Mike Butcher

Dating site Match.com is to launch a mobile web and text service for mobile phones in the UK, US and Canada, expanding out to a further nine countries by the end of the year.

Subscribers will be able to search Match.com from their mobile’s browsers and receive an SMS text message whenever another user sends them a message. According to research firm M:Metrics 3.6 million US mobile users made use of a mobile dating service in May 2007.

An earlier version of Match.com for mobile phones was used by nearly half a million subscribers, but the new service will allow subscribers to tap into Match.com’s database of nearly 15 million registered users.

Here in the UK two startups will be keenly interested in this news. Flirtomatic which has been playing in the SMS flirting game for a while now and newer startup Flirtnik.com.

As hinted at back in February, Last.fm has been trawling around looking for a buyer and today it found its harbour in the form of a US media giant. The ’social music’ site has been bought by CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m). This is less than the earlier rumour, but still the largest-ever buyout of a UK-based “Web 2.0″ site.

The site was founded in the UK five years ago (you may have heard the stories about the founders sleeping on the office roof in a tent when they couldn’t afford accommodation). It now has more than 15 million active users. Users basically connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, build their own personal radio stations and watch music video-clips.

Although the announcement today says that Last.fm’s managing team (founders Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones) will stay and the site will maintain its own separate identity, I can’t see this staying this way forever, now that it’s part of CBS, which will probably ditch the European sensibility of the service.

Stiksel reportedly said: “This move will really support us to get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made onto Last.fm.” He also says LastFM will “put the users in charge. CBS gets this.” Time will tell, time will tell.

Meanwhile for the less cynical among you, here is co-founder Richard Jones on the company blog today:

“The team here have spent a lot of time this year discussing what the future should hold for Last.fm, and while contemplating raising some additional venture capital we were approached by CBS. As you can imagine, we have been approached numerous times in the past few years from all the usual suspects regarding acquisitions and so on; CBS are one of the few companies who needed no explanation of what we are doing, and we were impressed at how progressive their plans are. This deal with CBS gives us a chance to really make Last.fm shine, and gives us more flexibility than other funding options would for doing all the crazy stuff we’re had scribbled on whiteboards for years.”

So why did CBS buy it? CBS radio is the largest radio group in the United States, with 179 stations in the top 50 markets, but traditional media growth is stagnating and all the action – as everyone knows, especially when it comes to music and the youth market – is all online. The purchase thus adds to an advertising portfolio that already includes conventional radio, broadcast and cable TV and outdoor services.

CBS now has a strategy of reaching as big an audience as possible, not on creating content. It sounds like they plan to rely more on the users and viewers themselves to do that. In fact, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves says Last.fm’s community play us “central to CBS”. In truth CBS is coming late to the now established idea that music is a natural community builder and therefore a very ’sticky’ eyeball attractor. As an anonymous CBS executive has already said: “We see it as a chance to get new eyeballs — or in this case earlobes.”

As for the price, it looks easily affordable by US standards. Consider some earlier deals: News Corp bought MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005. Google paid $165bn (£82bn) YouTube in 2006. But according to the LA Times, the final price for closely held Last.fm could rise substantially if performance targets are met. Last.fm got its first round of funding last May from Index Ventures.

There may be a problem for LastFM in that in the US the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board massively increases the royalties Internet broadcasters have to pay for streaming digital songs. This has already hit Pandora’s plans to expand outside the US.

However advertising may offer more hope. Although LastFM recommends music for purchase, sales are not in fact a big revenue earner. Instead CBS will probably create sponsored channels, garnering bigger corporate deals with its existing sales contacts.

Expect also CBS radio stattions to start to appear on LastFM. Country AND Western anyone?

As hinted at back in February, Last.fm has been trawling around looking for a buyer and today it found its harbour in the form of a US media giant. The 'social music' site has been bought by CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m). This is less than the earlier rumour, but still the largest-ever buyout of a UK-based "Web 2.0" site.

The site was founded in the UK five years ago (you may have heard the stories about the founders sleeping on the office roof in a tent when they couldn't afford accommodation). It now has more than 15 million active users. Users basically connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, build their own personal radio stations and watch music video-clips.

Although the announcement today says that Last.fm's managing team (founders Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones) will stay and the site will maintain its own separate identity, I can't see this staying this way forever, now that it's part of CBS, which will probably ditch the European sensibility of the service.

Stiksel reportedly said: "This move will really support us to get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made onto Last.fm." He also says LastFM will "put the users in charge. CBS gets this." Time will tell, time will tell.

Meanwhile for the less cynical among you, here is co-founder Richard Jones on the company blog today:

"The team here have spent a lot of time this year discussing what the future should hold for Last.fm, and while contemplating raising some additional venture capital we were approached by CBS. As you can imagine, we have been approached numerous times in the past few years from all the usual suspects regarding acquisitions and so on; CBS are one of the few companies who needed no explanation of what we are doing, and we were impressed at how progressive their plans are. This deal with CBS gives us a chance to really make Last.fm shine, and gives us more flexibility than other funding options would for doing all the crazy stuff we’re had scribbled on whiteboards for years."

So why did CBS buy it? CBS radio is the largest radio group in the United States, with 179 stations in the top 50 markets, but traditional media growth is stagnating and all the action – as everyone knows, especially when it comes to music and the youth market – is all online. The purchase thus adds to an advertising portfolio that already includes conventional radio, broadcast and cable TV and outdoor services.

CBS now has a strategy of reaching as big an audience as possible, not on creating content. It sounds like they plan to rely more on the users and viewers themselves to do that. In fact, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves says Last.fm's community play us "central to CBS". In truth CBS is coming late to the now established idea that music is a natural community builder and therefore a very 'sticky' eyeball attractor. As an anonymous CBS executive has already said: "We see it as a chance to get new eyeballs — or in this case earlobes."

As for the price, it looks easily affordable by US standards. Consider some earlier deals: News Corp bought MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005. Google paid $165bn (£82bn) YouTube in 2006. But according to the LA Times, the final price for closely held Last.fm could rise substantially if performance targets are met. Last.fm got its first round of funding last May from Index Ventures.

There may be a problem for LastFM in that in the US the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board massively increases the royalties Internet broadcasters have to pay for streaming digital songs. This has already hit Pandora's plans to expand outside the US.

However advertising may offer more hope. Although LastFM recommends music for purchase, sales are not in fact a big revenue earner. Instead CBS will probably create sponsored channels, garnering bigger corporate deals with its existing sales contacts.

Expect also CBS radio stattions to start to appear on LastFM. Country AND Western anyone?

There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason why there are more Germans in Second Life than Americans even though there are more American firms advertising inside the virtual world. Could it be down to better broadband in Germany? For now we'll have to ponder the results of a new Comscore study which finds that Second Life has a rapidly growing and global base of active residents.

The report found that about 1.3 million people ran the official software and logged-in to Second Life in March 2007, an increase of 46 percent in the number of active residents from January 2007.

On the face of it this sounds like rapid growth, but while the report found that only 207,000 people in the United States logged on to Second Life at least once in March, 'at least once' means they may never have come back – we just don't know.

At any rate, Second Life appears to hotter in Europe right now. In March, 61 percent of active Second Life residents were from Europe, compared to 19 percent from North America, and 13 percent from the Asia Pacific region. Perhaps predictably, 61 percent of residents were male while 39 percent were female.

In fact there are 209,000 Germans – 2,000 more than the US – inside Second Life. The UK is on 6 per cent, or 72,000.

This starts to get interesting when you realise that many of the businesses trumpeting a presence in Second Life are actually US-based: IBM, CNet, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker etc. Where are all the German brands?

TechCrunch is unimpressed with these figures and compares them with the billions of pages and unique users experienced by MySpace users – for example – every day.

And it's also worth remembering what social software professor Clay Shirky wrote back in December last year:

"Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders… There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

Breaking news: Yahoo! Photos will officially be axed today in favour of the Yahoo-owned Flickr, according to several news sites today. The closure will occur over the next few months, after Yahoo found that Flickr, with its social tools, is growing much faster than Yahoo! Photos and recently past it in traffic terms, according to Comscore. Users will be given the option of choosing one of a number of the top photo sharing sites, including Flickr but no-one will be forded to switch. The move confirms the widely-held view now that sites which employ social tools clearly have the edge of those that don’t.

Whatever happened to Angel Gambino, she of “MTV 2.0″? Well she’s been hired by Bebo to a new position of VP-music. Bebo is interested in rivaling MySpace in the music stakes. Until January this year she was VP commercial, strategy and digital media for Viacom in the UK, where she worked across 11 channels, and was previously controller of business development and emerging platforms at the BBC. Gambino announced the move on her blog. Bebo claims to have 450,000 musicians already and last month partnered with online music retailer 7digital to allow independent artists to sell their tracks.

MySpace is partnering with SimplyHired – which it works with in the US – to launch an online jobs channel in the UK, reports Mashable today. The UK version of MySpace will deliver a million job ads from SH, which aggregates jobs from thousands of sources. They say it’ll be bigger than Monster and Fish4jobs and SimplyHired expects to see 2 million jobs on MySpace UK by the end of 2007.

Whatever happened to Angel Gambino, she of “MTV 2.0″? Well she’s been hired by Bebo to a new position of VP-music. Bebo is interested in rivaling MySpace in the music stakes. Until January this year she was VP commercial, strategy and digital media for Viacom in the UK, where she worked across 11 channels, and was previously controller of business development and emerging platforms at the BBC. Gambino announced the move on her blog. Bebo claims to have 450,000 musicians already and last month partnered with online music retailer 7digital to allow independent artists to sell their tracks.

Whatever happened to Angel Gambino, she of "MTV 2.0"? Well she's been hired by Bebo to a new position of VP-music. Bebo is interested in rivaling MySpace in the music stakes. Until January this year she was VP commercial, strategy and digital media for Viacom in the UK, where she worked across 11 channels, and was previously controller of business development and emerging platforms at the BBC. Gambino announced the move on her blog. Bebo claims to have 450,000 musicians already and last month partnered with online music retailer 7digital to allow independent artists to sell their tracks.

Interesting times over at Pitch.tv, the mobile entertainment and community service from Pitch Entertainment Group.

Pitch Mobile Social Network is a mobile service that takes the best of sites like Myspace, Flickr and Youtube and mashes them all into a single site you can access via your mobile or the Web.

Tom Gordon a lead developer in this effort has been working on the project for the past 9 months, especially on multiple types of chat, picture and video uploading and downloading, sharing, commenting and rating. Sophisticated stuff.

Tom also happens to blog over at Mobile Weblog and today he writes that:

“the parent company has decided to focus on other aspects of their subscription-based mobile content business, and not on the social networking aspects, which means the time has come for me to move on.”

Tom is now looking for new projects.

What could this all mean? I’ve emailed Pitch for comment, so I’ll update this post when they come back to me.

For now, however it appears that this sophisticated application may no longer be developed. Perhaps it was too early for the market? It’s hard to tell the business reasoning behind this move right now, especially in a market which is buzzing about the mobile social web because of the hype around Twitter and the like.