The power of the Internet has given a platform for independent artists to market themselves without having a music label behind them.  And TuneSquare is no exception to provide such marketing.  I have seen a few different sites that allow artists to upload their music with some revenue-sharing, but TuneSquare is different from other indie music websites. 

TuneSquare allows customers to buy music that is DRM-free, just like the new Amazon.com MP3 store.  But the most distinguishing feature of TuneSquare is that music on the site is free!  Some of TuneSquares’ competition includes Amie Street and Spiral Frog. 

Users search for songs by categories or by searching, watch a video ad, and that is all.  Musicians can share advertising revenue from TuneSquare.  As Download Squad points out, since the musicians aren’t well known, its rather unlikely that TuneSquare will get a lot of traffic.  But TuneSquare provides music labels a portal to search for fresh talent.

There isn’t really any background information about who created TuneSquare or where they are based on the company website.  The only details that the website gives is that they’re run by several international companies.

NebuAd is a Redwood City, Calif. based behavioral targeting company that works with Internet Service Providers to determine how advertisers should design their media for different markets.  The names of the ISPs they work with seems to be confidential and undisclosed on their website. 

“NebuAd combines this web-wide view of pages navigated, searches performed, ads clicked, etc., with the industry’s most accurate targeting capabilities, matching consumer interests across more than 1,000 categories. And all of this is done without collecting and using any personally identifiable information,” states their Advertisers Overview page.

The investors of NebuAd includes Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures.  NebuAd has roughly $30 million in funding and has ambitious plans for operation expansion.  Considering the market opportunities, its an excellent time to sell services related advertising analytics such as those provided by NebuAd.  Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and AOL have all acquired digital advertising companies for billions of dollars, thus indicating that such opportunities will be around for a long time now.

A lot of expectations have been built-up for Joost: The company raised $45 million in funding in May 2007.  And since the company started, they’ve hired a new CEO and even gone through a name change.  Also while the application is still in development, so many changes have been made in the Internet video market. 

Around the time Joost finally released an invite-only release, Pulse 2.0, GigaOM, and Mashable were sending floods of invites manually.  The biggest problem with Joost is that users have to install an application that requires some of the highest hardware specifications.  It would probably take a half-hour for the application to pull up the video menus in developing countries that recently were introduced to broadband Internet.  There is a lot of aesthetic fluff surrounding the application that isn’t necessary for Joost’s primary purpose either.  There’s all types of flashy swirls and videos just surrounding the loading of the application. 

What is Joost’s primary purpose?
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I recently tagged some of my closest friends to a random photo of people I don’t know in India eating ice cream for the sake of adding humor to their day.  Little did I know that my friends would write a lot of comments on that random photo, thus sending a lot of e-mails to everyone that I tagged.  Facebook is a total nuisance for that feature.

So what is Facebook doing about it? 

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Yesterday Steve Jobs appeared before 300 Vice Presidents at Yahoo! to give them a pep talk that its okay to be the company that falls once in a while.  After all, Apple made a come-back and so can Yahoo!  However, at the rate that Steve Jobs is angering his many customers, it would come to no surprise that Steve Jobs motivational speeches are simply as effective as Matt Foley, SNL’s lovable character that lives in a van down by the river played by the late Chris Farley.

The effectiveness and realities of Steve Jobs speeches have been questioned to the point that Guy L. “Bud” Tribble, the Vice President of Software Technology at Apple Inc. coined a term after them.  The term is reality distortion field [RDF] and its the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe anything through the mix of charisma, charm, exaggeration, and marketing [Wikipedia].   RDF can also be considered deception.

What the Yahoo! VPs decide to make out of the keynote (also known as Stevenotes), is a mystery.  But I believe if Yahoo! was simply seeking motivation, they should have called upon a Matt Foley-like character to tell them to get back on the right track or they’ll end up living in a van down by the river.  The Matt Foley-like character would also probably tell them to stop creating avatars created by someone that was induced with something:

The Matt Foley video is available on YouTube:
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=EV7j5ZqWgYg[/youtube]

[Information Source: GigaOM]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=bkP_G8AxtIA[/youtube]

Yesterday, Apple released firmware 1.1.1, an application that “neutered the handset” according to Gizmodo.  One of the reasons why iPhone reached popularity so swiftly wasn’t just the technology built-in, but because of the opportunity that software developers had to modify the console.  This is why Gizmodo, a top 1,000 website that focuses on hardware, rated the iPhone from “Wait” in July 2007 to “Buy” and now switched reviews to “‘Don’t hold your breath.’ I’m done with this handset until third-party apps come back.”

