Changes to business digitisation brings
Universal, the planet’s biggest music corporation, has told Apple that it won’t be renewing its annual contract to sell music through iTunes.
According to an anonymous executive cited in the New York Times, the mighty Universal Music Group of Vivendi will now market music to Apple at will, leaving the company free to remove its songs from the iTunes service at short notice if pricing and terms can not be agreed.
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Motorola have a new campaign to push a set of their stereo BlueTooth music headphones, the Motorola S9 or MotoRokr S9 as they’re sometimes called.
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Music mega retailed HMV has announced that it will start selling “DRM-free” digital downloads from September 2007.
Over one million “DRM-free” tracks will be available for download at launch, including EMI’s full catalogue with big names like Coldplay, Lily Allen, Gorillaz and Robbie Williams.
They’ll also be existing content made available from other labels distributed by HMV’s digital partner, MusicNet, adding to the 3 million+ tracks already offered online by HMV.
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Everyone’s favourite games console manufacturer (except Sony, perhaps), is opening up another channel of content for its Wii.
Nintendo have announced WiiWare, letting people purchase and download original games software.
Nintendo have offered a service to download reworked classic games – Super Mario Bros, etc – to the Wii since last November. Indeed, earlier this month they announced that 4.7m of these classic games had been downloaded already.
WiiWare will attempt to get legions of small software developers to create compelling, less-expansive games, without them having to be concerned with the hassle and cost of creating games on disk.
Nintendo expect the first WiiWare content to arrive early 2008 – so coders, get coding!
‘Green’ festival uses mobile tickets to save the world.
With the glorious … or was it gory-est … Glastonbury out of the way for at least another year (as well as the BBC’s over-coverage), the other festivals around the UK now have a chance of getting their messages out that 1) They’re on, 2) that they have everything that you heart desires.
Getting a new festival going these days is pretty hard as so many people are trying to do the same, realising that live music is where-it’s-at as people generally become ever-more atrophied by recorded music.
New festival, Two Thousand Trees, have a very ‘now’ idea, labeling it as a festival for ethical music fans – and a very worthy one it is in our book too. Beyond this they also have a much-to-be-supported goal of “not ripping people off and making sure everyone has an awesome time at our lovely festival.” Long may this ethos last.
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Nintendo’s stock market valuation was briefly higher than Sony’s on the Osaka Stock Exchange this morning.
The combination of a record high for Nintendo’s share price and a drop for Sony lead to the strange situation.
Nintendo’s revenue is eight times smaller than Sony – not surprising when Sony’s empire spans so many different areas including, TV, music and film publishing.
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Yahoo has announced that it is going to shake up the structure of their advertising departments, merging its web search and display advertising.
Executive vice president of global sales at Yahoo, Gregory Coleman (pictured), was on hand to deliver the follow wise words, “When combined, the two organisations will deliver profoundly better results than when delivered separately.”
The most popular search engines rarely agree with each other when it comes to the top results for identical queries – and the differences are growing yearly.
In a study involving 19,332 queries typed (presumably not by hand) into Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask, the same top result only popped up on all four search engines 3.6 percent of the time.
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Google sparked outrage in the blogging world and elsewhere, when in January 2006 it decided to doctor the search results it gave users of its service in mainland China, to appease the government.
It was presented by those against the move as a significant blow against Google’s oft quoted mantra, “Don’t be evil.”
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In a long line of partnerships deals, designed to improve their standing – and income – within Mainland China, Google has signed a deal with China’s number one portal, Sina.com.
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