Blogging the Bloggers – Lala relaunches with new music streaming model
The industry is keenly observing the relaunch of Lala as an online music streaming service powered by very intricate machinery handily distilled by Rafat Ali at paidContent: "At least you have to give it marks for trying…again and again. Lala,
the three year-old polymorphous online music startup that started as a
CD swapping service and changed its business model twice and then
almost closed down, is now launching a new online music streaming
service, with a twist. The new service works like this (and if I have
to use bullet points to explain it, you know what that means for
consumer adoption):
– The site first analyzes a user’s existing music collection on their
PC, and creates an online virtual locker of all their songs, which can
be played as streaming songs online for free. Sounds similar to what
MP3.com tried eons ago and got sued out of business.
– Songs not in user’s collection can be streamed once free, and then for 10 cents, streamed unlimited times online.
– For downloads, prices are similar to iTunes and Amazon, but that 10
cents in streaming can be credited towards an MP3 purchase.
– It has signed on all four major labels, and four major labels, and over 170,000 independent labels and distributors."
Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat: "More seriously, Lala does have some very interesting potential. When
the day comes that high-speed wireless connectivity is ubiquitous, its
service could eliminate the need for music players with physical
storage — though it’s hard to imagine that Apple won’t be right on top
of this trend should it emerge."
Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch: The real question is whether or not music really is ready to make its
way to the cloud. With the increasingly wide spread of high speed mobile
devices like the iPhone it seems only a matter of time before users
stop worrying about syncing and transferring music and simply stream it
from a central server. I’m not sure users will be comfortable about not
owning full copies of any of their websongs (what happens when Lala
goes down?), but for 10 cents, it’s worth a shot.
Google smack down for ‘gullible believer’ in cloud computing
The Guardian’s Jack Schofield picks up on the story of Loren Baker, first tweeted by Steve Rubel, who two days ago woke up into the nightmare of discovering he’d been locked out of his Gmail account.
The venerable Schofield writes: "’Cloud computing’ has claimed another victim, in spite of my repeated warnings about keeping offline copies of online data."
We’re
not certain if Baker is a regular reader of Schofield’s column, so it’s
possible he may have missed the heads up. But we can’t disagree with
Schofield’s final word on this story: "You should always remember Schofield’s Second Law of Computing: data doesn’t really exist unless you have two copies of it. Preferably more.
If you only have one copy on Google then you don’t own it, Google owns
you. And if you are running a business on that basis, then either you
are naïve or you’re an idiot."
Bloglines is dead – long live Bloglines
Staying with a general wariness of allowing Google to completely take over the world, ReadWriteWeb reports Bloglines has fixed the bug that had been sending users in droves to seek the shelter of Netvibes and Google Reader.
In
a brief analysis of the RSS reader market which is well worth reading,
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: "Despite its shortcomings, Bloglines is
worth a look and when it works
it works very well for many people. RSS is such a powerful media (sic)
that
it’s essential that the market leader, Google, be kept on their toes."
TechCrunch’s take on the story: "The reason that Bloglines has become the unwanted stepchild at Ask? It
drives next to no revenue, and it’s (sic) excellent blog search engine has
become less strategically important as Ask.com defocuses on competitive
search."
- Basheera Khan
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