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Posts Tagged ‘Subscription Fee’

Zimbalam brings mass distibution to indie musicians

Zimbalam, which launched in Europe in 2009 to help artists get their music widely distributed without a lot of work, opened its doors to US stores this week, meaning any artist using Zimbalam can now sell their music in the United States.

Zimbalam promises to distribute an artist’s music across multiple services, from Spotify and eMusic to behemoths like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon. The company is hooked into 35 different outlets, which lead to hundreds of other stores – a huge distribution network for musicians. Like competitor Tunec

The company’s revenue stream is simple: It charges $19.99 for an artist to distribute a single, or $29.99 for an album. After the initial release, there’s a yearly fee of $9.99 or $19.98, respectively. The company keeps all the royalties from sales until that figure is met and then gives 100% of subsequent royalties to the artist. In a surprisingly musician-friendly move, if the music doesn’t make more than the subscription fee, Zimbalam only charges what the music earned, and no more.

Through March 31, because of South By Southwest, Zimbalam is offering an even better deal for artists, charging only $3.99 for a single release and $5.99 for an album. All a musician has to do is use the coupon code SXSW when they sign up.

Zimbalam offers some free tools as well. It has developed a number of widgets for artists that let them do everything from embed their music on a website to create apps on Facebook and MySpace to interact with their fans.

Like its competitor Tunecore, Zimbalam takes a non-exclusive right on the sales of an album. Users can pick and choose where their music gets distributed, and can see aggregated or individualized reports on how their album is doing. They also get control of the price and release date of their album, as well as all the details of how it gets sold.

Zimbalam’s parent company is Paris-based Believe Digital, which says it’s the “leading digital distributor and services provider for independent artists and labels in Europe.” Zimbalam seems to be a natural extension of what Believe Digital already does and takes advantage of the relationships the company already has. The company was founded by music executives from around the world, with a lot of experience in the digital music industry.

The model seems to be working in Europe: Zimbalam’s website boasts that Believe Digital has paid $22 million in royalties since 2005 and has had 10 number one digital singles in the same time span. If the company can get similarly entrenched in the American music scene, it might become an invaluable resource for independent artists in the US.

Believe Digital, based in Paris, is a 70-employee company with $8.5 million in funding from xAnge and Ventech.

Companies: co:believe digital, co:zimbalam

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Grow VC Aims To Be The Kiva For Tech Startups

Kiva is p2p-lending site that facilitates loans between lenders in wealthy countries and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now a new startup aims to bring a simialr model to startups in the developed world but with an investment focus. The idea here is to fix the current inefficiencies of private seed funding for web and mobile companies, especially in markets outside of the hothouse that is Silicon Valley (i.e. Europe and Asia).

Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially rewarded when the community fund begins earning a return on investment. So, if you promote the best companies you make moola.

Joining Grow VC, and the basic features such as building a person profile, are free. Premium features come with subscriptions ranging from $20 to $140 per month, depending on how much money the startup company is seeking or how much the investor is looking to invest. For unlimited service investments, the monthly subscription fee is $90 per month. The fund is aimed at startups that need $10,000 to $1 million USD.

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Sony Ericsson To Pre-Load Gokivo Navigator Onto New Windows Mobile Handsets

Unlike most other smartphone platforms, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a mapping application pre-installed by default. While this may very well change with the soon-to-be-announced Windows Mobile 7, it has thus far been up to the handset manufacturer to throw in a map app if they so choose.

Later this week, messaging/location technology providers TCS will announce that Sony Ericsson has chosen their turn-by-turn application, Gokivo, to be pre-loaded onto future Sony Ericsson-made Windows Mobile handsets.

The first Sony Ericsson handset to come with Gokivo out of the box will be the Aspen, which was just announced last week.

This is pretty big news for TCS; they just acquired the company behind Gokivo, Networks In Motion, back in December, and this is the first time any manufacturer has chosen to pre-install the app at the factory.

The flagship features, according to TCS:

• Local Search
• Traffic and Weather
• Location Sharing

While it’s great news for TCS, I have to wonder: with Nokia and Google’s recent moves toward making turn-by-turn navigation a standard feature on S60 and Android, how much longer will smartphone consumers be willing to cough up a subscription fee?

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AT&T’s New FamilyMap App: Track Your Family On the Go

AT&T just launched FamilyMap, the company’s newest iPhone app, which allows you to track the location of your family members directly on your iPhone. The app (iTunes link) allows you to see the exact location of your cellphone toting family members. You can also set up recurring alerts, which allows you to check if your child arrived at school in the morning, for example. Given that this is an AT&T app, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the service is only available if you pay a monthly subscription fee. Tracking the location of two phones costs $9.99 per month. For $14.99 per month, you can track up to five phones.

