New Media & Technology

MOG demo'd the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far. MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody. All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Vacation rentals are big business. HomeAway, which owns a dozen or so vacation home listing sites, just raised $250 million in a venture round that values the company at more than $1 billion. But listings are spread across lots of sites - what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It's also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

AOL's EVP of Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy is leaving to take a new position at Univision. This isn't much of a surprise - we speculated on his future back in July when he announced (internally) the shuttering of four of his products (Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile). That still left him with AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo, among others. But each of those products seemed to be a better fit in a different organization. CEO Randy Falco's memo to AOLers:

Today's keynote presentation by Phil Schiller has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. That isn't to say it went badly - I'm genuinely excited about some of the new software updates. But the Macworld keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. Investors have learned to expect big things from Apple every January, and for at least the last four years their reactions to the keynote have weighed heavily on Apple's stock price. Except for this year. And that's no accident.

Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I've previously called the iPhone's killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today. Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you've bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).

12 inch Netbooks are coming. Dell has the Inspiron Mini 12, Samsung will unveil its 12 inch netbook model to the U.S. shortly, and more are coming. And Intel isn't happy about this at all. In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can't afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it's clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations. That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. "If you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size--it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out," said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

MixedInk, a document editing site that allows large groups to democratically create a single collaborative document, has launched its service to the public. The service fuses concepts from Digg and popular wiki sites to create a unique document creation tool that is ideal for groups far larger than you'd normally encounter in the workplace. In conjunction with today's public launch, the site has also partnered with Slate to create a community-written inauguration speech for President Obama, which will be published on the site in two weeks.

ResizeImage is the simplest and most usable tool I've seen to handle quick image resizing and cropping. It's not as useful as Skitch, which a downloadable application for Macs only, but it works in a pinch.

Nearly two years ago, Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry calling for the death of DRM (digital rights management). He convinced EMI to ditch DRM back in April, 2007, but the three other major music labels held out. Until today. Now all the songs on iTunes are DRM-free, or soon will be. And, with that, the DRM era of digital music finally can be put to rest. But it looks like the labels prevailed in sticking it to consumers on one last point.

Artiklz is debuting its conversation search engine to the public today, and it's definitely worth taking a look. What the service does is aggregate comments from the more popular blogging and commenting platforms as well as a number of services including Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. and make them available through a single search engine. This is very similar to what companies like Crunchies finalist BackType and also uberVU are all about, and I definitely see the need for this type of service: regardless of one's interests or line of work, dedicated comment search engines make it easy for users to find out what the content and tone of conversations across social media really are. I like the fact that you no longer need to visit every web service that has comments separately in order to find out what's being said, but that you can go to a single place, do a simple search and find out.