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MediaMaster is a new web service that, like Faces and Oboe, let’s users upload music from their hard drive and listen to it online.

MediaMasters is pretty simple to use. You sign up for a free account. Your music folder starts with one classical music sampler, the equivalent of MySpace’s “Tom” for MediaMaster’s music service. Users can then upload songs from their computer into their MediaMaster account. Music you’ve selected for upload sits in a queue until the transfer is complete. They’re currently not limiting your account size, but disk space is cheap and users upload bandwidth is a good limiting factor. All the files you upload are linked to some nice looking album art, making it easy to drag and drop them into playlists.

You can consume your playlists in a variety of ways. You can listen to them from within your web account, a widget like the one to the right, or a “radio station” playable on any program that can process a .pls playlist file URL (ex. Windows Media Player). Once music is uploaded, MediaMaster never lets you download the whole file. Instead, the players stream music to you through each of these methods, perhaps dodging some legal bullets.

Oboe offers similar services, but is a desktop application that automatically syncs your music to your online account, allows you to download your music on another system, and doesn’t have an embeddable widget. Like Oboe, Faces allows you to sync your desktop music with your online account, but with the end goal being proliferation of your music on their social network through a widget. The Faces widget plays your own song list, but can also add and play your friend’s playlists via RSS.

Source of this post is Techcrunch, here

This, from Techcrunch…

Google Launches Free 411 Service

Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.

Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.

GOOG-411 is using Google’s normal local business information available on Google Maps and elsewhere. Businesses that want to add or correct data can do so here.

The product competes head on with Jingle Networks, which has taken 6% market share in the U.S. 411 business over the last year. AT&T is also experimenting with free 411 calls. None of these products come anywhere close to as good as TellMe’s rich client business information tool for mobile phones, but few phones support TellMe at this time (TellMe was recently acquired by Microsoft).

The paid 411 market is so dead. I’m betting these free alternatives take at least 50% market share within a couple of years.

I love Zillow. Its a truely web2.0 site (i.e. deep user involvement, UGC, social networking) that is based around residential properties. The great thing about it is, if you live in the US, YOUR home is probably on there with estimated valuation etc, so your sort of gently but involuntarily already involved. Anyone can update info about any property, but if you claim your property you then get to lock down some of that info and make your own updates.

There’s an old parallel with this (which I cant recall right now, but I’m racking my brain to remember), the way you are ‘involved’ before you’re even involved is very smart.

Zillow has raised $57 million in venture capital.

There are at least two groups independently trying to integrate social networking into your browser, so your social network accompanies you to every website you visit, as opposed to being a website destination in its own right. How this will flesh out I dont yet know, do we really NEED this? Time will tell.

The two groups are Flock which is a privately backed ’social browser’ built on Mozilla, and The Coop which is an add-on for the Firefox browser very much in prototype stage.

While Flock is a new browser with the functionality incorporated, The Coop is a Firefox add-on. I’d suggest that the latter seems most likley to gain more users given Firefox’s popularity amongst tech early adopters and the fact that you dont need to change your browser - just get the add-on. At present The Coop just gets your Facebook friends list and lets you share stuff by dragging it from the browser window over your friends names.

I bought another book on Amazon yesterday, the latest Geoffrey Moore book (the last one I read was Crossing the Chasm way back around 2004 I think). Its called Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution.

The summary on Amazon says
“You’ve read the headlines: industry after industry (airlines, automakers, drug companies, high tech) battered by globalization, deregulation, and commoditization. The Darwinian struggle to deliver profitable products and services keeps getting more brutal as competitive advantage gaps get narrower and narrower. Anything you invent today will soon be copied by someone else — probably better or cheaper.

Dealing with Darwin will help you understand your company’s role in its market ecosystem; where your competitive advantage came from in the past and how it will change in the future; what kinds of differentiation will be most rewarded in your current marketplace; and how to transform your internal dynamics to overcome the inertia that threatens every bold innovation.”
So I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

If Reuters news yesterday is to be believed (and is not an April fool joke like this from Google), EMI and Apple may be about to release the first DRM free music on iTunes. Jobs spoke out recently about DRM, effectively saying it was pointless, so maybe this is a natural step for Apple and EMI. Other labels will prob follow suit.

Engadget has a good piece on this here