Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

U.S. album sales plunged 9.5% last year from 2006, continuing a downward trend for the recording industry, despite a 45% surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Last year, Apple’s iTunes Music Store became the third-largest U.S. music retailer. (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jGK2CZZu1nEJtZekM7K39jfiLhWAD8TUP10O0 1/3)

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet. Sony BMG is to become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM. (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008013_398775.htm 1/4)

A lucky unsigned musician will win a chance to perform with the Foo Fighters next month during the Grammy Awards. CBS and YouTube’s My Grammy Moment contest will allow eligible musicians to upload a 60-second video clip of their performance of part of a song by the Foos. (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/01/03/cbs-youtube-offer-musicians-a-grammy-moment 1/3)

Wow. . .when did David Grohl get so old? It seems like just yesterday that he was sidekick to Kurt Cobain’s rasp. Thanks to Mary Cunningham from the Grammys for the hook-up on the link.

Google is working on getting the word out about AdWords to local businesses. The search giant recently gathered 150 AdWords partners at the Googleplex for a local markets symposium, which featured guest speaker Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame, among others. (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/adwords-and-local-markets.html 1/3)

A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video. The extension of the application would be that images and video indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself, a big step forward in indexing that has not previously been available. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/04/google-lodges-patent-for-reading-text-in-images-and-video 1/4)

The dream of free municipal WiFi refuses to die. Meraki Networks is picking up the ball that Google and Earthlink dropped, expanding its free WiFi network to cover all of San Francisco. The service will be ad-supported (ads appear in your toolbar when you are browsing through a Meraki WiFi router), and the build-out will be paid for out of a $20 million series B round the startup just raised from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital and other existing investors. This round is on top of $5 million Meraki raised last February from Sequoia and (ironically) Google and former Google employees. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/meraki-networks-raises-20-million-expands-free-wifi-in-san-francisco-where-google-failed 1/3)

As a loyal supporter of free ad-supported municipal Wi-Fi access, I commend Meraki for offering Wi-Fi on a mesh network rather than through stand alone Wi-Fi access points. This mesh network is cheaper than Google’s original plan. Now the only lingering question will be: Will local advertising revenue support the cost associated with establishing citywide Wi-Fi? Well, here’s a great market to test this out in. Free Wi-Fi is a service not only facilitating a community of techno-enabled; it’s also a service enabling the underprivileged. The cost of a computer has fallen drastically while the monthly broadband subscription has remained high, in relation to what low income families can afford. For more information on the digital divide, click here.

Spark Networks, the parent company of the popular Jewish online dating site JDate.com, is said to be putting itself up for sale. The company is already in early talks with suitors that include Yahoo, Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, and News Corp.’s MySpace. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/technology/04deal.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 1/4)

NBC Universal will hold what is being likened to an “upfront” presentation for its digital out-of-home assets Jan. 16. The company is hoping to get more advertisers to consider NBC for placing ads on television screens in supermarkets, near gas-station pumps, in taxi cabs and other places. (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=122861 1/3)

Fox will debut the pilot of Warner Bros. Television’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Yahoo! TV beginning tonight at 9 pm ET/Midnight PT. It will be available for streaming on Yahoo commercial free for a 24-hour period.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Trailer

Online video search engine Truveo.com catalogued its 100 millionth video in 2007, a 20-fold increase from the 5 million videos it began with at the beginning of the year. The company is predicting it will have 1 billion videos indexed by 2009.