(* Kristen Nicole *) 

GameStrata began as a developer of community tools for gamers, and is now getting ready to launch a new online community of its own, in order to provide a more in depth look at the games you like to play, whether it be on a game console or on the PC.

There are forums, leader boards, and of course, the actual games that users can take part in online. Theres even a good amount of development going on within the gaming community to bring new products like chat and media-sharing options directly into the games themselves.

But GameStrata takes bits from most of these concepts and rolls it into a community for dedicated gamers. Think of it as a leaderboard on steroids, where you can see an even more detailed look at your own game, including your skills, the weapons you use, and more. GameStrata does this by working directly with the gaming companies, like EA Games, in order to get some interesting stats for the gamers that are signed up in the GameStrata community. So you can see not only your own stats, but the stats from others. What’s the weapon of choice, kills scored for specific classes, etc.

This brings an interesting look at players, the overarching trends taking place in gaming communities, and some key details that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. This type of data would be difficult to get in a centralized location, and the good thing about all this collected data is that it’s being used for the benefit of gamers themselves. Would game developers be intereted in this type of community?

Most likely. Developers like EA Games are working on increasing user engagement for game players in an online market, and research is a big part of that development. So having a community that’s benefiting from such quantitative information that’s also creating its own self-contained metadata is a unique look at overall trends.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Soshable.com *) 

It’s time to run down to the nearest electronics store and grab a video camera while they’re still available.  Many of the businesses who haven’t been posting videos to YouTube will be jumping on the bandwagon soon.

There were 34 news stories listed on Google news for January 17th and 18th, 2007, stemming from the latest comScore video metrix results that have Google video sites owning over 31% of the online video market.  YouTube accounts for a huge portion of that.

Alexa data shows over 18% of Internet users worldwide visit YouTube, while Compete data has YouTube approaching 60 million visitors a month.

Perhaps most importantly, Google, Yahoo!, and some other search engines are starting to give very strong rankings to videos in their natural search results, especially those from YouTube.

All of these things point to one conclusion: the rise of video spam. Read more

Posted by brian tiong at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Soshable.com *) 

When a company has news that they want buried, they issue their information on a Friday night and hope nobody in the media notices on Monday morning.  Marred in controversy over their Beacon advertising platform, Facebook hoped that their latest attempt to gather more user-data would go unnoticed.

Developers will now be able to extend their Facebook applications to their own websites by using the formerly-closed JavaScript client library.  Since it does not require any server side code on the developer’s server, they can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML.  The result: putting a Facebook app on a website is now extremely simple.

As Mashable noted, “Users could now go about the Web, doing your own thing, but still be connected to their Facebook profiles.”

In the quest for more user-data, Facebook has exchanged its exclusivity on its apps for a free flow of cookie-based information.  By using web apps to follow users through cookies, Facebook will be able to collect user data on any site that uses the API.  This isn’t new, but by opening up the JS client library, the number of sites using Facebook apps will grow exponentially.

The timing of the release on their developer’s news page was perfect.  They cannot afford another storm of bad press associated with collecting user data.  Possibly in an effort to “smokescreen” it even more, they preceded the announcement with a “juicier” bit of news earlier that day, a partnership with Amazon Web Services.

Three important things were noted by Nick O’Neill on his unofficial Facebook blog:

1. “Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.”
2. “Facebook has now implemented the ability to leverage cookies to access a user’s data even when they are not at your application.”
3. “This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the ’social graph’.”

The fact that nobody noticed the implications of this big news is by design. They will be better off easing this forward rather than blasting it over the intercom.  The last thing they need is another user data controversy.

John Potter, ZDNet’s chief of development, said in his article, “With this new library, the number of sites, and site owners, that can deploy Facebook applications just increased dramatically.”

Posted by brian tiong at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Sherwin *) 

Bold statements by QTrax, 25 million tracks, support from all major labels... Wow! Pls show me more...  

Adam says...

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.

 More here

Posted by brian tiong at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

(* Source Adam Ostrow *) 

Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider alerts us to a new offering from Google: the ability to purchase ads within newspapers that contain a 2D bar code. If a consumer sees such an ad, they can capture a picture of the barcode, and special software will then de-code it and send them to a specified page on the mobile Web. Apparently, this advertising format is already gaining popularity in Japan.

Will it work in the US?

