Songs on Zune to cost 99 cents

By Vivek Puri | September 28th, 2006 at 10:07 am ET         

Microsoft has announced that songs available for download at the Zune Marketplace service will cost about 99 cents a song. This price is same as that offered for by Apple’s iTunes. So the whole battle boils down to the device. Comparing the specs of Zune and iPod, Zune has a head start by enabling the users to share photos and songs, on a limited basis, to one another.

Microsoft is also offering a subscription pass for $14.99 a month, which will allow users to listen to any of the songs on Zune Marketplace.

Update: Zune will be launched on Novermber 14 and will be priced at $249.99 for 30GB capacity.

[press releaase] 

[via]

Tags: StartupSquad, Zune, Music, iPod

DEMOfall: Eluma introduces desktop communities

By Vivek Puri | September 28th, 2006 at 09:43 am ET         

Eluma wants to build great communities but with a difference. Eluma’s focus group is the brand marketers. These brand marketers will get their loyal users to build communities around their products using Eluma. What Eluma will provide is its branded Desktop Community product to aid the brand marketers. This branded community can help generate discussions among users around something they have in common - The Brand! Eluma can reinforce brands, and allow users to benefit from the wisdom of crowds. Eluma, headed by Richard Buck, is located in Boston. Eluma had received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sebastian Holdings.

In my talk with Richard, he briefed me about how he and his friend Paul Christen (CTO, Eluma) came up with the idea about Eluma. First they recognized the fact that lot of consumers who have affinity for a particular brand are not able to keep track of the brand activities. On the other hand there are brand managers, who want to connect their loyal customers, but are not able to do that using the regular means like newsletter that end up in the spam folder. Also it is a time consuming and costly for them to develop and maintain their own community solutions.

So they came up with an advanced desktop communication tool that allows brand manager to push their message directly to the desktop, providing them with a targeted, one-to-many broadcast channel. This is also great for customers who get the latest information right on their desktop and also receive/give recommendations in their community. Interesting point about Eluma is that it does not have any web-version. All the content can be subscribed and read only from the desktop client. Eluma’s aim is to complement brand sites and not compete with them. It can instead increase web-site hits for the involved brands.

Brand marketers can get in touch with Eluma to build a branded community. Eluma takes just half a day to prepare the branded community which consists of Eluma Control Center for brand manager and a desktop client for the brand consumers. Eluma Control Center enables the brand marketers to easily upload and manage desktop alerts, feeds, and content for the users. Whenever the brand marketers wants to inform its consumers about a new product or a new release, he can push that content through the Control Center which will be delivered onto the desktop client through RSS. This desktop client is like an advanced form of RSS reader. Users are be able to view, comment and rate content items. Users can also rate and comment from toolbar or desktop client itself. Eluma has also developed client sync feature, like Feeddemon, so that consumers can install the client on multiple machines but don’t end up reading the same content again. Once they have the client installed on their desktop, they can search and subscribe to other branded communities as well using the same client. Eluma will also be providing a mobile based client by the year end. Currently Eluma is focused on US based brands, but will be soon offering multi-lingual desktop clients to enable a global push.

Eluma is going at great lengths to provide complete privacy to the users and also prevent community hijacking by top 20 users (read digg). Like, you can’t drill-down a user profile and get all the comments he has ever written or items he has ever rated in all the Eluma branded communities. Whatever happens in a community, stays in the community. Aside from the privacy, Eluma is not just for brand managers. If users want they can also setup their communities using Eluma.

As for monetizing their product, Eluma will be sharing advertising revenue generated through the branded desktop clients. Besides this brands also have to pay a monthly license fee to Eluma. Traffic.om will soon be the first company to launch a branded community using Eluma. Right now Eluma is aggressively focusing on signing up more brands.

I think Eluma is great idea. But the whole idea depends on the fact that users have to download and install the Eluma Desktop Community client. Brand managers and Eluma will have to work together to convince users that Eluma is in fact is a good option. Brand managers need to keep in mind that if they try to push out too much or false content, they might end up loosing their most loyal customers.

Links:
Eluma

Tags: StartupSquad, DEMOfall, Eluma, Marketing, Branding, Advertising

Funding: Videoegg gets $12 million

By Vivek Puri | September 27th, 2006 at 10:54 pm ET         

Videoegg, site specializing in video publishing, editing, distributing and remixing, has raised $12 million lead by Maveron. It was only last week that Videoegg had announced new partnerships with top social networking sites, which I had discussed here.
 
