Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.
Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around Twitter-like “real-time” sharing and conversations. The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet. But it has just raised around $1 million.
Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.
RealNetworks says more than 500,000 people have downloaded its all-you-can-eat music app. But it’s hard to tell what that number actually means.
Spotify, the streaming music service Americans love talking about but can’t actually use, has given us even more to chat about: The company now promises to roll out some sort of TV service…some day.
Where? In Sweden, of course, which is where Spotify started, and which acts as a sort of test lab/best-case-scenario provider for the service.
Google and Yahoo both expect mobile ads to provide big boosts. Time to rethink that notion, says Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay, who says mobile will be a modest niche business for the big guys.
Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.
The announcement from RealNetworks that Apple had approved its iPhone app–all you can eat music, to go, for $15 a month–gave the company’s stock a brief jolt yesterday. That’s over now: Wall Street seems to have thought about it and concluded that people won’t pay a monthly fee for music, even on an iPhone.
Okay, all you Spotify coveters who say you can’t wait to get the much hyped app on your iPhone, here’s your chance: Pony up $15 a month and you can get Rhapsody’s app, which does exactly the same thing.
Napster says it has an awesome new iPhone app that will let you stream music directly to your phone–just like the one Apple approved for Spotify, the superhyped service you can’t even get in the U.S. yet. But Napster says you won’t be able to use its app anytime soon, and it blames the big bad music labels.
Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?
Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.
Want to watch the season finale of “30 Rock” for free, whenever you want, on a big screen? Go for it, says Hulu–just don’t watch it on a TV.
Confused? Of course. So was I when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.
Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.
Publisher Condé Nast gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for its slow embrace of technology and the Web, but some of its individual titles do some interesting stuff. To wit: This video, which depicts how artist Jorge Columbo created this week’s cover art in an hour, using an iPhone and an app called Brushes.
Mystery solved, sort of: AT&T is taking the blame for crippling the SlingPlayer iPhone app. The company’s rationale: The iPhone’s too powerful, and our network isn’t powerful enough.
Remember all the way back, a couple weeks ago, when everyone was talking about Twitter and Oprah and Ashton Kutcher and the millions of people who were joining Twitter every week? Turns out the majority of those new Twitterers–three out of every five–won’t be back in May. That’s a problem, says Web measurement service Nielsen.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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