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telecoms.com
Finnish vendor Nokia put a new spin on the User Generated Content (UGC) phenomenon on Tuesday, with an addition to its own social network, Mosh.
Where the Mosh environment allows users to communicate and share their content, the Seek feature allows users to make requests for content not yet available.
“Seek allows Mosh users to make requests for content they crave and the community can then respond with suggestions or custom created content,” said Nokia.
The Finnish firm anticipates that Seek will be used to deliver requests for specific mobile applications, mobile maps or videos, but it will most likely be used to request various filth, or copyrighted material.
The Mosh community has downloaded more than 6 million bits of content since its beta launch on August 9, with 80 per cent of all downloads happening through mobile browsers.
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The cost falls from $1.29 to 99 cents a track amid rivals’ moves to drop anti-piracy software.
By Michelle Quinn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 17, 2007
Apple Inc. said Tuesday that it was lowering the price of songs it sells without anti-piracy software from $1.29 to 99 cents, the standard price for a copyright-protected song purchased on its online music store iTunes.
The move comes a month after Amazon.com Inc. launched its online music store, Amazon MP3, which sells songs without copyright restrictions for 89 cents to 99 cents.
In August, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced it would sell some of its songs without restrictions for 94 cents each.
Apple’s price cut was not in response to competition, spokesman Tom Neumayr said.
Consumers have complained that anti-piracy restrictions limit what they can do with music they buy from iTunes and other services. The restrictions, known as digital rights management, limit copying digital music on any device or computer.
In the past, music companies have wanted the software to stop copyrighted songs from being spread over the Internet for free.
But more recently, the music industry has been torn over the issue of selling songs digitally without copyright protection. In an open letter, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said the music industry should drop anti-piracy software to help boost digital sales of music.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has become the third-largest seller of music in the U.S., a position that has made some music companies nervous. Universal Music, for example, has not renewed its iTunes contract and has teamed with other online retailers.
In May, Apple began selling tracks from a 150,000-song catalog from EMI Group without copyright restrictions in a service called iTunes Plus. The songs also come with higher sound quality.
Apple does not give out sales figures for iTunes. But Neumayr said iTunes Plus has been “incredibly popular.” The company plans to add more than 2 million songs from independent labels.
Separately, Apple said it would begin selling the newest version of its Macintosh operating system Oct. 26. Called Leopard, it will hit the market after a four-month delay caused by the need for Apple engineers to finish work on the iPhone.
The software will cost $129 for a single user and $199 for a family pack that can be installed on as many as five computers in one household. It includes improvements to e-mail and instant messaging and new features such as a file backup program called Time Machine.
Apple shares rose $2.60 to $169.58. source
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From Bloomberg News
October 16, 2007
Microsoft Corp., lagging behind Google Inc. in Internet search, introduced a new version of its search engine for Windows-based mobile phones that enables customers to find listings using their voice.
Live Search Mobile, which users have to download to their handsets, displays listings and driving directions on maps, Microsoft said Monday. The company will also offer free 411 directory assistance from any phone.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, aims to take a larger share of revenue from mobile-phone advertisements, a market that may grow to $11.4 billion by 2011 from the current $2.17 billion, London-based research firm Informa said.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is looking for markets in which Google, owner of the most popular search engine, doesn’t have an entrenched lead.
The software will be available today.
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By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Prepaid International has launched a service in Australia that will enable any service provider selling prepaid mobile services to offer recharges via third party web sites.
It has already signed up Optus, 3, Virgin, Boost and GoTalk whose services can be recharged via a portal on the ninemsn web site. This service has been operating since July, but now Prepaid International has teamed up with web hosting specialist Hostway to rollout the service to other sites.
Hostworks will provide a managed service that delivers the Prepaid International software to web portals and to other available channels. It has entered into a revenue share agreement with Prepaid International that it says “removes upfront costs for breakthrough businesses with high growth potential in return for a share of future revenues,” and is working with Prepaid International to recruit more high-volume web portals to sell recharges.
Once Prepaid International and Hostworks have recruited additional web portals in Australia to demonstrate the business model, they say they will seek to develop international markets. Although Prepaid International is presently selling only prepaid mobile recharges, the company says it can offer any type of prepaid recharge product, including music and gift vouchers, debit cards, toll road tokens and non-allocated-seating event tickets. Also it says, “the hosted prepaid service can also deliver point-of-sale recharge sales for retail outlets, intensifying competition in that market.”
