Crenk » service

Myspace Acquires Imeem (Music Streaming Service) for Only $8 million?

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:42:41 +0000

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.

Today.com: Get Paid to Blog for Free

Dean — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:16:21 +0000

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

UbuntuOne: User Data Sync Service from Canonical

Steven Finch — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:44:17 +0000

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.

Seeqpod is Down Dut Not Out Just Yet

Steven Finch — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:27:55 +0000

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.

Umbrella Today: Free Simple Weather Forecasting Service

Steven Finch — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:03:00 +0000

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!

JumboURL: The Worlds Second Ever URL Extending Service

Steven Finch — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:48:43 +0000

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.

Tinychat: Free Online Chatroom That Are Simple and Easy to Use

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:45:57 +0000

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.

Don’t Get Sued… Use Tunerec

Keshav Khera — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:53:30 +0000

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.

Are Feedburner Currently Making Huge Changes To The Way They Collect Numbers?

Steven Finch — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:28:27 +0000

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.

Lycos To Not Shut Down Mail and Tripod Services in USA

Steven Finch — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:51:45 +0000

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.

Spiral Frog (Ad-supported music service) In Trouble and Heading Towards Deadpool

Steven Finch — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:40:12 +0000

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.

Are My Sites Up: Monitors When Your Sites Are Down and Send Notifications

Steven Finch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:00:41 +0000

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.

Mixturtle: Music Streaming Search Engine That Has Brilliant UI

Steven Finch — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:59:30 +0000

A couple of days ago we put together a great list of the Worlds top 10 free music streaming service. We received a comment that post that lead us to another music streaming service that I thought was worth a review, MixTurtle. MixTurtle is a great music streaming search engine very similar to Seeqpod.

MixTurtle lets users search for a song and then it provides instant results. Then users can play the single track or add it to a playlist. I couldn’t work out for a while how to view the playlist correctly, but all you need to do is right click anywhere on the page and it brings up the playlist you have created. I would suggest that MixTurtle work a bit more on this feature and really make it more predominant.

In terms of the overall design and layout of the site, I think it has great potential. I think it will be easy for them to add sponsored search results into the engine which will be a lot better to look at than display advertising. However, if they are going to go down the display route, it would be advisable to add the display add to the top of the site and have it rotate every couple of minutes.

Overall this is a great site with a lot of potential. It would be adviseable to add a business model sooner rather than later, because im sure their server costs are quite high. In terms of the user point of view, this is a great site! Simple, easy to use and give you with the results in seconds, brilliant!

Co.mments Will Be In The Deadpool on 11th January

Steven Finch — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:07:33 +0000

It has been reported today that Co.mments will be hitting the dead pool on the 11th of January. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down and the founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night.

I have never really understood these commenting services, because they dont seem to add too much to the user experience.

The World’s Top 10 Free Music Streaming Services

Steven Finch — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:25:50 +0000

Im spending a lot of time in the office recently and I’m one of those people who cant work without music playing really loud in the background. I’m sure its not just me who thinks better when music is playing loud, so I thought I would put together a quick list of the top 10 free music streaming service that are currently available. Some of these services can only be used in specific countries, but I’m sure this will change in 2009.

Pandora – Pandora is now just a USA based service. However, Pandora is a great service for those in the USA and im surprised if most people in the USA don’t already use it. Pandora is basically a music radio service which lets you listen to customised radio stations.

Last.fm – I have never really understood Last.fm myself, but they have a great service in which will let you stream music from certain artists. Some have full tracks for free to stream, but others have videos or some nothing at all.

Seeqpod – Seeqpod is basically Google for music. Seepqod is a search engine that allows users to find whatever music they want to listen too. Seeqpod can only find music that can easily be downloaded on the net, so it can be limited with some artists, plus sometimes the tracks might be corrupted and not completely work. However, it is great for making playlists.

Spotify – Spotify is a new music service that has launched out of Sweden. I have been using Spotify for several months now, even though it is in private beta testing. Though the music is streamed, it is played instantly and is partly supported by the famous P2P technology. Currently the service is only available in Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK. Spotify has to be the best music streaming service I have used in 2008.

