Google this week expanded its coupon service to mobile just in time for Black Friday, enabling U.S. consumers to access and redeem the discounts via their phones. It’s an effort that could give the space a much-needed shove into the mainstream.

Retailers can now create and upload mobile coupon offers to Google’s Local Business Center; the offers are presented with business listings to users searching Google.com on a handset. The move expands on a 2-year-old service that enables users to access coupons on the Internet and print them out.

Mobile coupons have been around for several years but have failed to gain much traction with consumers. Startups such as Cellfire and txtwire have launched promotions with nationally known retailers, but no campaign has enjoyed the marketing support necessary for large-scale success, and consumer awareness remains limited.

Google’s new offering could change that if enough retailers buy in and present their offers to consumers. While existing startups in the space must ink deals with individual retail partners, Google’s massive list of businesses could boost consumer awareness as users increasingly use their phones to find local retailers. While Google’s effort is unlikely to provide the overnight breakthrough many in the space have long hoped for, it could go a long way toward bringing mobile coupons to the mass market.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: google, Mobile Advertising, mobile coupons, mobile marketing

Updated with new information from Dropbox: You don’t go into file backup and syncing for the fame and glory, but that’s what it seems to be yielding for 2-year-old Dropbox. Simply put, people — including my GigaOM coworkers and I — love Dropbox because it works. “We do have a rabid following,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston admitted in a conversation today.

Over the summer Dropbox raised a $7.25 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, adding to $1.5 million in seed money it brought in from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator in 2007. Accel’s Sameer Gandhi, who had previously led Sequoia’s investment has since become a partner at Accel, led the round. We found out about the Series A via an SEC filing; Houston confirmed the funding had closed but said that the filing was not the final amount. Houston said the company had not yet disclosed its A round because up until last month it was in the process of obtaining the URL dropbox.com from a domain squatter.

He later contacted us (after this article was posted) to share more details. Dropbox had raised $1.2 million in debt in 2007 from Sequoia Capital and that along with interest (on that amount) converted to equity as part of the Series A investment, which included a fresh slug of $6 million. That brings company’s total investment raised to date to $7.25 million. Houston claimed that the round was closed in October 2008, though the documents were filed with the SEC in July 2009. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Accel Partners.

Dropbox now has 3 million registered users, up from 2 million in September and 1 million in April. Nearly 1.5 million of them were active in the last month, including 300,000 using the company’s new iPhone app, according to Houston. And many of those folks identify themselves as Dropbox lovers, with more than 35,000 signing up to be Twitter followers and 23,000 as Facebook fans. A 2-week-old feature that allows the community to vote on new features has garnered nearly 10,000 votes for the top choice: selectively syncing certain files or folders rather than a whole account.

Alongside other lightweight web apps like Gmail infiltrating the enterprise, Dropbox customers (an undisclosed portion pay $10-$20 per month for additional storage) are now using the simple tool to do their jobs. In some ways, the migration is flowing in the opposite direction — a traditionally enterprise concept is now available to everybody. And Dropbox, as could be expected, says it will offer tools for corporate collaboration in a more formal fashion early next year.

San Francisco-based Dropbox has just 20 employees. The service currently stores nearly 1.3 million gigabytes of data.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  21 Comments
Tags: Accel Partners, dropbox, Online Storage Startups, Sequoia Capital

Two-year-old Hulu, which has quickly become Americans’ preferred method of consuming TV online, is now blocking startups from embedding its video library. But while Hulu is now (mostly) unfriendly to startup video aggregators, it’s still sharing its videos with its corporate parents’ friends: the big web portals and MSOs. Put together, the retroactive and inconsistent nature of a recent spate of nastygrams shows the site is feeling insecure.

Over the weekend, Hulu demanded that a newly launched video discovery startup called Rippol stop embedding all its shows. Hulu told Rippol that it can link to its full library, but not embed the videos. Rippol tells us it will comply, and replace the Hulu embeds where it can from network sites like NBC.com and Fox.com.

