TTL - The Tech Link Blog

Deezer

Music site Deezer has now released the first official version of their iPhone and iPod Touch player, and it’s available for download directly on the Apple App Store.

For those of you not familiar with Deezer, it is very similar to iMeem. You can search for songs, artists, albums and stream them directly on your computer without the need to download the song.

Deezer also offers web radios and something they call “SmartRadio” where the service lets you discover new music based on your listening taste. These two features will be the only ones available on the iPhone and iPod Touch at first but Deezer plans on releasing a full featured application that will allow the user to enjoy 100% of the features available in the future.

clubic.com (French)

Lala

Lala.com just launched a new service for its U.S. users called Music Mover.

The idea is simple and quite similar to blueTunes.net, where the service will scan you entire music library (it’s iTunes compatible) and upload only the songs that are not present in the Lala.com music catalog.

Once this process is complete, the user’s entire music library will be available for free and unlimited streaming over the Internet. The main difference between blueTunes and Lala is that Lala is completely free and blueTunes will make you pay if you send more than 100 songs to your account.

ars technica

eBay

In an effort to protect elephants, and reduce the illegal traffic of ivory in and out of the originating countries, eBay will completely prohibit auctions that showcase products containing large amounts of ivory.

The new policy will take effect in December 2008 and will be enforced starting in January 2009.

washingtonpost.com

Yahoo!

Yahoo! and their employees have all been suffering from the tough financial climate in the U.S. since the beginning of 2008.

We should be hearing from Yahoo! tomorrow as they will be announcing their plans to cut on expenses and avoid loosing to much ground over #1 competitor Google. This will also include many job cuts; as much as 1,000 to 3,000 jobs will be lost before the end of the year.

TechSpot

iTunes

Apple has done it again! The iTunes Store has been offering TV shows/series download for only 36 months and they have already hit 200 million downloads.

The iTunes Store offers TV shows and series downloads from NBC, CBS, MTV, HBO, etc. at $1.99 for standard definition and $2.99 for high definition.

FierceMobileContent

Spam Emails

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they have stopped the operations of one of the largest spam rings in the world.

According to the FTC, the group would have been responsible for a third of all spam emails sent in the last 3 years. The group known as the HerbalKing gang were sending billions of emails selling fake prescription drugs and “natural” supplements to people around the globe.

From AP: “These sites are really professionally constructed,” Steve Baker, the FTC’s Midwest Region director, told the Associated Press. “Some years ago you used to be able to tell the bogus things because they looked cheesy and had misspellings. I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

guardian.co.uk

Zoho

It’s no secret that Microsoft Office is the most used desktop office application suite in the business world. What is surprising, is that more and more businesses are switching from desktop office applications to online suites.

Zoho and Google Apps are the most popular ones. Zoho has now over 400,000 users and Google Apps has over 500,000 users. Big names like GE, L’Oréal and now Washington DC are going this way for various reasons. Read it all..

YouTube

YouTube will now be offering free, full-length original television series directly on their web page.

For now, only content provided by CBS is available but more broadcasters are expected to join YouTube on this as everything indicates that we are stearing away from standard TV and moving towards on-demand content.

Pocket-lint

YouTube

Like what you see? Then “Click to Buy”. You will see a lot of this on YouTube from now on.

It’s no secret, Google has been loosing a lot of money with YouTube because it’s not profitable enough. Sure, it’s popular, but it doesn’t bring profits to the company. As a first step in transforming YouTube into a money-making venture, Google started integrating non-intrusive links within certain video pages that promote different type of products and media.

Users will be able to buy the music tracks of certain music videos they like to watch, or buy a game or movie right after watching the preview or teaser. Partnerships have already been made with iTunes and Amazon.

BetaNews

mySpace Music

Since MySpace Music launched on the 24th of September, 1 Billion songs have been streamed by its users. That is surely a record to base ourselves on for the next few years at least!

I’ve made some math here based on 1 billion songs in 13 days:

• 76,923,077 songs/day
• 3,205,128 songs/hour
• 53,419 songs/minute
• 890 songs/second

CNET

iTunes

The Copyright board spoke yesterday and decided to leave the current royalty rates unchanged for CDs and music downloads at 9.1 cents per song.

Web radios will have to pay the same 9.1 cents per song streamed never exceeding 10.5% of its total revenues in order not to completely usurp a net broadcaster’s profits.

If the decision would have been to raise royalty fees to 15 or 16 cents per song as suggested, online music stores like iTunes and AmazonMP3 would have had to increase their prices as they would not have been profitable anymore.

BetaNews

XOHM WiMAX

XOHM turned their WiMAX service “ON” in Baltimore in what is the first of many U.S. towns to get WiMAX coverage in the next year or two.

At launch, mobile WiMAX service plans include a $10 day pass, $25 monthly home Internet service and a $30 monthly mobile service available on any WiMAX device. Special launch pricing includes a $50 “Pick 2 for Life” monthly service option covering two different WiMAX devices.

CrunchGear
GigaOM

Wal-Mart

Starting October 9, Wal-Mart will change their music format and become 100% DRM-Free. Music downloads will now be in MP3 format with no DRM whatsoever.

This is really good news for new users but less if you have downloaded songs that were covered with DRM at Wal-Mart as they will shutdown their DRM server very soon. Anyone that bought protected WMA music files, will have to burn them to disc.

TechRadar UK

RIAA

Good news! An agreement has been reached between The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the streaming radio industry. Since many months, a battle emerged between people that operate online streaming radio stations and the people that own the music being streamed.

This week, an agreement has been reached: in exchange for the right to stream music from major record labels, streaming web sites will have to give back 10.5% of their total revenues to them. This agreement covers only music that is streamed but doesn’t have any detail on music that is to be downloaded and played at a later time.

CD Freaks
RIAA’s Press Release

Hulu

Universal’s Hulu is a huge success both in terms of subscribed users and also in terms of revenues for the company.

As of now, Hulu is offering video-on-demand streaming of movies and tv shows and this content can be viewed for free over the Internet. Profits to Universal come from advertisement from various companies.

Universal is now looking into offering the same service but this time it would be focused on the music industry. From cNet: The new venture would offer professionally produced music videos as well as other original programming that features the label’s artists.

cNet
Hulu