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Amazon is reportedly developing an online music store that will work with smartphones using Google’s ‘Android’ system - pitting the firm into competition with iTunes in the mobile space.

VentureBeat reports on Amazon’s move, based on advice from a tipster who claimed to have seen an HTC Android phone running such an application.

One signal difference between Apple and Amazon’s approach to mobile sales is that the latter firm seems set to enable over-the-air downloads of film and video. Read the rest of this entry »

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Digital media sales racked up their slowest quarter in quite some time in the second quadrant of this year, with iTunes sales down 7 per cent, Strategy Analytics claims.

The latest report from the research team reveals revenue growth for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple (in its music related products and services, aka iTunes, category), and AOL saw an overall 0.8 per cent slowdown quarter on quarter, down from 3.3 per cent in the previous quarter and 3.4 per cent in the same period last year, Rafat Ali writes. Google was the only one of the five to see improved revenues.
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Project Kangaroo, the TV video-on-demand joint venture to be jointly-owned by UK broadcasters BBC, ITV and Channel 4, has seen its launch delayed while the UK Competition Commission extends the duration of its probe into the service.

The jointly-owned service was originally expected to launch in the fourth quarter, but launch has now been delayed.

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This month’s lists of the top 20 band/artist searches sending traffic to social networking sites and music blogs for the four weeks ending August 2.

The list appeared this afternoon on the blog of Hitwise Intelligence analyst, Robin Goad. The lead seems to go to Basshunter and Biffy Clyro, who have been leading traffic for months.

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Google plans to introduce a dedicated MP3 search feature in China in time for the Olympics.

A local Xinhua report emanating from Sina.com makes the claim, saying the search giant has been testing MP3 searches in recent weeks. If correctly described, the new service performs searches only for legally-listed tracks.
 
This will be the first time Google has provided an MP3 search service and puts the company in direct competition with Baidu.com, its biggest rival.

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The UK Information Commissioner has declared the privacy safeguards Google uses in its Street View service to be ‘adequate’.

Street View service takes photographs of a city’s streets and publishes them together as a photo-map of a city. However, individuals can be identified in some images, raising privacy concerns.

To deal with these, Google is developing face and vehicle number plate blurring technologies which it is using in the bringing together of a Paris Street View service. Individuals can complain if they feel they are identifiable withing images, in which case the company will remove those images.
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Seems YouTube has begun pretty much smoking the pipe of peace with Hollywood, as movie moguls begin to comprehend the way clips online (they need not pay hosting fees for) can boost their business.

A new report states the, “company has adopted a more accommodating approach toward Hollywood, and that it’s finally starting to pay off.”
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eMusic has a new plan to make its online service more accessible - and it is turning up the heat with the introduction of a slew of social networking features to help users find new music online.
In an implementation that’s expected to emerge early next week, eMusic’s new social features will see artist pages updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. Fans will be able to embed parts of their favourite artist profiles, including streaming song samples, in their Facebook pages, and also recommend pages through services including Digg.
eMusic boss David Pakman explained his company hopes to attract music purchasers by providing deeper and constantly changing artist info through Web 2.0 sites.
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Former Google exec Kate Burns is joining social network Bebo in the newly-created role of VP and MD for Europe.
Burns will take overall responsibility for driving Bebo’s business in the UK and Europe and will report directly to Bebo CEO, Joanna Shields.
Burns joined Google in 2001 as its first employee outside the US and went on to develop the company’s most profitable and fastest growing region, rising to become Director, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Burns will be based at Bebo’s international headquarters in London, assuming her role on 4 August 2008.
Shields said: “Kate has a proven record in the UK’s digital media industry, having played a key role in its development over the last decade. Her creativity and dynamism makes Kate the natural choice for this new role as Bebo looks to further strengthen its position internationally.”
Before joining Google, Burns was Pan-European Sales Director for Altavista and before that she spent three years at Doubleclick joining as their first sales person in the UK. She has also worked for Ziff Davis and News International and most recently joined the world’s largest independent video sharing site, Dailymotion, as the company’s first Managing Director for the UK.
Burns explained: “Bebo has been at the very centre of the dramatic changes we have witnessed in the media landscape over the past two years.”
 

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Google has asked Viacom for permission to strip information which could help the latter firm identify individual YouTube users from the data a US court has said it must hand to Viacom.
US district judge Louis Stanton declared that Google must hand Viacom huge amounts of data detailing every video ever watched on YouTube - and also information on who watched the clip.
This is part of a copyright infringement case Viacom is mounting against Google. Viacom wants this data in order to ascertain just how much traffic unauthorised material creates on the online video service, in order to help it pursue its case and the $1 billion damages Viacom is suing Google for. The internet giant’s senior legal counsel told C21 Media, “We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

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