Written on 28th February 2009
9 COMMENTS Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
Soundzit is a new music service developed with the Youtube API that provides access to over 300 million songs where in you can search, listen and embed music online for free and without any registration. The users can also purchase music on iTunes and listen to high quality songs through a link on all music listing.
Below is a sample embedded player
Let us know your views about this music search engine in comments.
More and more the privacy of web surfers became a big concern. Not only for web surfers themselves but also for the service providers (ISPs, websites, etc).
One piece of the trail a web surfer leaves behind, as he navigates or uses web services, is the IP address.
This IP (Internet Protocol) is a tiny string of numbers like 234.12.102.15. There are millions of combinations! Every computer which gets on the Internet has this type of address which identifies each of them in the crowd (usually, assigned by the Internet Service Providers).
Most of the common users are not aware of this. However, that’s not the case of the service providers. Many of them use to get and store the IP addresses of the users so they could make their technology better, because the law requires them to, or just because that’s what they wanted.
Google used to retain the IP addresses indefinitely until the voice of privacy activists became too loud. Now it keeps that data for about 9 months. Yahoo keeps it even less: 3 months.
But one search engine (meta search engine, in fact) doesn’t keep it at all. That’s a Dutch search engine ixquick which became the first to operate in this way, according to The Register. The Article 29 Working Party, which is a committee made up of the privacy watchdogs of the European Union’s 27 member states, said last year in a report on the issue that any company that kept logs for longer than six months risked falling foul of data protection laws.
The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) is on a roll. After its recent €50,000 investment in VIDDIX, DCIF has now invested in online identity tool RealMee. The amount of funding is undisclosed, but the Dutch fund usually backs start-ups with a €20,000 to €40,000 money stack. RealMee helps people to manage their online identity by creating a profile which will show up in Google’s top results when searching for one’s name.
When I interviewed founders Roland Carpentier and Hans Helms in February, they assured me that no tricks like cloacking and linkfarming were used to push RealMee pages up in the search results. An important part of their strategy is urging users to link to their RealMee profile from social network profiles.
The service isn’t interesting for people who’ve already built a significant web presence. But ordinary people who haven’t created any web content, will gladly welcome RealMee. Moreover, the service will soon learn these folks how to take advantage of the upcoming open standards – since RealMee will start providing OpenID services. They will also suggest users new web applications (there’s your business model).
So far, RealMee has 3000 users. That isn’t impressive number, so it won’t be surprising to hear that Carpentier and Helms will use the financial injection to attract new users. I’m pretty sure they’ll ask DCIF partners Telegraaf Media Groep and Ilse Media – large media companies – to help them gaining some traction.
Ernst-Jan has already written a piece about how useful the Quintura corporate blog is for keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in Eastern Europe and Russia. Now Yakov brings us this gem: apparently Czech search engine Seznam is talking to potential buyers about selling for a price exceeding $1 billion. Yes, that’s billion with a ‘b’ as in ‘big money’.
Google is cited as a potential acquirer, along with private equity firms Warburg Pincus, owner of Czech portal Centrum, and Macquarie Capital Alliance Group, owner of Czech yellow pages publisher Mediatel.
Seznam had 62% share of the Czech search market vs. Google’s 29% share. The site reported 4.4 million unique users in May 2008, and is estimating bringing in revenues of approx. $90 million this year, up 40% from 2007. The company was previously valued at $300 million after two private equity firms bought out Lycos Europe’s 30% stake for $91 million. The majority of shares is still in the hands of founder Ivo Lukačovič.
There seems to be a huge consolidation wave in the Czech internet landscape (see Yakov’s post for more on that), but if this deal goes through, it would make it one of the largest in the history of the Eastern European web scene alltogether.
Written on 28th February 2009
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