The latest from TechCrunch
- Project Playlist Pushes The Line Between Music Search And Music Hosting
- You're Worth It: How the "Premium" Perception Is Changing the Way We Buy Gadgets
- Preview: Tweetie 2 Takes The Best iPhone Twitter App And Ups The Sex Appeal
- Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly
- Twitter Continues Talent Scoop, Takes Digg's UX Guy
- With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content
- Zoe Keating: Web Fame that Actually Translated to a Career
| Project Playlist Pushes The Line Between Music Search And Music Hosting | Top |
| If there is a poster child for the battered Web music startup, Project Playlist is it. The company had to fight lawsuits from the record labels , is still trying to iron out licensing deals with those labels, lost its last CEO Owen van Natta to MySpace, lost its CFO Mike Sheridan , and by the looks of it has lost most of its audience . What else could go wrong? Well, it looks like the self-styled music search engine is actually hosting MP3s of major label artists via content delivery networks such as Limelight. If you search for Britney Spears songs, for example, the second result is “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” The originating site where the MP3 was hosted, http://www.sarzamin.org/ , is no longer available. But not to worry because Project Playlist cached the song on its CDN, Limelight Networks. Khalid Shaikh, a TechCrunch reader and developer who wanted to harness Project Playlist to create his own music site, discovered this arrangement and sent me the screencast above to prove it. In the video, Shaikh speculates on the legality of this method of caching, which is impossible to say one way or the other without knowing the terms of Project Playlists’ licensing agreements with the labels. Project Playlist does have a licensing agreement with Sony , which owns the Zomba Label that Spears is on. But it certainly is a strange way to build a catalog of songs. And there are plenty of other examples, such as Alanis Morissette , who is on Warner Music, which is the one major lbel that still has not dropped its lawsuit against Project Playlist. Project Playlist bills itself as a music search engine that lets people share playlists, not the songs underlying those playlists per se. On its About page , here’s how the service describes itself: Playlist.com is an information location tool similar to Google® and Yahoo!® but devoted entirely to the world of music. Our purpose is to help you find and enjoy music legally throughout the web in the same way that other search engines help you find webpages, images, and other media and . . . Playlist.com allows you to discover all of this free music legally because we respect the rights of copyright holders and we insist that you do as well. . . . If an artist tells us that our search engine is linking to an illegally posted song, we will immediately take down the link to that music file. The site doesn’t say anything about caching songs which have been taken down, for whatever reason, from other sites. But it does raise some interesting questions. Has Project Playlist crossed the line from a music search engine merely indexing the music that is already freely available on the Web to a music hosting service (albeit through its CDN proxies)? Or is Project Playlist acting just like Google or any other search engine here, merely caching the most popular content in its index? When I contacted Josh Brooks, vice president of programming and content, he seemed genuinely surprised and said that this is the first time he’s ever seen anything like that. After viewing the screencsat, he says: “Watching that troubles me and it should trouble anyone trying to do anything n digital music. It is a problem that has to be fixed. All I can say is it is going to be remedied because it needs to be.” He also says that Project Playlist is in the middle of negotiations with labels to stream licensed songs directly: “Playlist.com technology neatly aggregates song searches on the web and directs a user to a stream of music from the site where the song is hosted. In the very near future, our hosted music service will find a linked stream and replace it with a stream from the broad library of music we have licensed. Users can then listen and share the music on Playlist.com or through an off-site embeddable player. There are dozens of linked services out there. Playlist is actively working with the content owners to insure proper reporting and accounting for music we have licenses for.” in other words, Project Playlist doesn’t want to be a music search engine anymore. It is already moving away from through the way that it is caching songs, but it needs to host those songs in a more straightforward manner if it wants the labels to take it seriously. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| You're Worth It: How the "Premium" Perception Is Changing the Way We Buy Gadgets | Top |
