Pandora top 3 iphone app after Google and Facebook

from Apple



http://www.apple.com/itunes/billion-app-countdown/

Divine Caroline bigger than iVillage

Congrats to Kate and the team.

Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP) announced that DivineCaroline®—the flagship site of Real Girls Media Network and an integral part of the Meredith Women’s Network—has cracked Quantcast’s Top 200 sites in the world. With 5.3 million users, DivineCaroline has now eclipsed longtime online traffic leaders such as iVillage.

DivineCaroline offers a unique platform that publishes user-generated content alongside expert-guided editorial to offer consumers a fully engaged community in which to share experiences and form connections. It targets women in the highly desirable 25-54 age group and has experienced strong and steady growth since its launch in 2007.

“The growth of Divine Caroline is a testament to the vibrant community of women online,” says Kate Thorp, CEO, Real Girls Media Network. “Sharing, helping, and participating in the world around them are an important part of our lives.”

Thorp notes that women now represent 53 percent of the total U.S. online audience, and “women's community” was the most visited and fastest growing internet category, acccording to ComScore Media Metrix’s year-end report.
The Meredith Women’s Network, which attracts 15 million unique visitors monthly,* is the first network comprised of premium, branded websites geared towards the topics that matter most to women. It includes The Better Homes and Gardens® Network (Better Homes and Gardens, Better Recipes and the recently launched MixingBowl™); The Parents® Network (Parents, American Baby and Family Circle); and The Real Girls NetworkSM (DivineCaroline®, Fitness, More and Ladies’ Home Journal).
“The success of DivineCaroline reflects the power of this exciting new brand and its connection to female consumers,” says Meredith Chief Development Officer John Zieser. “Real Girls Media is proving to be a perfect complement to the Meredith Women's Network, and we will continue to seek out partners where we can replicate this ‘one plus one equals three’ relationship.”

Pandora crossing into mass market

According to NPD, awareness and usage of Pandora, a leading online radio station, doubled year over year to 18 percent of Internet users; one-third of those who were aware of Pandora report using the service. Similarly, the percentage of consumers claiming to listen to music on social networks climbed from 15 percent in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2007 to 19 percent in Q4 2008. Nearly half of U.S. teens are engaging with music on social networks, which is an increase from 37 percent a year ago; among college-age Internet users, the percentage increased from 30 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in 2008.

Stanford VLAB event redux

Great event at Stanford VLAB Tues eve. Packed room with 250 plus people at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. On the panel on Music Models online, moderated by Paul Bonanos, MC Hammer, Jessica Kahn of Tapulous, Jordan Kurland who manages Death Cab For Cutie among others, Dorrian Porter of Mozes and Jeff Yasuda of Blip.fm. I was pleased with the feedback to private beta of a new music search and ID product that will be coming out from Melodis. After asking the audience to let me know if they wanted to beta test it, I got over 50 cards handed to me.

MC Hammer has a new show called Hammertime coming out on A&E. The camera crews were there in full force. He has over 150k people following him on Twitter, underscoring how powerful the artist fan connection can be. Twitter is clearly gaining a lot of momentum with its "real time web" experience.

Among the interesting data-points were that Tapulous has had over 6 million downloads of its free app with hundreds of thousands of paid purchases of it's artist centric apps at $5 each. Nice people. great app and glad they are doing so nicely.

I highlighted that music is a true passion point for users. It's how they want to spend leisure time and get joy in spite of the economy. That time translates to money in terms of commerce and advertising. Figuring out how to be at the heart of discovery, search and / or listening are the power centers. Notable that 2 of the top 3 apps on the iPhone are music (Pandora at #1 and Shazam at 3).

The mobile phone market feels like the Internet in the mid 90's on DOS and dial up. Crappy and slow. The iPhone on 3G is a crucial platform to get a glimpse of the future. In a broadband mobile world (and we all know that 3G is still "mid band" speed at best), time spent goes way up, as does commerce and advertising. iPhone sales at 14 mm units or so last year is just a remarkable validation of consumer demand for a next gen mobile experience and the app store. Finally a way for third parties to market their products directly to consumers on mobile. Every major phone maker and service provider is rushing to replicate the app store model.

Looking forward to the app store enabling recurring revenue models / subscription and easier in product commerce.

