Amazon Set To Bite Apple's Digital Core

Amazon's plans to launch an online music store and sell songs without digital-rights management, or DRM, have been blurry, but new reports this week are painting a clearer picture of the Internet retailing giant's intent.

According to sources in the London Times, Amazon has been talking with the major record labels "in the past fortnight" and is readying to open an online music store in May to challenge Apple's iTunes. The Times also reported that Amazon hopes to sell music with "reduced protection against copyright infringement."

If Amazon brings its plans to bear, it would follow in the footsteps of Microsoft, which followed in the footsteps of Apple with its Zune digital media player and online music store. Microsoft, too, is rumored to be considering DRM-free music, all spurred by Apple CEO Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry asking the labels to strip digital media of copy protection.

Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment on its plans.

Wimbledon to use HawkEye technology

WIMBLEDON - The traditional bleep of Wimbledon's Cyclops line-calling system will be silenced on the show courts this year as the All England Club adopts HawkEye technology for the first time.

The high-speed multi-camera technology which tracks the trajectory of a moving ball was first used at a grand slam in 2005 at Flushing Meadow and has also been successfully launched at the

Australian Open.

At those tournaments players can challenge two line calls per set. An instant replay is shown on large screens, allowing both the players and the spectators to watch whether the ball was in or out.

Wimbledon is played on lush grass where fast, skidding serves, particularly in the men's game, can dominate.

"We can confirm the introduction of HawkEye," Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of the All England Club told reporters on Tuesday. "We are going to have some final testing on grass courts in May to make sure we've got it absolutely right.

"We will use it on Centre and Number One court and we have put in place two large screens on both courts.

"We will not use Cyclops on those two courts because we feel to have conflicting technologies in use at the same time would be inappropriate. We will re-deploy Cyclops on other courts."

Ritchie said they were still to decide how many challenges players would be allowed at the two-week championships which begin on June 25, saying they could get more than they do elsewhere.

"There are slightly different circumstances on a grass court and there are things we are discussing before we decide the protocol we are going to adopt.

"God of War II" tops March U.S. video game chart

Sony Corp.'s (6758.T) "God of War II" for the PlayStation 2 was the best selling video game in the United States in March, market research firm NPD Group said on Monday.

The Greek mythology-inspired action adventure game sold 833,000 units at retail. That is more than double the unit sales of the second-best selling game, "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter" from Ubisoft Entertainment (UBIP.PA).

Activision Inc.'s (Nasdaq:ATVI - news) "Guitar Hero II" came in at No. 3. "Ghost Recon" and "Guitar Hero" are for Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Xbox 360.

Rounding out the top five were Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s (7974.OS) "Wii Play" for its Wii new console and Sony's "Motorstorm" for its new PlayStation 3.

Yahoo, Gracenote launch lyrics service

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and digital media company Gracenote launched an online lyrics service on Tuesday, the first industry-backed effort in a market dominated by unauthorized, rogue Web sites.

Song lyrics are among the top searches performed on the Web, but consumers have largely relied on unlicensed sources that often provide inaccurate and incomplete lyrics and do not compensate composers for their work.

"Finally, a free, legal and definitive way to settle a bet with the guy sitting next to you at the bar who is certain the Ramones' most famous anthem declares, 'I wanna piece of bacon,"' said Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo! Music, which will offer lyrics to hundreds of thousands of songs.

The Yahoo deal follows an agreement last summer between music publishers and Gracenote, giving Gracenote the rights to lyrics from the North American catalogs of Bertelsmann AG's BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi's Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, jointly owned by Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news). and Michael Jackson, peermusic and other publishers.

Terms of the Yahoo deal were not disclosed but officials said it was a variable revenue-sharing agreement based on advertising.

Gracenote Chief Executive Craig Palmer said licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually, with the words to songs ultimately providing as much as $100 million in annual revenues in about 10 years as the market expands with new opportunities like online subscriptions, downloads and automotive distribution deals.

The deal caps months of discussions between Yahoo and Gracenote, which said it was also talking with various other music partners, like Apple Inc.'s iTunes.

Yahoo expanding its online music section

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) is expanding its online music section to include the lyrics of 400,000 songs, hoping to strike a chord with Web surfers looking for a more reliable alternative to Internet sites that publish the words without the permission of the copyright owners.

The Sunnyvale-based company is touting the free service to be unveiled Tuesday as the Web's largest legally licensed database of lyrics.

"It fills a huge, gaping hole out there," said Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo music.

Song lyrics have been available through scores of other Web sites for years, but most of those destinations are technically breaking the law by posting the words without the approval of the publishers and writers that own the rights.

What's more, many of these unauthorized lyric sites rely on contributions from outsiders, a communal approach that increases the chances for inaccuracies.

Yahoo's song lyrics, in contrast, are supposed to be the official versions. Under the licensing agreement, Yahoo will share with copyright holders the revenue from the ads that will be displayed alongside the lyrics.

