MySpace Karaoke launched today. I had actually forgotten about this, but the site is powered by kSolo, an online karaoke service that MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media acquired back in April 2006. Yep, it took them two years to rebrand and relaunch it.
kSolo joins Newroo as the other startup Fox acquired in 2006 that has sort of languished. After acquiring Newroo (March 2006), MySpace sat on the asset for a year and then beta launched MySpace News. It was and remains a bit of a ghost town, with little integration with the main MySpace service.
MySpace Karaoke may not do much better. kSolo, which has remained live during the 2 year development cycle, has little traffic (nor does its competitor, SingShot, which shut down).
It’s U.S. only for now, with international rollout in the coming months.
Will this be a popular addition to the MySpace world? Here’s an example video, you decide.
In March, Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said he’d acquire five or so new companies in the near future. On Monday morning they’ll announce two of them.
The first announcement is a confirmation of the previously rumored NewRoo acquisition. The second announcement is the acquisition of New York based kSolo, a service that enables its users to create, share and rate their own recorded music (web karaoke).
Both of these acquisitions are excellent “plug-in deals” for Fox’s massive MySpace property, with nearly 70 million users.
Terms are not going to be disclosed, although rumors put the deals at less than $10 million each. Look for a press release Monday AM. Here’s the full text of the press release:
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Fox Interactive is in the closing stages of acquiring unlaunched startup NewRoo for “less than $10 million,” according to very reliable sources.
This follows Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn’s dramatic announcement at a recent UTR conference that “they’ve acquired someone in this room,” leading to serious blog speculation as to who the acquired company might be. While NewRoo did not present at the event, it turns out that they were in fact in the room at the time.
NewRoo is a real-time news aggregator that allows users to create their own customized news and content pages. The company has not launched. See my previous post on NewRoo for a full profile of the company.
While this is a small acquisition for Fox, there is a clear product synergy with their Myspace and Fox Sports online properties – users of those sites can create their own music/youth related content sites in the case of Myspace, or sports related news sites in the case of Fox Sports. Given Ross’ stated infatuation with user-generated content, it isn’t hard to see how NewRoo’s technology can add to their overall strategy of generating more page views without paying for the actual content generation.
UPDATE: Rafat at PaidContent says Yahoo was also in the running to acquire NewRoo. It’s always good to have (at least) two horses in the race – the acquisition price tends to go up dramatically.
I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo.
The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users.
It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.
My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting.
The List:
- Blogniscient
- Blogrunner
- Blogsnow
- Chuquet
- Megite
- Memeorandum
- Newroo (pre-launch)
- Tailrank
- Technorati Kitchen
- Tinfinger (pre-launch)
- Topix.net
- TruthLaidBear
The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services.
And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines.
Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe.
San Francisco based Newroo, founded by Brown University graduates Brian Norgard and Dan Gould in 2005, is just two weeks away from launch.
Like Megite, Newroo is ultimately addressing the same market as Memeorandum. However, they have a number of squidoo-like features (this is meant as a compliment) to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service.
The basic engine is like Memeorandum – they index and group blog posts based on topics in order to show emerging news in near real-time and to show distributed blog discussion in a single place.
Newroo is launching with a number of verticals, including Brin Rank (Google news), Series C (Venture Capital news), Jockzilla (edgy sports news) and Celeb Trash (celebrity gossip). Pictured here is JockZilla, although all verticals currently have a similar look and feel.
Soon after launch Newroo will allow users to create and customize their own sites, starting with a clone of an existing site. The revenue model is based on presenting amazon affiliate links for items related to the news, and eventually they plan to share this revenue with the creators of the sites.
I know the founders but am not affiliated with them in any way. Nevertheless, I appreciate the link to TechCrunch on their current landing page.
