According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20 or so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and six million paying subscribers. Tunigo had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo deals aren’t exactly parallel, since Twitter used We Are Hunted to build a brand-new music app, and Spotify doesn’t need one of those. But they do show that digital music companies are putting a renewed emphasis on helping people find stuff they like — which has the obvious benefit of keeping them on the service longer, and/or convincing them to pay for them.

Internet radio service Pandora has always been about discovery, but lots of other services have been content to assemble millions of tracks and ask listeners to poke through them on their own, or to ask their friends for recommendations.

Now lots of companies are starting to emphasize curation. That’s the entire point of Jimmy Iovine’s new Beats/Daisy music service, scheduled for launch later this year. And if Apple is able to hammer out deals with music labels — last I heard, they’re still stuck haggling with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, its related-but-separate publishing company — it will launch an iRadio service that combines elements of both Pandora and on-demand services.

If you have a Spotify subscription and haven’t played with Tunigo, by the way, it’s worth checking out: Like Web radio service Songza, it is focused on mood- and theme-based playlists, and it’s pretty good.

Shazam, the music discovery mobile app that is now calling itself a “media engagement” company, said it had hired former top Yahoo exec Rich Riley as its new CEO, with longtime CEO Andrew Fisher moving to executive chairman.

The London-based company — which reports that it has 300 million users in 200 countries around the world, including 90 million in the U.S. — said it made these moves to strengthen its leadership team and “position Shazam for next stage of growth and IPO.” Shazam also recently hired the BBC’s Daniel Danker as chief product officer.

“I look forward to extending our dominance in media engagement, from our roots in music to our leadership position in second-screen TV and want to ensure that Shazam is the company that helps people recognize and engage with the world around them,” said Riley in a statement.

It’s an unusual and interesting career move for Riley, who had been at Yahoo for more than 13 years. He was most recently EVP Americas for Yahoo, its most important unit, and before that was managing director and SVP of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The exec, who will be working out of Shazam’s New York offices, came to Yahoo when it bought a company he co-founded called Log-Me-On.com, which later became the Yahoo Toolbar.

This is Riley’s first gig as a CEO, although several sources said he had almost been recruited to be the CEO of performance advertising company Criteo. At Shazam, he will be charged with expanding and turbocharging the fast-growing app’s business from its roots in music to a range of other arenas.

As one of the more popular, though less flashy, apps on Apple iOS and Google Android, Shazam says it has more than 60 million monthly active users who install it on their smartphones to identify songs based on how they sound, via tagging of its 27 million tracks. Shazam said that drives $300 million in digital sales annually through affiliate partnerships with Apple iTunes and Amazon. Shazam gets a cut of these sales leads.

The company recently launched a TV service that has a range of features such as finding music in the broadcast, providing cast photos and a variety of other show information, and linking to sites with more information or to those with show-branded merchandise, previous episodes or the ability to rent or buy programming. Shazam is also offering a form of “clickable” advertising that links users to rich brand content, and is working on new tablet apps, too.

Whether all this activity translates into an IPO is to be determined, but that seems to be the aim.

Shazam is certainly well funded, having raised $32 million in the last round of funding from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Institutional Venture Partners, Acacia Capital and DN Capital.

That said, it looks like iTunes’ sales growth may be slowing down.

Last quarter, iTunes sales increased 28 percent; in the previous quarter they increased 23 percent. Most retailers would be very happy to see those kind of leaps, but as far as I can tell, they are the smallest increases Apple has seen in the last two years.*

You can see what the last two quarters looked like in context, below:

So what does that mean? Dunno. Maybe nothing more than a statistical blip.

If I had to bet, though, I’d put money on a couple different culprits:

• In the old days, when Apple only sold music, iTunes sales rose alongside iPod sales: Whenever someone bought a new gadget, they spent some money on songs, too. Assume the same is happening here, but for all digital media. And booming iPad sales aren’t enough to overcome more modest iPhone sales.
• The other thing that fuels iTunes sales is the expansion of new markets — new iTunes stores and iTunes App Stores opening up in new countries. And maybe those lines shoot right up again if or when Forbes shows up in China. We’ll see.