To be able to use barcode ads, you first need to download de-coding software to your phone. Google provides a link to a site Nokia has setup to download codes, as well as to a company called Kaywa that is offering a form of de-coding software. The problem here is that I know very few people who will go out of their way to download software that helps them participate in more advertising. For bar code ads to work, phones need to come pre-loaded with the software, meaning carriers and device manufacturers will ultimately decide when barcode ads take off, if ever.

What are the benefits?

For the most part, today’s print advertising is limited in terms of being able to measure response. You don’t necessarily know if someone is visiting your store or web site because of your ad. Google, through AdWords/AdSense has created perhaps the most advanced advertising measurement system in the world, and by making newspaper ads interactive, advertisers will have much more insight into how their ads are performing, and presumably, be able to get a better return on their investment. For consumers, the ad format beats writing down a phone number or cutting out a coupon.

When will it happen?

A mobile exec tells Frommer that probably only around 1% of phones in the US have the necessary software installed. Thus, while including a bar code in a print ad might be a nice novelty, it’s not likely to be a good investment at this time. That said, with Google Android ramping up this year with the support of most of the carriers, the company clearly has a plan for how to get the software on more phones. As usual, Google is aiming big on this one, and has a very clever strategy for making it work. However, I think it is likely still at least a few years until they get enough traction to make barcode ads commonplace.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Ostrow *)

So, U2’s manager thinks “hippy technology and internet executives” are to blame for declining music sales. According to The Guardian:

“He likened [the technology companies] behaviour to a magazine publisher which “was advertising stolen cars, processing payments for them and arranging delivery”.

This follows the controversial launch of Qtrax over the weekend, who claimed to have all four of the big labels signed on to provide a free, ad-supported music service, only to have the record companies reply with a big “huh?” come Monday. Then, you’ve got artists like Jermaine Dupri (and many others) who don’t like the iTunes model of allowing consumers to buy individual tracks. Of course, we’d also be lying if we said consumers aren’t partly to blame, perennially jumping to the next free p2p network to grab free music until the lawyers get it shutdown. Thus, without further ado, today’s poll asks:

Poll here 

Posted by brian tiong at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *) 

An important part of any blockbuster movie’s revenues these days comes from merchandising deals—all the ancillary toys, T-shirts, and backpacks that flood stores after the release of a Harry Potter, Spiderman, or Star Wars movie. Now that virtual worlds are popping up where residents actually pay for digital representations of avatars, furniture, clothing, and other items, perhaps there is a new licensing opportunity there for the movie studios. Paramount Pictures and Habbo, a virtual teen hangout with 8 million members worldwide, may have just struck the first such deal.

In February, Habbo will begin selling virtual goods inspired by The Spiderwick Chronicles, timed for the release of that Paramount movie. It will later add virtual items from Beowolf and Mean Girls, two other Paramount films that have already come out. Habbo says it has 1.8 million members in North America, which is the area covered by the deal. It will be a long time before virtual merchandise licensing comes close to matching the revenues from real-world licensing (typically, each item costs less than $1), but for Paramount the money is almost a secondary consideration. As teenagers pass these things around on Habbo, it is great marketing for the films. They are giving the movies their own personal stamp of approval, and expressing their identity through the characters and virtual objects from the films.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

Ah... the great thing about web2.0 is that whatever you're thinking, somebody has also thought about it already.  Here is a good example as just the other day, i was thinking someone should make self service widgets... here it is.

Mark says... 

A new application called Sprout, launching in private beta at DEMO today, promises to make the creation of Flash applets a whole lot easier.

Sprout is a browser-based, WYSIWYG editor for Flash with an interface reminiscent of Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Designers can use it to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and mashups, thereby obviating the need for them to work with programmers who would cost time and money, and who might not execute designs satisfactorily.

The application itself is entirely Flash/Flex-based and won’t require account registration for first-time users (that is, once the private beta period is over). As can be seen in the screenshot to the left, the interface consists of a staging area for construction of a so-called “sprout” (don’t call it a widget!), as well as several panels for tools, components, pages, properties, and more. I found that my experience with Photoshop served me well for creating a sprout (embedded below) that displays TechCrunch feeds, since the same editing concepts are applied by both programs. That said, it would be nice if Sprout had undo capabilities and proper layering, as found in Photoshop.