Why did Apple release this firmware?  It is believed that there are third party applications that aid in unlocking the iPhone so that it would work with other telecommunications providers.  Currently Apple shares company revenue with solely with AT&T for the iPhone.

“Programs like the faux-GPS, IM clients, Flickr Upload, and NES emulator—what did they ever do but make the iPhone far better than the stock original? They made it far more competitive with open-platform superphones like the Nokia N95, to which I will now be switching” wrote Gizmodo’s Brian Lam.  “I flew back from NY to SF today. While there, I would have liked to have pushed my photos from the trip to flickr; I would have liked to have played NES games on the subway. I would have liked to have used the Navizon GPS thing to figure out where the hell I was at any given moment, and when I used one of those web 2.0 IM clients, my battery took a huge hit, and I missed a lot of messages because Safari couldn’t tell me I was getting IMs while out of the browser. Very annoying.”

The firmware is known to brick some of the phones that have applications installed on them.  Many phones with these applications aren’t repairable after third party applications on them for now.  The new term for these phones that don’t work after the firmware update is called: iBricks now.

Xoom is one of the biggest money transfer companies on the Internet today.   The $20.29 million Series E funding was sent to Xoom from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Fidelity Ventures, and DAG Ventures.

Xoom is based in San Francisco, Calif. and previously raised $15 million in Series D in 2006.  Cumulatively, Xoom raised over $50 million to power its business operations.

Xoom makes money transfer easy in 4 steps:
1.) Enter your contact info, recipient’s info, and the amount of money to be sent.
2.) Select a delivery method.
3.) Select a payment method (Visa/MasterCard/eCheck, Discover, Paypal).
4.) Send your recipient a tracking method.

However, due to all the third parties involved, its rather difficult to support all of the developing countries for their operations.  This is why Xoom is limited to only Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Phillippines, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Vietnam.  I’m assuming that with this new round of funding, Xoom will be able to expand its operations to support other countries. 

Recipients of money transfers for Xoom do not necessarily require a bank account or Internet connection to receive funds because Xoom has money transfer partners to provide ways to send money to family and friends in other countries.

Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates, Anne Mitchell of Fidelity Ventures, Keith Hartz of the founding team of Xoom, and Keith Rabois sit on the Board of Directors for Xoom.

I first heard about this on ValleyWag and I had to agree that this belongs under their tag, WTF. “Now avatars can get decked out in Armani duds — horridly pixelated Second Life versions of them, anyway — and if they so desire, connect directly with the online store to spend money on actual goods,” stated ValleyWag writer, Mary Jane Irwin.

I refuse to ever sign up for a Second Life account because I think the whole idea of building relationships between other people on the Internet through the form of avatars is just sickening. Buying stuff with actual money for your avatar is also sickening. I think that its stupider than the idea of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that were hot in the 90’s. And now Armani is giving us the option to not only buy stuff, but actually buy luxury stuff for virtual reality characters.

My advice to today’s youth or grown-men that find themselves registering characters on Second Life and buying them clothes from Armani’s Second Life store, please look in the mirror and re-examine your life. It is probably best that you reacquaint yourself with nature. Just imagine if you fast-forward 50-75 years from now and you are on your death-bed, but the only thing you remember doing with your life is living the life of a virtual reality character and buying it consumer merchandise–you probably wouldn’t think much of yourself. Get a hobby and socialize with people that you actually know for crying out loud.

Information Sources:
[1] ValleyWag: Armani sets up shop in Second Life
[2] Reuters: Armani opens store in virtual world’s Second Life

RealNetworks, Inc. (NASDAQ:RNWK) is known for its digital media software that revolves around music.  RealNetworks’ develops popular music software, Rhapsody.  RealNetworks’ market capitalization as of right now is about $1 billion and they’re planning to acquire a small gaming company called GameTrust for under $50 million.  GameTrust develops flash games that revolve around contests and multiplayer abilities.

GameTrust  was founded in 2002 by Adeo Ressi.  Adeo sold a company he started in 1994 called Total New York Inc. to AOL.  AOL rolled Total New York into AOL Digital Cities.  Adeo also started methodfive, inc., brought in $2 million from Pricewaterhouse Coopers and then sold the company to Xceed for $88 million.