* All the data in this chart either comes directly from Apple, via the prepared statements CFO Peter Oppenheimer reads during quarterly earnings calls, or via math I’ve done myself, based on those same numbers. The chart only goes back two years because Apple didn’t consistently provide iTunes sales numbers before then.

Joi Ito/Flickr Kevin Thau, former Biz Dev VP at Twitter and Jelly’s new chief operating officer.

Kevin Thau — the man who led Twitter’s Music app project from acquisition to completion — has left the building.

Thau leaves Twitter to become chief operating officer of Jelly, the mystery startup created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, according to sources familiar with the matter.

News of Thau’s departure comes not more than a week after Twitter Music launched nationwide on “Good Morning America.” The app helps users to discover new music based on the trending listening habits of people using the app across Twitter.

Thau has been with the project since day one, and was a Twitter employee for much longer than that (employee No. 20 at the company, I believe). Thau was the biz dev guy who found We Are Hunted, the small team whose app Twitter acquired and which would eventually become Twitter Music.

Previous to this, Thau managed Twitter’s mobile engineering and design teams responsible for launching the first versions of Twitter’s mobile applications. From there, Thau became VP of business and corp development, where he worked to integrate Twitter into BlackBerry and Apple’s software platforms.

As my colleague Peter Kafka reported previously, during Twitter Music’s entire development process, the whole team (including Thau) was sequestered away from Twitter HQ in a sort of “skunkworks” project off-site. Thus, Thau and company haven’t been working on what much of the main Twitter product teams are currently working on.

It’s the third in a series of relatively recent Twitter employee departures for Stone’s new, yet-to-be-fully-explained startup. Earlier in the year, Vítor Lourenço left Twitter, and is now acting as a consultant to the Jelly team; earlier this week, Stone himself introduced former Twitter employee Ben Finkel as Jelly’s new CTO.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

Imagine being Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, who spoke at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday. You’re charged with taking a product as stripped-down as Twitter, which started out as a short messaging service, and gradually adding features and enhancements over time without alienating the very user base that grew to enjoy it in the first place.

Tough problem, for sure. And I’d doubt Sippey would want to change the core Twitter experience, a reverse-chronological, never-ending flow of tweets moving through your stream. So what do you do?

I sure can’t tell you the answer, and I’m not even sure Twitter can quite yet. But it’s certainly trying to figure it out.

Take search, for one. “We’ve made a big investment over the past few years in real-time search and archive search,” Sippey said, improving Twitter’s once poor experience of sifting through the billions of tweets that regularly flow through the service. So instead of missing out on all the conversation floating around in the ether, one could search for specific words, phrases or hashtags. (And yes, I can say it has grown better over time.)

More important, I’d argue, is Discover.

“The Discover tab and product on mobile,” as Sippey put it, are “essentially experiments that we’re trying out there.” It’s a way for Twitter to serve up user-suggested content, based on the accounts they follow, their histories of interaction with others — basically the stuff they care about. And ideally, if Discover worked perfectly, it’d be the best place for users to, well, discover all that stuff they’ve missed, the stuff they haven’t searched for — the stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to see.

Problem is, Discover is far from perfect. It launched essentially as a beta product a few years ago; suggested content wasn’t great, the design was lacking, and people just didn’t use it.

Now, Sippey said, people are using Discover (sadly, he wouldn’t disclose just how many). And, to be fair, I’d say Discover certainly has grown better over time. But I’d argue that it’s still not compelling enough to take users out of their main streams and into the Discover tab on a regular basis. (TBD if Sippey and pals ever figure that problem out.)

But! There’s a curious light at the end of this tunnel. Twitter’s answer to simplicity seems to be less in worrying specifically about major changes to its core product, but rather focusing on building separate standalone apps built entirely for different purposes.

Put another way: “There are times when you need a single purpose-driven knife when you’re in the kitchen, and there are times when you need a Swiss Army knife,” Sippey said. “We want to build the best Twitter we can build. But we also know that we want to build other things that can use the Twitter infrastructure to basically serve different purposes and different needs.”

