Leo Chen // Hi, I'm a geek and an entrepreneur. Technology, social media, photography, investing, and useless geek gadgets are some of the things I give a crap about... subscribe to get update on what leosaid if you give a crap too...
How to fail a test with dignity:
Moments after we heard reports
of Facebook’s new URL shortener, Google launched
its own service, aptly called goo.gl.
At the moment, its only being used for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google just announced the new service as a sharing feature of Toolbar that will let you share a web page directly from Toolbar. The shortener is not a stand alone service and is not available for “broader consumer use.” That is, at least for now.
Google assures that its shortener will be stable and secure to help protect users from clicking on malicious sites. And unsurprisingly, Google promises a speedy service for links.
Google’s foray into the URL shortening world isn’t surprising; many platforms are developing their own shorteners in house, such as Digg and Facebook.
Facebook’s new URL shortener is being used for URLs in its mobile interface. It’s unclear if Fb.me will be rolled out to the entire platform.Of course both Facebook and Google’s venture into this space will threaten bit.ly, the most widely-used URL shortener and default service on Twitter and many Twitter clients. Up until now, bit.ly has moved quickly to become the standard shortener. But the sheer volume of short links which both Facebook and Google can produce could soon overwhelm the number of bit.ly links. It’s the data behind the links, however, which is valuable. Whoever can gather the most unified view of all shortened links will end up winning.
You’ve got to think that Google will eventually roll this out more broadly to extend its reach but it’s unclear at the moment if this will happen. (Although Google’s Matt Cutts Tweets
that the restriction to Google’s own products is only “for now,” with the possibility of the service “opening up”
in the future).
Hat tip to True Pic for the headline.
Website: google.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Founded: September 7, 1998 IPO: August 19, 2004 Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including its more popular… Learn More
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $716M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 350 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More
Website: bit.ly Location: New York, New York, United States Funding: $2M bit.ly is a URL shortener, a web service which shrinks long URLs. Unlike early URL shorteners, bit.ly offers statistical tools to track the popularity of the shortened links. In May 2009, Twitter… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
I love ppl from the south... LOL...
Earlier today we covered rumors
that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala
. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted
that it’s a done deal. He writes, “Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story”. You can find the NYT story here
.
This could be bad news for Lala users. It’s unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We’ve reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back.
Likewise, this may well affect the Lala music gifts that have been recently offered by Facebook, and it could also harm the Music OneBox service Google recently launched (though Google can still rely on MySpace/iLike for its song streams).
Stone writes that Apple is interested in Lala because of its engineering talent and technology, and that it was Lala that initiated the discussions. From the Times:
One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes.
This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.
The deal makes sense. It seems inevitable that Apple will eventually launch its own cloud-based streaming music service. And that’s exactly what Lala is — an iTunes in the cloud, with some interesting pricing mechanics.
A few other interesting things to note. This acquisition comes a little more than a month after Lala was integrated into Google’s OneBox and Facebook’s gift store. Lala may well have been viewing these launches as last-chance efforts to find a path to profitability. Given these reports that Lala’s “prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim”, it looks like those launches may not have gone as well as Lala hoped.
Website: apple.com Location: Cupertino, California, United States Founded: April 1, 1976 IPO: 1980 Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computer maker to include consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from… Learn More
Website: lala.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Acquired: December 5, 2009 by Apple Lala is a hub for online music discovery and purchasing. Users can listen for free music, adding tracks to their playlist as they surf. members who download a plugin can turn Lala into an online music locker that syncs their desktop music libraries… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
