October 13th, 2009
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Here’s the next contestant in the never ending stream of music services, each of which, inevitably, slide into financial disaster at some point. Music service MOG says they’ll launch MOG All Access by Thanksgiving this year. It’s an on demand music streaming and Internet radio service that will cost $5 per month. The four major labels – Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Music are on board, plus thousands of indie labels via IODA and Beggars Group.
Sounds great, except users can listen to streaming on demand music for free today at MySpace Music and Spotify, which is preparing to launch in the U.S. Will MOG’s user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?
In January we first heard MOG’s plans for the service. At the time it sounded compelling – it combined a great user experience with a free streaming model. But the crucial part of that service has vaporized – it’s no longer free. And non-free music subscription services don’t work, despite years of attempts by major companies and startups alike.
We’ve championed MOG in the past, but this looks like yet another music failure to us. Too bad the labels didn’t agree to a pure revenue split, which is what CEO David Hyman was hoping for back in January.
MOG has raised around $12 million to date from Menlo Ventures, Simon Equity, Universal Music Group and Sony Music, among others.
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Written by Michael Arrington on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation.
As Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools have changed the way companies reach out to customers, some are using it internally to upend the way rank-and-file employees relate to each other and management.
They’re harnessing tools like Yammer and Present.ly, which are Twitter-like services designed specifically for enterprise use in that they meet the need for secrecy and hierarchy.
“Twitter is trying to be as public possible while Yammer is trying to be as private as possible,” said David Sacks, CEO of San Francisco-based Yammer, whose clients use the service so that coworkers and managers can constantly update each other about what they’re working on.
These types of services are reconstructing the flow of information through a firm — instead of asking a question or making a suggestion up the chain of management, ideas can flow horizontally through an organization. This cuts down on all the bureaucratic impediments that might keep a project from getting out the door.
In lieu of reports and meetings, corporate microblogging services provide a constant hum of updates informing managers and colleagues about what employees are doing. It makes it easier for others to chip in with ideas and workers to feel more accountable for their actions by the hour. A one-to-many model of information flow cuts down down on e-mail and can make a large, international corporation feel like more tight-knit.
Yammer offers several service levels to accommodate all sorts of businesses from the small five-man shop to a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of workers. The service is initially free, but if a business wants the ability to remove former employees, it needs to sign up for a paid version. The basic paid version is $3-per-user and lets admins manage the conversation and own the company data. For big companies, users can set up groups of Yammer accounts for different teams and make the service dovetail better with IT security needs. The most expensive model is $5 per user a month.
Yammer also envisions itself as a bridge between different companies. It’s developing private workspaces so that employees from different companies (such as a supplier and a retailer, for example) can talk to each other.
“We might actually create a network effect where there would be a pretty good reason for you to be on Yammer if all your partners, suppliers and vendors are,” Sacks said.
For example, Sacks said a doctor in a hospital using Yammer was facing a life or death situation: a patient under 18 had come in and was in serious need of an operation. But the doctor didn’t know whether they had legal authority to go ahead without parental consent. A quick status update on Yammer brought an answer from another doctor that gave them the green light to operate. It may have saved the patient’s life.
Another Yammer customer, Molson Coors Brewing Co., the biggest beer company based in North America and maker of Coors Light, has between 1,600 and 1,700 people using the service after launching it internally a few months ago. The company’s CEO Peter Swinburn is a top 10 user, posting constantly while abroad on business trips.
“It’s become our virtual global water cooler,” said Miguel Zlot, who is an IT solution architect at Molson Coors. “We have completely untapped intellectual wealth that we don’t know about. Social networking is allowing us to bridge those gaps and think in a collaborative way.”
Zlot says successful ideas in Canada get passed on to the U.K. through Yammer. Once, a sales representative posted some pictures of damaged Coors cases in a Canadian retail outlet on Yammer. Another employee saw the photos and was able to identify the production line and brewery responsible for the cases. The brewery manager investigated and then fixed the problem.
But enterprise microblogging services don’t have the market sewn up. They face a host of related services tailored to the enterprise like online and mobile conversation-tracking offerings — from the likes of Zenbe and Google Wave — that are re-imagining traditional e-mail. After wrestling with the idea of incrementally improving e-mail, Zenbe started from scratch and came up with Shareflow, which is essentially a dashboard for monitoring the flow of conversation around a single topic that incorporates e-mail. And Google Wave blends the immediacy of instant messaging with the permanence of media rich and threaded e-mail conversations.
Yammer’s Sacks say this is too much and that simplicity is the road to greater adoption. Like Twitter, enterprise microblogging services keeps things pretty spare: just text and occasional thumbnails of images.
