This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday - listen to here.

We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.
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Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable.

Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes:

1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available - permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.

Unfortunately we don’t like any of these choices.

Sonific joins the TechCrunch Deadpool

thanks to Andrew Watson for the tip

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MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance.

MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.

To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr - music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.

We covered GrooveShark’s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora.

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Music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s library.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).

The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music.

The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing.

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Warner Music has filed suit against music search engine Seeqpod for copyright infringement.

Seeqpod offers a music search engine that allows users to play music they find directly on the site. According to comScore the service had over 6 million page views in December 2007.

Warner Music claims in its suit that Seeqpod infringes on their copyrighted works by “making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of these works,” making a direct and material contribution to infringing content by presenting content from “pirate sites.”

What’s interesting about this case is that Seeqpod is a search engine; it links to content as Google would, although it does allow users to play the content from their site, but ultimately they never host any of the content.

The EFA notes that there is little case law relating to search engines and copyright claims, and the DMCA should be applicable here; “the defendants are complying with the letter of the law, but copyright owners are now trying to change the rules in court.”

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Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines in the future.

Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal).

Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well.

Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding.

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A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them.

Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web.

The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads.

Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen.

Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod.

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Chictini is a social network, launched just this fall, where people can submit fashionable items (clothes, accessories, art, and even electronics) found on the websites of online retailers. Members (”chicsters”) vote submitted items up or down, causing them to rise and fall, thus making the site like Digg but for trendy merchandise.

Chictini thinks that the expression of one’s taste in music will complement the expression of one’s taste in fashion, and has therefore decided to integrate SeeqPod functionality into user profiles. SeeqPod is an MP3 search engine, reviewed along with a couple others here, that allows you to stream (mostly copyrighted) music found around the web by its crawlers.

Now, Chictini users can search for music using SeeqPod within the Chictini site itself and add one song at a time to their profiles. The song will then show up on their profiles in the form of a SeeqPod widget that allows for instant playback.

As we mentioned in our previous coverage of SeeqPod, it’s unlikely that the labels have enough legal standing to win cases against the music search engines themselves, although there is a possibility that the engines could be held liable for contributory infringement. Chictini is evidently betting that their chances for legal repercussions are similarly very low, and probably even much lower.

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Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection.

Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr.

All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results.

Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below.

Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Songza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not - a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France.

Copyright, Schmopyright

There’s no reason to mince words here - the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves.

None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them.

Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. I spoke this evening with Andrew Bridges, counsel for Google in Perfect 10 v. Google. In that case, Google was held not held to be infringing the copyright on images just by displaying a thumbnail of the image in search results.

The same arguments are valid with the music search engines, says Bridges (with the caveat that he’d have to look much more closely at the specific facts of any case).

The services may still be liable for contributory infringement, he says, but there just isn’t any definitive U.S. case law on matter yet. And no statutes cover contributory infringement.

So for now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, and even stream them on their site. Just so long as the songs themselves are never stored on their servers. That’s good news for Deezer, Seeqpod and Skreemr, and the users who’ve come to rely on them.

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