In This Update:
• SAG Delays Strike Vote until At Least Mid-January
• Warner Music Removes Its Videos from YouTube as Licensing Talks Stall
• Ping.fm Gets Angel Investment from LinkedIn Founder and Creative Commons CEO
• Simple Blogging Startup Posterous Raises $725K
• Omniture Signs 15 New Startup Partners to its Genesis Network
• EU Prefers iTunes 2 to 1 But Amazon Gaining Share
• Robertson Launches Mobile Music Search Site
• Add Stock Quotes To Every Post with Upcoming Wikinvest Plugin
• Animoto’s iPhone App Makes Instant Slideshows from Your Pictures
• What Will Sell in 2009? SaaS, Mobile Apps & Security
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SAG Delays Strike Vote until At Least Mid-January
PAIDCONTENT
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has delayed voting on a potential strike until at least January 14, THR says. The actors’ union had planned to send strike authorization ballots to its members on January 2-though it had already started asking members to approve a strike vote when talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers ultimately broke down in late November. The two parties struggled to hammer out compensation terms for Web content, as well as residuals for new media and DVD sales, among other details. The report says the move to delay the vote came after a NY faction of the union spoke out against a possible strike, citing the poor economy as a whole, but SAG spokesperson Pamela Greenwalt would not comment. An AMPTP spokesperson said he knew the vote had been delayed but declined to comment further.
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Warner Music Removes Its Videos from YouTube as Licensing Talks Stall
NEW YORK TIMES
Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music’s videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening. Music video streams may be a new battleground between Google, which wants to expand its video advertising business, and media companies, which expect to be fully compensated for their online content.
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Ping.fm Gets Angel Investment from LinkedIn Founder and Creative Commons CEO
PAIDCONTENT
Ping.fm, a social media application that lets users cross-post messages to multiple sites has received an undisclosed amount of angel funding. Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman are behind the investment. Ping.fm launched in March and grew to include more than 30 networks (including Facebook, Twitter, WordPress blogs and Delicious) but it had been plagued with service issues and system overloads as it scales. In a blog post, founders Sean McCullough and Adam Duffy said they plan to use the money for new hardware to improve reliability, as well as add new features. Similar apps include Youmeo which acts like a single dashboard for all of a user’s given social media profiles and Digsby, a notification tool that lets users manage their IM, email and social media accounts.
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Simple Blogging Startup Posterous Raises $725K
VENTUREBEAT
Posterous, a startup that simplifies the blogging process, has raised $725,000 of new angel funding. The San Francisco company allows you to write and post blog entries any way you choose – through the web site, through email, or via SMS text message. You don’t have to create an account, or even post on the Posterous site itself. Instead, you can use it as a “middle man” for other blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. Posterous was incubated by Y Combinator, and I thought it was one of the most promising startups to present at Y Combinator’s most recent launch day.
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Omniture Signs 15 New Startup Partners to its Genesis Network
CENTER NETWORKS
Online business optimization software provider (that’s their tagline!) Omniture announced last week a number of new partners for their Genesis program. Omniture Genesis brings together analytics and online marketing tools together under one customer dashboard. It’s interesting to see Omniture in the news while I rarely ever hear about WebTrends anymore. The list of new partners is interesting because many of them are startups we’ve covered here on CN. The new partner list includes: Brightcove, ClickTaleour, Keibi, ShareThis, and Visible Technologies. It’s a smart move for the startups – they gain a bit of visibility and a good deal of distribution. Omniture has a wide reaching customer base worldwide and could provide a spark for each of the startups.
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EU Prefers iTunes 2 to 1 But Amazon Gaining Share
HYPERBOT
European broadband consumers who regularly listen to music on computers and MP3 players are twice as likely to purchase music from iTunes than from any other online store according to research from Strategy Analytics. The new report which is based on online interviews with broadband users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK, also notes that there is a significant difference between casual users and heavy users. “Heavy users show a much stronger preference for buying digital music from iTunes or directly from a record label, while casual users demonstrate a relatively higher preference for buying digital music from big Internet brands, such as Amazon, or directly from their broadband service provider,” says analyst Jia Wu.
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Robertson Launches Mobile Music Search Site
SOCAL TECH
Former MP3.com founder Michael Robertson has launched a new, mobile music web site called TuneRoom, Robertson announced Monday, which will help mobile phone users search and find MP files for their cell phones. The new WAP site allows users to search for music tracks, and can automatically send MP3 tracks wirelessly to a cell phone. According to Robertson, you can brose TuneRoom from a PC or mobile phone, and select songs which will be sent wireless to your mobile phone; the site lists more than 150,000 songs, which are available for free from the site.
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Add Stock Quotes To Every Post with Upcoming Wikinvest Plugin
TECHCRUNCH
Financial bloggers are going to like this one. Wikinvest is getting ready to release a Livequotes plugin that automatically adds a stock quote every time a publicly traded company is mentioned in a post. It auto-detects company names and adds the ticker symbol, price, and the percent change in parentheses after the name, with links to the Wikinvest page for that stock. It also can add links for financial terms and definitions such as “PEG ratio” or “price to book.”
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Animoto’s iPhone App Makes Instant Slideshows from Your Pictures
VENTUREBEAT
Everyone loves slideshows. You sit back and watch as the images before you help you reminisce about a past event. But why wait? Now you can make a slideshow minutes after taking photos thanks to Animoto’s new iPhone app. You simply select between eight and 16 pictures, arrange the order you want them to show up in, pick a song and let Animoto encode a video pulling it all together. Once you’re done, you can watch the video on your iPhone (in Quicktime format), edit it or share it via email with anyone. By far the longest step in the process is the encoding, and that only takes a few minutes.
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What Will Sell in 2009? SaaS, Mobile Apps & Security
GIGAOM
The Wall Street Journal talked to many people to find out where companies would be spending their precious dollars in 2009. Here is a quick look at what may sell in 2009: Software as a Service: Today 10 percent of total software sales come from on-demand software. Expect that number to rise as penny-pinching CEOs finally realize that SaaS is good for the bottom line. Even Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, has changed his tune about SaaS. Mobile Productivity Apps: Thanks to the success of Apple’s iTunes Apps store, many companies are toying with mobile apps that will help increase productivity. The upcoming BlackBerry Apps store is going to give this mobile-productivity trend a push.
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