Changes Is Good

Good news: Today Joost announced they raised $45 million bucks with power VC firm’s from around the globe and a YouTube hating media giant. The deal brings together Index Ventures of the EU, Sequoia Capital of Silicon Valley fame, and the Li Ka-shing foundation run by Hong Kong based billionaire, Li Ka-shing. The international focus [...]

CBS just put out a press release announcing that they have cut a deal with Joost to show “first run and other premium content”. They are slated to launch content through the application in the spring and say that it will come from a bunch of the CBS divisions. The release says that they will [...]

This amazing bit of news was forwarded by Fred Benenson of Free Culture @ NYU. It’s amazing news and a critical development for the online music space. You can get more information at the RARA site and I’ve duplicated their message in full below without commentary:
From: Press Contact <respectartistaudience@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 31, 2007 [...]

Better Title: Blockbuster (the also-ran) Contemplates Buying Movielink (the never-was)
The good folks at Ars Technica have an interesting post on Blockbuster’s desire to save its dying business by buying a failed business, Movielink. Movielink is a DRM crippled, online movie service foisted on an uninterested public by the five major movie studios. According to reports [...]

After Steve Jobs dropped his anti-DRM bomb on the labels people immediately started talking about which label would be the first to wake up to MP3. Early money was on EMI being the first to buckle, largely because they are in the toughest financial position and Ted Cohen used to run the show. We’ll looks [...]

“Were winning” they say! I’d have to agree.
Our favorite swashbuckling buccaneers over at the Pirate Bay have done it again. These guys have all the swagger, ambition and balls that their name implies. Its not enough that they want to buy an island to freely distribute the digital goodness we all crave, or that they [...]

One of the many astute observations made by the street philosopher and urban griot, Bonty Killa, in his seminal work on the moral decay urban centers, Caan Believe Mi Eye, was his observation that “everybody wan go heaven but no body wan dead.” This is a perfect metaphor for the corporate relationship to innovation. All [...]

I was looking through the traffic stats on the site a couple of weeks ago when I noticed something interesting. It seems that more then 2/3 of you, my readers, never actually visit the site. This discovery was a bit of a shock. Who knew that the reason most of you visited this site [...]

Sony Pictures Entertainment announced today that they were buying Grouper.com, one of the 30 plus UGC video sites attempting to unseat YouTube as the King of crap collection. The deal puts $65 million in the coffers at Grouper and CEO, Josh Felser, gets to keep his job. They say they may move the company [...]

Updated: A shining example of the future of online music sales has gone ominously dark. AllofMP3, which has been the center of IFPI and RIAA ire, may have finally succumbed to the forces of complacency and stasis.
Last week, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, declared in his state of the nation address, that in addition to having [...]