Rippol competitor Yidio also tells us Hulu commanded it to stop embedding, and video search site CastTV says it has also recently changed to make users click through to watch Hulu. Meanwhile, video guide Clicker declined to comment, but we’ve seen that over the last two months it’s swapped out Hulu embeds for TV network embeds as well. Continue reading the full post at NewTeeVee.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: Hulu, Rippol

Black Friday is rapidly approaching, and with it some big bargains on tech gear. A number of items have already gone on sale, such as these Dell laptops; Amazon, meanwhile, is featuring deals on everything from GPS devices to hard drives. We’ve got several stories up around our network to help you find the best gear at the lowest price:

Go Green. Whether you’re buying for yourself or getting a jump on holiday shopping, why not go green? See Earth2Tech’s “10 Green Tech Gift Ideas for Black Friday,” which includes technology that can help you reduce your home energy consumption to digital goods that also cut carbon emissions.

Web Worker Shopping. WebWorkerDaily’s “Finding Web Worker Gear Deals on Black Friday” rounds up bargains on external storage devices, monitors, Flash memory, digital media, keyboards and mice, printers and much more. Among them are an OfficeJet HP printer for half off (shown) and ultra-low-priced wireless routers for your Wi-Fi set-up.

Apple Gets in the Spirit. As TheAppleBlog’s post “Apple’s Black Friday Tease” notes, the company has confirmed that this Friday will be a “special Apple one-day shopping event,” with deals available online. While Apple is mum as to which products will be on sale, The Boy Genius Report suggests that iPods will be up to 30 percent off, and Macs will be 25 percent off. All shipping will be free on Black Friday.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments

Sometime over the last year you’ve marveled at the intersection of a real-time event and your social graph, whether it’s an earthquake, a big occasion like the Obama inauguration, or a football game for your alma mater. Suddenly, everything aligns in your Facebook and/or Twitter feed!

But surely, these communal, relevant, timely interactions can be made more so — whether by making connections with friends in advance, filtering out off-topic messages, or syncing to whatever device you’re on at the time. And a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup called Hot Potato is trying to do just that. We’d heard a bit about what the company was doing through the grapevine, knew it was started by some Major League Baseball Advanced Media alums and funded by RRE, First Round, Betaworks, SV Angel, Allen Morgan and other angels.

Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer came out to San Francisco on Friday to launch the company, and we interviewed him while he was here (see video embedded above). Honestly, there’s not a lot there in the product yet, and the Hot Potato iPhone app still hasn’t made it through Apple’s birthing process — but it’s interesting to see how the company is treating just about anything in life (car shopping, a WiFi-enabled plane flight) like a big-time event. In the video, Shaffer talks about how the service works, how he plans to monetize it, what platforms are up next, and what kind of usage he expects.

For me, Hot Potato will have to prove its value for smaller and more private use cases vs. Facebook, but I’m already sold on major public news, concert and sports events — especially the startup’s promise to filter thousands of updates into just the ones most relevant to me.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Hot Potato, Justin Shaffer, social streams

A month after Om trashed LinkedIn for failing to launch a promised application platform, and more than a year after the initiative was first announced, the professional network is finally giving out developer keys. Today LinkedIn launches a business-focused apps platform.

The full launch follows a string of LinkedIn deals to integrate with IBM, Research In Motion, Microsoft Outlook and Twitter. Promised early platform developers include TweetDeck, Posterous, Box.net and Ribbit. (More details on the company’s blog.)

With far too many platforms begging for developers’ services today, why should they head to LinkedIn? “Obviously LinkedIn is a pretty unique platform, but these are fundamentally standard REST APIs,” said Adam Nash, LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products. “More than 50 million people have used LinkedIn to build their professional presence online, and they want to use it everywhere.” He promised that the LinkedIn platform would ensure the same privacy protections as the company’s site. 

As for the delay, Nash said, “We wanted to spend time to understand how people wanted to use the platform and use the technology to scale.” Translation: Better late than never!

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: developers, LinkedIn, platform

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings. Those comments have confused and scared many folks as to how speed might impact their businesses.

To be sure, Cutts’ comments don’t offer any details, and it is not even clear if  Google will go down that route. (Matt, can you offer clarifications please?) Still, some are worried that Google is going to turn PageRank into a country club for the rich, and penalize smaller sites because they don’t have high-end hosting facilities. Of course, there is the uneven distribution of backbone connectivity. Many parts of the world are not as well-connected as, say, Asia or the United States, so does that mean this new approach to PageRank could penalize sites hosted in places that don’t have abundant connectivity?

Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite, a web site traffic monitoring service, thinks such a move could have a serious impact on many web sites. “The potential changes at Google mean there will be a REAL business impact for poor web site performance, and conversely, in Google’s words, a bonus for good performance,” he writes on the company blog. “Online organizations will need to look closely at themselves and the other parties that participate in the Web application delivery supply chain to understand and manage this new development in 2010.”

