Electronic Arts announced today that it has acquired San Francisco based online karaoke site SingShot for an undisclosed sum. Kareoke sites are real crowd pleasers and this is the third in a year to be acquired. Fox Interactive Media acquired kSolo in April, then Yahoo! scooped up Bix in November. All three acquisitions brought experienced social media executives into the fold of larger companies – Nimrod Lev from kSolo, Mike Speiser from Bix and now SingShot CEO Ranah Edelin and CTO Niranjan Nagar who previously helped build Rhapsody Digital Music before it was acquired by Real Networks. The SingShot team will join the EA Sims Division, but EA says the technology “can be applied to several different community projects within EA.” That’s similar to what Yahoo! said when it acquired Bix. Speiser went from head of Bix to product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community As a large company, it doesn’t hurt to have a nice, small, successful karaoke site in your portfolio – but what’s probably most important is the infusion of executives who have built successful social media sites before. → Read More
kSolo, acquired by Fox Interactive back in May, faces some new competition in the online karaoke space. SingShot is releasing their own variation of online karaoke tomorrow. The new service is essentially a copy of kSolo heavily influenced by the successful YouTube user interface. All the basic functionality of the kSolo product is there. Performers can select from a library of songs that are at least about two to three years old, listen to a demo, and record their own version while following along with the lyrics on the screen. The hope is to repeat the success of other social content sites like YouTube by allowing users to share their songs to be voted and commented on by the public. The human filtering will hopefully pick out the Kelly Clarksons in a forest of William Hungs. The big differences in these two services lie in the details. First of all, kSolo spurned Flash, the now-ubiquitous platform for online video, requires a plugin and runs only on Internet Explorer. SingShot runs completely on Flash and works in all browsers, making it a breeze to set up and start running. Users just have change their Flash settings to allow the program access to their mic. While both programs allow performances to be shared, SingShot follows the simple YouTube model and allows a simple cut and paste link or embed, whereas kSolo has a clunky share feature that allows you to email a link or, after a little hunting, embed your entire playlist on a page. Both services still haven’t gotten navigation right, though. I found it hard to stumble upon new songs or find ones where I only remembered part of the title or lyrics. Instead, I found myself filtering through broad categories (rock, pop, or 80s) and having to repeatedly hit “next page”. The simple addition of page numbers along the bottom would really help skim through the categories. However, unlike SingShot, kSolo’s search engine fails to recognize “the Beatles” as the same as “Beatles, the”. kSolo does have one up on SingShot when it comes to finding new music, though. They have a feature that allows you to find music that is similar the song you just recorded. For Today’s launch, SingShot sends a shot across the bow at Fox Interactive Media by launching an aggressive pricing model. SingShot gives two weeks of free use to kSolo’s one week and → Read More