Pandora on Blackberry

It's out. Went to Pandora.com on my Blackberry Bold. Found the mobile page, clicked on Blackberry install and voila. Loaded easily. A little bit of delay on my first time log in as it found my account. Worked flawlessly on my way to San Francisco this morning. Got a call, took it and then it returned to Pandora after the call was done. Radio remains on when I went to email too... including send and receive. This is a really big deal as the iPhone does not enable multitasking like this. UI works great through I prefer the UI and bigger screen on the iPhone more, but the multitasking is quite compelling. Thanks Pandora.

Here's a link to the Boy Genius report:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/03/18/pandora-for-blackberry-finally-launches/

Social networking overtakes email

Social networking is now the most popular web activity, surpassing even email, according to a new study issued by information and media firm Nielsen. Active reach in what Nielsen defines as "member communities" now exceeds email participation by 67 percent to 65 percent, the firm reports--among all Internet users worldwide, two thirds visited a social networking site in 2008. Facebook now leads the pack: Three out of every 10 web users visit the site at least once a month, and in all, Facebook experienced a 168 percent increase in users in 2008, galvanized by growth among the 35-to-49 demographic.

Mobile social networking is most popular in the U.K., where 23 percent of mobile web users (about 2 million subscribers) now visit social networks via handsets--the U.S. follows at 19 percent, or 10.6 million subscribers. Mobile social networking usage increased 249 percent in the U.K. in 2008, and grew 156 percent in the U.S. Nielsen notes that the most popular social networks via PCs and laptops mirror the most popular services on the mobile web--Facebook is the most popular in five of the six countries where Nielsen measures mobile activity, with Xing proving most popular in Germany. In addition to the mobile web and dedicated mobile social networking applications, users are also interacting with their social networks via SMS--according to Nielsen, at the end of 2008 almost 3 million U.S. users were texting Facebook on a regular basis.

For more on social networking's growth: read this Nielsen report

Read the full article here

Two Perspectives

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: advertising web)

Here are Mary Meeker's slides from her presentation at the Web 2.0 conference. For a slightly more upbeat perspective, see Pascal Levensohn's VentureBeat post about the growth of innovation in economic downturns.

Are Widgets Dead?

It's no secret that Facebook is making life hard for startups that are attempting to draft off of its huge universe of users - so much so that some are now speculating that the short-lived widget is now a thing of the past.

Webcasting Bill Passes Senate

In a big step forward for Pandora, yesterday, the Senate passed HR7084. Here's what Pandora founder Tim Westergren had to say:

September 30, 2008
WEBCASTING BILL PASSED !!

This evening the Senate approved passage of HR7084. Hooray! We still have to finish up the negotiations, but now the table is set.

Thanks to everyone for your incredible support over the past few days. It was just extraordinary. We had some terrific allies on the Hill; a hearty thanks to our sponsors on the House side - Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) pictured on the floor below, and Donald Manzullo (R-IL), and Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) who shepherded the bill through the Senate. And a special thanks to Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) for his key role as Chairman of the IP Subcommittee.

Behind all the activity within the halls of congress was the tireless advocacy by you, our listeners. None of this would have been possible without your overwhelming public support. Your voice was a constant reminder to everyone involved in this process about the importance of internet radio to music lovers and musicians alike. Your level of involvement was unprecedented. We are eternally grateful.

Thank you again for your amazing support. We will continue to keep you apprised as we work diligently to complete the process.

Jason Calcanis on Demo'ing Your Startup

Jason Calcanis has come up with a great list of pointers for entrepreneurs who are presenting their startups to investors.

Catchy App

Since this article appeared in TechCrunch, Pandora has moved up the list to become the second most popular free application on the iPhone.

Paper Power

This chart from the July, 2008, issue of Wired depicting the growth in pre-trial discovery documents points to H5 Technologies' enormous market opportunity.

Now I Understand Why I Never See Ads on YouTube's Home Page

From the June 16th issue of Forbes magazine:

An ad on the YouTube home page ... now costs $175,000 a day, plus a commitment to spend $50,000 more in ads on Google or YouTube.

The New Norm?

I really hope this isn't the new norm for funding announcements ...

[Editor's note: Here's a remixed version, courtesy of Valleywag.]

