analysis could be skewed.
• Geolocation by IP address is an imperfect science that is typically only accurate within a few dozen miles. It can also be thrown off by users taking advantage of proxy servers or using other techniques to disguise their IP addresses.
• Human image recognition is imperfect (even if mitigated by our vote convergence system). Any images that were judged incorrectly could skew the results.
• It’s also important to note that statistics about “the average chat session” (which we present here) are not the same as stats about “the average user.” For example, imagine if female chats averaged 100 seconds each, but male chats averaged 10 seconds each. Even if there were equal numbers of male and female users, males would enter the pool more often and would therefore appear in front of you more often, making the “average session” more likely to contain a male chat partner. Because of this, all of our statistics are about the average session and not the average user.

The Results

Gender

As you might expect, you’re most likely to encounter a solo male in any given chat session. 72% of our chat sessions were with solo males. Interestingly, 11% showed no person at all while only 9% showed a solo female. So, if you’re looking for women on Chatroulette, be forewarned: you’re more likely to encounter an empty chair.

Also interesting is the prevalence of groups on Chatroulette. In all, 8% of chats featured a group of people (4% all-male, 2% all-female, and 2% mixed). If you include groups, your chance of encountering a female grows to 13%. However, this means that if you do encounter a female, there is about a 1 in 3 chance that she will be part of a group. In contrast, the chance a male will be part of a group is only about 1 in 12.

Age

This analysis excludes cams where age could not be estimated. As you might expect, most people were young adults (about 70%). About 20% were under 20 and about 10% were 40 and older.

When we combine age with the gender statistics that we tracked above, we learn even more. For example, females tended to be younger than males, with 23% under 20 (vs. 18% for males). Only 3% of females were over 40 (vs. 8% for males).

Groups of females were even younger. Female-only groups were “Teen or Younger” 65% of the time, while groups of males were “Teens or Younger” only 36% of the time. There were no groups whatsoever of people 40 or older.

Location

47% of the Chatroulette participants measured were from the United States. The most popular countries are shown below:

When we combine geography with gender and age, we learn even more:

• Italy had the highest concentration of solo males at 98%. It also had the highest concentration “Men over 40″ at 13% (more than 3x the US rate of 4%).
• The US has the highest concentration of groups at 13%, followed by The Netherlands at 9%.
• Canada had the highest concentration of solo females at 13%, followed by the US at 10%.

Perverts

If you’ve ever used Chatroulette, you probably noticed that not everyone is there just to chat. Some users, which we have affectionately labeled “perverts,” fit into any of these three categories:

• Appear to not be wearing any clothes whatsoever
• Are displaying explicit nudity
• Appear to be committing a lewd act

The overall pervert rate in Chatroulette is 13%. This means about 1 in 8 chat sessions will have something decidedly Rated R (or NC-17) on the other end. Of the perverts that were identified, only 8% were female. Combined with the overall female rate, that means less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert.

Below, we see the “pervert rate” by country:

The United Kingdom dominates the rankings here with a pervert concentration of 22%! Turkey, France, and Germany tie for second place with rates of 15%. Bringing down the global average is the United States, which boasts the lowest pervert concentration of the bunch: 10%.

Also worth mentioning are the users who display signs (like the one below) requesting female nudity.

Signs like this make up between 1% and 2% of all chats. This means that you’re twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity.

Validation

In trolling through the thousands of photos collected by Chatroulette Map, I came across this extremely interesting image. It contains a statistical breakdown of what this user saw during his many Chatroulette chat sessions. Sound familiar?

These stats appear to be based on a data set of 1,090 points (pretty impressive for a single user). The numbers are generally in the same ballpark as ours (although we observed a higher pervert rate). We’re not sure who was behind this, but we like their style– they managed to sum up the gist of this blog post in a single image.

Conclusion

Scarcity of the data made this project both challenging and exciting. In an ideal world, it would be great to analyze things like average session length based on different attributes, chat user return rates, cohort analysis, and more. Because of the mostly-anonymous nature of Chatroulette, that data will be hard to come by. For now, at least you have a better idea of what you will see when you hit that Next button.

Guest author Robert J. Moore is the CEO of RJ Metrics, a startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better. He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics.

Plex’s main menu, shown with the optional Aeon skin As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time.

Go here to see the original:
Interview: We talk to the lead developer of Plex Media Center for Mac OS X: It was doing Boxee-like stuff before Boxee was cool

For all of you waiting for mobile data networks to catch up to broadband speeds on cable and DSL, the first 4G/LTE network has arrived . . . in Sweden. TeliaSonera launched the first two cities of its 4G network, which promises wireless download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (yeah, right) using equipment from Ericsson and Huawei.

So if you live in Oslo or Stockholm, you get to try it out. Everyone else is out of luck. TeliaSonera says it will roll out the 4G service to 25 cities in Sweden and Norway in 2010. But you know how these things go. The full rollout may take longer because they are still trying to follow the instructions on how to put it together. They are pretty sure they are missing some bolts. (We’ve all been there).

For the rest of us, the wait will be even longer. Mobile carriers in the U.S. are struggling under the weight of soaring Web phone data usage. Their 3G networks can hardly keep up (cough, AT&T). Verizon is supposed to launch 4G/LTE service in the U.S. next year, and AT&T won’t offer its version of 4G until 2011.

Until then, I suggest you move to Oslo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding.

See original here: 
It’s time for The Pirate Bay to die

iSync 3.1.0, to be shipped with Snow Leopard , has struck another blow against Palm. What is it this time? They’ve removed Palm HotSync support, relegating thousands of Centro, Treo, Zire, Tungsten, and Palm Pilot users to the darkest corners of Obsoletia

Here is the original post: 
OS X drops Palm HotSync support, Newton support next?

Sweden’s anti-piracy law, IPRED, seems to be working , insofar as various Internet traffic monitors have seen a significant downturn in piracy.

Excerpt from:
Sweden’s anti-piracy law sure seems to be working