EA Acquires Karaoke Site SingShot
by Marshall Kirkpatrick on February 12, 2007

Electronic Arts announced today that it has acquired San Francisco based online karaoke site SingShot for an undisclosed sum. Kareoke sites are real crowd pleasers and this is the third in a year to be acquired. Fox Interactive Media acquired kSolo in April, then Yahoo! scooped up Bix in November.

All three acquisitions brought experienced social media executives into the fold of larger companies - Nimrod Lev from kSolo, Mike Speiser from Bix and now SingShot CEO Ranah Edelin and CTO Niranjan Nagar who previously helped build Rhapsody Digital Music before it was acquired by Real Networks.

The SingShot team will join the EA Sims Division, but EA says the technology “can be applied to several different community projects within EA.” That’s similar to what Yahoo! said when it acquired Bix. Speiser went from head of Bix to product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community

As a large company, it doesn’t hurt to have a nice, small, successful karaoke site in your portfolio - but what’s probably most important is the infusion of executives who have built successful social media sites before.

Comments

I wonder if EA wants to build some sort of karaoke game….

 

fox and yahoo acquiring karaoke community sites - ok, i can clearly see how those sites can compliment their holdings.

but ea - the video game maker, acquiring a community site - a karaoke site at that?
video gamers plus karaoke singers, lol - those two are like oil and water

 

how does the licensing work on this? i know that the songwriters are supposed to be paid for their compositions. what would be interesting is to let users use voice modulation software to make them sound better. there’s a lot of potential growth in this space. and adobe is at the center of it all.

 

if ea brings some singing video games, i wonder if they want people to sing all at home alone? no sharing? no rating? no digging or burying? even they plan to provide these cheeses, how?…

 

What is EZ upto? Build a Karoake game…hmmm…i guess time or techcrunch will tell

 

So I guess this is not all about visitors, technology or money. Is this how Google and Yahoo recruit talent?

 

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