Mike Butcher

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.

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.

Mobango, a site for publishing and sharing user-generated content for mobile phones claims it has experienced a 41% monthly growth in the amount of content being downloaded through its mobile portal across Europe, North America and Asia. This uptake has resulted, in part, from a 26% compounded monthly growth rate in the number of people using this function, says the firm.

Over half of Second Life users are watching less TV since becoming memebers of the virtual world, according to a new report. But clearly TV advertisers had better get moving into this new world, because the report from market intelligence house GMI found that just over half (56%) of users think Second Life is a good promotional vehicle. Only 16 percent say they would not be more likely to buy or use a brand that is represented in the Internet-based virtual world

In addition twenty-four percent of respondents claim they go to Second Life to escape real life, which they are ‘not satisfied’ with, while 64 percent present themselves differently. Additional findings include:

* 45 percent give themselves a more attractive body

* 37 percent make themselves younger

* 23 percent give themselves a different nationality

* 55 percent watch less television since becoming active in Second Life

* 22 percent have more Second Life friends than real-life friends

* 29 percent feel Second Life interferes with their real-world social life

Moblog.co.uk has relaunched its site with a new redesign and launched a moblog for mobile operator 3′s X-Series handset range.

Co-founder Alfie Dennen says: “The new homepage is geared towards being more inviting to new users, whilst also being a much more easy way to discover new things happening on the site. One of the new elements is something we call “busyness”, which calls those posts which have the most comment activity to the front page.”Featured moblogs are also more prominent now, making it easier to see what competitions and interesting images and video are being posted by bands, charities and other organisations moblogging.

A new tag cloud, displays interesting posts and discovers what tags are common throughout the site. The site’s navigation is now always visible at the top of the page, with the addition of the new ‘featured’ and ‘highlights’ links. Some enhancements have also been made to the search page, improving search results overall.

Moblog recently announced a deal to license its technology to Channel for the for Big Art Mob.

Nic Mitham at the K Zero blog (a marketing and branding company) has posted a map of all the real-world brands he could find operating in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s a hard-wired map which would well do with uploading to Flickr so that people could start to tag it with their own knowledge. This needs a little crowd sourcing… Here is the link to the big version. It’s interesting how some brands cluster. Why are Adidas and Reebok so close? The same question could be asked of Sony Ericsson, Vodafone and CHannel 4. And again of Sun, Intel and Comcast. I guess they are trying for the high traffic areas, which is clearly a tactic which mimicks the real world.

Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti has published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward marketing in Second Life. MTV, Coke, Dell, American Apparel – they are all at it.

The results [PDF] are that 72% of 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life; just over 40% considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last. Only 7% of respondents in the Komjuniti study say that SL-based promotion would have a positive impact on their future buying behavior.

It gets worse.

As GigaOm reports:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtualautomotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

The FT reports that social media sites with video, like YouTube and MySpace, will not earn as much in advertising as professional video sites. According to Screen Digest, the media analysis company, ad revenues on UGC sites will grow from $200m last year to $875m by 2010. But this will account for just 15 per cent of the total online video advertising budget. Arash Amel, Screen Digest’s senior analyst, says there is no real busines yet for UGC video sites: “The business model for user-generated sites has been ‘build it and sell it and let someone else worry about the business model’.” Peter Chernin, News Corp president recently said "there is no scarcity value for the content … so there is very little ability to monetise video advertising on user-generated video,” and that the migration of video advertising to the web spells good news for professionally produced content.

Reaction is coming in on the Myspace decision to sell non-DRM MP3s from unsigned bands registered on the site.

The Register: “We reckon it’s the record companies that should be more woried about MySpace than Apple at the moment, though. If so-called “MySpace phenomena” such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen continue to emerge through self-promotion and are given unprecedented direct selling access to their MySpace-addicted audience, where do the big guys fit in exactly?”

The New York Times: “… for the four major labels, which must approve each retailer that sells digital versions of their music, the new store could represent a challenge. The MySpace store would let labels set their own prices for songs, which they have complained that iTunes does not let them do. And all of the major labels have put their catalogs into Snocap’s database, which uses an audio fingerprinting technology to prevent people from selling songs they do not own. The MySpace store will sell music in the MP3 format, however, which allows them to be played on the Apple iPod but does not offer any copy protection… For each track it sells, MySpace will charge a band or label a fixed fee of around 45 cents, which it will share with Snocap.”

Business Week: “Unlike iTunes, where all tracks are 99 cents, musicians set their own prices. MySpace and Snocap say they will take a cut just large enough to cover the costs of the materials and provide a tiny profit; the lion’s share of the sale goes directly to the artists. That’s a sweet deal for independent bands like The Format, a Phoenix pop band that participated in a test of the storefront. The band has listed 12 songs for sale at 79 cents each. Already, lead singer Nate Ruess says he has received loads of e-mail from fans saying they appreciate that they can get the music directly online. “We got burned by our old label, and you realize you don’t need these things when you have something like Snocap,” Ruess says.”

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