The rise and fall (and rise) of music distribution media

What a wonderful GIF, showing the rise and fall of music distribution media, since 1970: A few things to note, here: Changing music distribution formats is not a new thing. We see cassettes overtaking vinyl and CDs overtaking cassettes before the internet comes along. And even before vinyl, radio was supposed to kill the music industry, when in fact it became a great new marketing medium. This isn’t to say that the internet doesn’t pose challenges, but it is to say that the music industry has always been evolving based... Read The Rest →

Get Your Christmas Subscription Now Before It’s Too Late!

Dear Noosphere readers, We launched our PRO subscription service for the very low beta price of $19/year. Next January, that price will rise to $49/year, with the introduction of datasets. If you want to sign up for $19/year, you should do so now–treat yourself for Christmas. For $19/year, here’s what you get: Daily curated news and analysis on the technology industry ; Access to all our reports on the leading social media companies and internet trends ; A new report each week. In January, we will add access to datasets... Read The Rest →

Congratulations To Noosphere Partner Qunb For Winning The LeWeb Startup Competition!

We are at the LeWeb conference, where the winner of the startup competition has been announced: qunb, which is building a “YouTube of data.” This writer has been following qunb since they were admitted to Le Camping, the French startup accelerator, and qunb was a launch partner for Noosphere, putting out a great presentation at our recent Business of Social Media conference. Qunb has great technology and is building a very interesting platform, and we look forward to working with them in the future. Congratulations!

Tablet First

“Mobile first” design has been a thing for many months now, and for good reasons. Now it seems that news outlets have not only gotten the message, but are going one better with tablet-first designs. We at Noosphere feel like we missed a beat. (Our early mockups were very much on this trend–you’ll see when the next version of the site ships.)

Don’t Cheer The Series A Crunch

For a long while, observers of the startup world have warned of a financing crunch for B2C/social/non-transactional startups. Many of them were able to easily raise seed funding, but now they are finding it hard to raise follow-on financing from VCs. People are calling it the Series A Crunch. Many interesting things are being written about this (see Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy). Perhaps the dumbest one, however, comes from tech troll extraordinaire Dan Lyons, writing that we shouldn’t shed tears for “crappy startups that can’t raise any money.” Lyons is... Read The Rest →

Just In Case You Needed Further Evidence That Microsoft’s Surface Is DOA…

…now comes word that the Surface Pro tablet will start at $899. Meanwhile, the perfectly fine iPad 2 retails for $399, and the Kindle Fire HD for $299. To be clear, this is the “Surface Pro”, which is a little fancier than Microsoft’s other tablet, “Surface with Windows RT”. Which is $599 on Amazon right now. Now, either Microsoft just wants to do an experiment with Surface and is trying to keep it off people’s hands (then why are there a billion ads for it all over the two alpha... Read The Rest →

THE MOBILE CLIFF…

Your writer is in New York this week and speaking with a few entrepreneurs and investors, and a single word comes up again and again : mobile. Now that’s pretty obvious–mobile has been huge for years. But the word comes up more and more often, and–this is a first–with a tinge of fear. According to our sources, here’s the problem: Many of the world’s biggest websites have all-but stopped growing on the desktop web, even as they keep growing on mobile. For many of these services, within the next year... Read The Rest →

  • 2 comments   •   
  • by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

MyHeritage CEO Gilad Japhet On His Geni Acquisition

For a while now your writer has admired Israeli startup MyHeritage, which is the leader in the fast-growing and big (really) online genealogy space. Yesterday MyHeritage announced that it acquire its once-much-more-hyped competitor Geni, so we interviewed MyHeritage Founder & CEO Gilad Japhet about the acquisition. (You can also read this good interview by the Journal’s Matt Lynley.) Noosphere: Why did you do the Geni acquisition? More specifically, was it to acquire a team, a technology, a userbase, data…? Gilad Japhet: All of the above. Our goal is to become the... Read The Rest →

« Older Entries

Back to top