The database and licensing deals were cobbled together over the past two years by Gracenote, a digital media management specialist. The Emeryville-based company, formerly known as CDDB, is best known for developing technology that automatically recognizes the tracks on compact discs — a feature that is included in Apple Inc.'s widely used iTunes software.

The 400,000 song lyrics included in Yahoo's database span about 9,000 different artists, ranging from old standbys such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan to more recent stars like Radiohead and Beyonce.

Nearly 100 music publishers are contributing song lyrics, including industry heavyweights BMG Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group and Warner/Chappell Music.

Other lyrics sites boast that they have even more songs than Yahoo's database.

But Yahoo believes its lyrics library is destined to become a hit because it won't be bogged down with the pop-up ads and other intrusive "spyware" that clutters many of the sites that share lyrics without permission.

"Those sites generally aren't healthy places for your computer to be," said music analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media.

Leigh trumpeted Yahoo's lyric database as a "long overdue" breakthrough that will boost the music industry by creating a new revenue stream for artists and song publishers by making it easier for people to identify a tune they might hear on the radio or on the Web.

Podbridge Gets $8.5 Million Series B

Podbridge, makers of a podcasting analytics package that tracks audience demographics, plays, and ad rotation, just closed an $8.5 million series B round. A new investor Sutter Hill Ventures led the round, with the original investors Mayfield and Worldview participating.

We covered Podbridge in detail last March. Podbridge’s analytics tracker is an iTunes plug-in that gets downloaded and installed when a listener first downloads a Podbridge-enabled podcasts. When the plug-in is first installed, the listener is asked some demographic questions to help target ads. From then on, the plug-in-tracks a podcast’s online reach, frequency and playing time (anonymous), as well as the download count. Podbridge aims to have a plug-in for Windows Media Player as well.

The overall idea is that more detailed information on your audience will lead to higher ad rates. Targeting ads for the podcast is not a one time deal, with static ads embedded in the podcast. Instead, Podbridge allows for the dynamic insertion of ads that can change on each play. In a deal made last June, Podbridge opened their podcast advertising slots to Ingenio’s advertising network. Podbridge’s clients include Sports Byline USA, the BBC, Military.com, and Forbes.com, who started using the service last September.

iTunes has over 65,000 free podcasts and generated over 1 million subscriptions within two days of its 2005 launch. Research from a survey conducted last November by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found over 17 million people have downloaded podcasts, with 1.4 million saying they had heard or seen a podcast on a typical day (cited by MarketWatch).

Tiny Startup Mozy Nails Multi-Million Dollar GE Storage Contract

Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees.

MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses.

Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.

Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free. As a side note, GE certainly didn’t pay rate card rates - a deal this large would have a substantial discount.

The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees.

We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space.

A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line.

JS-Kit: Web 2.0 For Lazy People

We first covered JS-Kit last November when we talked about their quick embed code that lets you add comments to any site where JavaScript is accepted. Since then, JS-Kit has been creating more widgets making adding user interaction to any site dead simple (2 lines of code per widget). JS-Kit has also grown from a one-man-show into a full company after adding 5 of the 12 engineers from Filmloop (which shut down earlier this year). Since then, they’ve been turning out a new widget every two weeks.

[reconfigure]

[add option to poll]

[?]

Edit the poll options and settings, and click "Create poll" to launch it. Poll can be reconfigured at any time. Changing existing poll erases voting data.

Show intermediate results to each voterShow results only after expirationNever show poll results to voters Expire the poll in 1 hourExpire the poll after 1 dayExpire (disable voting) after 3 daysExpire the poll after 1 weekExpire the poll after 2 weeksNever expire the poll

Results bar color:

JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. Think Baynote, but for the little guys.

JS-Kit’s current widget suite consists of comments, five-star ratings, and a polling widget added this week. The new polling widget supports an unlimited number of questions, an expiration date, and only becomes visible after the site owner publishes it. Each widget has a fully customizable look through CSS and consists of two lines of code. The first line is a “div” tag brought to life by a second line of JavaScript code.

Each widget is by default differentiated by the URL of the page it is installed on, but can also be given a unique identifier by the user so that a page can have multiple instances of a widget, such as founder Lev Walkin’s photo site. JS-Kit is combating fraud by logging a combination of user cookies, IP, and user agent. The degree of this security can be throttled by the administrator. However, one major disadvantage of the JavaScript implementation is that it will not run on sites that break JavaScript code (MySpace).

Each widget also has administrative capabilities, assigned by cookie to the first computer to accesses the widget code. The administrator is able to moderate any comments that Akismet’s spam filter may miss or create new polls. JS-Kit has a user settings page that lets you view your activity across JS-Kit sites and reclaim administrator rights on a domain if you switch computers or lose the JS-Kit cookie.

To make these more than just website web 2.0 “bling”, JS-Kit is letting the widgets talk to each other. So far they’ve integrated comments and ratings into one widget that allows people to leave comments along with their individual rating, which combine on the server side into one overall rating for the object the widget is attached to. On top of these widgets, JS-Kit will be releasing a meta-widget later this week so that surfers can receive recommendations for your site’s top content (pictured right).