| This guy was asking the quality question way before the PSP Go The PSP Go just launched and the blogworld is in a tizzy about the price – $249 – and the apparent chintziness of this new PSP replacement. You see, the device doesn’t support Sony’s exciting UMD optical standard and is generally reported as “feeling” cheaper than the bulky but solid PSP. The PSP Go also requires you to buy your old games in UMD-less form, at least for the time being. So basically you get a smaller device, are forced to pay for downloadable content you probably already own, and, according to the teardown we linked to above, you get a poorly-made device with quite a few extra potential points of failure. Why am I bringing up this litany of complaints? Because of something Sony execs said back in June , namely that they PSP Go is a premium product and was therefore priced higher than, say, the Nintendo Wii . Quoth Andrew House of Sony Europe: "Those aren't the factors. When you introduce a new piece of hardware you have the opportunity to say there is a certain premium that is associated with it, and we took that into account. So what is this “premium” of which he speaks and why would you have been laughed out of your local Egghead if you had mentioned it maybe 15 years ago? Over the past few years manufacturers have jumped on the “premium” bandwagon. This has been especially apparent in the past year with HP, Dell, and even Asus creating “unique” products at a higher price to offset the cash they’re losing selling $299 laptops at Wal-Mart. For example, I have no fewer than three premium laptops in the house right now, and that’s not even mentioning the supposed premium offered by Apple in their MacBook Pro line. Premium in this case is a loaded word. What is premium anyway, but perceived value attributed to a device by price, design, or packaging? There is a lot to be said for the iPhone’s sexy box – it’s sealed in a coffin when you get it and it opens up with a puff of air reminiscent of opening a box from Tiffany or Cartier. A laptop I just tested came in that same sort of box and the Dell Adamo came in a plastic coffin that looked like it had been delivered via pneumatic tube from the inner sanctum of haute ordinateur designers. This is not to say that premium products aren’t worth it. I’d recommend a MacBook Pro over a standard laptop any day and I’d have a number of reasons for my recommendation. I always recommend Bose noise-cancellers when folks and not because I’m drinking the Bose Kool-Aid. But there is also a bad habit some manufacturers fall into that destroys the premium paradigm completely. This happens, when, like the PSPGo launch, the product clearly does not match up with its “premium” moniker. Sony, of late, has been the worst offender in the “false premium” market and it comes from a sense that their products are still leading in terms of mind share but they are definitely lagging in terms of quality, availability, and value. Samsung, too, has fallen into this trap and I would say that many point-and-shoot camera manufacturers create “false premium” products through the use of visual design cues to suggest quality (knurled knobs and analog read-outs are a big tip-off) while stuffing the same old gear into the same old boxes. If everything is premium, nothing is premium. Manufacturers have painted themselves into a corner. For the price of a nice meal in Midtown you can basically buy yourself a laptop or a smaller desktop. LCD monitors cost less than some keyboards and printers are basically free. Computing machinery, on the whole, is cheaper than it has ever been. But the tendency to create a two-tiered system is becoming disingenuous and difficult to take. While some companies know how to do it well – Apple and Bose are marketing geniuses who add a little value to commodity hardware and then add a few zeros to the price – but the rest of the manufacturers seem to be building “premium” models that never sell for an audience that doesn’t exist. Imagine an U-graph. On one side you have the “real” premium products like gaming machines and on the other you have the Wal-Mart specials. The valley between the consumer Apple is aiming at with the MBP and the consumer HP is aiming at with their cheap-o Wal-Mart specials is deep and wide, and it’s tough to move from one end to the other without creating problems of perception and losing value. Does HP make commodity consumer hardware or “high-end laptops?” It does both. Is the PSP Go a cheaper, fun game machine or a “high-end product for the gaming professional?” Who knows and, more importantly, who cares? Clearly Sony thinks no one does, more importantly, it believes it can get away with any number of shenanigans to make some profit. The same goes for any number of PC manufactures who are, currently, walking that thin line between quality and price. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Preview: Tweetie 2 Takes The Best iPhone Twitter App And Ups The Sex Appeal | Top |
