The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band edition has made its way to the Sony PlayStation 3 (starting later today), Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. The game was developed by Harmonix Music Systems and published by MTV and EA.

For those of you that are in your mid-20’s like I am right now, you probably spent your high school afternoons watching MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) TV show to find out what the hottest music is.  Starting this Monday, MTV will be starting a new show called “It’s On With Alexa Chung” that will replace TRL’s time slot.  The show will have Facebook and Twitter integrated.

Many TV shows already have Facebook and Twitter integrated already, but Chung’s show will be using the services as one of the main highlights.  The audience will be able to ask questions to the celebrity guests on the show using Facebook and Twitter.

Chung, a half Chinese and half British 25 year old model is from Britain and has hosted music and pop culture programs on Channel 4 in Britain.  ”It’s On With Alexa Chung” will be filmed in the same studio that was used in TRL.  TRL was cancelled last November.

The studio audience will add MTV producers as a friend on Facebook temporarily so that the show will have access to their status updates and pictures they take from their seats.

[via The New York Times]

In 2007, MTV’s Rock Band franchise launched.  Now the franchise as a whole has hit a major milestone, $1 billion in sales.  These numbers are based on the North American market.  The numbers were released in a press release this past Thursday.  Rock Band players have also downloaded more than 40 million songs from the DLC selection.

Even though Rock Band 3 has not been announced yet, there will be a Beatles version of the game for the PSP coming out soon.  Electronic Arts is the distribution company of the game and it was developed by Harmonix.

There are about 600 songs available for download to add to the game.  It took Guitar Hero about 26 months to hit the same milestone whereas it took Rock Band about 15 months.  The complete version of Rock Band costs almost $200.

[via Ars]

The Jackass TV show on MTV started in 2000.   The show grew popular and ended up launching a movie series owned by MTV parent company Viacom.  Anyone that has registered domain names before also knows how important it is to secure the .com for their business name right away.  Future Media Architects has made things a lot more difficult for people that want to buy the .com for their business name including the Jackass franchise.

Future Media Architects is known as a cyber-squatter, a company that buys domain names and doesn’t put any content on it… only advertisements.  Future Media Architects (FMA) won’t hand Jackass.com to Viacom because they plan to create a website for it about donkeys and “their contributions to society.”  The World Intellectual Property Organization knew that the FMA was full of it but decided that they cannot hand Jackass.com over to Viacom.

Future Media Architects owns 100,000 domain names, many of which only have ads on them.  FMA is based in the Virgin Islands and has a CEO based in Kuwait.  Viacom filed the complain to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center saying that FMA was using the domain name in bad faith.  For the last 6 years, Jackass.com only had CPC ads on them, but during the case the FMA even showed future website mockups of donkey websites.

“The Respondent offered no explanation as to why it has taken approximately 4 years to launch the donkey website. The Respondent also made no effort to explain why it suddenly wishes to operate a website promoting donkeys, and what benefit it will receive from pursuing this course of action,” according to the WIPO report.

A three part test was conducted to determine that FMA was the winner of the domain name.  The first test was whether the domain name was identical or confusing to the Viacom trademark.  Yes.  The second test was whether Future Media had any legitimate interests with respond to the domain name.  Yes, but Viacom failed to show that FMA did not have any legitimate interests.  And the last test was whether the domain name was registered and used in bad faith.  FMA made no attempt to sell the domain name to Viacom after purchasing it so they won from that standpoint.

My advice to anyone interested in starting a business is to snap up the domain name right away before the FMA takes it.

[Image credit: Radio And Internet Newsletter: www.kurthanson.com/dos]

Internet radio listeners, forget about the Apple iPhone releasing on June 29th for one minute and realize the consequences of what will happen on July 15th, 2007.  Royalty rates for Internet radio will be increasing at an alarming rate and was set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington D.C.  Two days ago, about 21 Internet radio websites shut down their service to make a statement.  It was officially the Internet Radio Day of Silence on June 25th.  I was not aware that this was going on until I read a blog post on Yahoo’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal^[1].

