Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Philip Kaplan seems to be the owner of Slaps.com, which is a new music website. Phil is a serial entreprenuer who seems to create a lot of startups and then a few years in will get a little bored and start a new project.
Slaps.com seems to be a very early and very basic Soundcloud streaming services, but with basically no features and hip hop heavy.
Blackstone Group is looking to raise $5 billion for its second Asian fund.
Blackstone is seeing huge potential in Asia and really wants to invest heavily and faster than ever before. Around 66% of their first fund $2.3 billion has been invested.
Blackstone see’s great growth potential in China and India and really wants to get a foot in those markets before they mature.
I have just come across Tara AI (via DaringFireball), which provides a completely free to use alternative to Jira and other project management software.
I had a very quick look at it seems to have a very strong user interface and provide a strong amount of features.
However, WHY IS IT FREE?
SellerX is a startup from Berlin that focuses on acquiring top Amazon sellers. SellerX has just raised $118 million led by Cherry Ventures, Felix Capital, TriplePoint Capital, participation from Village Global, et al.
It seems like buying Amazon based businesses is becoming an interesting proposition. Once Amazon sellers get to a certain level they need a lot of back office support and the vast majority aren’t set up to do this. It will be interesting to see if they are able to get a lot of great Amazon sellers together and turn this into a strong long term business.
Shutterstock has acquired AI driven Amper Music.
Amper Music claims to have over 1 million individual audio samples in its catalogue.
It seems like Shutterstock wants to be able to create endless AI driven music and be able to monetize that in its marketplace and keep 100% of the royalties. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amper Music after the transaction closes, as I expect that the company will be completely shutdown immediately.
RouteNote has started offering Free Music Distribution to TikTok and Resso. RouteNote was one of the first music distributors to partner with TikTok and Resso globally and they can provide full access into the platform for no upfront fees and artists and labels keep 85% of the royalties.
TikTok and Resso pay royalties to both artists and labels so its worth adding your music into the music library into TikTok so creators of all shapes and sizes can find you and promote your tracks to a global audience.
It was confirmed that Spotify is buying Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is a podcasting hosting and advertising company – it’s easy to see how this fits into Spotify’s plans for world domination in the podcast market, but it will throw up a lot of concerns on how powerful Spotify is in this market now and how they plan to control all the data around podcasts.
These podcasts should be platform agnostic – like music. However, they seem to be getting acquired and then made exclusive for either Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or whoever has the most money at the time.
Who is going to lose out? CONSUMERS!
Very interesting performance from Halsey – but it really seems like the video has been recorded separately from the audio and then its been placed together.
It is great to see companies like Magnum realise the influence of music within current culture.
Extremely strange interview with Erling Haaland, which talks about the him not taking a girlfriend at home and that he will sleep lonely tonight. Very awkward!
With 2020 being so rubbish I have been spending a lot of time on YouTube. Here is a video from Selected – which showcases their New Years Mix. It’s from 2017, but it still really packs a punch.
This video talks about voting systems and why the two party system is so common. It also looks at alternative voting systems.
It has been confirmed that PUBG Mobile will be removed for all Indian users on the 30th October – this accounts for 50 million Indian gamers.
India banned PUBG Mobile Nordic Map: Livik and PUBG Mobile Lite, along with over 100 apps with links to China on September 2.
Amuse announced the other day that they were expanding their Fast Forward program – which allows artists to have an advance on their royalties of between $250 and $300,000 (MA).
However, all these “news outlets” forgot to mention that Amuse will be charging artists 12% interest on the loans they provide as advances on their royalties.
12%!
I’m struggling to understand why any artist in the world would consider this a good idea!
This also goes against the artist first idea of Amuse. It’s not artist first in any way!
Google seems to think the future of work lies in between the office and working remotely.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google were currently making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future. He didn’t specific state what those changes were.
“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was an honoree on this year’s list of the most influential people in the world.
“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new. So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something,” he said.
Pichai said that Google is “reconfiguring” its office spaces to accommodate what he called “on-sites” — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office.
It seems as though Substack has been approaching writers at top national publications in the USA and offering them the ability to create and obtain subscribers on Substack. It also sounds like they are offering these writers minimum guarantees to move, which allows the writers to have a very minimal downside on moving.
Amuse.io is a new music upstart that has been getting a lot of press of late. Amuse.io has just released their official 2019 financials and it’s very interesting reading.
Revenues = $9.5 million USD
Profit / Loss = $10.9 million USD Loss
Staff = 49 staff
Cash Liquidity = 208%
This basically means that Amuse will need to raise another round of Venture Capital within the remainder of 2020 or start of 2021 to be able to survive.
Source – https://www.merinfo.se/foretag/Amuseio-AB-5590367016/2kgcyso-1hslk
Tesla shares have finished the day at 21.06% down. This is the biggest single day share decline for the company in its history.
Why this matters: Tesla is a company going after a big dream. However, it also seems to be the company that is riding a very high valuation based on very little fundamental numbers being it. Revenues have increase 14% in the past 12 months, but the share price has increased 573%.
My views: I love the company and I love what they are trying to achieve, but it seems like they have become the poster child for a heavily overpriced stock market based on poor fundamentals.
Yes of course. Take a look at RouteNote.
RouteNote has a FREE option for all artists and labels. Any artist or label in the world is able to upload their music to the worlds largest music streaming services and download stores with no upfront costs.
I wrote this article over 10 years ago. I thought it would be very interesting to post again to see how many of these services are still alive and going over 10 years later.
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites?
Warren Buffett’s views on Jeff Bezos and how he has changed the world.
Why this matters: Warren Buffett for a long time has been watching Jeff Bezos and commenting on how amazing the run of Amazon has been. It would have been very interesting if Warren Buffett understood the technology industry at the beginning of the internet as it would have provided a lot of great investment opportunities.