Just a quick FYI: The Sonos S5 is now available in both white and black. It’s still the same $399 price and loaded with all the wireless music goodies. → Read More
Venture capital is flowing once again to startups at a steady pace. During the first quarter of 2010, the total value of venture funding doubled to $12.8 billion from $6 billion a year before, when it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, the funding amount is down 16 percent from the $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, based on an analysis of CrunchBase data.
Some of the venture rounds during the first quarter include Sonos (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/12/sonos-confirms-25-million-investment-from-index-ventures/), betaworks ($20 million), Hunch ($12 million), and Posterous ($4.4 million). → Read More
Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.
The funds will be used for growth equity, says the company, which signals that they are past the proof of product stage (well past, in this case) and will use the funds to speed market penetration.
From our original post: → Read More
Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.
Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.
Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult. → Read More
If you’re familiar with the Sonos system, then there isn’t too much news here. In fact, there’s not too much news even if you don’t know what Sonos does. Let me break it down for you: the Sonos system is a nice, comprehensive wireless music system for your house that you can control via your iPhone. If you haven’t heard of it before and you’re wondering how to get your music collection to various rooms in your house, check out the demo.
The rest of you, think on your current Sonos speakers: are they good enough? No? Well then — these ones are better. → Read More
What we have here is the Sonos CR200 controller that was leaked a couple weeks back. By now, I’d imagine most of the CG audience is familiar with Sonos and what they’re all about, so I don’t really need to dive into that. All you really need to know about the CR200 is that it features a 3.5-inch capacitive VGA touch-screen and has a kickass keyboard. Just check out the video to see what it’s capable of. Available now for $350. → Read More
Boy oh boy did I love reviewing the Sonos Bundle 150. The Sonos multi-room home audio solution is superb. One wart to the system was the controller: the scrollwheel was a little cumbersome for some actions, not to mention outrageously expensive as a stand-alone component. Looks like a new touch-screen controller is due out soon, though, which should remove one complaint from my review. Or you can keep using the free iPhone controller with its touch-screen interface right now. → Read More
Unless you’re down to hobble your own crazy homebrew set-up, tinkering with wireless audio systems is a damned expensive hobby. Everytime I read about these products, I imagine some rich old dude tango’ing himself around his mansion with a rose in his teeth and an air-partner in his arms.
Linksys’ just announced “Wireless Home Audio System” is an obvious attempt at a shot across Sonos‘ bow – we’ll have to wait until we get our hands on it to see if Sonos has any reason to be wary. → Read More
I think what they’re trying to say in this video is that the new Sonos CR100 remote is completely water proof which means you can can leave it by the pool next to that bottle of Jack Daniels without worrying that your “house guests” might drop it into the deep end. Note: you can probably stop watching this at about the 2 minute mark. → Read More
Sonos, makers of everybody’s favorite way to stream music throughout your house, has announced a partnership with Sirius. The deal: Beginning today, if you’ve got Sonos’ Zoneplayer hardware, you can download software that lets you stream 80 channels of the satellite stuff–including Howard Stern and the NFL. It’ll be free for 30 days, after which point it’ll ring up to $12.95 per month for new Sirius customers, or $2.99 if you’re already a subscriber. Of course, Sonos already streams content from Rhapsody and Pandora, meaning that this is just one more step in their every-increasing web of alliances that could make them the daddy of streaming services. Not bad for a company that doesn’t even approach the name recognition or size of the CE giants. And still no telling what effect, if any, an XM-Sirius merger would have on this deal. On the same note: Sirius is set to announce a bunch of new recievers later today, so stay tuned for what’s in store. [via BusinessWeek] → Read More
This week: Computers, set-top boxes (like AppleTV), and AV receivers are battling to be your household hub, streaming music and movies back and forth across your pad until you become sterile and glow in the dark. All this gear is versatile, but it’s hard to know which one to pick — especially when hefty sums of money are involved. Sonos and now Denon seem to have the most promising solutions, but life is passing their equipment by while gadgets like the iPhone and Archos’s 605 WiFi threaten to swoop in and take all. → Read More