While all WYSIWYG editors lack at least some of the functionality achievable through direct programming, Sprout overcomes this limitation in part by providing a library of “components” that can be integrated into a given creation. The company has lined up general components such as video, slideshows and RSS feeds in addition to components from 3rd party web services such as Meebo, Yahoo Maps, PollDaddy and Ribbit.

Sprout is marketing its release as a better way for designers to create distributable widgets. The company has partnered up with Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets to provide both easy distribution and tracking/analytics. Sprout creators can track the usage of not only entire sprouts but the elements, such as buttons, within those sprouts. They can also use the application to make changes to sprouts that have already been distributed across the web.

While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.

Sprout should be publicly available in the next few weeks. Until then, the first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to its private beta. A video demonstration of Sprout is provided below, alongside the RSS feed sprout I created for TechCrunch (hosted on their demo server so it may go down).

 

Posted by brian tiong at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *) 

For any aspiring guitarists out there, here is a site for you. iVideosongs is launching at DEMO today after two years in the making. It offers video tutorials on how to play guitar from world-class instructors, musicians and sidemen. You won’t find instruction videos from Slash here (yet), but there are guitar videos from Graham Nash, John Oates, and Alex Lifeson (the guitarist from Rush). This site seems to be aimed squarely at the aging Baby Boomer male who still wans to play guitar. And there are a lot of those. But, actually, anyone can learn from the videos, which are quite good. The videos are large and clearly show closeups of exactly what you need to do.

The startup was founded in 2006, and has raised $3 million in angel funding. It’s spent the past two years licensing rights to song libraries from all the major music publishers. The site offers some free tutorial videos, but most cost $5 (for instructor videos) or $10 (for artist videos). Compare this to $35 to $40 an hour for guitar lessons.

That’s the beauty of the Internet: you can be taught by the best instructors at a fraction of what they would charge you for a one-on-one session. With each download, you get one song, broken up into bite-sized chapters for learning a song’s intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro. Artist videos also include interiews where they talk about their influences, guitar-picking history, and inspiration for a particular song. The site is launching with a catalog of 50 songs, plus 25 free tutorials. By the end of the year, it hopes to have 1,000 different songs. Instructions for how to play the drums and keyboard are available as well.

Posted by brian tiong at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source:  Nick Gonzalez *)

Social music is all about making music free, aggregating community and monetising the service with ads. It is still early days now but this is the way forward and where the record industry needs to be looking and investing for their future in this fragmented market.  It's really no different from the past and all about conversation that sells more music... Go Imeen Go!

Nick reports... 

"Both Imeem and Anywhere.FM saw a lot of synergy in the deal. Anywhere.FM has the best upload and player interfaces I’ve seen, but lacked a solid monetization method. Imeem will bring its music deals and sales team to bear on the service and hopes to leverage Anywhere’s client side iTunes sync uploader, buddy radio, and recommendation technology in particular. Anywhere’s uploader can upload your entire iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player libraries, including personal playlists, song ratings and play counts, with a single click. In an email correspondence, Imeem’s CEO Dalton Caldwell hinted at the company’s future saying, “I think that an excellent and complete product that is fully licensed will win vs. the fragmented market we are seeing out there right now.” I couldn’t agree more.

Although not currently announced, Anywhere.FM will likely have access to the same licensing deals Imeem struck with the major labels. The deals allow users to stream any of 5 million songs from their friends for free. Being included on the deals would mean Anywhere.FM could avoid web broadcasting rules that placed limits on how often and in what order songs could be played.

Inking deals with all the majors marked a major turn around in Imeem’s history by ending the lawsuits that earlier dogged the site. But the deals came with at least Universal exacting a pound of flesh in form of some stock and a large upfront cash payment. The Financial Times said the payment was $20 million, although Imeem disagrees. Michael Robertson of MP3tunes.com, and earlier MP3.com, called it a death sentence.

While the ad supported model by their executives own admission has yet to be proven, Imeem has a major leg up over the competition. They’re legal with a large library and currently have over 20 million monthly uniques and 65,000 new registered users each day according to their own stats. Comscore ranked them the top growing social site last September. If ad supported music is going to succeed, Imeem is the startup to watch."

Posted by brian tiong at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

The Hype Machine is a great music blog aggregator that we’ve somehow failed to write about until now.

The site continuously collects material, including reviews and songs, from the best music blogs on the net. Comparisons can be drawn to Techmeme, which curates a selection of the best tech news articles from the multitude published each day. The Hype Machine does the same for music, saving indie music aficionados the time it would take to scour the web for the hottest new songs.