On a personal level, I believe that a faster web is good for everyone.  At some point in our web journeys we have all cursed slow-loading sites, a problem that is only going to increase as the web becomes more intricately intertwined, in the process becoming a patchwork quilt of diverse  services. Performance hiccups at one service can send out ripples of disruption.

Increasingly popular widgets can slow down the performance of even the best web offerings, thus lowering the overall experience. The increased interdependency of various services can often cause disruption. Hours after the news of Michael Jackson’s death spread on the web, many news sites became inaccessible and suffered slowdowns. Those sites didn’t crash but instead were hampered because they were pulling data from ad servers that weren’t prepared for the onslaught of traffic. On our own sites, we have seen things break down when one of our partners suffers an outage or has performance problems.

As a consumer of information, I would say Google giving preference to faster sites doesn’t seem like a bad idea. As a publisher, the high cost of speeding up my web offerings might hurt in the short term, but ultimately it means a better experience for my readers — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Photo of Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2009 courtesy of PlanetC1 via Flickr

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  29 Comments
Tags: google, Matt Cutts, PageRanks

AOL will launch a new look and logo along with its official spinout from Time Warner on Dec. 10, as it tries to become a content-centric company. Wolff Olins, a global brand and innovation consultancy, worked on this new look and logo which seeks to replace the older, more iconic AOL branding. The minute I saw the logo (and its various interpretations), my first reaction was simple: lame. It is ambiguous at best, and as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie “WALL-E.”

Why such a visceral reaction? Perhaps because I grew up with the old AOL (all caps) and am mad at change — a malady normally associated with aging. Jokes aside, the new logo fails to capture what is going to be a smaller, nimbler AOL, one that is represented by a collection of smaller, iconic brands such as Engadget and Joystiq. AOL should ask for its money back!

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  82 Comments
Tags: America Online, AOL, tim armstrong, Time Warner

The Internet is abuzz over Google’s release of the open-source version of its Chrome OS, and for good reason. It’s free, which will save hardware manufacturers licensing fees, and it appears ideally suited for the netbooks that have become such a hot item for the mobile crowd (GigaOM Pro, sub. required). But Chrome is not without its detractors, and it’s worth remembering that Google isn’t King Midas — in fact, there’s a substantial list of Google products and services that have flopped, floundered or simply disappeared into the ether. Here are a few of the most memorable:

• Google Lively was a web-based virtual environment that allowed as many as 20 people to sit in a virtual room and chat with each other. The offering debuted in July 2008 only to have Google pull the plug a mere four months later.
• Google Print Ads was dropped earlier this year after the company’s vision of bringing web-like automation to the world of traditional media failed to materialize. The effort went belly-up just three weeks before the death of Google Audio Ads, which ended a three-year run in February after the company failed to gain traction in the radio ad game.
• Google Answers spent a year in beta before a full-blown launch in May 2003, but the effort to create a fee-based knowledge market never gained much traction outside a small base of users and the service was dropped in late 2006.
• The social networking site Orkut launched early in 2004 as an independent project of noted Google developer Orkut Büyükkökten and has caught fire in Brazil, a market that accounts for roughly 50 percent of its membership. The site reportedly claims roughly 100 million users, which is impressive, but Google can’t be happy that its effort is virtually unknown in Europe and North America while Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others have gained such impressive traction.
• Google Catalog Search debuted in 2001 as a way for consumers to go online to check out their favorite print catalogs that had been scanned and uploaded. Of course, retailers were already taking their inventories online themselves, and the effort was put to rest earlier this year.
• Google Health was released as a beta test in May 2008, but the service has yet to find much of an audience among insurers or the general public. Which may have something to do with the combination of the words “health” and “beta test.”
• The location-based service Dodgeball was shut down in 2009 after Google had acquired it four years earlier, and while Google continues to operate Jaiku – a social networking service it picked up in 2007 — the company has effectively abandoned the project. The technologies and expertise from both startups is being incorporated into other Google businesses and projects, however.

No company bats 1.000, of course, and a company as experimental and entrepreneurial as Google is bound to have its share of failures. As the blogosphere gushes over Chrome, though, Google’s stumbles help provide some perspective. Are there any other names that should be on this list?

