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Interview With Mike Jones, CEO of Userplane Posted: 21 Jul 2008 05:00 PM CDT Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Jone of Userplane. We had time to discuss Userplane’s recent partnership announcement with Converdge. I also explored what services Userplane currently offers, what sort of monetization models Userplane currently uses and how Mike sees chat platforms evolving over the coming months. One thing I brought up during the conversation was the recent launch of Meebo’s competing platform and what his thoughts were. I also suggested that AOL work on acquiring Meebo to integrate into Userplane. Mike couldn’t confirm that an acquisition was in the works unfortunately! Mike took time to discuss some new features that Userplane will be releasing in the coming weeks as well as discuss his thoughts on how Userplane fits into the social application space. Listen to my podcast with Mike to hear more! This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

D.C. Based LivingSocial Raises $5 Million Posted: 21 Jul 2008 08:00 AM CDT Today, D.C. based LivingSocial.com announced their first round of funding from Grotech Ventures and Steve and Jean Case. The company was started last year with the launch of the Facebook platform when the company first developed the Visual Bookshelf application. I interviewed Tim O’Shaughnessy back in February when the company was still operating under the name Hungry Machine LLC. The company rapidly expanded beyond books to include movies, music, gaming, dining and drinking and now has applications for each of these channels on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and hi5. LivingSocial has now positioned themselves as a serious competitor in the social discovery and cataloging market. The company has over 6.4 million users and have catalogued more than 80 million reviews. This makes them a force to be reckoned with. The Visual Bookshelf has catalogued more comments on books than Amazon for the most popular books. Outside of Amazon, in the books category the company faces competition from companies like Goodreads and LibraryThing. In its other channels, the company faces a wide range of competition as well. The company has been able to differentiate itself by focusing heavily on reviews and personal inventory management. There are a lot of possibilities for expansion and with this new round of funding you can guarantee that the company will be moving rapidly to build out on new platforms and expand their existing channels. Congratulations to the LivingSocial team, one of the leading D.C. based web start-ups.

iLike Announces Ad Network and Developer Platform Posted: 20 Jul 2008 11:03 PM CDT Today iLike, the leading social music discovery service on the web, announced an ad platform for concert promoters and a music development platform for web developers. The ad platform enables promoters to reach out directly to fans based on location and musical taste. Advertisers can also place their advertisements across iLike’s entire network or Garageband.com, a site primarily targeted to independent bands. For users of the iLike application, songs can now be listened to as full-length tracks for up to 25 songs per month. While the ad platform is significant, I’m not so sure that listening to 25 full tracks per month provides much of an incentive to use the platform. Developers will have access to iLike and Rhapsody’s entire library of music to embed on their own sites and applications. This service sounds similar (if not identical) to the soon to be released platform by imeem. Given that the press release states that this new service will be launching in the coming months, I’m guessing that this announcement was intended to attract developer attention of the upcoming API. The company has now surpassed 30 million registered users, making it one of the largest social music services on the web to date. iLike faces fierce competition from companies like Last.fm, imeem and Qloud which was recently acquired by Buzznet. This space continues to heat up and iLike’s release highlights their rapid growth. I would expect a number of similar announcements to coincide this week with Facebook’s f8 event which could possibly turn out to be the largest event for the social web industry this year. If you’d like more details about the new iLike ad platform you can visit www.iLike.com/advertise’. Developers can also check out www.iLike.com/developer to be part of the new iLike developer program.

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