Sonos is busy this week. After announcing Phil Abram as its new president and COO, the Santa Barbara based company has announced an arrangement to offer its wireless music boxes in Best Buy stores. The Sonos BU130 is available today in more than 440 stores and will be featured in more than 600 stores by the end of 2007. It will be showcased with a live, interactive multi-zone display. Depressingly, however, the wider availability does not signal a price drop for the excellent, but expensive, device — it will maintain its $999 price tag. Nevertheless, the greater visibility afforded by a prominent Best Buy display is certain to augment Sonos’ sales greatly and increase awareness of the company. Sonos Best Buy → Read More
Sonos has announced the installation of Phil Abram as its new president and chief operating officer. He comes fresh off an 11 year stint at Sony where he held a number of strategic management roles, the most recent being vice president and senior general manager of television products. The move could signal a significant strengthening of the core for Sonos, who, to date, has released superb products, but only managed to cater to a mostly niche market. As of now, however, it remains unclear what sort of impact this hire will have on the company. We’ll continue to monitor the goings-on at Camp Sonos and keep you all posted on whatever gels. → Read More
Sonos today announced the availability of the $999 Bundle 130 (BU130). The bundle includes one Sonos ZonePlayer 80 (ZP80), one ZonePlayer 100 (ZP100) and one Controller 100 (CR100). The package will allow users to wirelessly stream music to two rooms and control it remotely using the awesome controller. Users can also opt to include a Loudspeaker 100, bringing the package total to $1,149. Previous bundles will be discontinued. Sonos’ complete new pricing scheme follows the drop. Sonos also announced today that a 30-day trial of Pandora would be included with all new devices. How much effect this will have on either company is uncertain, but it is, at least, good for users. → Read More
Pandora, the U.S.’s favorite streaming music service, just launched two new products, Pandora for Sprint and Pandora for Sonos. → Read More
Music streaming service Pandora has had its ups and downs over the last two years since launching. People love to listen to their personalized radio stations that get more and more tailored as you tell it what you like and don’t like. But recent changes to the royalty rates they must pay the RIAA for playing music over the Internet will be going up drastically in the coming years. And licensing complications have led them to block out all non-U.S. listeners. Tonight, however, Pandora and its users are celebrating. At a 7 pm meeting for press at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, they just announced a bunch of new features: Pandora For Sprint In their first mobile deal, Pandora is offering to stream radio stations on a number of Sprint handsets via pre-installed or downloaded software (take your Sprint phone browser to Pandora.com and you will be prompted to download the client). This is free for 30 days. After that you must have a Pandora premium account, which costs $3/month (this also removes ads from Pandora.com when you listen there). Pandora For Sonos Sonos now supports Pandora, so you can stream Pandora music through your normal home sound system. Sonos has been aggressive about getting deals done with partners. They launched with Rhapsody last year, and announced support for Microsoft DRM earlier this year – meaning music from AOL Music Now, MTV Networks’ URGE, Napster, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! Music and the Zune Marketplace now play on Sonos devices. The State of Pandora Pandora has also redesigned its website to better integrate the listening and community features. The company says they now have 6.9 million registered listeners who have played 4.7 billion songs and voted up or down half a billion times. This makes them, they say, the third largest Internet radio station in the world. They play 94% of their entire catalog every day, so they are dipping far into the long tail of music. Pandora also invited some of their heaviest users to the event tonight. On average, they say, their heavy users listen to Pandora for 18 hours/week. → Read More
Later today Sonos will announce that their home music devices will now support Microsoft DRM’d music. That means music from AOL Music Now, MTV Networks’ URGE, Napster, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! Music and the Zune Marketplace will all play on the Sonos devices. Users have been able to play music from Rhapsody since September – meaning that all major music services except iTunes are now supported to some degree. Sonos users must upgrade to v 2.1 of the software, available here. Apple still has such a stranglehold on the digital music industry that it’s unclear this will drive much additional usage. And while Sonos will play downloads from the music services, they will only play streaming music from Rhapsody subscribers. So if you are a Sonos user, you’re best bet is to make sure your downloaded music is in the MP3 format, or use the Rhapsody subscription service if that’s your cup of tea. Things got a little simpler in the DRM world today, but it is our opinion that the days of being forced to buy protected music will soon be over. In the meantime, we do not recommend buying DRM’d downloads from any service. Either buy the CD and rip it, as Bill Gates recommends, or join one of the subscription services. We won’t talk about BitTorrent and AllofMP3 ’cause our lawyer told us to stop. Our previous coverage of Sonos is here. → Read More