| There is absolutely no shortage of Twitter apps available for the iPhone. But in my mind (and the minds of many others) one stands above all the rest: Tweetie . And while the app has undergone several small tweaks since it was first released last year, a big time revamp is about to hit: Tweetie 2. We’ve been testing out of the app for a few weeks now, and I’m happy to report that it’s the Tweetie you know and love, but better. Maybe you’ve seen some tweets from users in recent weeks labeled as coming from “Bigbird”? Yeah, that’s Tweetie 2.0. Some may recall that this was also the code name for Tweetie for the Mac right before it launched . The reason for the nickname is that Tweetie 2 is built on top of the Project Bigbird core , which Atebits developer Loren Brichter first developed for Tweetie for Mac. This means an iPhone Tweetie that is “faster, slimmer, and much more powerful,” as Brichter puts it . So what’s new? A lot. Here are the big ones. Persistence — Tweetie now remembers the last thing you were browsing when you closed the app. This means if you were on a user’s Twitter profile, you will go back there when you open the app again. New message indicators — When you have a new @reply or direct message, you will now see a glowing blue light below those sections to let you know. Scroll up to reload — Rather than having a separate reload button, to reload your main tweet stream, you simply now scroll up, hold for a second, and Tweetie will check for new tweets. More third-party service support — You can now use services such as Favstar.fm (which we’ve covered here ), Tweet Blocker , and Follow Cost . Live-filtering search — At the top of your tweet stream is a Search Timeline option from which you can search your stream. The best part about this is that it filters as you type. Very sexy. You can also search your mentions this way. New tweet options — Bringing up the tweet box (the area where you write your tweets) if faster than ever. But there are also a range of new options if you hit the 140 character counter. You can now easily geotag tweets (presumably this will work with the Twitter Geolocation API when it goes live, but for now it inserts a Google Map link), search for hashtags to include, and even search the people you follow to find someone to @ reply to (this is very nice). Draft manager — If you’re the kind of person who writes tweets to send at a later time, Tweetie 2 has a draft manager where you can save multiple drafts of tweets. New tweet stream options — One of the nice features about Tweetie from the get go was that swiping a tweet to the right brought up a range of options for things you could do with that tweet. Tweetie 2 o offers even more of these including new ways to retweet, quote tweets, post a link to a tweet, mail tweets, and translate tweets. If there is a link in the tweet, you also have a bunch of options. Notifications — Yes, you can now get Push Notifications for specific users’ tweets on your device. Create iPhone contacts from Twitter profiles — Pretty self-explanatory, pretty awesome. Saved searches — The searches you save on Twitter.com are now synced with Tweetie. Landscape — The whole app now works in Landscape mode. Or you can disable that. More threaded conversations — One of the really nice UI elements of Tweetie for Mac is that is allows you to easily see a threaded conversation view between people. You can now do this on Tweetie 2 as well simply by clicking on who a tweet is in reply to. Video support — If you have an iPhone 3GS (Tweetie 2 requires iPhone 3.0 or above, but will work on older iPhones that that OS) you can also easily upload videos to Twitter via services such as yFrog. Get It…Soon So those are a lot of the big changes, but there are many more subtle ones as well. The main takeaway is that if you’re addicted to Tweetie 1, there isn’t anything in Tweetie 2 that you won’t like, and several things that are greatly improved. It’s simply a must-download. So when will it be available? Brichter plans to submit to the App Store at some point this week, so you can look for it sometime in the next couple of weeks depending on the approval process. The app will be $2.99, just like the first version was. Sadly, this will not be a free upgrade for existing Tweetie for iPhone users, as Britcher considers this to be (and has made it) a completely new app. Still, it’s easily worth the price. One more thing Brichter has also revealed that he is working on Tweetie 2 for Mac , and that it should be available shortly. He doesn’t give away too many details, but there are features such as syncing between the iPhone and Mac version. That will be a free upgrade if you already have a license for Tweetie for the Mac. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly | Top |
