EMI Music Sues Hi5, VideoEgg and Ten Defendants To Be Named Later

EMI, which is looking less like a music label and more like a lawsuit label, is at it again. This afternoon they filed a lawsuit alleging “massive and blatant” copyright infringement by Hi5, VideoEgg and ten John Doe defendants to be named later. The core of the suit is over copyrighted EMI content that appears on Hi5, particularly music videos.

EMI is a particularly litigious company. In the recent past, they’vd sued or threatened to sue AllofMP3, YouTube, Apple, MP3Tunes, XM Radio, Infospace (can’t really blame them there) and even The Beatles.

One person close to the litigation says that the parties have been negotiating with EMI for well over a year to avoid litigation, but that they were unable to reach agreement. The shakedown attempt before litigation is standard practice these days. But what is a little different here is that EMI is going deep into the supply chain to find other deep pockets.

VideoEgg, for example, provided video functionality to Hi5 in the past, but the deal ended in April 2008, and they no longer work together. The ten John Doe defendants are presumably other service providers, and/or executives of Hi5, VideoEgg and those other companies. The fact that EMI included VideoEgg in the lawsuit shows that they care little about current infringement - they just want a payoff for stuff that happened in the past.

VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez says that they comply with all DMCA takedown demands, but never received one from EMI. VideoEgg also used AudibleMagic , he says, to identify and proactively removed copyrighted material.

The lawsuit complaint, which was filed in New York, is below.

EMI Music v. VideoEgg, Hi5 and others - Get more Legal Forms

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Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.

Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.

But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.

But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.

If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.

Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.

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Whoisi - Community Edited People Profiles and Tracking

Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you have added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed and MugShot, making it easy to track a large number of feeds.

In Whoisi, any visitor to the site can define a person or an identity, and add the feeds associated with that person for other users to find and follow. To prevent vandalism, there is a revision history so that changes can be reversed. The database already has a large number of names within it - and when you search for a friend or feed you’d like to follow, if they are not already on the site, you can add or edit their feeds easily. Users do not need to signup for an account with Whoisi, as user data (such as followers) is all session-based using a browser cookie, which means you can’t move your follower list between browsers.

You can edit and customize any persons profile with “aliases” to provide alternate names or groups. What this means is the TechCrunch feed can be tagged “Michael Arrington” or “Mike Arrington.” You can also have a TechCrunch group, so Nik Cubrilovic’s feed could be tagged “techcrunch:nik.” The grouping feature is very simple and it could be developed further by users and used for other purposes.

Whoisi is a very clean site, as there is little on the site except for data. An open API is provided that publishes RSS feeds for each defined user, so that the data can be integrated into other applications.

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Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You

Everyone likes to share their thoughts and activities with friends and family, but, narcissists aside, most people don’t have time to spend hours each week blogging about their life. Swurl, a new startup that just launched in public beta, is looking to fix this problem.

Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services that include Last.fm, Flickr, Amazon, and nearly twenty other sources (you can see the full list here). The site is reminiscent of Tumblr and FriendFeed, automatically adding a new short post whenever you update one of the aforementioned services, and allowing users to comment on each update.

But CEO Ryan Sit says that Swurl isn’t so much about keeping your friends constantly updated on your current activities (à la Friendfeed). Instead, Swurl is more like an automatically generated blog and scrapbook that you’ve created for your friends and family. It’s a subtle distinction that may not be not be readily apparent, but it’s safe to say that Swurl isn’t just a FriendFeed clone.

As entries get added to Swurl, the site will automatically detect what kind of content it is and “enhance” it accordingly. If you rent a film from Netflix, Swurl will append a link to the movie’s trailer on YouTube. Photos from Flickr will be shown full size in an automatically generated slideshow. You can use the impressive calendar function to visualize when actions have occurred, and there’s also a nifty “infinite scroll” that eliminates the need for a “previous” button - get to the bottom of the page, and the site will automatically load the next few entries without having to refresh.

One of Swurl’s key (and perhaps misunderstood) features is its ability to pull an entire entry, rather than just a snippit, from the services it supports. If you create a blog post, it will be recreated in its in entirety within Swurl - something that won’t appeal to users looking to monetize their blogs. But for the vast majority of internet users, blogs are about sharing thoughts, not making cash. You’ll need proper credentials to add a blog to Swurl in the first place, so content-creators won’t need to worry about having their material swiped.

