Sunday, August 23, 2009

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The Latest from TechCrunch

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Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes

Posted: 23 Aug 2009 07:00 AM PDT

It's happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.  But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world's brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Much of the world's economic growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper and in many cases competitive academically, and then there's the H-1B issue. If America won't allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the student loans to begin with?

Make no mistake: This is a huge blow for the United States, and particularly Silicon Valley. It's killing diversity in graduate schools at a time future business leaders most need to understand other countries, especially Asian ones. Xenophobic, anonymous cowards may leave as much bile in the comments as they want: The reality is one out of every four tech companies is started by an immigrant. In the tech industry, immigrants have created more high paying jobs than they've "stolen."

And nearly every CEO will tell you how much added cost and hassle there is in hiring a foreign-born worker—they do it because they physically can not find enough appropriately skilled workers in the U.S. (Below is an interview I did with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman about this very subject a few months ago, and he wrote a guest post on TechCrunch discussing the issue as well.)

Indeed, a recent study by the Bay Area Council, the Campaign for College Opportunity and IHELP showed that we'd need a 90% upswing in people graduating with degrees in science, technology, math or engineering to keep up with all the new jobs being created in that discipline.  What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things. Money and talent are fungible assets that flowed to the U.S.—and specifically the Valley—because that is where they were supported and rewarded.

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech; that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

(Flickr image by Stephen Pierzchala)

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Say what you like about the Google Books Kool-Aid, but it tastes much better than Microsoft’s sour grapes

Posted: 22 Aug 2009 06:34 PM PDT

koolIf this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

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The Would-Be FFugees Shouldn’t Pack Up And Find A New Home Just Yet

Posted: 22 Aug 2009 12:00 PM PDT

the_scoreFollowing Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees.

Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

  • FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
  • Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
  • Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
  • While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
  • With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
  • That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
  • Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
  • Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
  • He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
  • Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
  • He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
  • Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
  • There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
  • On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
  • Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

CrunchBase Information
FriendFeed
Facebook
Paul Buchheit
Information provided by CrunchBase

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Your Guide To Music On The Web - Part #1

Posted: 22 Aug 2009 11:30 AM PDT

I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do).  Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most  from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.

Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like  — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.

Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.

Music Recommendations:

paPandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to  40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.

lastfmWith almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it - you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you've already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)

deezerThis is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today - pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most - The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist - completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.

finetuneI think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.

Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv

Independent Music:

amieAmie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price -  Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.

jamendoWhy is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses - worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free.  The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have one too.

soundcloudSoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.

thesixtyoneTheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.

Create & Listen to Playlist:

playlistI’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist from 2006…

jiwaJiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm - highly recommended.

jogliAt Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist - they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD  Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.

mixtubeMixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration - lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..

Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.

Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm

Music Visualization:

musicoveryThere’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are - the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.

citysoundCitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.

Web-Radio:

jangoVery similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear - and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.

radiobetaRadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that  you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.

theradioOK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like - it simply works.

aupeoAupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo.  The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!

Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and  Play.fm

That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!

Image by RossinaBossioB on Flickr.

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Facebook Hires TipJoy Co-Founder Ivan Kirigin After Backing Away From A Full Acquisition

Posted: 22 Aug 2009 11:10 AM PDT

It turns out there is more to the story behind the sudden demise of Tipjoy. The micro-payments service was trying to sell itself, according to a source with direct knowledge of the attempted transaction, and even got an all-stock offer from Facebook nominally worth around $5 million. The deal fell through when Facebook walked away.

But Facebook didn’t walk away completely empty-handed. It managed to hire Tipjoy co-founder and CTO Ivan Kirigin instead. After the acquisition negotiations fell apart, Facebook reached out to hire Kirigin. They made him an offer, and he accepted. It is not clear what he will be working on, but Facebook Payments would be a good guess.

Some investors weren’t too thrilled because Tipjoy was still in discussions with other potential acquirers (including Twitter and PayPal). But once Kirigin was out of the picture, the other interest evaporated, say our sources.

All of this brings up a real dilemma for small-app startups. If all Facebook or Twitter has to do is hire one or two key people instead of buy the whole company, then it will be hard to capture much value in the long run.

As for Facebook, building its own social payments platform makes a lot of sense. Kirigin and his co-founder (and wife) Abbey, spell that out in Tipjoy’s farewell post:

We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. . . . we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments - then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

Now Kirigin can try to prove that social payments can succeed within one of those larger platforms, Facebook, even though Tipjoy was better known as a Twitter (and blogging) phenomenon.

TipJoy did not respond to repeated attempts to contact them on this post.

Update: Abby Kirigin emails:

Erick’s accusation that Ivan took a job at Facebook while “Tipjoy was still in discussions with other potential acquirers (including Twitter and PayPal)” is absolutely absurd and totally untrue.

Of all people, it is Ivan and I who would have most loved to see Tipjoy acquired and our investors paid. That anyone can even insinuate that that is not the case shocks me.

-Abby Kirigin
co-founder, tipjoy.com

Perhaps the TipJoy founders should discuss this issue with their investors, who disagree, in a more private forum.

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One PR Firm’s Lack Of Ethics: Reverb Caught Astroturfing The App Store

Posted: 22 Aug 2009 09:23 AM PDT

When it comes to winning in the App Store, one PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple's App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications. Yeah, that 5-star iTunes app review you saw for the once top-5 paid app Enigmo? It might not be written by a real user, but rather by Pangea Software's PR firm. Reverb isn't the first to try and game the user review process, but they are definitely one of the most blatant cases. Reverb Communications is an extremely successful PR firm that claims to have "first party" and "personal" relationships with Apple. Aside from representing Pangea Software, one of the more successful App developers for the iPhone (they made Enigmo, which was featured during the Apple WWDC Keynote 2008), they also represent Harmonix (the Guitar Hero and Rock Band guys), MTV Games, and a host of iPhone game developers. Additionally, they've managed to do an impressive job at courting the press: clients have had iPhone apps featured in just about every major media outlet known to man, including Forbes, MTV, G4TV, NBC (in fact, all the examples were for one developer: Publisher X, which Reverb happens to own). Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 Billion of product under their watch.


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