Google has acquired SageTV, an Inglewood-based company that makes both DVR technology and streaming-video software for PCs running Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Mac OS X.

The tech giant hasn’t yet said exactly what it plans to do with SageTV or how much it paid for the company. But, a Google spokeswoman said the company was looking forward to taking SageTV’s media management software and technology “to the next level.”

The deal is seen as a move to improve Google TV, the Mountain View, Calif., firm’s software that allows users to search and find video in their TV listings, DVRs and from the Internet, including sites such as Google-owned YouTube.

So far Google TV has failed to catch on with consumers, and it hasn’t been met with much excitement from developers, TV makers or networks either.

One item SageTV offers that Google TV doesn’t yet have is the company’s Placeshifter software, which lets users watch TV (live or recorded to a DVR) over a high-speed Internet connection on another screen (such as a laptop or a second TV set).

Placeshifter is a similar product to the more-popular Slingbox and SlingPlayer software from Sling Media, which streams video to TVs, computers and even the Apple iPad.

Sling Media is building a version of SlingPlayer for Google TV and other Internet-connected TVs, but Placeshifter could allow Google to build in such functionality without having to rely on outside companies.
Google may also be looking to beef up its cloud services related to video and TV in an ongoing cloud computing arms race against rivals Apple, Amazon and (on the business end) Microsoft.

All three companies now offer cloud services for music libraries, but video and TV services aren’t as fleshed out yet.

Rakesh Agrawal, who founded and runs SnapStream, which at one-time competed with SageTV and is now a TV-search challenger to Google TV, said in a blog post that he thought the purchase could be a step toward adding native DVR features. The technology blog GigaOm dismissed that notion on Monday, arguing that “this will be Google TV’s take on TV Everywhere — and it will add features to the device that will make Apple and others look weak in comparison.”

SageTV announced the Google takeover on Saturday in a message on its website.

“Since 2002, we’ve worked to change the TV viewing experience by building cutting-edge software and technology that allows you to create and control your media center from multiple devices,” SageTV said in its statement. “And as the media landscape continues to evolve, we think it’s time our vision of entertainment management grows as well. By teaming up with Google, we believe our ideas will reach an even larger audience of users worldwide on many different products, platforms and services.”

From LA Times Business.

CBS’ outdoor division has announced a new option for their billboard advertisers today. The program is called txt2go and allows advertisers to place a sms code on their advertisements that viewers can enter into their mobile device to gain access to something from the advertiser.

Jodi Senese, Executive Vice President, Marketing, CBS Outdoor said, “…if someone is interested in a product or service advertised they can receive a coupon, free merchandise or another offer simply by texting in a short code, giving the company ongoing communication with an interested consumer.”

Mobile technology provider Rip Road will serve the text messaging portion of the advertisement. Campaigns start at $225 for 500 SMS interactions. I’ve always pushed for every offline ad to have some way to get users and/or viewers online. It’s a mistake to run a campaign in a magazine, newspaper or on a billboard without some online call to action.

It will be interesting to see if the CBS billboards in Times Square and around NYC start to feature SMS codes as part of this program.

As reported by CenterNetworks

In 2006, long before Slumdog Millionaire awakened U.S. moviegoers’ inner Bollywood, three Americans of Indian heritage nurtured an instinct that digital Bollywood content would become a hot ticket in the U.S. market.

Today, three-year-old Saavn (an acronym for South Asian audiovisual network) controls global distribution rights, outside India, to a massive number of Bollywood films, songs, albums and music videos, all downloadable to iPods, MP3 players, cell phones and computers. And if consumers in America are captivated by the song-and-dance extravaganzas of Bollywood — the umbrella name for Mumbai’s film industry — Saavn believes its offerings will be attractive marketing tools for U.S. companies. (See pictures of Saavn and its stars.)

Last year Saavn posted revenues in the low seven figures — five times its 2007 numbers — with the largest spurt coming from its music enterprise. The company expects 2009 revenues in the low eight figures, “growth north of 500%,” says Neal Shenoy, one of Saavn’s co-founders, who manages the three other media companies within Saavn’s parent company 212Media. (Saavn is co-owned by Indian company Hungama, a competitor turned partner.) “We had no idea how quickly Bollywood and India would penetrate American culture,” Shenoy says.