Myspace Music – Myspace is of course the worlds largest social network and Myspace Music is just an add-on of this social network. With Myspace Music users can search for pretty much any artist in the world and stream the music they have on their profiles. Remember it is limited to only the music the artist wants you to hear.

Rhapsody – Rhapsody has a nice “listen FREE” search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. Once you find the artist you are looking for then you can play any of the songs in their catalogue for free. However, then I realised streaming is only for the USA.

Imeem – Imeem is a mixture between music streaming service and social network. On Imeem to stream music all you need to do is to search for the artist you want to listen to and then the majority of the time they will already have an Imeem account.

Deezer - Deezer is a mixture between Seeqpod and Imeem. Deezer has some social networking aspects but mainly it is just a great music streaming service that is very easy to find the music you are looking for. All music on there is legal and free and artists actually get royalties from your streams.

Skreemr - Skreemr is very similar to Seepqod and it is just basically a search engine for music online. Skreemr is a free service that picks up free music from across the internet and allows you to play it easily. However, unlike Seeqpod they don’t allow users to make playlists.

Lala – Lala is one of the new music streaming services on the block. Lala provides free streaming to only USA users. There is a limit on how many times you can listen to a track for free, but you also have the option of purchasing that stream for $0.10 so then you have can unlimited plays. Additionally, if you want to take the tracks off the site then there is an option of $0.79 for the download.

Crenk Hits 500 Followers on Twitter

Steven Finch — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:32:08 +0000

Here at Crenk we have just reached the magical 500 subscribers mark on Twitter.

Please follow us: http://twitter.com/crenk

Twitter is a microblogging platform that has been really making some strong improvements in the lats year or so. I’m sure there aren’t too many people who don’t currently know about Twitter (that is if your interested in tech). Twitter is basically a huge IM service in which you can only message 140 characters at once, you also able to follow other people and talk with them directly. It is basically a new type of MSN or Yahoo Messenger.

Technorati Media Launches Their AdEngage Product. Just a Poor Advertising Network

Steven Finch — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:52:25 +0000

Technorati Media has finally launched their Engage (advertising marketplace product) live. Previously this new tool was in Alpha stage and only certain people could use the product. This all happened because Technorati purchased AdEngage.

Since purchasing AdEngage and launching Technorati Media I think Technorati has really lost sight of what their core business model is!

Technorati was a blog search engine that doesnt currently have really market share and presence and their product offering seems to be going down hill by the day. To compensate for this they purchased AdEngage and launched Technorati Media, which is just an ad network.

Looking at the current results from this ad network which has been in operation for several months, seem to be very poor. They are selling advertising for blogs such as The Inquisitr and Profy. The results seem to be as follows, for CPM advertising they are offering a decent CPM rate in between $1.00 – $2.00, but ads are currently only for the USA market and even then their fill rates arent 100%. For all other countries they suggest to use Google Adsense, which is fine, but unless you have a huge amount of USA traffic then this isnt really worth the effort, because what you make on USA revenues you lose on Google revenues elsewhere. In terms of selling sponsorships they also seem to be terrible, with The Inquisitr having 2 125×125 ad slots in the sidebar in which they havent even been able to sell 1 for a few months.

This is all about Technorati realising they dont have a search engine product that is any good, so they are looking for additional revenues streams which will help them eventually sell the company. Is that the way it is or am I wrong?

Lycos Europe To Close Its Doors. Is This First Step to Tech Company Closures?

Steven Finch — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:17:29 +0000

There have been a lot of huge companies here in the UK shut down of late because of the economic crisis, such as Woolworths, MFI and others. In the technology world there havent been too many casualties so far. However that being said, it has been reported this morning that Lycos Europe will be closing its doors. A date still hasnt been confirmed but it is rumoured to be before the end of the year.

Lycos Europe, the portal and Web hosting service, said on Wednesday that it has concluded a strategic review process and will shut down operations and seek a sale of remaining assets. The company is separate from Lycos in the U.S., and was launched as a joint venture between Telefonica’s Terra and Bertelsmann.

“As a result of this strategic review process the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of Lycos came to the conclusion that the best available option of the company is to (i) strive for a sale of its domains, Danish portal and shopping activities and (ii) to discontinue the portal and webhosting activities,” the company said.