“There’s this idea of turning e-mail into the document that does everything — it’s a wiki, you can stick widgets in there and you can have multiple people editing each others comments,” Sacks said. “But we’re not interested in e-mails doing more. We want them to do less.”
Also see previous stories in our Conversations on Innovation series:
Healthcare: It’s time for technology
The new healthcare: Smart band aids, digital pills, wrist bands
Not everyone’s ready for the cloud: 8 roadblocks software developers face
Is it time for business to embrace the cloud?
Speech, touchscreen — been there, done that. What’s the user interface of tomorrow?
How phones emerged as main computing devices, and why user interface will improve
Put your finger on it: The future of interactive technology
“Touch” technology for the desktop finally taking off
Written by Kim-Mai Cutler on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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Flint, Mich., the small automotive city northwest of Detroit known best for being featured in Michael Moore’s first documentary, Roger & Me, has been in dire straits for a while. When the movie came out in 1989, it was already suffering from mass unemployment. Now, 20 years later, it may have a chance to rebrand itself as a home to General Motors’ Chevy Volt — perhaps the most practical electric vehicle primed to hit the market next year.
Today, Cruze’s size will allow it to get a mileage of 40 miles per gallon.
The cars themselves won’t be put together in Flint, but rather in Hamtramck, Mich., another town similarly effected by the demise of big automotive business in the region. The lithium ion batteries, perhaps the most important component of the Volt, will be made by LG Chem, a Korean company, but assembled into usable battery packs in the Detroit metro area as well.
While many skeptics have accused GM of exaggerating the driving range and convenience of the Chevy Volt (pictured above), it is still expected to be the most practical plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle available next year. The car maker says the eventual price should hover somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000, making it much cheaper than Tesla Motors‘ $109,000 roadster (and even its more affordable Model S), and Fisker Automotive’s $87,000 Karma — while still remaining more similar to traditional vehicles than supposedly cheaper EVs made by Zenn Motor Company and Coda Automotive.
VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register and see a preliminary agenda at GreenBeat2009.com.
Written by Camille Ricketts on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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Wikia, the home of fan-based wikis, has acquired the LyricWiki database of licensed song lyrics. LyricWiki users, in return, are now able to use Wikia’s custom tools including the Question and Answer section.
Part of the deal is that Wikia secured a licensing deal with Gracenote, so that music publishers will get paid their due royalties.
Wikia is assembling a collection of complementary sites, including Guitarhero.wikia.com, Music.wikia.com, documenting how music is tied to culture, Ibanez.wikia.com, a community centered around guitar maker Ibanez, as well as artist favorites beatles.wikia.com, holdsteady.wikia.com, and ladygaga.wikia.com.
LyricWiki solves two problems: It counteracts the annoying spread of incorrect song lyrics across sites that copy each other by letting the community argue over what the correct words are. And it offers lyrics in a tasteful ad-supported layout, free of the garishness of so many lyrics sites. I’m catching up on REO Speedwagon’s “157 Riverside Avenue” right now.
Wikia is a for-profit company in San Mateo, founded in 20o4 by a team including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. It has, of course, an extensive Wikipedia entry.
Written by Paul Boutin on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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MOG, the Berekely, CA-based music-blogging site launched in 2006 with hitmaker Rick Rubin as one of its advisors, has announced that it will launch MOG All Access, a new digital music service for North America, by Thanksgiving. To create the service, MOG signed deals with all four major record labels and a batch of independents.
MOG founder and CEO David Hyman, known to many as the founder of the Gracenote music service, said in a prepared statement, “We’re providing access to millions of songs (just about everything), with a drop dead easy way to hear any song or album you like in an instant, from the convenience of your web browser. You’ll get access to MOG radio, a revolutionary listening experience that will forever change how you discover music and truly redefines what radio is, and killer tools for discovery through other users of the service. And you get it all monthly for the price of a beer.”
I know. Another music service. Does it have a chance? Gartner analyst Mike McGuire thinks it does. McGuire replied to my email questions about why he liked MOG: “The demos indicated a nice mix of straight-up interactive streams plus some interesting recommendation/discovery features (the slider for mixing artists etc. is neat) based on what appears to be a set of fairly liberal licensing agreements. (Achieved, I think, by MOG/Hyman’s willingness to spend a lot of time negotiating and the labels realization that they have to embrace all of these systems that are based on interactive streams with some sort of direct payment. In other words, they have to find and work with all the entities that are trying to create legitimate alternatives to p2p and social sharing.)”
I’ll have an opinion, but not until I get my hands on it in November.