Sponsor

While AT&T already offered this service, you were only able to see your family member’s location by using a desktop computer. Now, you can just use your iPhone to see a map with your family member’s location. Your family members don’t need to have an iPhone for this service to work. Most AT&T phones now support this feature. If your phone doesn’t have a built-in GPS chip, AT&T will estimate a phone’s location based on data from nearby cellphone towers.

Interestingly, this launch comes just one day after Apple itself got a patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. While Apple’s method is completely permission-based, though, AT&T’s system isn’t. Instead, any FamilyMap enabled phone – once you activate the service – will send location data back when requested, without prompting the receiver for confirmation. Given that AT&T is mostly marketing this service to parents, this makes sense, though some people (including children and teenagers) will surely feel a bit uneasy about this feature.

Discuss

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Plato’s Forms Gets Seed Money To Open Dialogue Between Bloggers And Companies

As a blogger, sometimes the most difficult part of writing a post is contacting the company it is about. First, you either have to search your contact list, or the web, to figure out who to reach out to. And then you might not get a response right away. And finally, if you do get a response, it may include misdirection or less information than you’d like. All of these things led to the idea for a new startup, Plato’s Forms.

To be clear, the communication problems run the other way too. Sometimes companies would love a better way to talk to journalists before they publish a story. Plato’s Forms would offer that communication pipeline. The idea is to make it easier for the two sides to communicate on any given story, so the correct information is shared with the readers.

And this communication isn’t meant to be necessarily be filtered through a PR agency (unless the company wants it that way), it’s more about direct interaction. This is meant to cut out all possible noise and just get to the signal of what trying to be communicated, in a timely manner.

Plato’s Forms would charge the companies a subscription fee to use this service, but it would be free to journalists. And this isn’t just meant for big enterprises, they envision that startups would use a tool like this as well.

Since the product won’t launch until next Spring, co-founders Darryl Siry and Ben Metcalfe didn’t have a demo to show just yet. But I’m told that the method of communication will not just be another email or IM tool. And the core of the product is the communication platform, so it will work with a number of different applications, presumably.

The company’s name is derived from the philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms, Siry tells us. Basically, the thought is that humans can’t understand the true nature of things, but can only interpret it. And different humans have different interpretations. Plato’s Forms (the company) wants to get those more in sync.

Plato’s Forms has just closed a seed round of funding to the tune of $545,000 (but the note has been left open to accept up to $750,000). The round was led by a group of angels (including Sifry) and Zelkova VC.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Operation Failure: Times Plans To Charge For One-Day Access To Online News

Newspapers continue to struggle with finding an economically viable and sustainable business model for the production and distribution of news on the Web, and not a day passes without me reading about some idiotic statement about the future of online news or journalism made by someone in charge of something at one of the world’s beleaguered newspaper and/or magazine publishers.

Today we have James Harding, editor of News Corp-owned The Times, giving some insight into the publisher’s plans to generate revenue from the digital edition of the paper to an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Essex, per PaidContent.

The plans? To charge for 24-hour access to the digital version of the daily newspaper in combination with a subscription-fee based model.

Seriously, Harding apparently said he believed charging for a full day’s access to online news you can – and will continue to be able to – essentially get for free elsewhere is a good idea. Pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers”, I can’t help but wonder how he wouldn’t expect such a stupid endeavor to rewrite nothing but the economics of The Times exclusively.

And not in a good way.

Paywall brouhaha aside, I figured everyone realized by now that people tend to cherry pick news content online based on their time and specific interests, and that there was quite some agreement around the fact that people vote with their wallets when given more individual choice (e.g. evolution of music album sales vs. single track sales). If you could choose between paying per single music stream rather than spend your money on 24-hour access to an entire album, which would it be?

Even if you still go out and buy the news as printed on actual paper and subsequently read every single article in it, how many people are like you, you reckon? And if you wanna read everything and everyone a daily newspaper has to offer anyway, why not just, erm, continue to buy the newspaper instead of paying for time-limited access to the digital version of it? Because the advertising alongside articles in the latter case is more interactive?

Despite clear indications of the contrary, Harding believes people will be prepared to pay for news, citing the 270 million books purchased annually in Britain as evidence of an “enormous appetite for the written word and for news”. Except of course you usually pay for a book only once in your life and it (hopefully) stays relevant for the rest of it, while a newspaper by definition stops being a vehicle for actual news the very moment it gets printed.

At least Harding and I agree that micro-payments are not the way either – he claims newspapers should be “wary” of article-only economics because they could find themselves “writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka”.

An excerpt from the MediaGuardian article:

“From spring of next year we will start charging for the digital edition of the Times. We’re working on the exact pricing model, but we’d charge for a day’s paper, for a 24-hour sign-up to the Times. We’ll also establish a subscription price as well.”

The paper’s recent decision to end the free distribution of bulk copies was in line with this strategy, he said.

“We think it’s good for us and good for business to stop encouraging the trickery and fakery of the ABCs. We want real sales to real customers – that’s what our advertisers want too.”

