AllThingsD » Ocarina

Music App-Maker Smule Adds More Voices, Buys Music App-Maker Khush

Peter Kafka — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:01:38 +0000

Smule, the company that makes cool music-making apps like Magic Piano and Ocarina, has bought Khush, the company that makes cool music-making apps like Songify.

The companies aren’t disclosing details except to note that it’s a cash and stock deal. Smule has more of the former because it just raised a $12 million funding round, and some of that is being transfered directly to Atlanta-based Khush.

The logic here is pretty simple: The two companies can combine tech, and just as important, they can combine their installed base — together they’ve moved 35 million apps — to promote/distribute more apps.

All of that activity, by the way, remains confined to Apple and its iOS ecosystem. Neither company makes apps for Google’s Android operating system, pretty much for the same reasons that Smule co-founder Jeff Smith explained to me more than a year ago.

If you want to raise a skeptical eye, it would be perfectly fair to point out that both companies traffic in novelty items that rely on gimmicks like “auto-tuning” people’s voices. And that while both companies insist that they’re really trying to make music-creation a social experience, you probably don’t want to hear most of your friends’ attempts to make music.

But who cares? If people like the apps, they like the apps. For insight into the brains that make the apps popular, check out this excellent profile of Smule’s chief brainiac Ge Wang, via the New York Times magazine’s Rob Walker.

You can also see Wang, Smith and their new employees Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia in this clever announcement video; below that is the interview I shot with Smith back in March 2010.

[ See post to watch video ]

Dell Buys 3Par for $1.15 Billion

John Paczkowski — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:17:56 +0000

When Dell (DELL) purchased Perot Systems back in September of 2009, founder Michael Dell said the acquisition was the first of many such deals. And, true to his word, it was. By mid-2010 Dell had acquired three more companies–KACE Networks, Exanet and Ocarina Networks. Monday it announced the purchase of a fourth–3Par.

Early this morning, Dell said it will pay about $1.15 billion cash for the data-storage company–an 86.5 percent premium over 3Par’s Friday closing share price of $9.65. For Dell, which has been looking to diversify away from its core PC-manufacturing business, adding 3Par to its portfolio is one more way to do so, solidifying its position in the storage and services markets. A pure-play PC and server maker no longer, the company is fast transforming into a full-fledged consulting and services concern to boot, something it must do if it’s to compete with enterprise-technology rivals like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM). Said UBS analyst Maynard Um, “The 3Par deal helps bolster Dell’s competitiveness and profitability in the mid & high-end of the Fibre Channel SAN segment and strengthens its position for cloud & virtualized environments (key long term areas of focus). We also see opportunity for Dell to drive solid growth of 3Par systems (similar to success achieved with EqualLogic) as only 20% of 3Par sales are from outside the US & 80% of sales come from repeat customers, which provides significant growth opportunities by leveraging Dell’s scale, distribution and global reach.”

More iPhone Apps = Less TV, Newspapers and Everything Else

Peter Kafka — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:42:34 +0000

You knew this intuitively. But interesting to see the numbers: The more time iPhone users spend with their apps, the less time they spend watching TV, reading newspapers, using PCs and pretty much everything else.

Check out these self-reported behavior changes, via Gravity Tank, a Chicago consultancy that surveyed 1,000 heavy “app phone users.” That’s defined here as people who used either Apple’s (AAPL) handset or Google’s (GOOG) G1 phone from T-Mobile. (Click chart to enlarge.)

Of course, you’ll want to take this with big bags of salt. Because I’m not sure how many app users were really using an “Internet Tablet” to begin with. And I don’t see how monkeying around with likes of Ocarina and The Moron List is going to cut down on your caloric intake.

But! The fact is that app users think they’re watching less TV, etc., which at least means they value that stuff less.

So if you’re in the media business, the implications here are clear: Shoving your stuff into a browser won’t do you much good in a mobile world defined by apps. And the smarter media executives I know are scrambling to adapt.

I talked to a network TV guy yesterday who told me his company was making “tens of millions of dollars” from mobile right now but that pretty much everything it has done to date–carrier deals, licensing pacts, etc.–will have to be rethought and redone in light of the coming app world. He’s going to have to move very fast.

And if you’re not convinced, here are some of the folks Gravity Tank interviewed for a parallel set of “ethnographic” studies. If some of them seem a bit too much like the “I’m a Mac” dude from the Apple ads, bear in mind that these are iPhone users who agreed to be interviewed on camera talking about their love of apps. So that’s going to come with the territory.

gravitytank // Apps Get Real from Teaque Lenahan on Vimeo.

Also, apologies to readers viewing this on the All Things Digital app: Still no Vimeo on the iPhone.