Swurl joins a number of competitors in the life and activity streaming spaces, which include FriendFeed and Spokeo. And while it does sport some similarities to these services, the site is well done and stands a fair chance at silencing its critics.

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Elevator Pitches, Now Ready For Your Uploads

Earlier this month we launched Elevator Pitches, a site for startup CEOs and founders to upload a 60-second video explaining what their companies do and how they make money. As I explained in the launch post, the idea is to create a repository of startup pitches where viewers can offer their critiques and vote the best ones up and the worst ones down.

The initial response was very encouraging. We got 50,000 pageviews in the first three days. But we soon realized that we had launched too early because the process for getting new videos on the site was just too cumbersome. It was all e-mail cut-and-paste, essentially, and we were overwhelmed. New videos didn’t immediately go up, and traffic trickled down.

Lesson learned: Don’t launch an audience-submitted video site without making it super easy for the audience to submit videos. Duh.

Well, that problem is now fixed. The process is pretty simple. Upload your video pitch to YouTube, tag it “tcpitch,” and then submit the video URL here. It will enter a moderation queue and we’ll be able to approve them and get them up much faster. Approved videos will also be automatically inserted into each submitting company’s CrunchBase profile (so create a profile there too if you don’t have one already).

We are still moderating each submission to filter out spam and inappropriate content. But more importantly, at this early stage each video counts—and helps to set the tone for the overall site. What we are looking for is a verbal pitch. No screencasts, no slideware. Just the entrepreneur looking the audience in the eye and making his or her case verbally. Props are allowed, but only if used creatively. More guidelines for submission are here.

Below are some examples of the highest rated pitches on the site right now, from SmugMug, mEGo, and WrapMail You’ll notice the last one does not have BeFunky’s signature Cartoonizing effect. That turned out to be another holdup and people had mixed feelings about it. I haven’t completely given up on it. But for now the videos will go up as submitted, and we may end up stylizing them down the road.

We’re planning more improvements to the site in the near future, based on reader requests, including search and RSS feeds for the latest submissions.

So send us your pitches. We’re ready for you.

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Helio Hangs it Up

Virgin Mobile purchased Helio today for $39 million in equity. Helio is a small MVNO that made its name by selling powerful and high-end telephones aimed at technophiles and, thanks to an investment by South Korea’s SK Telecom, Korean-Americans. As part of the deal, Virgin Mobile is also receiving $50 million to pay down Helio’s debt (half from SK Telecom, and half from its parent company Virgin Group), as well as an additional revolving credit facility of $60 million. Just last September, SK Telecom tried to save Helio by pouring an extra $270 million into it, to no avail.

The Helio brand will be subsumed by Virgin Mobile. All of the Helio stores will close except, it’s reported, the flagship store in New York, and there is a full restructuring of the company going on right now. Thus, after much struggling, Helio enters the deadpool.

Helio had 170,000 subscribers while Virgin Mobile currently has about 5 million. The deal will also give Virgin access to a number of technologies owned by Helio including customer management and cellphone deck applications.

Helio also has received investments from Earthlink, but when Earthlink pulled out last year and charismatic CEO Sky Dayton stepped down it was clear something was afoot.

Peter Ha at CrunchGear wrote a full analysis of the merger:

So what exactly does the merger mean for customers of Helio who have grown to love the hardware and features that Helio is best known for? Well, Virgin Mobile will be keeping all of those goodies in place. If you’ve seen any VM devices, you know they stink. VM is relatively boring and absorbing the technology Helio is best known for will certainly boost the MVNO’s status and appeal to a broader audience. That means future VM devices will include apps such as Google Maps with GPS, YouTube and MySpace… all of which Helio brought to the table before other carriers.

What about the Ocean 2? If you haven’t already figured it out by now, the Ocean 2 has been delayed over the last few months because of merger talks. It’s unclear when the device will actually launch, but it hasn’t been scrapped.

While I hate to see Helio dissolve, this is great for both brands. VM knows how to make money while Helio knows how to create technology that works and is appealing.

With Helio gone Boost Mobile in the only targeted MVNO running in the US right now.

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When Is Good: The Bare-Bones Meeting Scheduler

Need to schedule a meeting or phone call, but can’t agree on a time that is good for everyone? Try using When Is Good, a dead-simple Web app that does just one thing: zero in on a meeting time that is good for everyone without sending 20 emails back and forth. There are plenty of other apps that help you find a mutually convenient time time for meetings or events (such as Presdo, Scheduly, or Jiffle). But When Is Good strips the process down to its bare essentials.