“The new royalty rates are higher than the revenues anyone can hope to make from related advertising. In other words, we all lose money on Internet radio starting July 15th. Yahoo! has no intention of operating LAUNCHcast radio as a loss-leader,” wrote Ian C. Rogers of Yahoo! Music.  Rogers began working for Yahoo! Music three and a half years ago after Yahoo! acquired Mediacode.  Rogers wrote a brief history of the situation with the Copyright Royalty Board on the Yahoo! Music Blog.^[2]

If the bill passes, Internet radio companies will start losing money.  Less than 3% of Yahoo! Music subscribers pay for music and the money made from ads is not sufficient enough for the hike in royalty fees.  So if Yahoo! Music keeps losing money along with the other Internet radio companies, keeping them afloat won’t be easy.  Many companies cannot afford the royalty rates and may even shut down.

Royalties will increase between 300 and 1200 percent.  Internet radio currently pays double of what satellite radio pays and Internet radio listeners jumped from 45 million listeners per month to 72 million listerners since last year.  Yahoo! Music has been providing value to Internet radio listeners for years and for free.  I don’t want to see the service taken away as it is one of my favorite products made by Yahoo!

For more information, visit http://www.savenetradio.org.

[1] Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo! Music goes radio silent
[2] Yahoo! Music Blog: Yahoo! Music Goes Radio Silent

This Thursday, MTV Networks will be launching a virtual network to complement its TV show, Pimp My Ride hosted by Xzibit.  The website will be launching in celebration of the show’s new season.

MTV has a couple of other virtual networks for other shows, Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual The Hills.

Users of Virtual Pimp My Ride will be able to interact with simulations of Xzibit and Mad Mike (another host) to express what they would like to do with their car.  To buy and modify cars, users will have to use MTV currency.

It is not yet known how to attain MTV currency and whether there will be actual money involved.  I’ll write more about it as details are released.

Oodle is a startup that has over 20 million classified ads and features listings from all over the U.S. and the UK. Oodle has raised $11 million in a 2nd round from current investors, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures along with new investor, JAFCO Ventures. The first round was $5 million. Oodle has a partnership with The Washington Post (D.C.) and The Sun (British tabloid owned by News Corp).

This is Amp’d Mobile’s 5th round of funding and the amount is quite substantial. According to the SEC, Amp’d has raised $107 million. This round of funding was provided by Old Lane Management (hedge fund created by former Morgan Stanley execs) and joins previous venture backers: Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital, MTV Networks, Tudor Investments and Universal Music. The CEO of Amp’d is Peter Adderton, who also founded Boost Mobile.

Gal Trifon and Ofer Zadikario founded Eyeblaster in 1999 and has established the company as a leader in digital marketing. The company had announced today that it has raised $30 million in funding from private investors. The company has been profitable every year since 2002. The company was founded in Israel and had previously raised $10 million ($8 of which came from Insight Venture Partners). The current investors are Eli Barkat (BRM Capital), Jonathan Kolber (Koor Industries, Ltd.), Shlomo Dovrat (Carmel Ventures), Harel Beit-On (Carmel Ventures), and Nir Barkat. Eyeblaster designs rich media and standard banners.

MyCoupons, a Pittsburgh-based company that was the first online coupon site launched in 1995 and took in $750,000 to re-launch its product… as a social network. “We have invested close to three quarters of a million dollars over the past year and we are proud to be able, today, to announce our re-birth” stated a company representative [Source: alarm:clock]. Jason Wolfe, the original founder of MyCoupons had bought back the domain name from Direct Response Technologies after the Save.com (who bought it for MyCoupons.com for $20M) went bankrupt after the dot-com bust.

Ludic Labs is a San Mateo-based company that is run by Dr. Brian Totty. According to alarm:clock, Totty was most recently a Venture Advisor at Foundation Capital and was a Founding VP of Research and Development and a General Manager of Inktomi. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. “Ludic Labs is creating a mass-scale, social-media service for internet and mobile devices” stated a Ludic Labs representative. The company says that they are well funded and are planning on hiring Python, Web UI, and Internet Service developers around Silicon Valley shortly.

Boorah, a retaurant review website based in New York has raised angel funding and is now looking for venture capitalist funding. The company was founded by Nagaraju Bandaru and Eric Moyer. Both of them were previous executives for wireless broadband provider, MetroFi. Moyer presented BooRah at the past DEMO conference.

[Information Source: PaidContent and alarm:clock]