| Google has been aggressively marketing Google Apps to schools, recently launching a centralized site designed to recruit universities and colleges. Now, Google is tweaking Google Docs, which is a part of Google Apps’ productivity suite, by adding a few student-friendly features. Google Docs has added an equation editor so students can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing students to not only write papers that include numbers and equations but also take notes from quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also added the ability to insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful for writing out chemical compounds or algebraic expressions. Google is also trying to make Docs appealing to those humanities majors out there by letting users to select from various bulleting styles for creating outlines and giving students ability to print footnotes as endnotes for term papers. And a few weeks ago, Google launched a translation feature in Google Docs. As we’ve written in the past, Google is wise to recruit educational institutions because that’s where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Drawing from Apple’s strategy, Google knows that brand loyalty is definitely forged at these schools and is steadily developing its products to become more appealing to students. Rival Microsoft is also launching web-based versions of its Office products aimed at the student audience. And startup Zoho offers a free web-based productivity suite. >?center> Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Twitter Continues Talent Scoop, Takes Digg's UX Guy | Top |
| Fresh off their new $100 million funding round , Twitter continues to scoop up talent from around the web to expand operations. The latest catch is Mark Trammell , who had spent the last two years working on user experience for Digg. Trammell will start his new job at Twitter in a week on the design team working to build a user research program. Trammell is the latest in a series of long-time employees to leave Digg in recent months. In May, former lead architect Joe Stump announced he was leaving to do a new mobile location startup (now called SimpleGeo ) with former SocialThing founder Matt Galligan . A couple of weeks ago, Digg’s design lead Daniel Burka , announced he would be joined Tiny Speck , the new social gaming startup led by former Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield . Despite the loses, Digg still has no real peer in terms of size in the social news space. Founder Kevin Rose recently spoke with Sarah Lacy backstage at TechCrunch50 about what is going right with Digg and some plans for the future. Notably, Sarah asked about if upcoming changes will make Digg more of a Twitter competitor, to which Rose replied that he didn’t think so. Instead, he wants to leverage Twitter to spread Digg’s stories more, and to bring Twitter users into the Digg experience. Trammell, it seems, should be able to help ease that transition if Twitter feels the same way. Trammell sounds particularly enthusiastic about his new gig: I’ll be working with a new set of folks I admire ( Doug Bowman , for instance) on a site that is changing the way the world communicates. Did I mention I’m excited? ‘Cause I am. Trammell notes that despite his new job, he will continue to advise Digg on user research. Meanwhile, Twitter is rapidly approaching 100 employees. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content | Top |
| One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite. Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to stick around on Google itself. But there is still a clear demarcation between its content/communication sites and search. At least there was until late last week when it launched Google Places on Google Maps. Google Places is a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, Website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page. When you click on a pin for a local business or place of interest on Google Maps a bubble will open up, and if you click “more info” sometimes it will take you to the Google Places page. So far, so good. Google Places is simply making Google Maps better, right? The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy . And Google is indexing them, despite assurances to the contrary . If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel. This wouldn’t be so bad if Google wasn’t already linking to itself in the top “one Box” result, which shows a detail from Google Maps. So within the top ten results, two of them link back to Google content. Your chances of clicking on a Google page for this particular search are pretty high. Google isn’t sending you away anywhere. And if you do go to the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate , it is made up of rehashed content from other sites: snippet descriptions from InsiderPages, Judy’s Book, a menu link from AllMenus, photos from CityGuide and Yelp, and reviews from Igougo and CitySearch. On the right is a small Google Map and below that are Google search ads. It’s actually a pretty useful page, and there is certainly value in aggregating all of this information in one place. Google might even license the data, which would mitigate any protests that it is “stealing” the content like we see with Google News. But nobody really cares about that. The real issue is whether or not Google is going to favor its own pages in its index when it comes to local search. SInce Google’s algorithm is a black box, there is no way to know one way or another. But the question is out there. Maybe the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate ranks highly only because Google used it as an example in its pre-briefings and a lot of bloggers subsequently linked to it. The point, though, is that these Google Places are