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  22 Comments
Tags: chrome, Dodgeball, google, Google Answers, Google Catalog Search, Google Chrome, Google Health, Google Lively, Google Print Ads, Orkut

Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo.

Achieving the seemingly impossible task of building up more hype about Twitter’s business model, Costolo promised Twitter’s advertising will be “fascinating,” “non-traditional” and “really cool.” Some partners already pay Twitter to use certain parts of its APIs, he added, though Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur noted from the audience that his company does not.

Costolo emphasized that Twitter will continue to offer free access to users and partners, and that small startups who start building on Twitter’s APIs won’t be expected to pay up front.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: Twitter

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

ICQ was long ago eclipsed by other instant-messaging services (AOL’s AIM among them) and the last person to prefer MapQuest over the competition was probably Andy Samberg in “Lazy Sunday,” but those services are hardly tiny. MapQuest alone accounted for more than 40 percent of AOL’s U.S. search queries in October. ICQ reportedly has 40 million to 50 million unique monthly visitors and still leads the market in countries like Germany, Russia, Ukraine and Israel.

Given the overlap, it’s understandable that AOL no longer needs ICQ as much as it once did, but a sale of MapQuest is pretty strange — though AOL might be able to get a decent price for the unit out of Apple, which clearly would be happy to wean its mobile self off of Google and its Maps.

AOL paid $287 million plus earnouts for ICQ in 1998 and $1.1 billion for MapQuest in 1999. The soon-to-be-spinoff itself is also possibly thinking about getting rid of recent acquisition Bebo, cause, you know, social networking’s another boring sector these days.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: AOL, ICQ, Mapquest

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing.

Goals

With Chrome OS, Google had three goals, according to Pichai: speed, simplicity and security. ”Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster than Chrome [the existing browser],” he noted. “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. If a user loses a Chrome OS machine, the user should be able to log back into the cloud and retrieve cached data.” Pichai also demonstrated that Chrome OS loads in only a few seconds.

The demonstrations made clear that the OS relies heavily on “panels,” pop-up windows housing web-based applications that are similar to multiple open windows in a browser.  Papakipos, meanwhile, characterized the security model in Chrome OS as very much like the one in the Chrome browser, and unlike the one in standard operating systems: If malware is detected, all cached data is saved; Chrome OS is subsequently re-downloaded, then freshly imaged on a machine. If an application crashes in a tab, only that tab goes down.

Coming to Devices Next Year

The target date for delivery of Chrome OS machines is the end of next year. Google is working with hardware partners to bring Chrome OS to market, Pichai said, and doing so in unusual ways. Chrome OS is not aimed at hard disk-enabled machines, for example, but rather at systems with solid-state drives. Google is also working with hardware vendors on what Pichai described as “slightly larger netbooks,” with full-sized keyboards and large displays. All the open source code is available today, as are all the design documents, said Papakipos.  You can find the source code for the OS and other links here.

So does Chrome OS have a fighting chance in the hot netbook market that it’s squarely aimed at, given that it won’t make its debut on devices until late next year? Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM processors, which as jkOnTheRun has noted, will give it a broad spectrum of coverage on devices, and could make it a significant player in the emerging ARM-based smartbook hardware category. Still, the OS will significantly trail the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which is also squarely aimed at netbooks.

Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other ways we can make money from it.” He added that:

“The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require each and every project to be completely profitable or not profitable — we look at them in a strategic context: are they making the web a better place?”

Could Google subsidize Chrome OS-based netbooks in an effort to attract users with low prices and feed them into its search-and-advertising ecosysytem? As is true for most of Google’s projects, feeding that lucrative ecosystem tends to be a high priority for the company. It will no doubt be one as Chrome OS makes its way into devices next year.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  13 Comments
Tags: chrome os, google, netbooks, operating systems, windows 7

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors.

However, a recent report by Next Up Research (reg. req.) put out by a competing private company stock exchange, SharesPost, puts Facebook’s value much lower. Interestingly, it doesn’t use data from SharesPost’s own stock trades — though that may be due to the fact that the exchange’s last noted Facebook transaction is from August at $12 per share — but rather uses revenue projections, value vs. comparable companies and Digital Sky’s recent investment in the company (which included purchasing of employee stock). Those three methods give Facebook a total valuation of $5.48 billion, $5.07 billion and $6.5 billion, respectively.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: facebook, Next Up Research, SecondMarket, SharesPos