Not interested on keeping tabs on the music scene on a daily basis? You’re in luck - The Hype Machine just released its 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist, a collection of the best songs, albums, and bands of 2007. CEO Anthony Volodkin says that the year’s picks were made through extensive analysis of the data collected throughout 2007. The song picks are broken down into months so you can see what was popular in, say, January of last year. The site’s built-in player also lets you play the year’s songs back-to-back and instantaneously.

The Hype Machine was originally started in 2005. The site generates revenue through both on-site advertisements and music sales leads. Version 2 of the site was released just this past fall and featured greater personalization capabilities, such as favoriting and customized feed creation.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Dave Bullock *) 

We get strange Jacob’s Ladder flashbacks every time our musician friends ask us if we’re going to NAMM, but then we realize they're talking about the National Association of Music Merchants show. Chock full of motorized automated faders and digitally controlled blinking lights, NAMM 2008 was a digital producer's nirvana.

(Note: To get the full experience of the NAMM show floor while you view this gallery, take every MP3 you own and play them simultaneously while banging on some drums.)

Posted by brian tiong at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

Either way, marketers are getting prepared.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

First the news on Googles' new platform to compete with Facebook late last year, then a whole bunch of other social networking sites (incl Myspace) then jump on the platform bangwagon, a data portability workgroup is then formed to help all these companies talk in the same language and now... Facebook pulls another rabbit from it hat.  Clever? only time will tell.

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Techcrunch *) 

It sounds like finally (maybe) the labels have put DRM to rest.  Ad supported initiatives next? Maybe they should have a proper look at how these new digital distribution players are connecting with their users for a quick lesson on the music business today.  Stop pissing your customers off!  It's all there, you just have to look. Read on...

Mike says...

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but in case you haven’t heard: The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing).

Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes)

It isn’t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it’s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

But the trend is clear - labels have given up on DRM completely and are willing to experiment with ad supported free downloads. Once they give up on the ad supported part of the model and just realize that recorded music is nothing more than marketing collateral for other revenue streams like live performances, we’ll have gotten somewhere. But my guess is that one of the labels has to go out of business first for that to happen.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

The unbiased opinion is trusted around the globe.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Eric Pfanner *) 

Eric says... 

As consumers lose interest in compact discs and balk at paying for the digital alternatives, the music industry is looking for new allies, including Internet service providers, lawmakers — even Chinese air guitarists.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Thursday that worldwide digital music sales rose to $2.9 billion last year, from $2.1 billion a year earlier. That was about 15 percent of overall sales, up from 11 percent a year earlier and less than 1 percent in 2003.

But digital sales have yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs, and overall sales of recorded music fell about 10 percent last year, to $17.6 billion, the federation estimated. A recovery in the music industry remains at least a year away.

 

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Comscore *) 

The widget space is evolving as quickly as the audience is growing.  Have a look at some numbers Comscore has put together this time round...

Comscore reports... 

MySpace.com Widgets Reach Largest U.S. Audience

In November 2007, nearly 148 million U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, representing 81 percent of the total audience. MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users, while Slide.com ranked second with 39.2 million viewers. Google.com has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 million viewers.

*Facebook.com excluded from list due to different measurement methodology

** Clearspring is a widget platform and has independent objects; both are included in its total

“Top Friends” Tops Facebook Application Rankings

The inaugural Facebook application rankings revealed that more than 20 million Facebook visitors, or 61 percent of the site’s U.S. audience, engaged with an application in November. Visitors between the ages of 18-24 were twice as likely as the average Facebook visitor to engage with applications, while those aged 25 and older were less likely than average to exhibit this behavior.

“Top Friends” by Slide was the top ranked application during the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers (18.5 percent of the Facebook audience), followed by Movies by Flixster with 5.2 million (15.4 percent), and SuperPoke! by Slide with 3.6 million (10.8 percent). Slide contributed three of the ten most engaged Facebook applications in November, while RockYou! contributed two.

* Rankings based on number of people that actively engaged with the application during the course of the month, which includes interacting with the object, downloads of the object or views of the application information page. The rankings may differ from Facebook.com’s own “Most Active User” rankings, which are based on daily active users.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *)

Posted by brian tiong at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *)

Facebook might not be such a distant second.