Hence, the Vine acquisition last year, and the forthcoming Twitter Music app to drop soon (which Sippey was pretty mum about). Create these sort of satellite apps, and perhaps you don’t freak out your core base of users. In the meantime, perhaps you’ve also found a new on-boarding mechanism to capture and convert non-Twitter users into living, breathing tweeting machines; neither Vine nor Twitter Music (from what we’ve heard) require you to have a Twitter account in order to use the service, but sure make it easy to sign up for Twitter if you want to!

So, in Twitter’s perfect world, we’re able to find stuff — video, music, whatever — using these other services without screwing up Twitter’s proper app. Great, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. People actually have to download and continue using all the apps to make it a successful strategy, and Twitter isn’t exactly keen to break out its engagement stats for us. Guess we’ll see if Vine can maintain its download success, and if Twitter Music is a hit when it launches.

If not — good luck with that whole simplicity thing, tweeps.

1. “Firefox OS? What the f**k?” asked AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, kicking off the day’s first interview. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said it’s all about the open Web standards that underlie the forthcoming Firefox operating system.
2. Google may not have 44 million robotic cars on the road, but Waze has 44 million users, Waze CEO Noam Bardin said, and they make Waze’s maps better by using them. Bardin touted the power of crowdsourced driving directions, which so far have “validated” about 1.5 billion km (or about 932 million miles).
3. Google’s Jason Spero, appearing with Millennial Media’s Mollie Spillman, said that mobile ads will have more potential once they can track user behavior for advertisers’ sake. However, Spillman added, “It’s becoming more mainstream and mandatory that mobile is part of the marketing budget or media spend.”
4. Xiaomi sold 7.19 million handsets in 2012, and expects to sell double that number this year. The high-end smartphone company is one of China’s fastest-growing. “We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” said company president Bin Lin.
5. Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter simultaneously balanced Gaga’s plans for a hybrid album-app with the fact that physical CD sales are still incredibly important in the music business: “You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile. See you tomorrow!

Pretty cool, right? We’ll see — the app was supposed to be out around now, but Gaga has been sidelined by hip surgery. But Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager, stresses that people who don’t want to consume Gaga as an app won’t have to: He’s very happy to sell music the old-fashioned way, as an iTunes download, and even on a physical CD.

Why? Because that’s where the market is, he reminded Kara Swisher at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference. A good reminder: When Justin Timberlake sold close to one million copies of his new album in a week, the bulk of those were CDs, sold via Target and Walmart, Carter said.

“You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

So when does that change? Soon, but not very soon, Carter predicts. He figures his market goes mostly mobile in three to five years.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130415/why-lady-gaga-isnt-ditching-the-cd/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130413/appgratis-gets-the-boot-whatsapp-aint-selling-and-blackberrys-do-not-want-problem-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-40713-41313/ http://allthingsd.com/20130413/appgratis-gets-the-boot-whatsapp-aint-selling-and-blackberrys-do-not-want-problem-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-40713-41313/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:00:32 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=311638 For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Apple’s Ouster of AppGratis Is Just the Start of an App Store Crackdown
2. Confirmed: Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the Store for Being Too Pushy
3. Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million
4. WhatsApp: We’re Not Selling to Google
5. Twitter’s New Music App Launches Friday
6. BlackBerry Tops iPhone and Android … In a “Don’t Want” Poll
7. Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

[note: this article is from February, but resurfaced this week]

8. PC Sales Show Biggest Q1 Decline Ever
9. California Court: Even Checking Maps on Phone While Driving Not Okay
10. News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox off the Airwaves if Aereo Wins

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130413/appgratis-gets-the-boot-whatsapp-aint-selling-and-blackberrys-do-not-want-problem-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-40713-41313/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130412/twitter-music-is-here-today-and-you-cant-use-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20130412/twitter-music-is-here-today-and-you-cant-use-it/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:30:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=311467 Want to play with Twitter’s new music app? You can get it today — if you’re really famous.

If not, you’re going to have to wait a week.

