Tag Archives: Seeqpod
Microsoft Rumored To Be In Talks For Seeqpod Acquisition
In late April, Seeqpod founder Kasian Franks reported that his company is in talks to become acquired by a major company. Seeqpod recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to all of the litigation that they are dealing with from major music labels. Now the homepage of Seeqpod contains a cryptic message stating “While we’re cocooned for metamorphosis… ”
The term metamorphosis links directly to http://search.microsoft.com indicating that Microsoft may be the company behind a potential acquisition. Seeqpod is rumored to be selling their search technology to Microsoft rather than the whole company. Seeqpod team members may also be seeking employment from the software giant.
Seeqpod’s search engine has indexed about 14 million playable audio files across the web. Seeqpod also holds five patents related to this technology. Seeqpod started at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. On the homepage of Seeqpod, there is also a link suggestion to follow a band called Arlo Hero on Twitter.
Categories Kasian Franks, Microsoft Corporation, Seeqpod
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Seeqpod To Be Acquired?
Wired.com is reporting that an acquisition of Seeqpod is expected to take place very soon by a major new media company. This news arrives about one month after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Even though Franks did not reveal who the buyer is, he stated that the company is large enough to persuade major labels to stop suing Seeqpod and embrace it instead. Seeqpod is currently in the final stages of acquisition talk. The company scours the Internet to find MP3s being hosted and streams it to the public. Once the acquisition takes place, the company will use Seeqpod’s technology to find videos made of Flash and other file types.
[via Wired]
SeeqPod Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
SeeqPod.com was founded by Kasian Franks. SeeqPod is a music search engine that spun out of a project at the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. However the search engine has had a stroke of bad luck as they have had to file a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
SeeqPod had raised $7 million in funding from undisclosed investors and is doing this out of fear over some multibillion dollar lawsuits. Some of the music labels suing SeeqPod include Warner Music, Capitol Records, and EMI. Some of the music companies even went after developers simply using the SeeqPod API.
SeeqPod is similar to Napster in the sense that it never actually hosted files on their actual servers, but it still crawls illegally copied music from servers and across the web. SeeqPod encourages the adherence of the DMCA according to their copyright document.
[via TechCrunch]
Categories Seeqpod
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SeeqPod: The Best Music Search Engine I’ve Seen So Far
“The amount of music on the Internet is much larger than music found in localized catalogs or physical inventories,” stated Kasian Franks, founder of SeeqPod. “It’s also a well known fact now that the Internet has a growing inventory filled with mashups, mixes and music of all kinds.”
Mo Kakwan, Pulse 2.0′s Silicon Valley correspondent attended the sfnewtech meetup a couple days ago and he informed me about an up and coming music search engine called Seeqpod. I checked it out last night and I was extremely impressed by the service.
First of all, I’ve never seen a search engine that shows what its crawler is indexing in real-time. And secondly, SeeqPod does an amazing job focusing on a specific niche by incorporating a music search with an Adobe Flash-controlled playlist. Its very simple. You search for a song, click play, save it to a playlist if desired, and the properties of where the MP3 is pulled from is provided.
I’m a huge fan of mashups, so I typed it into SeeqPod and below is the results that were found (click the thumbnail to enlarge):
The picture shows that Seeqpod found 703 results. But I typed in mashups again a couple minutes later and it found 808 results. The beauty of Seeqpod’s search is that it depends on users to delete tracks that no longer work, but is constantly indexing new songs. There are options to embed tracks and share tracks as well.
Kakwan informed me that one of the key takeaways from Franks’ pitch at sfnewtech is that the importance of web sites like SeeqPod will continue to increase as the music industry realizes that music is to be treated like content. Just like you search for web sites using searches, music searches are becoming equally embraced.
One thing to note as you use Seeqpod is how they’ve hidden access to the actual URL of songs found from you. It seems as though Franks and team took efforts to keep Seeqpod from becoming a big illegal mp3 swap area. Searching for a song is a breeze. I searched for Junior Senior and within moments had their entire discography blasting through my speakers courtesy of the inbuilt playlist and player. Then I started looking at ways to find the page on which the songs were residing. I was only able to find options to buy the tunes, via itunes or amazon. Or use their inbuilt flash player to embed the playlist I had created or a little player for the individual song. There were other options to send the song to a friend or share your playlist too.
Seeqpod indexs music from all over the net but does not easily give you access to the single thing you need to download the tune. I say “easily” because if you hover your mouse over the song you can get a complete url to the song, which you can painstakingly type in if you are so inclined to take the effort. Seeqpod is like going to a national park. You can enjoy yourself while you’re there, but you can’t take a bit of the park with you when you leave. The reasons for this set up are clear with how ridiculously the RIAA and music industry fights technology that makes music easily accessible. The no URL layout of the site maybe a single line defense to stay in business. That’s how they support their position that they are not a search engine to steal music.
Perhaps in time as the music industry starts realizing that they cannot run the same way as they used to precautions of no url will be lifted and the music will be completely free.
Kasian Franks is the co-founder and CEO of SeeqPod. Seeqpod was evolved from a project out of University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
Edit: By Mo Kakwan