Tuesday, October 09, 2007

outside.in Raises $1.5 Million

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Outsidein outside.in, the Brooklyn-based "place blogging" site, has raised $1.5 million, which it will use to build out the site and develop a geo-targeted ad platform. The site, founded by writer-entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson last year, raised $900,000 this spring.

Most of the original investors re-upped for this round: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Ventures, Village Ventures, George Crowley, John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson and John Borthwick. We're confirming whether Marc Andreessen, who invested in the first round, participated in this one.

Related: outside.in Launches Neighborhood News Widget
Brooklyn Bonkers About Blogging

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Nine Inch Nails Help Seal Record Industry’s Coffin

Highly popular Industrial Rock Band Nine Inch Nails have announced that as of today they are free agents, and will not be using the services of a record company in the future.

Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor wrote on the NIN site that the writing is on the wall for the traditional music distribution model, saying that the music business has radically mutated from one thing to something inherently very different today and that "it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate."

It's expected that Nine Inch Nails next album will follow on from Radiohead's Rainbows and be released directly to the public.

I think Gizmodo hits it right on the head when they write:

If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model "of the future" feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now.

See also Michael's take on the music industry here.

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Search Engine Marketing Firm ReachLocal Takes $55.2 Million

reachlocal.jpgWoodland Hills based search marketing firm ReachLocal has taken an additional $55.2 million in funding, brining total funding to $67.9 million on a valuation of $305 million.

The round was led by Rho Ventures, with original investors Galleon Crossover Fund VantagePoint Venture Partners also participating.

ReachLocal offers a local-focused search marketing product that targets SMBs. ReachLocal offers campaign management for online advertising on major services including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, and also provides campaign specific site building and click tracking to customers.

For what is basically a SEM firm, the valuation is staggering; however despite the direct to buyer model of advertising options such as Google Adwords there is a growing market for middle-man services such as ReachLocal. There will be many people in the SEM business who will be re-evaluating their company valuations following ReachLocal's new round of funding, and I'd suggest that many of them may be sitting on a lot more value than they had previously thought.

(in part via LA Times)

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What The Kids Are Stealing These Days -- And What They'll Be Buying Soon

ZoeThe same record labels that complain about the epidemic of file-sharing/song-stealing also pay close attention to what songs file-sharers are swapping. Why? Because song-stealers tend to have the same tastes as song-buyers, but they tend to move faster. So if you track the what songs are moving quickly on P2P file-sharing systems, you can get a good sense of what's will be selling in a few weeks' time.

Online measurement firm BigChampagne has generated a "biggest movers" chart for us, which tracks which songs have had the biggest week-to-week increases on file-sharing networks. We've published it after the jump. Note that it doesn't correlate at all to CD sales, because people who buy CDs aren't buying them because there's one good song on them. But if there's more than one good song on them, they tend to do very well. That's why we're confident that Gorilla Zoe, who we'd never heard of prior to today, will be selling a lot of copies of his album Welcome To The Zoo in the coming weeks. The album, released by Warner Music Group (WMG), has two fast-moving songs on the BigChampagne chart.

Related: Big Music "Wins" Trial Against Song-Stealer; Industry Still Screwed

Bcchart

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ASUS P5E3 Deluxe mobo boots in five seconds with embedded Linux

If you're an impatient individual, you're probably going to like what you hear about ASUS's newest motherboard, the P5E3 Deluxe. Sound fancy? Well, it is -- featuring Intel's X38 chipset (with an FSB running at 1600MHz), Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme CPU support, plus the company's Energy Processing Unit, 8-phase power, and WiFi-AP. Of course, that won't help with your MTV-generation attention span and lack of patience, but the embedded micro-Linux variant, Express Gate, just might. You see, when you boot the system, you're given an option to immediately enter into a small Linux OS -- within five seconds, they say -- called SplashTop (developed by DeviceVM). The OS is coupled with a stripped-down version of Firefox and Skype, allowing you to update your Facebook profile almost instantly. The whole shebang is available right now for three-hundred and sixty of your precious dollars.

[Via Phoronix]

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