This would put in head to head competition with The Blackhawk Network – a wholly owned subsidiary of US Supermarket giant Safeway - that plans to launch in Australia its Gift Card Mall (store-on-a-stand) concept before Christmas. The Mall is in-store display stand or kiosk large enough to carry hundreds of third party branded cards in a wide range of categories: sports, telecom, open loop gift (cards that can be used at thousands of locations), theatre, movie, sporting, and event tickets and other reloadable products.
According to Hostworks, the global market for mobile phone recharges alone is estimated to exceed $200 billion a year, and prepaid mobile phone services are used by nine million Australians, accounting for 51 percent of the mobile phone market. Australian prepaid users spend an average of $30 a month valuing this segment of the market at more than $3.2 billion a year.
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source : The Guardian
Big-selling albums by Linkin Park and the White Stripes were not enough to prevent widening losses at Warner Music, which suffered a drop in income as fans shifted from compact discs to digital downloads.
The American company’s third-quarter loss widened from $14m (about £7m) to $17m. The deficit included an exceptional outlay of $8m on Warner’s failed attempt to buy EMI and a $52m gain on a legal settlement with Germany’s Bertelsmann over the once illegal music-sharing website Napster.
Chairman Edgar Bronfman said Warner was facing challenges from the move to downloads. “This proved to be a more challenging quarter industry-wide as the difficult global music environment persisted,” he said.
Sales of recorded music fell by 4%, with a marked decline in Britain, France and Canada. Digital revenue jumped 27% to $112m, although this was not sufficient to make up for a fall in CD sales.
Warner’s artists include the Red Hot Chili Peppers and US hip-hop star TI.
The company has made repeated attempts to merge with EMI. It tabled a £2.1bn bid in March but lost out to a higher offer of £2.4bn from Guy Hands’ private equity outfit Terra Firma. “In order for us to succeed as a company, it is essential that we maintain our financial discipline,” said Mr Bronfman. “Accordingly we elected not to make an offer.”
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Twitter of success | New media | MediaGuardian.co.uk
Twitter of success
Jemima Kiss
Monday October 8, 2007
The Guardian
One of the biggest problems with Twitter, its founders admit, is explaining what it is. Ev Williams can’t persuade his mum to use it, but engineer Jack Dorsey, who came up with the idea, has somehow persuaded his whole family to sign up.
In explaining it to my mum, I’d describe it as group text messaging. You can also send messages online for free, so it ends up being a bit like an instant messaging tool. At this point my mum’s eyes would glaze over and she’d start talking about dinner.
“It’s certainly taken on a life of its own,” Williams told me, chatting at a coffee shop in the start-up district of South Park in San Francisco. “It’s still early of course, but Twitter is growing nicely and it’s fascinating to see what people are doing with it. To me Twitter is the perfect idea; it has core functionality that can be extended.” Twitter has been unfairly dismissed by some journalists, perhaps because, as “celebrity programmer” Dave Winer observed, they had only visited the home page and didn’t understand how it worked.
It’s not a complex idea, but the tool is in its infancy and needs to be nurtured before it develops as a functional, personal tool. Users need a critical mass of friends, and then the real conversations begin. Landing on the homepage with its thousands of random, out of context messages from strangers will mean nothing, but its dedicated users share ideas, ask questions, suggest meetings and post useful links and stories. And once you’re there, you’re hooked.
Tweets, as they have come to be known, might seem to be filled with mundane observations, but these later become rather charming details of our day-to-day lives that would otherwise be lost. “Every moment has a caption” is the Twitter mantra, and this has come to be known as micro-blogging, a “capsule of your life in 140 characters,” says Williams.
Though only 17 months old, Twitter has exceeded 350,000 users and inspired a cult following among early adopters, but it needs to be able to define itself more strongly if it wants to break into the mainstream. “Early adopters are,” he adds, “willing to work a little bit harder, but we’ve realised we too need to work a bit harder with the basic functionality like finding other users. The biggest goal is to grow the core service.”
