Imeem

Exclusive: LinkedIn Has Bought Contact Management Start-Up Connected

Liz Gannes in Social on October 5, 2011 at 1:16 pm PT

LinkedIn has acquired Connected, a small contact management start-up that unifies and dynamically updates users’ connections on email, social networks, calendars and phones.

Free Music For Everyone! Rdio Joins MOG, Spotify in the Big Digital Music Giveaway

Peter Kafka in Media on September 14, 2011 at 2:25 pm PT

A few months ago, free music looked dead. Now it’s up and at ‘em. Why now? Ask Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook next Thursday.

Beyond Name Dropping and Fancy Degrees: Crunching Data to Make Living Resumés

Liz Gannes in Social on May 9, 2011 at 4:00 am PT

A new site called Gitalytics credentials programmers by crunching the numbers to evaluate the significane of their open source contributions as recorded on the popular project hosting site Github.

SoundTracking Gives Music Its Own Check-In App (Video)

Liz Gannes in Social on March 16, 2011 at 12:31 pm PT

SoundTracking, the recently launched iPhone app, is a social version of the ambient song recognition technology many are familiar with from apps like Shazam and SoundHound.

Video: Picplz's Dalton Caldwell Says It's All About the Money

Liz Gannes in Social on December 13, 2010 at 8:48 pm PT

Mixed Media Labs CEO Dalton Caldwell doesn’t want to brag about the features of his photo-sharing app Picplz. He wants to talk about how it will (eventually) be monetized.

Voices

After Imeem Ends On Bum Note, Founder Back With New Venture

Ty McMahan, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on November 12, 2010 at 1:58 pm PT

Investors often talk about the importance of a founder having previous start-up experience. Dalton Caldwell’s last start-up certainly was an experience. He founded online music service Imeem Inc. in his apartment and watched it grow to 95 employees and raise more than $25 million in venture capital. Then he watched it fall apart, selling to MySpace Inc. for a reported $1 million.

News Byte

No, It's Not Instagram: Photo-Sharing App Picplz Raises $5 Million

Peter Kafka in Media on November 10, 2010 at 8:31 pm PT

Mixed Media Labs, the parent company behind photo-sharing app Picplz, has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Up until now Picplz, which works on both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms, has been best known as the new project from Dalton Caldwell, who ran music service Imeem until it collapsed a year ago. Next question: Who is investing in rival photo-sharing app Instagram? (Ahem. Besides Andreeseen’s firm, which invested in that start-up’s seed round.)

News Byte

Digital Music Distributor The Orchard Goes Private (Again)

Peter Kafka in Media on July 29, 2010 at 2:40 pm PT

The Orchard, which distributes digital music and video to the likes of Apple’s and Amazon’s online stores, is going off the public market. The New York-based company is being bought out by its parent, private equity shop Dimensional Associates, and stops trading tomorrow. Shareholders will get $2.05 per share, and they’re apparently okay with that price, since that’s where ORCD has been trading for some time. This is a round trip for the company, which was originally wholly owned by Dimensional before a reverse merger deal that brought it public in 2007. Dimensional also owns e-music, the indie music MP3/subscription service. The Orchard may be familiar to some of you as the company whose copyright infringement lawsuit marked the end of iMeem.

Why Digital Music Is a Terrible Business That Google Should Embrace

Peter Kafka in Media on June 22, 2010 at 6:00 am PT

Digital music is a lousy business. Almost everyone who tries it loses money, and even mighty Apple says its iTunes Store is basically a break-even proposition. But if Google does it right, it makes perfect sense for the search giant to jump in anyway.

MySpace and News Corp. Eye Flixster (But for What?)

Kara Swisher in News on December 14, 2009 at 5:12 pm PT

Now that the digital equivalent of a super-vac, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, has sucked up some decent music start-ups–Imeem and iLike–for a song, to bolster the social networking site’s efforts to expand into an entertainment portal, what’s next? According to several sources, the News Corp. unit has turned its omnivorous attentions to Flixster, the popular social networking site for movies. Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear. Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase.