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 Seeqpod via Chapter 7 Bankruptcy proceeding. Intertrust – former by Sony and Philips in partnership with Stephens Bank – has however not acquired the domain names used by the company. → 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 personalization technology and thus enable consumers to rapidly discover mobile apps and content across all devices and platforms. → 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 have not been disclosed and the sale is still pending with the bankruptcy court in San Jose, Calif.
Seeqpod has had a tumultuous history over the past year. In February SeeqPod was slapped by lawsuits from EMI and Warner Music, as the record companies looked for billions of dollars in damages. In March, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy protection and put itself up for sale. Last June, we wrote that the company was looking to sell off its domain name, with reports that it would be acquired by Microsoft (which didn’t happen). Last December, we heard that the technology assets of SeeqPod, which are owned by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, were being sold to a “large Japanese media company” and the founders of the startup were building another company: the Mikojo music search engine. → 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 wouldn’t divulge the name). And now the SeeqPod team is back building another company: the Mikojo music search engine.
Before we get to that though, a recap of SeeqPod’s difficult year. In February SeeqPod was slapped by lawsuits from EMI and Warner Music, as the record companies looked for billions of dollars in damages. In March, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy protection and put itself up for sale. → 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 on the Web where that kind of stuff can be found.
Evidently, the music industry took notice and sought to shut the service down in court. Warner Music was the first to file a lawsuit against the startup behind Songbeat and ultimately forced the fledgling company to take the service offline, but not without them promising to return with something bigger and bolder in the future.
Yesterday, the guys behind Songbeat came out with a revived version of the desktop client, which has been renamed Songbeat 360. Music lovers are going to love it. The music industry, however, is not. → 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 confirmed.
Today we’re hearing that Seeqpod has started looking to sell off its seeqpod.com domain name, pending an acquisition deal that is about to close. We got in touch with CEO Kasian Franks, who refused to confirm the rumors, saying that a deal has “not officially closed” and that a decision to unload the domain is still “up in the air”. It may not be official yet, but given that the company has apparently begun prodding for buyers for the domain, it sounds like it’s nearly finalized. → 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. Rather, it is trying to negotiate a piecemeal sale of its technology assets and find new jobs for its core technology team.
And while Microsoft seems to be interested in the largest chunk of Seeqpod’s assets, the company is speaking with other large search companies in hopes of finding a home for the other pieces. These assets include its targeted crawling system for finding playable media on the Web, its search index of 14 million playable search results and 500 million associated text pages, its recommendation and discovery system, five related patents, and the teams associated with each of these technologies. The fact that Seeqpod is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy makes this sort of fire sale easier to pull off. As far as the pending lawsuit with the music industry which forced it to seek protection under bankruptcy in the first place, there is no plan to settle at this point in time and “become an ATM machine” for the dying music industry, says my source. → 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, the startup has had a rocky road up until now.
SeeqPod has always tried to avoid getting sued by pointing to the DMCA, and arguing that it merely indexes media from across the Internet (much of it not copyright-cleared) but does not effectively host any files and thus should be protected from litigation. Regardless, music labels in particular were not pleased with how SeeqPod and many of the web services using its technology as an underlying foundation were discovering and streaming songs on the net. The record labels sued, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy, and then put itself up for sale. → 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 California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.
Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)
Apparently, Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again after 45 minutes and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night. → 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 multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result. → 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 not a joke.
The service amassed merely 2,400 registered users since its launch in early 2008, and has a monthly visitor rate of only 7,000. The back-end runs for free on Google App Engine and the Flex front-end code will be included should someone decide to pick up the site. → 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 raise the ire of countless developers, a developer named Ryan Sit who happened to tap into the Seeqpod API.
The legality of Seeqpod is murky. The company says that it doesn’t store any songs, but instead streams them from countless music files littering sites across the web. In effect, it acts as a powerful music search engine with a media player built in. The record industry claims that this is still illegal, and the new EMI complaint goes as far as to say that Seeqpod actually does host some of these music files, at least temporarily (which would strike a major blow to Seeqpod’s defense if proven true). In any case, Seeqpod is clearly on some shaky legal ground, so the new lawsuit doesn’t come as a surprise.
What is surprising, and potentially very alarming, is the fact that Ryan Sit was named in the suit for running the one-man startup Favtape, which leverages the Seeqpod API to stream music. Sit has created a number of sites, including Swurl and FavThumbs. In short, he’s a prolific developer who takes advantage of the APIs offered by many popular websites. → 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 here. We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise. Evernote Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data. See Erick’s review here. → 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 decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward. 2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available – permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep. Unfortunately we don’t like any of these choices. Sonific joins the TechCrunch Deadpool thanks to Andrew Watson for the tip → 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 to avoid any copyright issues. To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr – music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well. We covered GrooveShark‘s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora. CrunchBase Information Myplaylist Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal). The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music. The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing. CrunchBase Information Grooveshark Last.fm Seeqpod Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 digital public performances of these works,” making a direct and material contribution to infringing content by presenting content from “pirate sites.” What’s interesting about this case is that Seeqpod is a search engine; it links to content as Google would, although it does allow users to play the content from their site, but ultimately they never host any of the content. The EFA notes that there is little case law relating to search engines and copyright claims, and the DMCA should be applicable here; “the defendants are complying with the letter of the law, but copyright owners are now trying to change the rules in court.” CrunchBase Information Seeqpod Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 in the future. Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal). Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well. Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding. CrunchBase Information songza Seeqpod Skreemr Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web. The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads. Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen. Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod. CrunchBase Information Seeqpod Skreemr songza Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 taste in music will complement the expression of one’s taste in fashion, and has therefore decided to integrate SeeqPod functionality into user profiles. SeeqPod is an MP3 search engine, reviewed along with a couple others here, that allows you to stream (mostly copyrighted) music found around the web by its crawlers. Now, Chictini users can search for music using SeeqPod within the Chictini site itself and add one song at a time to their profiles. The song will then show up on their profiles in the form of a SeeqPod widget that allows for instant playback. As we mentioned in our previous coverage of SeeqPod, it’s unlikely that the labels have enough legal standing to win cases against the music search engines themselves, although there is a possibility that the engines could be held liable for contributory infringement. Chictini is evidently betting that their chances for legal repercussions are similarly very low, and probably even much lower. CrunchBase Information Chictini Seeqpod Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