It’s easy to see the practical benefits for socialising, for example. Twitter 10 friends to tell them where you’ll be at 8pm, you can do it with one Tweet. For retail, Woot.com, which sells a different heavily discounted product every day, was quick to start using Twitter so that followers could catch bargains before they sold out.
For news organisations, the potential goes far beyond the automated distribution of links to news stories, which more than 80 mainstream sites are doing already. MTV has also experimented with offering stars like Timbaland his own Twitter channel during its video music awards; it’s a very efficient, practical and quite intimate way of reaching fans.
The limitation of Twitter - that messages can only be 140 characters - is also an advantage in a time where we are increasingly bombarded by information. It could be an incredibly efficient, and cheap, real-time sports results tool, for example, and some of those early-adopter users are already Twittering one-line headlines from news events.
“That limitation is very interesting and presents a new set of opportunities,” says Williams. “We’ve had people reporting Nascar race results as they happen. It’s exciting, because we don’t know what else people will build or how they will use it.”
Ev Williams has a respectable Silicon Valley pedigree; he co-founded the DIY blog tool Blogger.com and sold it to Google in 2003, and later sold his next project, the podcasting service Odeo. As part of his Obvious Corp, Twitter has ambitious plans for growth, Williams explained. A group feature is being developed, a better way of browsing a user’s history, and there are also some long-awaited plans to monetise the service. The strategy will involve branded channels, so companies like Woot would pay to reach those very valuable, loyal users.
“Rather than attach advertising to a personal communication channel,” says Williams, “we want to make it a benefit so that there are people or entities you want to follow. We think those things have potential, so as the userbase grows we’ll flesh out which of those things work and the business model and revenue will fit in.”
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Independents decry approval of Sony-BMG merger | | Guardian Unlimited Business
Katie Allen
Thursday October 4, 2007
The Guardian
Independent music companies reacted angrily yesterday to the European commission’s decision to approve the merger of Sony Music and BMG despite rivals’ complaints that it has stifled competition.
The commission’s ruling on the joint venture was its second approval after its initial 2004 clearance was overturned by Europe’s second-highest court.
In a move that sent shockwaves through the music industry, the court of first instance last year upheld an appeal by the independent record labels association Impala. The lobby group argued at the time that the commission had put 80% of the worldwide music market into the hands of four media conglomerates.
Brussels launched a fresh inquiry this year into the ramifications of the Sony-BMG tie-up, which covers artists such as Céline Dion and Bruce Springsteen.
The new inquiry could have ended in a decision to unravel the joint venture. The commission said, however, that it had not found that having fewer big music companies had resulted in them coordinating to raise prices or restrict production.
The decision comes against a backdrop of sharp declines in global music sales and rampant piracy. Neelie Kroes, EU competition commissioner, said: “This investigation represents one of the most thorough analyses of complex information ever undertaken by the commission in a merger procedure. It clearly shows that the merger would not raise competition concerns in any of the affected markets.”
Impala, which represents 3,500 members, described as “bizarre” the decision to approve the merger without imposing any conditions on Sony-BMG. It accused the commission of disregarding its evidence of anti-competitive behaviour and of failing to consider the effects of the merger on consumer choice.
Impala’s president, Patrick Zelnik, said: “The European commission has ignored the simple fact that four companies control 95% of the music most citizens hear on the radio throughout the world.”
The independent labels now plan to ask the European ombudsman to investigate potential maladministration. Impala said it also had the option of appealing.
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source
Katie Allen, media business correspondent
Thursday October 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Madonna is leaving her lifelong record label Warner and is poised to sign a contract worth around $120m (£58.92m) with concert promoter Live Nation in a deal that has sparked fresh debate over the future of record labels. Warner will keep Madonna’s back catalogue.
The US singer is thought to be getting a $17.5m cash advance on signing a 10-year deal with the US firm, the world’s largest live music group, as well as another $50m in cash and shares and multimillion dollar windfalls for each of three albums she will commit to.
While the deal is seen by some industry watchers as underscoring the importance of live music in an era of falling album sales, others panned it as financially flawed.
Music industry insiders pointed out Live Nation faces an uphill battle to recoup on its big payout for the Like a Virgin star.