Videoegg daily reach on Alexa has shown some increased activity after the earlier announcement about partnerships. It has to seen whether those data points are outliers or combine to form an upward consistent curve.

Also, Comscore has today released results for Video Metrix, which tracks actual online streaming video behavior among U.S. Internet users. Myspace topped the ranking to have the highest individual video streams initiated by U.S. users with nearly 1.5 billion streams. Videoegg has yet to reach the top 10.

Links:
Videoegg

Tags: StartupSquad, Videoegg, Video, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Funding

Retrevo launches gadget research engine

By Vivek Puri | September 27th, 2006 at 12:31 pm ET     4 Comments »    

Retrevo has launched its vertical search engine at DEMOfall that makes decision making about product purchase quicker and easier. Retrevo is currently focused on enabling an easier way to perform consumer electronics product research by providing current and aggregated information. For any product you search at Retrevo, it brings back the related Product documents, Manufacturer Information, Review & Articles, Forums, and Blogs.

Retrevo is located in Sunnyvale, CA and is headed by Vipin Jain. Vipin Jain had previously co-founded Telseon, a pioneer in Metro Ethernet network technology, which was acquired by OnFiber in 2002. OnFiber was acquired by Qwest Communications earlier this month.

Vipin himself a gadget geek found that any product research process is very time consuming and inefficient. He came up the idea of providing a platform which will provide comprehensive information about products and their entire ecosystem. Work on Retrevo was started last year and was initially bootstrapped by Vipin. Earlier this year Retrevo had raised $1 million from Alloy Ventures. Retrevo team includes 9 people, all of them located in US.

Retrevo has developed its own algorithm for content aggregation, semantic analysis, classification and ranking, which provides up-to-date and relevant results. This combined with the nice adjustable 2 pane UI provides a very good user experience. I tried searching for my favorite device Nokia 770, and Retrevo came back with its ‘Top Results’, which include Nokia 770 User guide and 3 results each for Manufacturer Info, Reviews & Articles, and Forums & Blogs. If you want to dig deep into a particular result type, just click on the required tab on the left. You can either preview the results on the right pane of search results or you can jump right on the site. Currently the only collaboration feature offered is sharing of results through email. Still, it’s a great user experience.

Currently Retrevo is free of any form of advertising, although they might be looking at sponsored results in future. In my conversation with Vipin, he mentioned that Retrevo will be continuously evolving in the next couple of years, with major features being introduced every quarter.

Looking at the current feature set and consumer needs, I feel that decision about a purchase depends heavily on the price and rating, areas not covered by Retrevo. I don’t know if providing pricing and rating content is in their future plans, but will definitely like to have it there. Wize, which I had discussed earlier, does a great job at rating products, but lacks Retrevo like comprehensive product data. Also there should be option to save research data, ability to subscribe RSS feeds for review and blog posts, and related social features.

Links:
Retrevo

Tags: StartupSquad, Shopping, Web2.0, Web2.0, Retrevo, DEMOfall

DEMOfall: Joopz launches Group SMS

By Vivek Puri | September 27th, 2006 at 01:23 am ET     5 Comments »    

Joopz from Mobile-Sphere is an interesting product being launched at DEMOfall. Twitter has been working in this space (although product is not exactly the same), but Joopz seems to have developed a better approach to enable group SMS.
 
Joopz lets you send and receive SMS from the Web to any mobile phone for free. You can send your message to multiple phone numbers in a group at the same time. If any member of the group replies to your message, all the members will receive that SMS. Best part is that the communication is stored and updated on Joopz site in real-time using a cool AJAX interface.
 
Joopz also has few other nifty features to it including setting up reminders or sending text messages to recipients at a specific time – after a day, a week, a year.
 
However, I noticed couple of issues with the Joopz setup. Message history is available only to the user who starts the discussion from web. Even if the recipient is a registered at Joopz, the messages don’t show up in his message history. Another issue is that if you send out a SMS reply in a discussion, you yourself also receive back that SMS, which logically you shouldn’t be receiving. Also there should be some way to start a group SMS discussion from mobile itself, instead of someone having to push start it from web.
 
Personally I feel Joopz has the potential to catch up very quickly in the SMS world especially if targeted towards Asian countries where mobile is the primary device for most people.

Links:
Joopz
Mobile-Sphere

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, SMS, DEMOfall