Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Soundrop, the social “listening room” service that is similar to Turntable.fm, has found a lot of success on the music streaming service Spotify, with 500 million streams of its rooms in its debut year. Now, Oslo, Noway-based Soundrop is taking its growth strategy up a notch: from today, people can also create and embed listening rooms in Facebook, too.
In a quintessentially European move, Fanatix, the iOS-based second screen app and wider ‘mobile-first’ social network for sports fans, has released a Portuguese-language version in partnership with Sportinveste Multimédia — a joint venture between Sportinveste and Portugal Telecom which owns the digital media rights the Liga Portuguesa soccer league.
The deal also comes hot on the heels of the UK startup releasing some encouraging numbers: It’s hit the 500,000 download mark, up from 250,000 downloads as reported in late October last year.
Lees meerIn a quintessentially European move, Fanatix, the iOS-based second screen app and wider ‘mobile-first’ social network for sports fans, has released a Portuguese-language version in partnership with Sportinveste Multimédia — a joint venture between Sportinveste and Portugal Telecom which owns the digital media rights the Liga Portuguesa soccer league.
The deal also comes hot on the heels of the UK startup releasing some encouraging numbers: It’s hit the 500,000 download mark, up from 250,000 downloads as reported in late October last year.
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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, isn’t entirely happy with what he has created — and has thrown down the gauntlet to web developers to come up with more disruptive forms of online communication. He was speaking in an interview at the World Economic Forum today entitled ‘what’s wrong with social networking?’ but joked the title had been cooked up merely to draw in the crowds.
Earlier this month we broke the news that Russia’s search giant Yandex was eyeing up a move into the mobile, social search space with the development of an app called Wonder, which drew on Facebook data to let people search for local places and content, incorporating what their friends have also visited and consumed. Now a source has passed us some screenshots and more details about how it looks right now, how it works, and who is behind the project.
Spraffl is a new iOS app that’s attempting to buck the trend of real name policy, or even semi-identifiable pseudonyms, in favour of an entirely anonymous social network, tied to a user’s location. I say social network, when in actual fact the UK startup is dubbing the app a ‘social experiment’, and in some ways the concept is reminiscent of the anarchic and experimental element of the Internet of yesteryear. And that may be both its appeal and its ultimate downfall.
More money for big data analytics — and a sign that, as the space matures, we will see more segmentation of what kinds of big data is getting analysed. Semetric, the UK/LA-based company behind the music data tracking service Musicmetric, has today announced £3 million ($4.7 million) in new investment, which it says that it will use to further expand its music service, as well as other big data products specifically for the entertainment industry. New investor Imperial Innovations Group and existing backer Pentech Ventures both participated. Semetric has raised $7.4 million since being founded in 2008.
SkyNews has obtained a letter sent to Twitter subsidiary TweetDeck warning the company it has three months to file accounts or be struck off the U.K.’s business register. The letter follows a proposal to strike off added to its Companies House listing earlier this month. TweetDeck was also fined for overdue account filings in December — as was Twitter, but Twitter has since filed its accounts.
Dave Morin, CEO and founder of Path, today likened Facebook to a Chevy, and Path to a BMW or Audi, as he attempted to draw out the differences between his privacy-focused social network and the one that is now publicly-traded and recently passed 1 billion users (and is his former stomping ground). Speaking at the DLD conference currently underway in Munich, Morin admitted that while people have floated the idea that Facebook might want to someday buy Path to complement the more open, sharing-by-default mantra that Facebook espouses, this is not on Path’s cards for now:
The world of ed-tech is ramping up another notch, and getting a lot more open in the process: educational publishing giant Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Mendeley, a London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics to share research and collaborate with each other via a social network. TechCrunch understands from sources close to the companies that the deal is underway and should close this quarter, possibly by the end of February — all things being equal — and will be in the region of $100 million. The news comes at a pretty busy time for Mendeley: it has also closed a recent round of funding — value undisclosed but thought to be under $10 million — with investors including Access Industries, Passion Capital, Tom Glocer (Ex-CEO Thomson Reuters), and UK-based Andurance Ventures.
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