getting into Google’s index. ( Tartine Bakery is another example). Even if they make it onto the first page of Google search results for legitimate reasons, their very presence goes against the fundamental principle that Google’s main purpose is to link out to the best information on the Web, not to hoard the links for itself. We know what will happen if it keeps going down this path. It will turn into Yahoo. Update : It appears that Google is now taking steps to remove Places pages from its organic results. It’s added a “Disallow: /places/” tag to the robots.txt for Google maps . (The robots.txt tells Google’s search engine how to treat the content on a site, and a disallow tag instructs it not to crawl indicated portions of a site). Update 2 : A Google spokesperson came back with teh following explanation: From the time of launch, we did not intend for the Place Pages to be crawled or appear in organic results – we even confirmed that publicly. We did discover that some URLs were still open (the example in question, Burdick, was the one that we heavily promoted in all our blog posts, as Matt [Cutts] pointed out ), so we’ve blocked those over the past 24 hours to stay consistent with our original plan for this launch. These should no longer appear in our organic search results. Also, I know there have been some questions about the URL structure: they were designed to be “friendly” URLs with the specific intention of making them easier to share and link. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Zoe Keating: Web Fame that Actually Translated to a Career | Top |
| Just like Web 2.0 start-ups have been spending much of 2009 trying to figure out how to turn users and community into revenues, so too have the last few years’ crop of Internet celebrities been trying to figure out how to make a business out of those over-used buzz words "their personal brands." Think of all the online fame that's been created in the last few years amid this hype of the Web democratizing celebrity. Now try to name how many of them crossed over to mainstream popularity. Tila Tequila got an MTV show and a record deal. LonelyGirl15 is on ABC Family's Greek. And…the list dwindles from there. Amanda Congdon's "talks" with HBO never seemed to materialize. Kudos to Julia Allison for snagging a Wired cover and starting a lifecasting site, Nonsociety , but that Bravo pilot never saw the light of day and even Gawker doesn't cover her much anymore. (She may consider that a blessing.) The people who get the most press for using social media are still, well, the real celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. It's enough to make you a cynic that celebrity isn't really getting democratized at all—it's just getting fragmented into slivers of micro-fame. And the truth is so far micro-fame doesn't pay. Enter an unlikely Internet fame winner: Zoe Keating. Keating is an avant garde cellist and that is her day job. She has no label. No agents. Nothing. Just 1,081,522 Twitter followers (and counting), the number one spot on iTunes classical music list, YouTube videos of her performances and a Web site . Keating was on NBC's Press:Here along with Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren this week. While Westergren left the music world to start a tech company, Keating left a high-paying tech job to become a full time cellist. Her music has been featured in film scores and commercials, but she makes the bulk of her income from iTunes. And because she doesn't have any "people," she gets to keep every dime. It's an interesting flip from the mainstream model where studios make money off music sales and artists only make money when they tour. Keating also doesn't have the normal hang-ups of a prima donna musician. I asked her if she had the usual anti-corporate bias against her music being used to advertise products and she looked at me like I was mental. (See the clip below. The entire show is available here .) In short, she gets that the model for musicians is thoroughly broken and she revels in it. I asked if she would take a huge record deal if it came to her now and she said “no” before I could finish the question. “I would definitely do it myself because I don’t want to compromise,” she said. This is all the more impressive when you consider she's a classical musician—not exactly a category that flies off the shelves. Or is that part of why it worked? You don't exactly see classical musicians on MTV's Cribs squandering multi-million signing bonuses. So someone like Keating would have to find another way to make a living making music. Keating says she spends 50% of her time managing and promoting her music and 50% actually making music. She also emphasized this was a long struggle to get to this point. Lesson to would be fame seekers: It's not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It’s still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can't create lasting value and income overnight. [More on all of this on Keating's blog .] [PHOTO CREDIT: Jeffrey Rusch .] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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