MOG has raised $12.5 million in funding to date, including strategic investments from Menlo Ventures, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. It launched its public beta July 2006.
Written by Paul Boutin on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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New Mexico may become the epicenter of the cleaner, more efficient Smart Grid shaping up all over the country. A proposal unveiled by state governor Bill Richardson today calls for a massive electric transmission station in Clovis, N.M., dubbed the Tres Amigas Super Station, designed to connect the U.S.’s three main power grids and better channel solar and wind energy.
The proposed project, which would take about five years to build beginning in 2011 or 2012, would be the largest power converter in the world, covering 22 square miles and fundamentally changing how electricity flows across the country. New Mexico, which would benefit tremendously from the jobs and revenue created by the facility, was chosen because it is located nearest to where the three power grids — referred to as the East, West and Texas interconnections — meet up. On top of that, conditions in the state would allow it to generate up to 27 gigawatts of solar and wind energy.
According to today’s announcement the Tres Amigas energy hub will create 50 new permanent jobs and inject as much as $4 billion back into the local economy. It plans to bring in revenue from utilities that will pay to use the station to transmit their energy across longer distances.
Tres Amigas would route energy through underground superconductor pipelines (measuring 3 feet in diameter) equipped with AC/DC converters to provide seamless transmission between one region and the next. Enough energy would be delivered to keep the lights on in 2.5 million homes. To do so, the facility will have a capacity of 5 gigawatts to start, with potential to scale up to 30 gigawatts. So far, the price tag on the first phase of the project is estimated at $600 million — but this is probably conservative.
The structure of the pipelines, filled with superconducting wires developed at Los Alamos Labs, would go a long way toward connecting remote and isolated wind and solar developments into mainstream grids. That said, it will also be capable of handling energy generated by traditional sources like coal-fired power plants and even nuclear generation facilities.
But none of this is a reality yet. The next step will be for the project to win approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees operations for the East and West interconnections. Tres Amigas LLC — the company created to construct and operate the station — has yet to make a formal request.
The development stages of the product were financed by private investors and strategic partners, including American Semiconductor (which owns a $1.75 million stake in the company already). The project has yet to secure long-term sources of funding. Considering its potential impact on the economy, and the government support its already enjoying, federal stimulus funding shouldn’t be too far behind.
That’s not to say there won’t be challenges along the way. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier today, some eastern states are concerned they will lose out if the new energy economy sets down roots in the southwest (solar) or midwest (wind). Earlier this year, several of them — including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts — sent a letter to Congress poking holes in plans for a national transmission superhighway, arguing that generating energy regionally will be more cost-effective than stringing thousands of miles of transmissions lines. Whether or not they have enough muscle to block the development of a national system remains to be seen.
VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register and see a preliminary agenda at GreenBeat2009.com.
Written by Camille Ricketts on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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Following our post about Chrome OS yesterday, it looks like those wily folks at Google have removed the “chromeos” folder from the Chromium build folder. Too bad. But luckily, before they did, TechCrunch reader and Linux user, Jonathan Frederickson, was able to grab the code and managed to install it. He has posted some results in our comments section and even more on his blog.
It would seem that the result is the browser aspect of Chrome OS running inside of Linux. As you can see in the screenshots below, it looks very similar to Chrome, the browser, on Windows (still the only officially released version of Chrome), but there are some key differences.
First of all, it looks like there is a new logo of some kind. If you look in the upper left hand corner, you’ll see a a colorful circle with a white center. This is obviously different from the Chrome browser logo, which looks like the children’s game, Simon.
According to Frederickson, clicking on this logo opens a Google Short Links window. Unfortunately, you need a Google.com domain (which he obviously didn’t have) to go any further. It seems reasonable to assume that this page houses a simple link page to all the major Google Apps. But what’s odd is the wording that reads, “Google is not affiliated with the contents of Google Short Links or its owners.” No clue what that means, but maybe that’s just placeholder text.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the window, the far right side, you’ll notice a clock, a network status indicator (the “X”), and a battery level indicator. Of these, only the clock appears to be working at the moment. But all of those things are in line with what has been found in the code for Chrome OS so far.
There is also a drop down menu button. Here, you’ll find the options that will be familiar to users of the browser version of Chrome. But you’ll also notice the new “Chrome OS” tab. Here, you’ll find Network options, as well as Touchpad settings. Okay, this is the point where I’ll admit it was silly to think the “touchpad” may have been some sort of device, rather than simply a notebook trackpad. I noted that was probably the case yesterday, but I also let my imagination get a little carried away.
Too bad we scared Google’s “chromeos” folder off, this is getting interesting!