Lycos Europe will also return about $60 million to its shareholders.

What other technology companies are going to follow in the footsteps of Lycos? It tends to be old brands that are struggling to actually build a strong brand in this ever growing environment. My tip has to be on Napster being of the big boys to close its doors very soon!

Imeem: The Music Streaming Service That Is Taking Over The Web 2.0 Music Market

Steven Finch — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:09:59 +0000

Imeem is a music social network like no other. Currently, Imeem is the most popular music community in the world and its growth has really been amazing in the last year. Imeem allows artists and users to both have their own profiles and communicated in a social enviroment.

Artists on Imeem can have their own profiles while at the same time make money from their streams on the site. Thus, each time someone listens to an artists tracks the artist receives some royalties, these royalties are based on a percentage of advertising revenues.

Users are able to check out songs from their favourite artists while fill out the basics of a social networking profile. Additional features include mail, creating playlists and more.

Imeem is a great platform that is definitely on the rise, especially in the USA. Look out for more and more changes that im sure they will be bringing to the service in the coming month. The only downside is the quality of advertising on their site! Due to Imeem paying royalties, they must try to each as much advertising revenue as possible for their artists, and in doing so their quality seems to be very poor and lack creativity.

Joost and Meebo Partner, But I Have No Idea Why!

Steven Finch — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:02:00 +0000

It has been reported around the web yesterday evening that Meebo has partnered with Joost to provide Chat solutions.

Joost has chosen Meebo as the provider of chat solution on its IPTV service, but I really dont see the point and how this is going to enhance the user experience on Joost. When users log onto IPTV services they do so for the one reason of watch TV shows Free, not to chat to their friends. If they did use the service to chat to their friends how are they going to see what is on the TV, because although it is transparent to some degree, it is still going to be annoying. Thus if you wanted to run both at the same time why not just minimise the Joost service and run Meebo or another chat client in another window. Overlays just dont work!

Napster Is Now Web Based

Steven Finch — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:33:37 +0000

Napster have announced that they are dumping their desktop client and re-launching with a new web-based version. Napster customers will now be able to listen to their music from any computer anywhere in the world. This will hopefully enable Napster to also develop embeddable widgets that can push their products on possible web enabled devices.

Napster is still going to be based as a subscription model, which most industry experts think is holding back the company, because it makes Napster incompatible with the iPod. Consequently Napster has lagged behind Appleâ€™s end to end iTunes system which reportedly controls 70% of the digital music market.

UMG has announced they are now happy with iTunes and the revenue split, so it is only a matter of time before DRM free becomes standard and Napster will really need to gain some market share before Apple.

If you would like to see a slideshow of the new Napster service, please head over to Crave.

RouteNote Signs with AudioLunchbox

Steven Finch — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:09:19 +0000

RouteNote has just signed a deal to provide our content on Audio Lunchbox. Audio Lunchbox will sell our content on their sites and services for the next three years. Audio Lunchbox has a licensed catalog of over 2 million songs in 79 sub-genres. Audio Lunchbox is the only service on the web to offer both a la carte and permanent subscription downloads side by side. Well thats what they claim.

Spiral Frog Up To More Tricks??

Steven Finch — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:54:52 +0000

This is quite funny actually. Bruce over at Hypebot has been running a poll on which paid download service has the best chance of success – Spiral Frog, We7 or Other. The poll ran for 7 days, after 6 days he only had 100 votes with 80% of the votes going to We7. Then suddenly this morning Bruce noticed that the 100 votes was now 650 and now with Spiral Frog slightly ahead. Of course it looks like someone from Spiral Frog just kept logging on to the site and voting for themselves, pretty sad really! But then again it is Spiral Frog.

Spotplex What Is Going On?

Steven Finch — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:41:06 +0000

Spotplex was touted as a Digg killer by many! It never eventuated! Why do you think it never really grew to be a strong player in the content aggregation market?? Well I know why, CAUSE I CAN NEVER GET IT TO WORK PROPERLY!!

The site itself has very good fundamental and the service could be very very useful but possibly they are having a lot of problems because it provides dynamic and instant content.

Does anyone use Spotplex and what do you think about it service?