Some of RealNetworks’ previous acquisitions inlcude Zylom Media Group B.V., WiderThan Co., Ltd. and Atravia Latin America Ltda. in 2006.  And RealNetworks acquired Sony NetServices in 2007.  Sony NetServices was a joint venture between Sony DADC and Sony Europe.

[Information Source: Paidcontent]

Demand Media Inc. is a Santa Monica, Calif. based company that was founded by Richard Rosenblatt. Roseblatt was the former President of Intermix Media, parent company of MySpace. News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media became the part company of MySpace when they acquired Intermix.

The company has raised a 3rd round of funding at $100 million by investment banking company, Goldman-Sachs. The previous investors include 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and Spectrum Equity Partners [Source: alarm:clock]. Demand Media has raised a total of $320 million as of now.

So what does Demand Media actually do?

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Netvibes has recently relaunched their Ecosystem, a widget directory. Netvibes partnered NYTimes, CBS Interactive, CNET Asia, Clearspring, Widgetbox, RockYou, Miniclip, NewsGator, and yourminis for more widgets.
Some of the Premium Widgets has tabs that provide an easier way to find content and now finding widgets are easy to find by categories.  I would say that as of right now, Daily Comics is my favorite widget.  Once you add it to your Netvibes account, there is a list of comics.  If you put your mouse over a cartoon name, it will show today’s comic for that title.

What I’m still waiting for in terms of additions to the Ecosystem by Netvibes however is the ability to create public Universes.  I subscribe to many resourceful RSS feeds about technology (including the New York Times Technology section and Techmeme) and I want others in my space to benefit from what I read.  Between TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, Read/WriteWeb, ValleyWag and myself, I am fairly certain that we subscribe to the same feeds.

 “Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” stated Bill Carr, Amazon.com’s VP for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) officially launched Amazon MP3 today, an online store that sells over 2 million songs from over 180,000 aritsts and 20,000 labels.  All of these MP3s do not contain DRM (digital rights management) software.  This already provides a competitive advantage and incentive to use Amazon over iTunes.  When purchasing a song from iTunes, a user is limited to what they can do with the song.

Most of the songs are priced from $0.89-$0.99.  The top 100 best-selling songs are generally marked as $0.89 on Amazon MP3.  Most albums are from $5.99-$9.99 on Amazon MP3 as well. 

Amazon is also utilizing 1-Click shopping technology that allows users to seamlessly add MP3s to Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, etc.  Amazon MP3 could drastically effect shopping for CDs in stores and we will probably see a lot of iTunes’ song purchasing market-share get taken away from them.

Amazon MP3 can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011 

News Corporation-owned social network, MySpace.com has recently launched a mobile version of their site. The official announcement will be made soon. The URL for the mobile site is: http://mobile.myspace.com.

“Accessing the Internet from your mobile phone will soon be as common as text messaging and voice calling,” stated John Smelzer, the senior VP of Mobile at Fox Interactive. Fox is a subsidiary of News Corporation.

Other Fox Interactive Media properities, Photobucket, FoxSports.com, IGN, and AskMen.com will also soon be going mobile. MySpace mobile users will be able to send/receive messages and friend requests, comments, add posts to bulletins, update their blogs, and find/search friends.

Information Source:
[1] Wilmington Star: Myspace to Launch Ad-Supported Cell Phone

Buddy Media, the owner of Acebucks was said to have received $1.5 million recently by a variety of well-known investors.  The investors include Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus, James Altucher, and Howard Lindzon.

The purpose of the funding is to expand the operational and marketing abilities of the Acebucks Facebook Application.  Acebucks’ aim is to become the leading virtual currency on Facebook.  Acebucks will be opening an API soon and other developers will be able to integrate Acebucks into different applications.

“”Facebook members can earn AceBucks by playing games, adding applications, completing surveys, inviting friends, opening a store and more. AceBucks can be used to buy both virtual and real goods and services through the AceBucks Mall and user-created stores,” states Buddy Media’s homepage.

Buddy Media is founded by Michael Lazerow.  Lazerow sold companies, Golfserv to Time Warner and U-Wire to Student Advantage.  Lazerow’s personal web site is available at: http://www.lazerow.com/.

Information Source:
[1] AllFacebook: Breaking: Acebucks Raises 1.5 Million
[2] Mashable: Facebook Virtual Currency AceBucks Raises $1.5 Million