Flixwagon

Apple's relationships with cell phone providers prevent it from offering live video streaming on the iPhone, but a startup called Flixwagon appears to have engineered an elegant workaround. Video Twitter, anyone?

Where's the Beef?

Fast Company just published a glowing profile of Ning, which recently raised $60 million at a $500 million pre-money valuation; Ning has now raised over $100 million. paidContent.org rightly raises a number of questions about the article. I was amazed that Fast Company didn't include any mention of Ning's revenues. I guess I wasn't alone.

Hang in There, Yahoo

Gartner believes that Microsoft is buying Yahoo because Vista has been such a colossal disappointment. It will certainly be a sad day for the Web if Microsoft succeeds with its offer. For all of its faults, Yahoo created a reason for many of us to use the Web; it elevated the browser to a new form of OS. Yahoo has also been a powerful proponent of open source software, another major trend which runs counter to Microsoft's interests. But the primary reason why Microsoft's offer is unfortunate is the impact that it will have on startups. As others have pointed out, with Yahoo's demise, there will be one less acquirer of young companies. Many might snipe that when it comes to M&A, Yahoo has been its worst enemy. Still, Yahoo has been an important player in the startup universe for a long time. Perhaps News Corp. will become more active in acquiring young companies; it certainly seems to realize that the Web is an important platform for the distribution and consumption of content. However, it will take more than News Corp. to fill the void that Yahoo will leave.

Microsoft Strikes Again

Yet another damning indictment of Microsoft, which continues to abuse its monopoly of the operating system.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites.

Retail Therapy

Market Insight has won some prime real estate on PC World's Web site, where it provides recommendations for consumers interested in buying HDTVs, digital cameras, or notebooks. Check it out!

Glam Raises $84.6 Million Round

Today, Glam announced that it has raised $84.6 million in private financing, with $64.6 million in Series D funding and $20 million in revenue-based debt financing. Here are links to Glam's press release as well as The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the deal.

Feeling Vulnerable?

Palamida has released its list of the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities.

Often, developers embed popular open source code while developing applications that do not fall in the normal software procurement process. Businesses and users need to take ultimate care to ensure that they are up-to-date with the latest patches in order to reduce uncertainty and secure their software from security attacks.

Open source code is "not any more vulnerable than commercial software" and in some cases, less so, said Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver. Open source projects tend to acknowledge their vulnerabilities and fix them promptly, he added.

Home Is Where the Home Network Is

Dean Takahashi highlights the importance of home networking at this year's CES show in Las Vegas. (By the way, Takahashi quotes an analyst from Iconoculture, a Walden portfolio company.)

The idea of home networking has been around for more than a decade. But now 34.4 million homes in the United States have computer networks, according to International Data Corp. Of those, 12.4 million homes have living room devices (game consoles, video recorders or set-top boxes) that are connected to the Internet.

That represents a big market opportunity and, as a result, gadget designers are more aggressive about designing Internet connectivity into their gadgets. It allows them to claim that the era of convergence - when computers, communications and consumer electronics are linked - has truly arrived, said Jonathan Steuer, an analyst at consumer research firm Iconoculture.

The Customer Is Always Right

Interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal about the changing face of online ads. Here's an excerpt:

The Web's emergence is forcing ad executives to succumb to marketers' demands that agencies reinvent how ads are created, and forgo their TV-centric approach. Clients are even calling for changes in the way ad firms are structured. But until now, few advertisers have spent more than 5% to 10% of their marketing budgets online. With the growth of online video and social networking, ad experts expect that percentage to jump significantly this year.

Softness in the economy also will likely drive more money to the Internet, which can be cheaper than other media and has a reach that is easier to measure, which is attractive to advertisers in slower times. Merrill Lynch predicts overall ad spending in the U.S. for 2008 will grow 2.3%, while the portion of that spending on the Web will increase 18%. Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia says it expects the amount spent on Internet advertising to overtake spending on radio in 2008, and spending on magazines in 2010.

Music to Our Ears

Pandora ranks #17 in Consumer Reports' list of the top products of 2007.

