Posts Tagged 'spotify'

As my trusty side kick Hannah is off getting muddy in a field this week at Glastonbury, Tim, our Head of Search has stepped-in in her place. It’s another week on the web, here we go…

World Cup fever hits the internet

Its World Cup time again and chances are that you are reading this blog post with one eye on another open browser window streaming a game. Occasionally your smart phone beeps with a tweeted reaction to a wonder strike, or an old school friend uploads a photo of himself blowing a vuvuzela in the stands. You know about it as it happens. You have passionate arguments with fellow fans in other hemispheres during the game. You form and share opinions well before the host in the studio has time to read the half time auto cue. Often you hear about the goal before the slightly delayed TV coverage shows it. For many viewers, connecting their HD screens to their broadband connections, television is nothing more than another media feed. This is a massive paradigm shift.

According to Akamai networks internet usage is up over 233% over normal. 11 million visitor requests to its network per minute on the first day of the football carnival. This has smashed the previous record which was for the inauguration of Barrack Obama and remember that this was not even for one of the big games. Wait for the figures for the final. The internet is now part of the experience.

AOL sells Bebo

Back in April we spoke of how AOL was to shut down social networking site Bebo if they couldn’t find a buyer. Step forward two months and Bebo has now been sold but for a fraction of the price AOL bought it for a mere two years ago. Although details of the sale have not been officially released its been widely reported that Criterion Capital Partners, a private equity group specializing in facilitating in growth plans and turnarounds were sold Bebo for less that $10m (£.6.8m), that’s less than 2% of the $850m (£574m) AOL paid for it in March 2008. More about that in the press release here. So where did it all go wrong for the once social behemoth? Bebo was sold at a time it was riding a wave of growth and opportunity, one of the first social networks of its kind, Bebo was hugely popular particularly with the teenage audience. For AOL it represented the chance to gain traction in the rapidly emerging social media channel. As we reported in April, social network new kids such as  Facebook – supported by robust ecosystems -  arrived on the block and began to steal scale and popularity from Bebo. In an article on Cnet news, Tim Armstrong CEO of AOL (who wasn’t yet at the company when it paid $850m for the social network) offers his view saying “the exorbitant price tag itself got in the way from the start since it made expectations so high. Bebo was a major distraction for the company,” Armstrong said. “Every meeting I went to, everyone was talking about spending $850 million, that it wasn’t really working out that well.” Bebo wasn’t a bad product, he insisted, but “the execution piece of it really fell apart.”

Twitter’s promoted trending topics

Figuring out how it can monetise its service has long been Twitter’s challenge. Its first ad revenue model came in the shape of Promoted Tweets, closely followed by the newly launched promoted Trending Topics – of which Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3 was the first brand to test out the waters. The promoted Trending Topics are the same as a regular trending topics, the main point of difference being that a yellow box will appear next to the promoted trend to make the users aware of its paid for nature. Techcrunch have a few words to say around this “First, it’s interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities.”

Stuff of the web we think you might like:

1966 spotify playlist: Created by us today, the day that England take on Slovenia for a place in the world cup second round. Turns out 1966 was not only a great year for British football but a cracking year for music too.
10 fun facts you didn’t know about Google: By their own admission they’ve never been a conventional company but little did we know they rent goats to mow the lawn and their first storage unit was made of Lego.
Embrace Life: This poignant and tear-jerking internet ad has become a global YouTube hit with more than 12 million views.
OGC Open.com: First of its kind 3D browser based online golf experience for all you sports fans out there.
The big picture: Images so often more powerful than words

An alternative way to view the world (and a map)

Take a minute to marvel at Google Earth View. Unveiled this Monday, this new feature to Google maps fuses the popular map application with Google Earth.
For users, this means the ability to view the earth from a three dimensional perspective complete with stunning imagery which lets you explore mountains, terrains and cityscapes in full detail. This doesn’t stop at a ground-floor level; you can even dive below the ocean surface to roam around the Titanic. Then, in a single fluid motion switch right back to the traditional Google Maps view.
Dramatising the 3D capabilities even further, the inclusion of world-famous landmarks including the Taj Majal, Sydney Opera house and Coliseum of Rome, available at the single click of a button in the left hand navigation, ups the wow-factor of the overall experience.
As mentioned by Google Product Manage Peter Birch “The new Earth view is on the Google Earth API and browser plugin, which make it easy for web developers to include Google Earth in their own websites. If you’ve already installed Google Earth, you can start using Earth view right away. Otherwise, with one click you can download and install the browser plugin and you’ll be ready to start exploring in 3D.”
Its not often a map can get us excited, but this one’s a game-changer. Have a play for yourself or watch the video demo by clicking the large image above.

A nod to the past to appreciate the present

Such is the fast paced nature of the web, eyes are always firmly fixed on the next trend or innovation. However, over the past week it caught our attention that it’s been the anniversary of a couple of internet firsts. So we thought we pay tribute to these important milestones that shaped the web as we know it today.

On April 23rd  2005, the very first video was uploaded to Youtube. Shot by Yakov Lapitsk and titled ‘me at the zoo’ this nineteen second clip sparked a new phenomenon with a massive 24 hours of video content now uploaded every minute, daily. From humble beginnings to the second largest search engine in the world – happy 5th birthday Youtube.

On April 22nd 1993, Mosaic – the first web browser capable of displaying both text and images on the same page, in the same window – was launched, bringing life, colour and creativity to the web, which until that point was predominantly text based. As Wired put it “Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.”

Spotify vs Mflow

Spotify has gone social, with more than just some minor tweaks on it’s new version 0.4.3, a ‘total music management platform’, launched yesterday. Spotify has stepped up it’s game since Mflow was released publicly last week and aims to engage with users and increase the amount of time they spend on the software, increasing appeal to advertisers. Users now have an editable public profile with an inbox where they can send and receive music from friends, and view and subscribe to other users playlists and favorite artists. It’s got the Twitter popularity aspect too, you can monitor how popular your music tastes are by how many users subscribe to your playlists. You can import music from your Windows Media Player or iTunes library, integrating it straight into your Spotify library and the Gracenote digital file identification service has also been added, a function which searches for and updates the track names of your music files. Users can link their profile to their Facebook account, instantly add friends profiles and see any music they’ve posted on Facebook in Spotify’s feed. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify told the BBC, “We’ve enabled people to share music through their friends on Facebook really, really simply and we’ve also managed to make it so you can play your own music through the Spotify client. That’s in a nutshell what we’ve done.”