Here’s the deal: As we wrote yesterday, Twitter is launching its new music discovery app for iOS devices, timed to the start of the Coachella music festival this weekend.

But for now, only a handful of “influencers” are going to get their hands on it.

That’s why Ryan Seacrest was tweeting about the app yesterday.* And that’s why sources say you should expect to see dozens of other celebrities chatting it up over the next few days.

And you, non-famous person with an iPhone? Hang tight for a week.

So that helps explain why we heard contradicting reports about the app’s launch date (Today! This weekend!) yesterday. (They were both right! Sort of.)

And as long as the celebrities don’t spend their time tweeting about how much they dislike the app, it will be a smart move by the Twitter folks: They get to stoke demand and do some last-minute bug-testing** at the same time.

* This is not the first time a big Web company has used Ryan Seacrest in a faux-stealth app marketing push. Apparently it worked well for Zynga, too.

** This might have been helpful for the Vine launch earlier this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130412/twitter-music-is-here-today-and-you-cant-use-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 02:38:50 +0000 Mike Isaac and Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=311355 Next up on the jukebox — Twitter Music.

The microblogging service plans to launch its new standalone music application on Friday, according to sources familiar with the matter.

(Update:: Of note — another source claims that the app will indeed launch this weekend at Coachella, though not necessarily on Friday.)
(Update 2: It’s out! But unless you’re one of a very select group of famous Twitter users, you’re going to have to wait a week to use it.)

The app suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service. Users will be able to listen to clips of music from inside the app, using third-party services like iTunes and SoundCloud; they will also be able to watch music videos provided by Vevo, the music video service owned by Universal Music and Sony.

Earlier today, Twitter acknowledged that it had acquired music recommendation service We Are Hunted last year and put its staff to work building the new app.

Timing of the launch couldn’t be more appropriate. It’s the weekend that kicks off Coachella, the huge music festival presented every year in the middle of the California desert, attracting some of the music industry’s top talent.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitter-confirms-music-startup-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitter-confirms-music-startup-acquisition/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:53:47 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=311348 Twitter on Thursday acknowledged that it had acquired We Are Hunted, a startup aimed at tracking the most popular songs on the social network at a given time. As we wrote previously, the team has been working on a yet-to-debut standalone Twitter Music app, which helps Twitter users find the most popular music recommendations across the company’s 200-million-user network. CNET first reported the acquisition news.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitter-confirms-music-startup-acquisition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:06:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=308306 Matrix Partners has added two new entrepreneurs in residence, Kevin Barenblat and Mihir Shah. Barenblat founded social music app SpotDJ and Context Optional, a social marketing software startup which was bought by Adobe. Shah was the former CEO of mobile advertising platform Tapjoy, and also worked at social app firm RockYou and QuinStreet, a performance marketing firm. Both will focus on cloud, mobile, consumer Internet and ad tech at the Silicon Valley venture firm.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/ http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:54:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=308193 In the U.S. it’s perfectly legal to buy a CD or DVD and then sell it to someone else — that’s the reason Netflix exists.

But when it comes to digital media, that doesn’t work. That’s the gist of a new Federal court ruling, which says that startup ReDigi can’t do what it says it can do — let users resell songs they bought on iTunes.

In a judgment filed Saturday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan sided with Universal Music Group’s Capitol Records, which had sued ReDigi for copyright violation.

Sullivan’s argument, in a nutshell: Unless the copyright owner gives you explicit permission to do so, you can’t resell a digital media file. ReDigi used multiple arguments to support its case, including the “first sale doctrine” that supports companies like Netflix when it comes to physical goods; you can see Sullivan shoot them all down in his decision (also embedded below, courtesy Jordan Golson).

Sullivan granted a partial summary judgment in Universal’s favor, and told both sides to report back to him by April 12 for next steps.

Capitol Records v. ReDigi Judgment by MacRumors

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130329/play-ball-free-mlb-streams-on-twitter-facebook-and-all-things-digital/ http://allthingsd.com/20130329/play-ball-free-mlb-streams-on-twitter-facebook-and-all-things-digital/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:32:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=307792 MLB Advanced Media, pro baseball’s digital arm, continues to find interesting ways to promote its popular subscription service. Here’s the latest: Free streaming across Facebook, Twitter and the Web. Even here!