Funny Video on Social Networking

Managing Risk

Palamida recently announced an important new focus area - security. Most corporations use open source software, and Palamida helps its clients determine whether they are in compliance with open source licenses. Now, Palamida also determines whether its customers are vulnerable to over 400 open source security issues, 148 of which are defined as High-Severity Common Vulnerability and Exposures. (These include cross-site scripting and buffer overflows, to SQL injections.) As Mark Tolliver, CEO of Palamida, put it, "Open source is inherently no more risky than commercial software. The majority of open source projects provide a patched version to any issue within hours of discovery. Users of open source, however, need a way to quickly and accurately verify what components they are using and associate them with known vulnerabilities so they can retrieve updated versions. Without a mechanism in place to perform this function, organizations put themselves at risk for introducing security vulnerabilities into their code base." Here's a link to Palamida's press release on the subject.

BoomShuffle

SNOCAP has a new service called BoomShuffle that lets users create custom 15-song mixes. Here's something I put together in under five minutes (including the time it took to set up an account).

Glam Hits the Books

In this article, The New York Times' Saul Hansell writes about Glam's recently announced deal with Lifetime Networks, which he calls "a textbook example of how to co-opt potential competition":

[Glam CEO Samir] Arora has big plans for Glam. He would like to do similar deals in other categories including health, shelter and entertainment. He’s been able to attract high-powered managers including John Trimble from Fox Interactive and Joe Lagani, the publisher of Conde Nast’s House & Garden. (That’s a sure sign that Mr. Arora convinced them that either a public offering or a pricey acquisition is not that far off.)

The big question here is how many of these ad networks end up surviving. If there are many dozens, Glam may win because it locks up relationships with multiple partners. If smaller networks wither, Glam may still win because it has the right to roll up the inventory of the networks it runs into one big package that may be more appealing to advertisers.

Facebook Considers Its Options

With hiring already tough in Silicon Valley, Facebook has just made its HR head's life much more difficult. Here's an excerpt from an article in today's Wall Street Journal about the company's options dilemma [subscription required].

There is a little-noticed downside to Microsoft Corp.'s investment in Facebook Inc.: The deal will likely raise the price of stock options issued by the social-networking company and could make it more difficult to hire talented employees.

Last week, Facebook appeared to score a major victory when Microsoft said it would invest $240 million in the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up, in exchange for a 1.6% stake. The investment values Facebook at $15 billion, up significantly from last year when a financing round valued the company at $525 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft's investment cemented Facebook's reputation as one of the hottest Web start-ups in Silicon Valley.

With the rise in valuation comes a rise in the value of employee stock options. And in Silicon Valley, where stock options can be a major component of employee pay packages, more expensive stock options mean less potential upside for the option holders once start-ups go public or are sold.

Pandora Gets Some Ink in Inc.

Inc. magazine has a cover story on Pandora in its latest issue. Here's a link to the story, and here's an excerpt:

Westergren realized he had a huge weapon in his arsenal: his customers. Westergren sends a welcome e-mail to everyone that signs up. It's an automated e-mail from an alias address, but whenever anyone replies, he replies back. Last year, when he was touring the country looking for new music, Westergren decided to begin holding meetings with listeners. He'd choose a locale, post it on the Pandora blog, and invite anyone in the area to attend. Four people attended the first meetup in Austin, but as he traveled to a senior center in Phoenix, a taco joint in San Antonio, and a lecture hall at MIT, the groups grew, and soon dozens, even hundreds, of listeners were attending. All the effort spent courting nonpaying customers might seem excessive, but it lets Pandora spend next to nothing on marketing. In any case, the listeners responded. Some have become so fanatic that they've written songs about the site, sent boxes of fudge, and even made donations.

That work turning customers into fans, Westergren realized, meant he could rally them behind the royalty rate issue. So he sent an e-mail to all the Pandora listeners that identified their representative and senator and asked them to write in. Pandorans responded. Westergren estimates that about one million e-mails, phone calls, or faxes were made or sent by Pandora listeners. California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein received 25,000 e-mails; in the office of Jay Inslee, a Seattle-area representative, correspondence about Internet radio equaled that concerning the Iraq war. Inslee and Illinois Representative Don Manzullo drafted a bill that brought Internet radio rates in line with those of satellite stations; in the Senate, Sam Brownback and Ron Wyden sponsored a companion bill. "I said, 'Oh, my gosh, this is a bombshell ready to explode with the small radio stations,'" says Manzullo.