Click on the images for larger versions (obviously, pay no attention to the Linux OS (Ubuntu) in the background of the pics)
Update: Another reader, Adam Shannon, took the image below. He also had this info to share:
Also, some basic facts.
– Frequent Crashes
– HTML5 works
– only supports .ogg (No H.264 love)
Browser Info:
Internal Code Name: Mozilla
Browser’s Name: Netscape
Browser Version: 5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.4.0; en-US)
AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.222.5 Safari/532.2
User Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.4.0; en-US)
AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.222.5 Safari/532.2
Browser Language: en-US
Computer Platform: Linux i686
Update 2: But wait, there’s more. Frederickson was able to get a slightly newer build (with the “compact nav bar”) before it was taken down. More pics below.
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Written by MG Siegler on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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In the endless game of cat and mouse that is Apple vs. the jailbreak scene, the cat just put a pretty nasty gash in the mouse’s face.
For the past seven months, jailbreaking (opening an iPhone to applications not signed by Apple for installation) has relied on an exploit dubbed “24kPwn”. We’ll skip the technical voodoo for the sake of not putting you straight to sleep, but here’s the important bit: in the latest batch of iPhone 3GS units to hit the shelves, the exploit has been fixed. Unless a new exploit is discovered (and, with each patch, this is becoming less and less likely), any iPhone 3GS to ship after last week will not be jailbreakable.
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
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Written by Greg Kumparak on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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We’ve all grown accustomed to Twitter’s website going down. And even Facebook is often less than reliable. But tonight a big boy has crashed. Apple.com is completely offline right now.
No, I’m not talking about the Apple Store being taken down for its routine maintenance. I’m talking about the entire site being down, returning a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error for about 15 minutes now.
While sites like Apple sometimes experience slowness, they rarely completely fail. Apple uses Akamai to serve the actual website and its content, and it was down everywhere, based on some tests we ran quickly. That’s fairly crazy, and likely points to a an original source server error not on Akamai’s end. But still, you’d think Akamai would have have a cache to serve rather than an error.
Let’s break out those conspiracy theories. I blame Twitter.
Update: And she’s back. Seemingly, unharmed.
[thanks Austin]
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Written by MG Siegler on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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Much emphasis is being placed on the development of smarter electrical grids. But, in the U.S., little attention has been paid to equally antiquated water systems, which have a major impact on public health. In coming months and years, it would behoove the government and corporations alike to support the creation of a smarter fresh-water grid.
Environmental changes and urban planning are stretching water supplies in the industrial world. In Europe, where the problem is more pressing — considering its proximity to the Middle East and Northern Africa — startups and government incentives are cropping up to confront shortages and contamination.
But in the U.S., we’re seeing the first stirrings of private involvement. Last month, IBM announced that it is working on a suite of technologies applicable to water management. The company says this business could represent $20 billion in revenue in the next five years. IBM will be partnering with Intel to study how IT can be used to make water systems safer and more sustainable.
Adding IT to current water grids will produce an interesting hybrid indeed. Right now, many plumbing systems are so old that they lose 25 to 45 percent of the water they carry. There’s a reason for this: Many cities just don’t have the coffers needed for upgrades.
IBM and others are betting on government subsidies and policies. While there has been a lot of focus recently on biotech companies patenting living filters and other purification processes, IT corporations already have sensors that could be installed to keep real-time tabs on water quality, leaks and supply loads. These capabilities could drastically improve overtaxed water boards.
IBM and others are also working on the software used to receive, organize and make use of the data they collect. Just like smart meters, water meters could soon keep track of consumption, disruptions and possible contamination. Broad deployment of electrical smart meters could even pave the way for water utilities to do the same.
Still, upgrading the water grid may be a hard sell. Water utilities are generally slow-moving and reactionary. Not to mention that improvements would be invasive, and therefore expensive. If no funding comes from higher up, its unlikely cities will change.
But, there are a lot of other incentives for corporations and startups to forge ahead now. So many industries depend on a consistent and pure water supply — agriculture, petroleum, semiconductors — that it’s unlikely the federal government would let a serious problem arise. Beyond that, so much electricity in the U.S. is used to pump water — almost 20 percent in California. This makes water system efficiency central to electrical efficiency, which is the current priority.
It’s good to know that private business big and small is tracking this issue relatively early. But it’s clear, based on the evidence, that the Obama administration needs to take note now. Even if it can’t afford to throw some of the stimulus package funding at the problem, it should start thinking about how and where to get the money required to overhaul America’s plumbing.
This post is sponsored by IBM’s A Smarter Planet blog.
Written by Camille Ricketts on October 13th, 2009 with no comments.
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