You can watch today’s spring training game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals for free just about anywhere you can point a browser, either on a desktop machine or an iPhone or Android. MLB.com is handing out embed codes so people like us can stream the game from our pages, and you can also check it out live on Facebook or Twitter.

Baseball has been playing with free Facebook streams for a couple years now; in the past, MLB.com boss Bob Bowman has said the idea has been “de minimus” as a conversion tool to his paid product, but he must think there’s some promotional benefit to doing stuff like this on a site with a billion users, because he keeps doing it.

Twitter is more interesting, simply because Twitter seems to be more and more interested in seeing what it can do as a video platform (for example: its upcoming music app, which will play music videos from Vevo).

Two years ago MLB.com streamed a minor-league all-star game on Twitter, but I believe this is the first time the league has used Twitter to show a game with real pros. My hunch is we’ll see more of this stuff in the near future.

Oh yes: And starting around 2 pm ET, you should be able to see the game below. Meanwhile, if you want to see Bowman live, head to our D: Dive into Mobile event next month in New York. Registration info here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130329/play-ball-free-mlb-streams-on-twitter-facebook-and-all-things-digital/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130313/twitters-music-app-will-let-you-watch-too-with-help-from-vevo/ http://allthingsd.com/20130313/twitters-music-app-will-let-you-watch-too-with-help-from-vevo/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:02:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=303472 If you want a very good idea of what Twitter’s music app will look like, you should check out Casey Newton’s detailed report at CNET.

Back? Okay. Here are a few more details I’ve gleaned from people familiar with Twitter’s plans for the app:

• SoundCloud and iTunes won’t be the only third-party services integrating into the app. Twitter would like multiple companies to participate, and has signed on at least one: Music video service Vevo will display its clips on the app, using a Twitter-built player.
• Those Vevo videos are also likely to be the only way you can hear full songs from acts you’ve heard of when you use the app. SoundCloud has the ability to play lots of music, but for the most part it can’t play songs owned by the big music labels and publishers; Apple can only offer up partial clips of the songs in its music stores. And music-only services that do have licenses for complete songs, like Spotify, generally don’t have the ability to play them on third-party apps.* So for now, at least, the emphasis on the app will be about sampling.
• While Twitter purchased music discovery startup We Are Hunted to design the app, this isn’t like Vine, where Twitter bought an existing product and added it to its portfolio. This one has been spearheaded internally by Kevin Thau, Twitter’s first business development head. Thau’s Twitter profile no longer identifies his job at the company, and he no longer has a LinkedIn listing, either. But I’m told he’s been running a sort-of-secret “skunkworks” for Twitter for some time, and this project is either the result or part of it.

Silky smooth.#NowPlaying @bullionness – Even Steven ♪ soundcloud.com/deekrecordings…

— Kevin Thau (@kevinthau) March 12, 2013

Now let’s zoom out and look at the big picture. Why exactly is Twitter building its own music app?

Perhaps because it agrees with Facebook: There’s a benefit in breaking up the feed.

That’s what Mark Zuckerberg and company did last week, when they offered users a chance to look at everything Facebook had to offer, or to slice it up into smaller streams. Now you can go to the site and just look at your friends’ pictures, or just check out what games they’re playing, or just find out what music they like.

When the music app launches, Twitter will be offering its own take on the idea. You’ll still be able see what music your friends talk about on the main service. But if you want your music recommendations without Pope jokes, Google Reader obituaries or whatever else is filling up your stream, you can use the app.

The analogy isn’t perfect, because the Twitter music app won’t just be what your friends care about, but what other people on Twitter are listening to as well. That’s where We Are Hunted’s design skills and discovery algorithms come in. But close enough.

It’s possible that Twitter thinks the app may help it round up eyeballs it wasn’t reaching before, but my gut is that if the app works, it’s simply going to segment Twitter’s existing audience into multiple containers.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, businesswise. You can imagine all sorts of advertisers that would be interested in participating in a music-only app. Like Pepsi, which did a big music promotion with Twitter last summer.