Evidence Machine

H5 receives prominent coverage in this week's Forbes. Here's a link to the article [membership required] and an excerpt:

Corporations are evidence machines, generating terabytes of electronic documents, e-mails and digitally recorded phone calls each year. Lawyers try to sift through all this dross in search of the smoking gun that can determine the outcome of a case. But, so say studies by library scientists and others, the lawyers aren't very good at sifting. Worn down by the anesthetizing process of flipping through thousands of digital images a day, they miss as much as they find. That's where a San Francisco company, H5, comes in. "Our work is to discover the ideal narrative to walk into court with," says Nicolas Economou, 42. "We give you the bullets designed to win."

Mexico or Bust

This article about Pandora in today's Oakland Tribune adds a little color to Tim Westergren's recent article in VentureBeat.

"At our worst moment, we were being evicted from our office, sued by four employees for back pay," Westergren said. "We owed almost $1.5 million in back salaries. We were living on credit cards: I was making plans to go to Mexico."

Instead, he went on the road — meeting potential investors, making constant pitches.

When it was over, the cash was in hand. He said he went back and counted how many times he spoke to investors in four lean years.

"I just kind of kept going. We had survived the bust when no one else had and we had built a pretty significant data base," he said.

Finally, Larry Marcus, managing director of Walden Venture Capital of San Francisco, got on board, followed by Labrador Ventures of Palo Alto.

Funding finally came on his 348th pitch, Westergren said.

Motivated Investors

Check out this article in VentureBeat by Pandora founder Tim Westergren. In "What Motivates an Investor to Say 'Yes,'" Westergren explains that he was turned down 347 times before Walden's Larry Marcus agreed to invest the first institutional capital in Pandora. Here's an excerpt:

As I reflect back on this most unlikely turn, I have come to a belief about what motivates an investor to say ‘yes.’ Or perhaps more accurately, what causes an investor to shift from looking for ways to say ‘no’ to looking for ways to say ‘yes’. For, in my mind, this is the key to raising money. Venture investments by their very nature require a leap of faith (none more than ours) that only comes when an investor becomes aspirational – when he or she wants the investment to make sense (even though statistically deals never do make sense). I believe that shift happens when three things come together for the investor: They personally believe in the entrepreneur; they have a sense (and it’s often just a gut feeling) that the idea could be very big; and finally they have a personal interest or background in the industry that gives them a leg up the diligence curve. Put these together and an investor will start bending their investment criteria.

Larry M. was a musician (or at least a drummer) and an avid student of digital media. In the Music Genome Project he saw an idea that could be big, and as an expert in the sector he had the confidence to trust his own ability to spot potential, even if it was buried in mud. We also got along very well personally. So we had the three ingredients that tipped him into the aspirational mode. He wanted to make the investment and we started working together to make it happen – convincing his colleagues and other investors.

U2Tube

Like "LonelyGirl15," a 24-year-old singer and guitarist named Marié Digby is manipulating YouTube to her advantage.

Ms. Digby's simple, homemade music videos of her performing popular songs have been viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube. Her acoustic-guitar rendition of the R&B hit "Umbrella" has been featured on MTV's program "The Hills" and is played regularly on radio stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Portland, Ore. Capping the frenzy, a press release last week from Walt Disney Co.'s Hollywood Records label declared: "Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records."

What the release failed to mention is that Hollywood Records signed Ms. Digby in 2005, 18 months before she became a YouTube phenomenon. Hollywood Records helped devise her Internet strategy, consulted with her on the type of songs she chose to post, and distributed a high-quality studio recording of "Umbrella" to iTunes and radio stations.

In an Aug. 16 blog posting on her MySpace page, Ms. Digby wrote: "I NEVER in a million years thought that doing my little video of Umbrella in my living room would lead to this . tv shows, itunes, etc !!!"

Ms. Digby's MySpace and YouTube pages don't mention Hollywood Records. Until last week, a box marked "Type of Label" on her MySpace Music page said, "None." After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the entry was changed to "Major," though the label still is not named.

Here's a link to the full story in today's Wall Street Journal. [Subscription required.]