The Inquisitr » dodopool

Wikia Search finally canned

Duncan Riley — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:36:35 +0000

Wikia Search, pitched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as a Google killer when it launched in January 2008 is no longer.

Wales wrote in a post that Wikia Search “has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped” and then blamed the economy for the demise.

Wikia Search failed to find an audience, which in turn meant that it failed to establish a credible search index. The idea was to take Wikipedia crowd sourcing to search, so search results were edited and inserted by users. Things started to look bad in August last year, when Wikia launched a toolbar that allowed users to scrape results from Google; as I wrote at the time, providing a tool that encourages users to use a competing search engine (one that was claimed would be killed) reeked of desperate times.

Wales says that he may return to search again in the future, but we wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

ManiaTV shuts

Duncan Riley — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:43:58 +0000

Internet TV company ManiaTV has shut down after failing to find a buyer.

The company, founded in 2004 was one of the early attempts to take online live streaming television to a mass audience. The service though failed to catch on, not helped by regular changes in format, from user generate content into edgy 18-30 programming among other attempts.

In recent times it moved toward more of a Revision 3 style production house, offering shows on demand.

Ultimately though it was a failure of distribution that was always going to doom ManiaTV from near the start. They were ahead of the market when it came to live streaming television at a time that video podcasting (and podcasting full stop) was in its infancy, but failed to not so much as build an audience alone, but gain access to a potential audience.

Rocketboom was (and perhaps still is) the leader in distribution in the online produced video space. Andrew Baron built distribution networks where none existed before, generating an unprecedented at the time level of access to the show, which was key to its success. ManiaTV on the other hand didn’t work on access, and while you could view it on a computer, or via a plugin if you had a Windows Media Center Box attached to you TV, it rarely, if ever appeared as an option in the early or even later wave of internet to television devices. Even computer focused media software (Miro comes to mind) ignored live online TV in favor of podcasts, where as ManiaTV could have, and should have been working toward access (note, Miro only recently added live streaming).

Before their time perhaps, but now ManiaTV joins the dodos.

(in part via NewTeeVee)

Sorry, there’s no easy way of putting this: Lala Sucks

Duncan Riley — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:31:37 +0000

Lala is gaining headlines across the tech blogosphere for a new service that allows users to play songs on the web. The glowing reviews mention support from major record labels and an extensive library. Some are calling it “The Next Revolution In Digital Music,” “Spectacular” and “Switched On.”

Here’s what Lala is offering. Users sign up, and if they choose to they can sync what they own locally with what’s on Lala (no uploads, but owned single recognition). Users can then play any song on Lala for free…once. If they already own the song (as identified through the sync process) they can play that song on Lala on an unlimited basis, if they don’t own that song, they have to pay 10c for the rights to play it on an unlimited basis, per song.

Lala comes bundled with the ability to purchase songs at competitive rates vs Amazon or iTunes, and songs purchased are DRM free. 10c play payments are credited against the future purchase of the song.

Pay to play: fail

What’s revolutionary about a site that charges people to play music on demand that is freely available on other sites (some legal, some dubious) at no cost at all. It’s not only bizarre, it’s beyond stupid. It is spectacular…spectacularly dumb. This is the third incarnation of Lala, with the site having started as a CD swapping service. One headline said it may be third time lucky for Lala, more like three strikes and you’re out.

People are not going to flock to, and use a service that charges them 10 cents every time they want to play a single more than once. Why would they? Last.fm and Grooveshark are two perfectly legal players in this space where they don’t have to pay (Last.fm can be limited at times), and there are a range of other sites, such as Seeqpod that offer free on demand music as well. It’s insane to enter a market trying to get users to make micropayments when your competitors don’t.

Bonus points: it’s georetarded

Now here’s a surprise (not), Lala can’t be used outside of the United States, so the chirpy voice, with a couple of translations told me when I tried to play a song on the site. So you’ve got a model which charges users for playing songs when your competitors don’t, and it’s only available in the United States, so you immediately reduce the odds that you might be able to find enough people gullible enough to cough up to use the service. lalalalalalala.

