May 18th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 
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Napster tries again
Now under the stewardship of Best Buy, Napster is taking yet-another-stab at offering a compelling music service since its glorious P2P days of yesteryear. This time round the company is touting the combination of unlimited streaming of its 7 million strong music library in combination with 5 DRM-free downloads per month, all for a monthly subscription of just five dollars. “Music fans now have the best of both worlds”, boasts the press release.
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March 16th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Net TV | Comments
No longer a ‘one trick pony’, Vudu’s ambition to become a fully-fledged platform, capable of pulling in content from a range of third-party services, appears to be bearing fruit.
Today the company announced that owners of its set-top box now have access to Internet radio service Pandora. Features include support for multiple Pandora accounts, “enabling every member of the family to play his or her own personalized Pandora stations”, along with the ability to create custom stations and tweak them dynamically by thumbing tracks up or down.
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June 10th, 2008 | Posted in Audio | Comments Off
We’re big fans of Logitech’s line of Squeezebox streaming audio devices, and today the company announced that it had partnered with Last.fm to add the social music service to its existing bevy of online streaming options.
Owners of the Logitech Squeezebox Duet (see our coverage), Squeezebox Classic or the high-end Transporter network music systems who are based in the U.S., UK or Germany will be able to access Last.fm’s music catalog through their home stereo systems. Users will be able to listen to Last.fm Internet radio stations based on artist or genre, as well as stream personalized stations created based on their listening habits — thanks to Last.fm’s “scrobbling capability” which debuted on Squeezebox earlier this year.
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April 15th, 2008 | Posted in Audio, Other, Social | Comments Off
It’s hard to fault Peter Gabriel’s logic: We are overwhelmed by the amount of information and choice we have on the Web. But is his solution — a recommendation engine called The Filter — really the answer?
Of course Gabriel, the genius behind the British rock band Genesis and the solo artist who gave us such tunes as “Solsbury Hill,” “Exposure,” and “Games Without Frontiers,” thinks so as he and England’s Eden Ventures have invested $8 million in The Filter. They believe people are overwhelmed by the Web and can’t find good content because it’s buried out of sight.
“When you drown people in an ocean of information, you’ve got to give them navigation tools,” Gabriel told News.com. “I know that there is better stuff out there than what I generally am exposed to . . . So if I have a sort of intelligent ally working with me 24 hours a day, I think I have a much better chance of getting stuff that will entertain, excite, and inspire me.”
The Filter, originally launched as a music recommendation service about a year ago in Europe, re-launched today in private beta as a more complete solution. It will be available to the public sometime in May.
But there’s something about The Filter that bugs me. What separates The Filter from any of the other algorithm-based recommendation engines out there, whether a human is a part of the process or not — Amazon, iTunes, lastFM, Netflix, Imeem, Digg, Pandora, and many more?
LONDON - Steve O'Hear reporting from the trenches of convergence (more)
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