No login is required. You simply highlight the times that are good for you and create an event. You are given a code and a link. You send the link out to your invitees and they are shown the available times, and they select the ones that are good for them. Easy.

The UK-based service is working on Outlook and Google Calendar integration, as well as premium features. For instance, you can pay 180 Pounds a year to have a branded version of the app hosted on your company’s own subdomain.

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Who Will Fill Bill Gates’ Shoes?

Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the PC era. His products touch nearly every computer user on the planet. And he created what is still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. But now that he is leaving, who will fill his shoes?

I don’t mean who will fill his shoes at Microsoft. Gates stepped back from day-to-day management years ago, handing his business responsibilities to CEO Steve Ballmer and technology responsibilities to chief software architect Ray Ozzie. What I mean is: Who will carry on his legacy and define the current Web era of computing?

It is unlikely there will ever be another Bill Gates if for the only reason that Gates’ influence stemmed from his control of the computing platform of choice (the PC, through Windows). The computing platform of choice today is the Web, and no single person or company can control that. But there are plenty of Web company founders out there—from large companies to small startups—that are turning the Web into a platform for applications and creating new kinds of software as a result.

In fact, there are many application platforms emerging on the Web. There is Facebook and Open Social for social networking apps. Salesforce.com AppExchange for enterprise apps. And more generic cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Web Services and Google’s App Engine for any kind of app. And soon these will be extended to mobile devices as well with the iPhone and Google’s Android.

The resulting software being built on top of these and other Web platforms is qualitatively different than PC software. It is connected to other software and other people. That makes it inherently social and driven by communications rather than productivity. It can also be taken apart and spread to other Websites, or even put back on the desktop, in the form of widgets.

So who is filling Gates’ shoes? Lots of people are collectively, starting with Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Slide’s Max Levchin, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. These are some of the names we came up with for Reuters, who asked us to put together a list of “Entrepreneurs to watch” box, which you can read on Reuters as part of its Bill Gates coverage (it’s the interactive box at the bottom of the page).

Below after the break are the people we chose, along with why we chose them. This is just a representative sample, and was written for a general audience. Add your own candidates in comments along with why you think they deserve to be recognized.

Who Will Do The Most To Carry On Bill Gates’ Legacy In The Web Era?
( surveys)

Sergey Brin/Larry Page (Google founders)

The two people most likely to carry on Bill Gates’ legacy also happen to be his biggest nemeses. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already nerdy, brainy billionaires and are taking on Microsoft on multiple fronts—from search to online applications. And, in fact, when it comes to making money on the Web, it is Microsoft that is trying to catch up to Google.

Just like Windows is the starting point for everything people do on their PCs, for many people Google’s search engine is the starting point for everything they do on the Web. Brin and Page are building on top of that with online applications and other products aimed directly at Microsoft’s other businesses such as Gmail (Outlook), Google Docs (Office), and Android (Windows Mobile).

Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and CEO)

Jeff Bezos, one of Seattle’s other billionaires, is best known for bringing shopping online with Amazon.com. But over the past few years, Bezos has started selling something besides books and digital cameras. In his eyes Amazon.com is just a massive Web application that sits in the cloud.

He is now offering Amazon’s “cloud computing” infrastructure to other companies that don’t want to have to build their own data centers to store data or run a Web applications. Through a series of “Web services,” companies can buy data storage, compute cycles, and database access from Amazon, and pay only for what they use. In this way, Bezos is helping to define the next era of Web-scale computing.

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO)

If there is one person who reminds people the most of the young Bill Gates, it is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The 24-year old is a Harvard drop-out (like Gates) and is building his company with the focus and singular vision of making it the operating system for social applications.

The rise and success of Facebook is largely due to the fact that it is a platform for Web applications created by other developers (just as Windows is a platform for PC applications). And Zuckerberg has created a mini-economy around Facebook. Maybe these similarities are what convinced Microsoft to invest $240 million in Facebook last fall.

Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder and CEO)
Just like consumer applications, enterprise software is moving to the Web as well. One of the first entrepreneurs to capitalize on this shift is Marc Benioff. His company, Salesforce.com, began by selling browser-based customer relationship management (CRM) software as a subscription service over the Web.

