Intertrust Technologies Corporation, a company that develops and and licenses technologies and intellectual property for digital rights management (DRM), has moved to acquire the assets of media search service Seeqpod.
Intertrust, which holds over 150 patents and has offices in Silicon Valley, London and Beijing, announced this morning that it has purchased all software and patents developed by… → Read More
Kasian Franks, an engineer and researcher mostly known for being the technical founder of music search venture SeeqPod (more about its tumultuous history here), is back with another startup in the search space.
This time, he’s set his sights on the world of mobile applications – obviously quite the booming space.
Meet Mimvi, which aims to combine its proprietary search, recommendation and… → Read More
The story of music search engine SeeqPod may be finally nearing an end. It appears the remaining assets of the troubled startup have been purchased by Bloson, a recently launched social network to raise money for charitable causes. Bloson has specifically acquired SeeqPod’s domain and the contact information of its user base, which equals around 4 million users. Specific terms of the transaction… → Read More
The tumultuous story of music search engine Seeqpod is finally coming to a close. Last June, we wrote that the company was looking to sell off its domain name, with evidence suggesting that it was about to be acquired by Microsoft. That didn’t happen. We’ve just heard from CEO Kasian Franks that the technology assets of SeeqPod are now being sold to a “large Japanese media company” (he… → Read More
I liked Songbeat the minute I started using it. First released as a desktop app for Seeqpod back in January 2008, the upgraded version that was introduced nearly 12 months after that not only made searching for music extremely simple but also offered an excellent way to download tracks to your computer.
And like Seeqpod, it was also an easy way to obtain copyrighted material from the many places… → Read More
It’s been a tumultous few months for Seeqpod, the powerful music search engine that skimmed the web for music files hosted on other servers. In March the site finally cracked under the weight of multiple lawsuits brought on by the major record companies and filed for bankruptcy protection. Then came word that it may-or-may-not have been acquired by Microsoft, though the deal still has yet to be… → Read More
Earlier today, I wrote a post wondering whether music-search engine Seeqpod had finally sold itself to Microsoft because of a suggestive link on its homepage linking to Microsoft Search. Some other bloggers noticed also. Since then, I’ve been able to confirm that no acquisition has closed and that talks continue. Seeqpod is indeed speaking with Microsoft, but not about an outright acquisition. … → Read More
We’ve covered SeeqPod quite a bit here on TechCrunch. The San Francisco startup has been hard at work to develop a way to intelligently index media files on the Web to make them searchable online, and introduced an API which many other startups and projects made use of to power their own music, video and audio search engines. But despite the fact that its technology has always been pretty unique… → Read More
Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation. At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of… → Read More
SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the … → Read More
SeeqPod has decided to sell its source code to developers to spawn more clones, one of the media search startups that built upon its API is apparently calling it quits: Streamzy, which we profiled in July 2008, is selling itself on eBay at a starting bid of $1,000, provided it’s not a lame April Fools joke (the bidding ends April 1).
Update: Streamzy co-founder Brian Krantz says it’s definitely… → Read More
It’s no secret that the record industry hates Seeqpod, a music site that lets users stream songs for free. Last year the company was sued by Warner Music Group (the outcome of the suit is still pending). Now, the company has just been slapped with a complaint from EMI. But the new complaint goes one step further, personally naming some of the Seeqpod executives, and in a move that may well… → Read More
This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday – listen to… → Read More
Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable. Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes: 1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label… → Read More
MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance. MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music… → Read More
Music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s library. For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest… → Read More
Warner Music has filed suit against music search engine Seeqpod for copyright infringement. Seeqpod offers a music search engine that allows users to play music they find directly on the site. According to comScore the service had over 6 million page views in December 2007. Warner Music claims in its suit that Seeqpod infringes on their copyrighted works by “making on-demand and unauthorized… → Read More
Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines… → Read More
A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them. Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a… → Read More
Chictini is a social network, launched just this fall, where people can submit fashionable items (clothes, accessories, art, and even electronics) found on the websites of online retailers. Members (“chicsters”) vote submitted items up or down, causing them to rise and fall, thus making the site like Digg but for trendy merchandise. Chictini thinks that the expression of one’s… → Read More
Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection. Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr. All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking… → Read More
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