Wenda Harris Millard used to be the Co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living.  Before Martha Stewart, Millard worked for Yahoo! as the Chief Sales Officer.

Now Millard will be taking over advertising sales at MySpace.  While working for the head of advertising sales at MySpace, she will also remain as the president of median consulting company Media Link. MySpace sales boss Jeff Berman will be leaving the company as Millard joins.

Some of MySpace’s new hires include:
- Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer
- Mike Jones as COO
- iLike CEO Ali Partovi, President Hadi Partovi, and CTO Nat Brown through an acquisition
- Katie Geminder as SVP of user experience and design
- Mike Macaadan as VP of Product

Below is the full press release of the announcement:

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Rumor has it that iLike is currently in talks with MySpace about an acquisition deal.  MySpace is planning to acquire iLike at a price of $20 million.  This would be MySpace’s first acquisition since Owen Van Natta joined as CEO.

iLike has a sidebar that can be added to iTunes in order to discover new music and artists.  iLike also has an iPhone application that detects where you are located and tells you about upcoming concerts.  And iLike has a very popular Facebook application.  In total, the company has about 50 million registered users.

The company raised $16.5 million in funding from Ticketmaster, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, and Vinod Khosla.  The company was valuated at $53.2 million based on the term sheets on their last round of funding.

Facebook’s on and off rumors about a Music feature is getting pretty repetitive and stale.  If they want to launch it, JUST DO IT ALREADY!  The media (specifically the New York Post) has been lead on to believe Facebook is still contemplating the launch of a music service, especially given the success of MySpace Music.  Facebook is reportedly in talks with Rhapsody, iLike, Lala, and iMeem.

All of the aforementioned services already have Facebook Applications launched.  What possible further discussions can be taking place?  All of them have their own music purchase affiliation system running.  And it’s not like Facebook’s demographic is based on bands and music like MySpace is.  Facebook’s demographic is primarily still high school and university students not looking to start their own bands.  The MySpace demographic is the type of people that think they can make a comment on one of the A-list music artist’s profile and think they’ll instantly get a record deal.  I’ve seen this happen way too many times on MySpace.

If Facebook wants to get into the music foray, they should acquire iLike outright.  Facebook already has millions in funding and an inflated valuation.  iLike has a massive music user-base (over 25 million) and advertises at major sporting events.  And iLike already has a major relationship established with all of the big music record companies.

iLike is Facebook’s most popular music application with over 5 million monthly active users.  If Facebook bought them out, then the possibilites between the two companies would be endless. 

  
Jobster co-founder and former CTO, Phil Bogle left Jobster last year to start a company called MergeLab.  MergeLab is shutting down even though they were still in alpha mode so Bogle has joined iLike as an engineer. 

“Some of the things I like about iLike: the team combines smarts with personal integrity and minimal ego; they ship every week and iterate and learn rapidly; they have a small team and flat org structure without excessive overhead for meetings, process, or politics; they’ve built a valuable service with tens of millions of satisfied users (their FB app ranks among the top in terms of user ratings); each developer owns substantial feature areas; and they have interesting problems in scale, data mining, syndication, and user experience. (Several fine developers I’ve worked with in the past are here, including Mark Aiken, Scott Haug, and Ray Fortna.),” wrote Bogle on his blog. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook has often times cited iLike as a company that makes great use of the Facebook Application platform.  Ticketmaster is an investor in iLike.  And iLike advertisements often times appear at the back of tickets sold through the Ticketmaster.

What Bogle is working on at iLike right now is hush-hush, but he’ll post it on his blog when iLike ships it out.  In March, I wrote that Jobster lost $11 million in 2007 and is seeking additional funding.

Information Source:
[1] SeattlePi.com/John Cook’s Venture Blog: Jobster founder Phil Bogle joins iLike

hi5 Networks Inc., Qloud, and iLike have collaborated using Google’s OpenSocial software to deliver two new music applications.  The two new applications will leverage hi5’s 70 million user count to provide the service that is similar to Facebook’s iLike music application.  These two applications are the first to use OpenSocial to go live on hi5.

“We are very pleased to increase the depth of our music offering for our members around the world, making it easier for them to find, listen to and post more of the music they like on their hi5 profiles.”
“These collaborations with iLike and Qloud really demonstrate how well the OpenSocial initiative can make it simpler for developers to build useful, fun and engaging applications for hi5 users.”

-Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO and Co-Founder of hi5 Networks.

The iLike application will give hi5 users the ability to embed songs and videos within their profiles.  And the Qloud My Music application will allow users to legally play songs and videos directly from their iTunes libraries within their profiles.

hi5 is based in San Francisco, Calif. and started in 2003.  The iLike hi5 music application is also available in Spanish.

The Seattle Times has a list of some free downloads that are available for Christmas today. eMusic.com is offering 25 free movie downloads and iLike is also offering a similar service. eMusic requires a credit card number to be entered, but iLike does not according to The Seattle Times.

The only drawback is that you are asked personal information when registering for these services and there are some advertisements. The companies may also encourage you to pay for premium services as well. Earlier this month, Ticketmaster had invested for partial ownership in iLike.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is also offering 25 free e-mail addresses when registering for OfficeLive. Users are able to choose a domain name and Microsoft pays for the registration cost and offers the web building tools for the service.

It wasn’t too long ago since GarageBand took a $2.5 million investment from David Weiden of Khosla Ventures and former COO of AOL Time Warner, Bob Pittman, and launched iLike, a service that helps you determine what music you may be interested in based on your and your friends’ taste.

Garageband crashed during the Internet bubble burst and then rose again from the ashes in 2002. Apple has a similar product group and software name as iLike and Garageband. Apple’s iLife division has developed Garageband, a software that eases the creation of podcasts. Initially when iLike was launched, Garageband allowed users to upload music and then would decide which bands were to be featured.

October 25, 2006: The opening day for iLike:
iLike launched on October 25, 2006 and saw an immediate approval reaction from the public as proved by the Alexa chart below:

Some of the publicity iLike had to cause this spike in traffic is partially responsible by Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch, who reviewed iLike on the day before it was released. The CEO of iLike provided feedback on the TechCrunch post by stating that the review did not focus on the social networking aspect of iLike, a key selling feature. The users in the social network surrounding iLike take responsibility for reviewing and rating the independent artist music that is submitted on iLike as well as the mainstream music which should deter any skeptics about the quality of indie music. Later that week, VentureBeat also gave exposure to iLike’s release which also must have contributed to the spike.

Above is a picture of the iLike team found from the iLike Team Blog, who had been working on the iLike development for 6 months before the company launch. iLike is run by two twin brothers, Ali and Hadi Partovi. At the time during launch, iLike was backed by 25 engineers based in Seattle, California, and Australia. I’m not sure what the current employee numbers are.

November 2, 2006: iLike Team decides to add a music feature to complement their 30 second music preview:
“Not just music clips” exclaimed Hadi Partovi. “But music videos!” The iLike Team then sat down and started plugging-and-chugging this feature into the iLike user interface. Within 72 hours, the iLike team turned an idea into specifications, began development, started testing, and then sent the new feature into production. Hence the reason for my post title. “What I Like About iLike.” Any company that can have such a quick turnaround time on an idea gets my vote.

November 7, 2006: YouTube Features Launch; A couple days later, Michael Arrington Writes About It:
The idea behind this new feature is that if music videos are available for the selected songs, iLike users can click on “Play Video (if available)” and if it is, then a mini-embedded video from YouTube will open up directly below the song title on iLike. Here’s a screenshot:

November 9, 2006: VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall reports that iLike Has Quietly Acquired FotoDunk:
The four founders of FotoDunk are David McIntosh, Daniel Kluesing, Alan Rutledge, and Darian Shirazi. “These guys met with the iLike folks at in a Fulsom St. bar in SF to sign the documents, but were forced to go into an alleyway to finish the deal because there were underage,” stated Matt Marshall. FotoDunk is a software application that allow users to upload photos from their phone into a Flash widget which can be embedded in MySpace profiles.

November 10, 2006: New technology company, Pulse 2.0 reviews and submits an Approval for iLike:
I strongly believe that iLike has come a long way in such a short time. I’ve never heard of a company that has produced strong results for a company that could potentially absorb marketshare from Yahoo! Music and Amazon.com. Now if only there was a way for iLike to open their own music store rather than sending music customers to Amazon.com and iTunes.