Taking a page from the Bill Gates playbook, he’s extended his pay-by-the-drink concept to other areas of enterprise software and opened up Salesforce.com as platform for other companies to build and distribute their own Web-based software.

Max Levchin (Slide founder and CEO)

A Ukrainian-born programmer, Max Levchin started his career as the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Two years later he founded Slide, which pioneered a new type of software known as a widget. Slide’s widgets typically draw data from the Web and are geared towards self-expression. They can appear on your desktop or added to other Websites such as Facebook.

Slide’s Facebook applications, which include FunWall and SuperPoke, boast more active users than any other company’s. In January, Levchin raised $50 million for Slide, giving the company a valuation of half a billion dollars.

Kevin Rose (Digg founder)

If software is becoming social, there is no better example than Digg. The popular news site attracts 15 million visitors a month, according to comScore. Digg relies entirely on its readers to submit headlines and links to articles, and vote them to the homepage.

Digg is the brainchild of founder Kevin Rose, who has mastered the art of teasing wisdom from the crowd. It is not so much about the underlying algorithms that power Digg as it is about setting the right conditions to give people the incentive to contribute.

Evan Williams (Twitter)

The Web at its core is a communications medium, and Evan Williams keeps coming up with new ways to for people to communicate over it. He founded Blogger, one of the original and largest Web-based blogging services, which he sold to Google in 2003. More recently he co-founded Twitter, a micro-blogging service that lets people broadcast short text messages of no more than 140 characters.

By limiting the length of the messages, Twitter effectively lowers the barriers to communicating. After all, it is much easier to send a Tweet than to write an entire blog post.

The service is growing so fast that it is hitting serious scaling issues and if often down. But the company raised $15 million to help solve those issues. One of the investors: Jeff Bezos

Stewart Butterfield/Caterina Fake (Flickr founders)

Husband-and-wife team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created the most successful photo-sharing site on the Web with Flickr. By default, every photo uploaded to the site is public to encourage sharing and can easily be displayed on other sites as well. Flickr shows what can happen when you take personal media and put it online. Instead of being forgotten in a shoebox, a photo you took two years ago can be discovered and enjoyed by someone halfway around the world.

After it was purchased by Yahoo in 2005 for an estimated $35 million, Butterfield and Fake stayed on. The service kept growing and eventually replaced Yahoo Photos. It now attracts 54 million visitors a month worldwide, according to comScore. Both recently departed Yahoo, which is undergoing management turmoil, but keep an eye on them to see what they do next.

Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor (FriendFeed founders)

On the Web, it can be hard to keep track all the information and services that are available. FriendFeed, a startup that launched publicly earlier this year, helps you manage the information overload by pulling together the online activities of all your friends in one place. You can see all of your friends’ blog posts, Twitters, Flickr photos, stories they vote up on Digg, and YouTube videos they like, among other things, all in one feed. This turns out to be an effective, and addictive, information filter.

Two of FriendFeed’s co-founders are ex-Googlers Paul Buchheit and BretTaylor. Buchheit was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto. Taylor led the development of Google Maps and Google Local.

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Google Goes After the TV with Google Media Server

Google just announced its odd Google Media Server, a Windows app that finds photos, music, and video and makes it available to DLNA devices like the PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and most Media Center PCs.

Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses Google Desktop technology such as Desktop gadgets for the administration tool and Google Desktop Search to locate media files. All you need is a PC running Google Desktop and a UPnP-enabled device (e.g. a PlayStation 3). At the touch of a button, you can then:

* Access videos, music, and photos stored on your PC
* View Picasa Web Albums
* Play your favorite YouTube videos

This shows that Google is very interested in getting its message out across multiple platforms. With the launch of Android forthcoming, could the Google set-top box be next?

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TinyPaste: Like TinyURL…for Text

Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit.

Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a regular webpage, a TinyPaste’s URL sends its clickers to a simple page displaying the poster’s message.

Who would use this? Perhaps those who don’t maintain blogs but who still want to expound on their thoughts from time to time. It’s common practice for bloggers to adopt Twitter as a marketing tool that drives traffic back to their sites. This could start a reverse trend of sorts, one that introduces tweeters to the art of blogging. Or maybe I’m just extracting too much.

In any case, TinyPaste also comes with a Firefox extension for when you want to pass along a clip of text you found on the web. The service and plugin come from the same guys who brought you ControlC.

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