Shazam started in 2002 as a mobile music discovery company. The company first gained an immense amount of popularity when launching an iPhone application. The Shazam application has been downloaded about 50 million times on the iPhone, Google Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, etc. Shazam has a database of over 8 million songs on their database which goes back to the 1950’s. Shazam is a private company that is based in London, England.
When you hear a song on the radio or on your laptop, you can Tag it using the Shazam application. Shazam will tell you the name of the song, give you a link to buy the music on Amazon or iTunes, and allow you to tweet what you are listening to.
The latest news with the company is that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has invested in them. Kleiner Perkins made the investment through their iFund financial arm which is intended for iPhone application developers. Shazam previously raised $12.3 million in funding from DN Capital and Acacia Capital.
Shazam is planning to launch a service that will connect with concert tickets for artists that have been tagged by the app. So far Shazam has been cash-flow positive.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been airing commercials that feature a young Asian-American girl named Kylie to promote their new operating system called Windows 7. In the commercials, Kylie points out all the “happy words” that reviewers have been giving about Windows 7.
To get a further boost in publicity, Microsoft is hiring Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein to put on a variety show. MacFarlane is the creator of the animated series Family Guy. Borstein is one of the voice actresses for Family Guy, best known for playing Lois Griffin. The variety show will be aired on November 8 without commercials.
The deal was made between Microsoft, The Family Guy cast, and ad agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Media agency Universal McCann brokered the deal. Crispin and MacFarlane worked together on a deal in the past for creating Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. The series was uploaded to YouTube and was sponsored by Burger King initially. The series is now being sponsored by Priceline.com.
The variety program sponsored by Microsoft will feature Family Guy musical performances, celebrity guest appearances, and Microsoft product placements. “You’ll see us deeply integrated into the content … you’ll hear a lot about how Windows 7 can help you simplify your PC — it’s simple, fast and easy to use,” stated Microsoft general manager of consumer engagement and advertising Gayle Troberman. “Think about metaphors and examples we might use, talking about how simple things are. We’ll be evoking the cast of ‘Family Guy’ in some interesting ways that integrate the product messages.”
Update: Below is a video sneak peek from Win741 of how Windows 7 will be used by Family Guy:
Miley Cyrus made a rap video about quitting Twitter. The video received over 3 million views in 3 days. The video was just asking for a parody to be made and Jimmy Fallon jumped on it quickly while tapping his inner Billy Ray Cyrus. Miley Cyrus’ dad Billy Ray still uses Twitter and so Jimmy Fallon made a song about that. Above is a video embedded of the video.
Jyri Engeström co-founded a social network in Finland called Jaiku. A couple of years ago Google bought his company out and did nothing with it. Between the time that Google bought his company and now, Twitter took off and Jyri decided to leave. Jyri took on another project at Google and the search engine company ceased internal development of Jaiku. Jaiku was added to the Google App Engine and was open sourced.
Jyri left Google in order to “make meaning” out of another project. The tweet he wrote was “It was my last day at Google today. As for what’s next, @guykawasaki nailed it by saying: make meaning http://ping.fm/TUBnO.”
After the acquisition, Jyri and his family moved to San Francisco. But ever since then his family wanted to move back to Finland. Jyri and Chris Messina are rumored to be working on a new project together that involves “social objects.” Messina is a board member of the OpenID foundation.
Jyri is also helping his wife on a start-up called Thinglink. Thinglink will focus on sharing collections and photos.
AVG Technologies, the company behind the very popular anti-virus scanning software has launched a new feature. This new feature is extremely handy for those who are active on Twitter. Twitter messages often contain short URLs, but it is unpredictable which ones have links to viruses and which ones don’t.
AVG’s LinkScanner scans websites as you browse them to make sure that malway is not contained in them. If there is malware, the Internet user is blocked from revisiting the website. Twitter themselves use the Google Safe Browsing API to check websites that Google has blacklisted to make sure that there aren’t any short URLs connected to them. Twitter deletes the post immediately after detecting the malware-contained short URL.
AVG’s LinkScanner service track the malware websites in real-time. Short URLs are scanned by LinkScanner which can find bad links within GMail, Digg, MySpace and Bebo.
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