And if that works with music, why not carve up the feed into other strips? Easy enough to imagine all sorts of takes on the idea — either by medium (TV, movies, photos) or topics (politics, sports, gossip).

Or maybe Twitter will be resistant to atomizing its audience, and will only want to do this a few different ways. It would be great to get some comment from Twitter itself, but they’re profoundly uninterested in providing one. So for now, speculate away, and we’ll come back when we have more.

*Note that when you want to hear a Spotify song via Facebook, for instance, you still have to open the Spotify client on your desktop before you can listen.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130313/twitters-music-app-will-let-you-watch-too-with-help-from-vevo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130312/spotify-adds-1-million-subscribers-in-3-months/ http://allthingsd.com/20130312/spotify-adds-1-million-subscribers-in-3-months/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:58:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=302692 Spotify has signed up six million paying subscribers for its streaming music service, CNET reports. In December, Spotify reported five million subscribers, with one million of those in the U.S.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130312/spotify-adds-1-million-subscribers-in-3-months/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130309/marissas-million-dollar-bonus-youtubes-money-woes-and-cell-phone-unlocking-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-30313-30913/ http://allthingsd.com/20130309/marissas-million-dollar-bonus-youtubes-money-woes-and-cell-phone-unlocking-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-30313-30913/#comments Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:00:02 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=301915 Hello, and happy Panic Day! If it is possible to have a happy Panic Day, that is. In fact, for the benefit of those who do not own a copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” please DON’T PANIC.

And here’s something else to calm your nerves: Our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 4:

1.) White House: It’s Time to Legalize Cellphone Unlocking

2.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

3.) YouTube’s Show-Me-the-Money Problem

4.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

5.) What Could Apple Buy With Its $137 Billion? About 18 Homes Each for Every Yahoo to Not Work At, and More!

6.) Former Top Yahoo Ad Exec Sues Yahoo, Accusing It of Trying to “Cheat” Him Over Acquisition Compensation

7.) Heads Turn as Microsoft Shows Off 3-D Scanning Techniques

8.) Loose Lips: Yahoo M&A Head Told Employees Company Looking at Two “Significant” and a Half-Dozen Small Buys

9.) The Disappearing Interface

10.) Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130309/marissas-million-dollar-bonus-youtubes-money-woes-and-cell-phone-unlocking-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-30313-30913/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130306/jimmy-iovine-explains-his-60-million-music-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20130306/jimmy-iovine-explains-his-60-million-music-plan/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:42:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=300857 Hey, Jimmy Iovine! You just got $60 million to launch a new subscription music service!

What are you going to do with it?

The legendary music producer, executive and headphone marketer hasn’t spelled out all of his plans just yet. We’ll have to wait until later this year to see exactly what he’s going to roll out to compete with the likes of Apple, Spotify, Pandora and perhaps Google (x2).

But last month at D: Dive Into Media, he gave Walt Mossberg a pretty good sense of what he’s working on — a highly curated service, as opposed to the robot+friends approach most of his competitors use — as well as a history lesson on the rise and fall of the music industry.

Here’s the entire interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130306/jimmy-iovine-explains-his-60-million-music-plan/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130305/why-google-thinks-two-music-subscription-services-are-better-than-none/ http://allthingsd.com/20130305/why-google-thinks-two-music-subscription-services-are-better-than-none/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:58:14 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=300724 Alrighty. Time to start sorting out what Google is up to with music. And why it thinks it may make sense to launch two different music subscription services.

Spoiler alert! No one outside of a handful of Googlers really knows.

But we can make some educated guesses:

As previously reported, Google’s Android unit wants to launch a subscription service.

This one’s a no-brainer. Music is a key part of mobile, and Andy Rubin doesn’t want to cede that to outsiders like Spotify and Pandora. (Android’s effort to break into music via a download store and a scan-and-match locker have had little take-up.) And this one is relatively easy for music owners to sign off on, since they’ve already bought into the Spotify model — free ad-supported music that pushes users into a $10-a-month mobile offer.