Conclusion

Lala sucks, and I can’t believe that so many in the tech blogosphere are either taking drugs, or drinking so much kool aid that they think this service is a good thing. I tried extremely hard to find something I liked about this site, really, really, hard, and I just can’t. Dumbest business model ever combined with the myopia of georetardation. Three strikes equals an EPIC FAIL.

Lala

Gator, aka Claria, aka Jelly Cloud may have finally joined the dodopool

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:58:19 +0000

Jelly Cloud, the company formerly known as Claria, and before that Gator, is finally joining the dodopool, according to Valleywag.

Gator first launched in 1998 with a “companion service” that offered to autofill in site passwords and deliver users great savings when buying things online, and was regularly offered in conjunction with other programs, including Kazaa. The nicest definition for Gator was adware, inserting adcertising into browser sessions, and causing some reasonable havoc along, although others described it as malware and spyware.

Gator changed its name to Claria Corporation in 2003 in an attempt to reposition the company from its sordid past. The “reformed” company took a staggering $40 million in 2006 from Comdisco Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Garage Technology Ventures, Greylock Partners, Rogers Communications, Sand Hill Capital, SOFTBANK America, Technology Crossover Ventures, and U.S. Venture Partners shortly after promising to exit the adware/ spyware business. As Jelly Cloud, now reformed as an “ad network,” the company pulled $11.5 million in March this year from U.S. Venture Partners, SoftBank, Sand Hill Capital and Cross Link Capital.

The dodopool entry isn’t confirmed yet, but you’ve got to question a market that invests $11.5m in a company with a history such as this. Only one word comes to mind: bubble.

Claria

JellyCloud

Social.fm joins the dodos

Duncan Riley — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:58:27 +0000

Social music discovery service Social.fm has joined the dodopool, according to a report at GigaOM.

Social.FM helped users find new music through their social network, in a similar way to Western Australian startup Scouta. User profiles included a “DJ Rank” that allocated preference based on the number of hours spent listening to particular artists.

I last covered the company in October when it announced a comprehensive deal with Microsoft. A deal that was said to be “extremely fun-to-use for Windows Mobile customers” included Microsoft offering a free lifetime subscription to Social.FM for all Microsoft employees worldwide. Under the deal Social.FM joined the Microsoft Mobile2Market Program which promotes “Designed for Windows Mobile” logo-certified applications for Windows Mobile-based Smartphones and Pocket PCs to mobile operators, e-tailers, retailers and consumers.

Obviously Microsoft and $5 million in VC wasn’t enough to push Social.fm to profitability. No word yet on what will happen with the assets for the site, but the domain name itself should be fairly popular.

Vale eWeek’s BlogSeeker

Duncan Riley — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:39:19 +0000

eWeek’s BlogSeeker blog tracking service, a service nearly everybody reading this post would have never heard of (and herein lies the problem) is apparently no more.

Following a tip, I visited BlogSeeker to find that nothing on the site has been updated in over two months, with most of the content on the front page going back to March. The really odd thing about this service, if it ever really existed as an ongoing concern, is that it doesn’t exist in Google…or Yahoo, or even Technorati (outside of the page itself), and that’s how far I went in trying to find more about it. It’s like it never actually launched, or if it, eWeek has tried to scrub every reference to it. In fact the only links into it were some stray eWeek posts where an ad for BlogSeeker was hard coded into the posts itself and must have been too hard for eWeek to remove.

There’s also an interesting twist: the project would appear to be linked in some way to Steve Gillmor. As well as appearing as the featured blogger on the front page of BlogSeeker, the demise of BlogSeeker would appear to be around the same time as Gillmor stopped blogging for eWeek here. A failed Gillmor project perhaps? I asked FSG for comment and all I got was something about mesh and Al Capone, so that didn’t solve the mystery.

One person pointed out to me that this is yet another example of a traditional media outfit trying to break into blog tracking and failing so badly that no one noticed. Despite this being a rational conclusion, I think that if Steve Gillmor was involved that it could never be as clear cut as that and that the real reason would be far more complicated, something that I, as a mere mortal, could not understand. So be it. Either way, BlogSeeker joins the ~~mai~~ dodopool.

No related posts.