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise collaboration offerings from Cisco and Microsoft, which revolve more around traditional IM screens, video conferencing and presence awareness inside an email program. For internal use, Salesforce Chatter gives employees profiles, feeds and groups. With the Salesforce Chatter platform, developers will be able to build social enterprise applications that can contain status updates, create Facebook apps, and hook into APIs from Twitter so enterprises can track comments about their brand or from their employees. As employees use more social-networking applications while at work, the security of those applications and how to harness them for corporate use have become increasingly common concerns in IT.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: Cisco CSCO, CRM, Microsoft, msft, Salesfoce.com

The Pirate Bay is shutting down its tracker technology, its crew announced in a blog post that only accentuated the positive, in a move that follows a multiyear hailstorm of legal machinations, jail sentences thrown at founders, and constant public scrutiny. The positive spin in the blog post is reminiscent of the founders’ claims that their jail sentences represented “an epic win.”  But now that the site will switch to decentralized distributed hash table (DHT) technology for pointing to torrent sources, what is the likely impact on downloaders and freeloaders? They will have to turn to new alternatives, but those choices will take shape.

According to today’s blog post:

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!…By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages.

Magnet links let users download torrents directly into BitTorrent clients, circumventing browsers. Through DHT technology, users seeking torrents access a dedicated DHT network, and find peers for the actual downloads. So, effectively, The Pirate Bay is seeking to avoid centralizing tracked torrents and services in such a way that it can stay free of legal problems.

Does that mean the end of widespread torrent downloading, including illegal downloads, though? Absolutely not. The Pirate Bay’s position as the leading purveyor of BitTorrent traffic is threatened, but torrenters will march on.

For one thing, TorrentFreak already spoke with Pirate Bay insiders who said that a decentralized model can work across many high-profile torrent sites:

We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally — like pick a date and all agree “from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore.”

The idea of a federated collection of BitTorrent trackers around the web has been raised before. Now that idea could shift to a federated trackerless collection of sites, with P2P-based torrenting becoming more widely distributed.

Let’s also keep in mind that the overall world of torrenting extends to many useful, legal sites providing content. NewTeeVee collected many of them here.  Legaltorrents, for example, distributes lots of Creative Commons-licensed content. Legal and illegal torrenting will continue as The Pirate Bay sends its tracker to Davey Jones’ locker, but today does mark an official end to a torrent tracking strategy that was central to The Pirate Bay’s ongoing notoriety.

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, torrents, tracker

Consolidation appears imminent in the free streaming music sector, as MySpace is on the verge of acquiring social music site Imeem. A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that negotiations are in process, but no deal is set. If it happens, the buy would be MySpace’s second fire-sale acquisition this year, following its mid-summer deal for iLike at a bargain-basement price. Imeem’s valuation, once reportedly above $200 million, was said to have fallen below $10 million at the time of a recapitalization round earlier this year.

The proposed deal would unite two companies that share the same problem: Rights holders demand royalties for song streams at rates higher than advertising alone can offset. Imeem has been a money drain to its stakeholders, but it does have several assets that could prove valuable to MySpace, which may be mulling a move toward a “freemium” model. Its sales, engineering and leadership teams hold significant value. Imeem acquired Snocap, the music-selling widget provider founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning and seen on many MySpace artist pages, in early 2008, and launched an iPhone app in May 2009.

Although no company has reached profitability providing free ad-supported music streams, Imeem was optimistic about reaching that point next year. The company had renegotiated its royalty rates with at least some of the major labels, reduced its headcount and other expenses, and accepted a round of funding worth about $6 million in spring 2009. But key investor Sequoia Capital bailed out of the recap round, and was largely washed out along with other stakeholders.

What’s more, its brand name is known as a music destination, in contrast with MySpace’s reputation as a broader social network. Imeem is also said to be developing a new user interface, the better to compete with Spotify, and if MySpace is planning to launch a paid service, it could incorporate parts of Imeem’s existing but little-used VIP service. Imeem has put those pieces in place already; for MySpace it’s a chance to buy rather than build them.

Imeem began exploring a sale more than a year ago, retaining Montgomery & Co. to evaluate strategic options, but no buyer emerged. Since that time, the free streaming model has fallen on hard times, and may soon be a thing of the past. If the current deal produces an exit disappointing to Imeem’s stakeholders, at least it will have produced something better than bankruptcy — which would be a small victory.

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

Posted by Paul Bonanos on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: acquisition, Imeem, MySpace, social music