As previously reported, Google’s YouTube unit wants to do … something with a subscription service.

At a minimum, YouTube is trying to collect the rights to sell music, in both audio and video form, via subscriptions. But it hasn’t told music owners what it actually wants to do with those rights, and it hasn’t shown outsiders a prototype of what it’s working on.

This one also has some logic to it, but it’s not quite as clear-cut. More on that shortly.

Before we get there, though: Regardless of what you’ve read about timelines (“imminent,” or “Q3,” or “2013,” or “sometime” are all options), none of this can happen if Google doesn’t get deals with the music owners.

Right now, as Billboard reports, Warner Music Group has signed on to both ideas. I hear that Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music label, is interested, but is at least a month or so removed from inking a deal. But industry sources say that Sony Music is resistant to all of this. For now.

Even if Google gets all three of the big labels on board, it’s not home free. It needs buy-in not just from the people who own music, but from the ones who own the publishing rights — the underlying compositions for each song.

Sometimes those rights are owned by the big-three labels, but sometimes they’re not. And particularly outside the U.S., Google will need to make peace with the agencies that represent music owners. That could be tough, given that its relationship with some of them is frequently fractious.

So there are lots of ways this could get slowed down/crippled/derailed.

One encouraging sign that all of this could get done is the fact that Google is no longer insisting that music owners negotiate their deals with both an Android team and a YouTube team. Instead, YouTube content head Robert Kyncl is representing the search giant in all of its talks — though the deals are still going to get done separately.

Small beans? Sure. But at least it shows the Googlebots are beginning to grok the way the humanoids in the content business would like to work.

For argument’s sake, let’s say Google does get all of its deals done. What next?

The Android scenario is relatively easy to map out. Google has yet to show a competence for selling content, but its huge installed base will still make it a serious contender. And that will be an issue not just for Spotify, but Pandora and Apple and anyone else with a vested interest in digital music. At a minimum, it could make Android phones more attractive and/or harder to switch away from. And that may be enough to make Rubin happy.

The YouTube version is harder to nail down. As many people have pointed out, YouTube already functions as the world’s biggest digital music service. That’s in part because of the official music videos it serves up in conjunction with Vevo, the video company it is set to invest in.* But mostly because of all the music that its users upload to the service, with homemade visuals and without permission, which ends up staying there with the blessing of the music owners.

So why does it need to sell music? As Eliot Van Buskirk notes, all of that free music may be the reason YouTube is talking about subscriptions. Offering a paid version may make the music owners more likely to keep their free stuff up there, too.

Background: In olden days, music owners got paid a small fee every time someone played their stuff on YouTube. All those small fees added up, which was nice for the labels, but a real problem for YouTube, particularly when it didn’t have much of an ad business to absorb those costs.

Fast-forward to today: Now the music owners get a cut of the ads YouTube shows when it plays their songs. Much better for YouTube, but music owners grumble that they’re not making enough. And their deals are all up for renewal right now.

Subscriptions can solve problems for both sides. YouTube can tell music owners that it’s providing a funnel to encourage people to actually pay for music. And the music owners can let YouTube hang on to what may be its most valuable asset, which it can keep offering for free.

I don’t believe music subscriptions indicate a real change in Google’s plans for YouTube, though. As far as I can tell, Google fundamentally sees the site as a giant advertising platform, and I don’t think a new music product changes that. Just like the talks YouTube is holding with other content owners about other subscriptions.

I also don’t see how YouTube’s audience, which skews very young and probably hasn’t bought a thing from Google in their lives, is likely to pay for any of this stuff.

But if subscriptions — or even the idea of subscriptions — help convince YouTube’s partners to keep supplying their stuff to the site, then that’s probably good enough to keep everyone happy.

*As far as I can tell, none of the subscription talk affects Google’s plan to renew its Vevo deal and put money in the site. The reason the Vevo deal hasn’t been finalized, I’m told, is because its closing has always been contingent on Google wrapping up other deals with the labels, including subscription rights, as I reported earlier.

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