Archive for: service
It has now been confirmed that Myspace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the music streaming service. It is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell.
The deal basically values Imeem at around $8 million, even though Sequoia and Warner Music have already pumped $25 million into the venture.
I dont understand why Myspace thought it was a good idea to purchases Imeem! Was it just about the users who are still active on Imeem, cause it definitely wasnt about the technology or the earnings potential.
Getting paid to blog is a distant dream of most bloggers. The initial high hopes for Google ad sense will have vanished after just a few weeks, even days. So what is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get paid to blog? Today.com seems to have the right idea.
The service allows you to establish your own blog as a sub-domain of Today.com. E.g. Myblogsname.today.com. You can then customise using the Word Press tools and begin blogging as you normally would. I tried this out and my third post was featured on the international homepage within hours of it going live. This got my page quite number of views as I’m sure you would imagine.
Today.com do pay you, however, it’s not a set rate or pay per post (at least for most bloggers – there are some who gain popularity and get a pay per post). Instead they pay you depending on how many impressions your page gets. For each impression you, $0.002 is added to your account ($2.00 CPM). This may seem minuscule but if your blog gains popularity you could be earning hundreds each month.
Today.com is different from other blog providers as they actually publicize your blog on the homepage rather than just leave it to it own devices at the mercy of the search engines. Users can search for terms on Today.com and your blog will appear if appropriate.
All in all, it’s a good service that is a step above the rest with the highest industry payout. However, the blogs themselves are always kept looking similar to Today.com and as such you can only really customize basic features such as colour etc…
It could be a good earner for bloggers but keep in mind – to get regular readers and thus impressions you have to blog regularly (one or twice per day) and also publicise your blog. 6/10
Microsoft has Live Sync, Apple has MobileMe, and Canonical is now beta testing their own user data synchronization service called UbuntuOne.
Currently the service has two levels by which you receive 2GB of storage for free and and upgrade to 10GB will set you back $10 per month.
The service works as you’d expect – set up your sync, access files anywhere, share your online items with anyone you choose. I can see this new service being a great revenue stream for Canonical but I cant see it leading the way at the moment.
Here at Crenk we have talked about music streaming service Seeqpod a huge amount. Seeqpod was a music streaming search engine in which users could search for tracks in the same way at searching on Google. Once finding the track they wanted to play they could add it to a playlist.
Seeqpod indexed music files from all over the internet. However last month the filed for bankruptcy and since Friday of last week they have been offline. “SeeqPod is in the process of moving a few servers… We’ll be back up shortly”, said SeeqPod CEO Kasian Franks on Sunday.
Seeqpod is in acquistion talks with “a large media company that was a competitor to Apple” according to MP3 Newswire. Any suitor would have to be willing to get involved with several pending rights holder lawsuits against the company.
Have you ever wondered if you should take an umbrella with you to work? Well here is a very simple website that makes that decision for you, UmbrellaToday.com. With UmbrellaToday you just simply input your zip code (USA only service) then their service will let you know if you need an umbrella for the day. Its that simple!
Additionally, UmbrellaToday now has a opt in text and email service in which send you an update only when you need an umbrella for the day. If you are using the text option I’m not entirely too sure if the website is paying for the text message or you are, I’m guessing the later.
However, UmbrellaToday is a very simple idea and service that can actually help!
There are so many url shortening websites on the web these days and more and more are popping up every day. Today I was using stumbleupon when I was bored for a couple of minutes and came across a bit of a different take on url shortening. JumboURL is the complete opposite to url shortening, its a url extending service.
JumboURL claims to be the second website of its kind on the net and I’m surprised it wasn’t the first. I’m not entirely too sure what the point is of this service. Why would you be looking to extend you url? Anyways, its an interesting service and decent site to check out.
Have you ever wanted your own online chatroom where your friends can come and meet and chat? If this is the case then Tinychat is for you. Tinychat is a simple web application that allows anyone to make a chatroom very quickly.
All users need to do is head over to Tinychat and then they have an option of typing in the url of the chatroom they want to join or they can make a new chatroom. Its that simple.
If you are in a business and you are looking for feedback on your site then it seems like a simple idea to create a chatroom in which your users can give you direct feedback on what they are looking for from your service. Since this sounded like a good idea we have created a Crenk chatroom in which you can check out here.
With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.
Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.
Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.
It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”
You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.
Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
What is currently happening with Feedburner stats? Is Google somehow updating the service, because in the last few days I have seen a huge drop in Google Feedfetch numbers within Feedburner. I thought I would also spend sometime trolling around the web to see if other sites have been affected by this situation and what I have noticed is that all sites have been affected by this. I was hoping Feedburner might be able to let us know if they are updating this system and why there are such drastic changes.
It was reported yesterday that Lycos will not be shutting down their Mail and Tripod services as reported by Techcrunch and others.
In an article appearing this morning, TechCrunch erroneously reported that Lycos will be closing its Tripod and Lycos Mail services on Feb. 15. The information contained in the blog posting pertains to Lycos Europe products and services and affects Lycos Europe users only.
The closing of these two products by Lycos Europe does not impact Lycos users in the U.S. Lycos, Inc. and Lycos Europe are two completely separate entities and business units. Lycos, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daum Communications, Corp., while Lycos Europe is owned by Telefonica. Late last year, Lycos Europe’s parent company announced it would be shutting down its operations and seeking a sale of its remaining assetts.
Lycos Inc. (www.lycos.com) continues to operate social media, publishing and search services including both Tripod and Lycos Mail. Currently, Tripod is the #17 social networking site worldwide (comScore MM Dec. 2008), with millions of member pages hosted, published and visited each month.
There is another music streaming service that we didn’t mention in our Top 10 free music streaming services and that is Spiral Frog. Spiral Frog is an ad-supported music download service which has had a huge amount of hype since launch.
Today it has been reported that Spiral Frog might be in a bit of trouble and heading towards the deadpool. These reports come from executives within the struggling company. Why is Spiral Frog in trouble? When launching Spiral Frog was in a growing advertising market in which was still yielding good CPM (cost per 1000 ads) rates, however now in the economic downturn these rates are quickly dropping. Therefore, companies need to keep increasing pageviews and presence to stay ahead of the curve. Spiral Frog has been losing a lot of traffic of late and this combined with the big licensing fees they had to pay upfront for major label catalogues means their in a lot of trouble.
There are only a couple of options that will save Spiral Frog. Firstly, a miracle could happen and they could turn around the traffic and the revenues, but that’s not going to happen. Secondly, they could get more funding and sell part of the shares, but they are running out of shares so I don’t think this would happen either. Finally, the only real option is for someone to step in and purchase the company just before they run out of money and get a bargain basement price.
To be fair in the past Spiral Frog has had a lot of issues and they have been in trouble a couple of times. This is probably what has lead to Spiral Frog getting a lot of media attention. I think Spiral Frog will be acquired by the end of 2009, its the only decent option of the company.
There are so many places on the net these days where you can track if a specific website is down for just you or for the entire internet. Today I have no idea why but I wanted to introduce you to another such startup, Are My Sites Up.
Are My Sites Up is a new web based startup that allows you to track the up time of web sites and it even sends you notifications when they are down.
Currently in the free service you are able to setup 50 sites to monitor and for that you also receive a great control panel and even set it to email you or send you an SMS update when one of your monitored sites is down. The service requires no ownership of or modification to the web sites you are monitoring, you can use it on your own site or any site you want to keep an eye on.
It has now been confirmed that Myspace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the music streaming service. It is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell.
