Week of November 12, 2007

Ad-Supported Music, Two Tales

Friday, November 16, 2007

Ad-supported digital download service Spiralfrog filed its financials, and it's not pretty: The service lost $3.4 million in the third quarter with revenues of $20,400. With only $2.3 million in cash, the service is facing a significant uphill battle.

While the news was poor for Spiralfrog, MySpace certainly sees a future in ad-supported music. Through an agreement with Textango, MySpace will begin allowing downloads of songs paid for with ad support. So far only one band is lined up--Pennywise--but the potential is real.

One interesting aspect is that Textango is powering the downloads in exchange for MySpace promotion via "friends." To download music, you simply have to add Textango as a friend.

U2 Releases song via iLike

Thursday, November 15, 2007

It doesn't hurt to have friends in high places. Music site iLike has released an unreleased U2 track from the eighties entitled "Wave Of Sorrow." The song is going to be released next week as part of the DVD re-release of The Joshua Tree. U2 is connected to iLike through investment (Elevation Partners) and friendship (Bono is friends with one of the iLike staff).

PS3 Price Drop

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Earlier this week we outlined the fact that the XBox 360 was the leader in the game console space. Earlier this month Sony halved the price of their 80 GB Playstation 3 and the results have been impressive for them: Sales have doubled. While cutting prices is not the best way to garner long term market share in a technological segment, it sure seems not to hurt in the short run.

IBM Offers Distributed Computing in 2008

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

One of the real trends in technology on the IT side is distributed computing: The ability of a company to spread the workload of its processing across a wide range of computers. Google does this in house with its massive server farms, but this efficiency is beyond the capability of most companies. IBM is looking to change that next year as they offer "Blue Cloud" to their corporate clients. There are also efforts on the individual user level, along the lines of what we see with non-profit programs like SETI @home. Again, this is a trend worth watching as it has all the markings of an open source solution waiting for the problem.

XBox Leads Console Sales

Monday, November 12, 2007

In an industry where industry titans Nintendo and Sony rule, Microsoft has achieved the incredible: Beat both of them. This year he Xbox 360 has a commanding lead in console sales, and it has done it through something Microsoft rarely gets credit for: Innovation. Over two years ago we mentioned the trend of the game console evolving into a unified entertainment center, and no company has embraced that more than Microsoft, with the XBox 360 leading in online interactivity, television DVD and video file playing, and several other elements.