There’s not a doubt in my mind that that’s indeed what The Times wants and hopes for.

There’s even less doubt in my mind that this is not what readers want, though.

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Timeline: no-regret version control for Photoshop

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Productivity

If you work in Photoshop, you’ve probably had designs which branched off from the original look, based on your own ideas or client feedback. This has, more than likely, resulted in multiple files with names like mockup1.psd, mockup1b.psd, mockup2.psd, etc. The solution would be what coders know as Version Control, something which allows you to “commit” any version of your project to a repository, letting you jump around from version to version, making changes without worrying about losing one of those branches you went off on as an experiment. Version control systems like Subversion and Git can do this for you, but there’s a learning curve and a certain amount of geekery required to make it work smoothly.

Timeline from PixelNovel aims to take the “geek” requirements out of using version control in Photoshop. Timeline goes beyond other options and uses a Subversion repository to store any revision of your progress while working on a Photoshop file. If you don’t know what Subversion is, that’s ok. Timeline simply shows you a row of previews of versions you’ve chosen to save, and you can jump back in time with a couple of clicks. Make a change, commit it, jump to a different version … all in a slick, minimal toolbar. You can add comments (a commit message for those already svn-savvy) to each revision, which is handy whether you’re working alone or collaborating.

Timeline offers two ways of handling the repositories necessary for it to function. The least geeky option is to use their hosted Subversion service, which provides easy-to-use collaboration options, a web interface and automatic backup. It’s available at a subscription fee, but signing up includes a copy of the plugin for free. Alternatively, you can host your own Subversion repository, which isn’t terribly difficult. This avoids both the hosting fee and (if you create a local repository on your own computer) the need to download your revisions from a host.

I spoke with the developers of Timeline about the potential for a Git version, and it’s something they’re looking into. For now, though, the Subversion plan is working quite well. If you frequently find yourself with a folder full of poorly-titled versions of a project, and flipping between them is getting to be a pain, it’s definitely something to consider. The plugin itself will cost you $60US and — if you choose the hosted route — an account runs $5US for 5GB of storage, or $20US for 25GB. TUAW readers can take advantage of a special offer, and get 20% off of either: use coupon tuaw1 for a standalone license, and tuaw2 for a 20% discount on a hosted option.

[Side note: For the Git-inclined, I've found that the previews in GitX combined with a few shell scripts can provide a decent (but less integrated and robust) versioning system for Photoshop and other graphics applications.]

TUAWTimeline: no-regret version control for Photoshop originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Five Apps for the Gastroenterologist

Filed under: Cool tools, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review

Sometime this summer a wiseacre commenter (we get a few) suggested we do a “Five Apps” for a variety of somewhat offbeat topics. One wasn’t so far-fetched however: gastroenterologist. One could say that a gastro doc has about the same needs as any doctor, of course, and that’s an easy out. So here are 5 apps that are great for gastroenterologists and possibly any medical specialist… Coming soon: 5 apps for the lemur owner.

Epocrates Rx – This free app looks up drugs and is updated weekly. Epocrates [iTunes link] has already been available for other mobile platforms for a while, this is a must-have for physicians, I would think. There’s also a Pro version that is designed for medical professionals, and it requires a yearly subscription fee to work. It’s $99 for one year, which is pretty reasonable for what this does — which includes an amazing pill ID tool.

DocWrite – Another free app with a service you subscribe to, but this may appeal to more than doctors. DocWrite [iTunes link] is a transcription service that sends your ramblings securely and sends you back a complete transcription in PDF or Word. DocWrite has a web-based dashboard for your stuff, too, so you’ll never be without those documents in text or audio.

PubSearch – PubMed is a massive database of medical research papers and PubSearch (free version) [iTunes link] is an iPhone app that’ll search them. Yes, of course you need a subscription to the database (noticing a trend here?). PubSearch also has a Mac desktop app, although there does not seem to be any coordination between the two. I’d imagine something like sharing bookmarks would be helpful. PubSearch Plus [iTunes link] costs $1.99 and is really the more functional version as it will show full articles and use EZProxy (where supported).

Medcalc – A free medical calculator? Yep, Medcalc [iTunes link] includes a ton of formulas for doctors, plus a few indices and charts and whatnot to keep a handy reference for those who need it. This app seems to cover a lot of ground, although I’m not sure how much applies to the field of gastroenterology.

Mobile MIM for iPhone and iPod touch – Sadly, this has yet to be released. But I’m guessing it’ll be at the top of many doctors’ wish lists. MIMvista makes real-deal medical imaging stuff and the MIM app for iPhone was demonstrated at WWDC. The demo was astounding, showing how doctors could merge CT and PET scans right on their iPhone and make notes for later use. The app is pending FDA approval, with no release date or price set.

TUAWFive Apps for the Gastroenterologist originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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