Madonna’s “Confessions” tour last year ranked as the highest-grossing tour ever by a female artist, according to Billboard magazine. But even if she can replicate that success in the future, Live Nation will only get a small slice of the money made, with the singer getting the lion’s share as has traditionally been the case with live music.
On the albums side, meanwhile, Live Nation’s deal takes it into the recorded music industry at a time when global revenues are falling amid rampant piracy. Madonna would have to sell around 15m copies of each of the concert promoter’s three albums to recoup its investment on that piece of the deal, industry experts calculate. She has only done that three times in her career and the last time was almost two decades ago with Immaculate Collection.
Warner has been home to Madonna since her debut album in 1983. The label, which also has Red Hot Chili Peppers and James Blunt on the books, will keep her back catalogue including hits such as Holiday and Material Girl. It also has a new studio album from the 49-year-old pop star in the pipeline as well as a greatest hits compilation.
It is understood that Warner walked away from talks about a new contract with Madonna last week after deciding that matching Live Nation’s offer would not make financial sense and would let down shareholders.
Warner’s head Edgar Bronfman Jr has not referred specifically to Madonna’s departure but did make his stance on such negotiations clear in a recent speech.
“If a deal doesn’t pencil out in a way that meets the needs of artists within a framework of financial discipline we’re more likely to walk,” he said.
Peter Ruppert, founder of music consultancy Entertainment Media Research said the deal should not throw music industry models into question given that Madonna’s contract was unlikely to be widely replicated.
“It’s not a wake-up call for the industry. It’s a ridiculous deal,” he said.
Even if artists like Madonna and Prince - who recently gave away his album free with a newspaper - can shun record labels, new artists will continue to need the established music companies, added Mr Ruppert.
“It wasn’t Live Nation that got Madonna where she is now. If you want to be a mass market artist you need a major label to invest in your career.”
Warner declined to comment and Live Nation did not return calls.
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Zed invests $65m in Web 2.0 platform - www.mobile-ent.biz
Zed invests $65m in Web 2.0 platform
19:30, Feb 8th 2007 by Stuart O’Brien
D2C giant Zed has embraced Web 2.0 for a $65 million revamp of its mobile and PC content offering, which was unveiled today.
The new look signals Spain-based Zed’s move into a connected cross-platform environment as opposed to the one-off mobile content downloads on which its business has been built to date, though the latter will continue to play a core role in the business.
The revamped portal is built around user-generated content, community tools (blogs, dating etc) and communication software (mail, messenger, etc), and will launch first in the US this month, followed by Spain and all remaining markets shortly after. Customers will be offered several tiered subscription options.
The services will also be made available to Monstermob customers in anticipation of Zed’s impending acquisition of that company, so by the end of this month the Zed community will stretch across 31 countries.
Speaking to ME, Zed CEO Javier Perez Dolset, said: “When you look at the kind of mobile content that’s been popular to date it’s single, one-off downloads of ringtones, wallpaper and games etc. That goes against the philosophy of mobile - community is ultimately the key to the platform. We’ve been preparing for today’s launch for 17 months and the idea is to integrate our services with all devices that connect to the internet.”
Dolset added that the new services allow Zed to target the 45-65 per cent of people that use the internet regularly, as opposed to the five-six per cent that download mobile content on a regular basis.
Going forward, Zed will be adding video, imaging and online games functionality to its portals. Dolset said, however, that music downloads are something Zed is eschewing right now due to continued uncertainty over the business models required to ensure a profitable service.
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O2 UK and MySpace to launch on-portal mobile service in November.
The new offering will allow MySpace users on the O2 network to browse and upload content to their pages while on the move.
It builds on an existing agreement the News Corp-owned social networking giant has in the UK with Vodafone.
To encourage take-up among O2 will be ‘zero-rating’ data traffic customers incur to access its MySpace offering throughout November and December. It will then push customers towards its recently unveiled data ‘bolt ons’.
O2’s customers base would seem ideally suited to mobile social networking: it’s Active content portal generates 650 million page impressions a month, from five million ‘30 day’ active users and 7.5 million 90 day users.
O2 CEO Matthew Key said: “We want to be one of the first mobile operators to fully exploit the new phenomenon that is social networking and by working with MySpace we can now take the site mobile.”
source
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