TIME’s Coeli Carr talks about the music behind Slumdog Millionaire, and the style, stars and business of Bollywood:

Shenoy and Saavn’s two other founding partners — CEO Vinodh Bhat and managing director Paramdeep Singh — had witnessed popular media’s gradual but certain infatuation with Bollywood, whose revenues account for roughly 80% of India’s $2 billion film industry. In 2003, rapper Jay‑Z sampled London DJ Punjabi MC on the Bollywood-flavored track “Beware of the Boys.” Bombay Dreams launched on Broadway the following year. The infectiously danceable “Chaiyya Chaiyya” played over the opening credits of Spike Lee’s film Inside Man in 2006. And last year even Snoop Dogg got into the act by creating a rap song for the Bollywood movie Singh Is Kinng, “helping put the film and its music on the map in the U.S.,” says Bhat. Warner Bros. recently released its own Bollywood film, Chandni Chowk to China, whose sound track Saavn distributes for downloads.

And then there’s Slumdog.

A.R. Rahman, a 20-year Bollywood veteran — he wrote “Chaiyya Chaiyya” and hundreds of other songs — and the composer of Slumdog’s Oscar-nominated score, concedes that the film’s music, with vocals sung in English rather than Hindi, is not true Bollywood. Nevertheless, the movie has been a dynamic conduit for Saavn‘s business — even if Saavn distributes only one Mumbai-produced song from it. “Slumdog’s sound track has elevated the entire Bollywood genre and brought us a new customer base wanting to explore similar music,” says Bhat.

Saavn’s offerings — more than 90% of all Indian music is film music — are available at digital music stores, while mobile carriers offer Bollywood ringtones, ring-back tones, single tracks, music videos and Bollywood graphics. “Since the release of Slumdog, we’ve seen a substantial increase in the sales of Bollywood ringtones, ring-back tones and songs,” says Ed Ruth, director of V Cast Music at Verizon, which offers more than 1,200 Bollywood ringtones and ring-back tones and more than 30,000 songs.

Powered by Bollywood, Saavn has already conducted a brand-marketing campaign for Verizon. Half a dozen major U.S. companies are now in discussion to use Saavn’s content to pursue the same market. The wealth and education level of South Asian consumers in the U.S. make them a desirable target, says Nirmalya Kumar, a professor of marketing at the London Business School and the author of India’s Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking On the World. The best way to reach them emotionally, he says, is through the music and movies they love. As for Saavn’s platform, “You can’t market today without including the digital world,” says Jerry Wind, a professor of marketing at Wharton.

Americanized Bollywood hybrids could help Saavn expand. “Whether it’s Slumdog or Snoop Dogg, future media collaborations will inject Bollywood further into the mainstream,” says Shenoy. “And when fans want to experience the real Bollywood genre, they’ll come to us.”

These two music apps will appeal to three types of people: current Depeche Mode fans, potential Depeche Mode fans and anyone with an interest in creating electronic music.

The free Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe is the more simple of the two apps, developed by Branded Research. By tapping colored bars on the iPhone screen, Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe allows you to make your own mix of vocal, keyboard and drum samples for each of the songs on Depeche Mode’s new album. Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe offers insight into how an electronic song is layered, and teases you by introducing you to what you will find on the album.

iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe is much more complicated. Like the other iDrum apps from iZotope, such as iDrum: Ministry of Sound, you can remix pre-loaded audio tracks from the band’s album to customize the sounds and rhythms. You can also create your own original electronic tracks. The iDrum apps offer a complex and impressive interface for creating, re-mixing and sharing professional quality audio tracks.

I will not try to explain exactly how iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe works. This music app is essentially a professional electronic drum machine in app form. Contrary to its sophisticated nature, iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe is easy to use once you have read through the directions. Anyone interested in creating electronic music on-the-go will drool over this app. The creative possibilities are endless.

For $59.99, you can download iDrum for your PC or Mac, too. The iDrum computer program can interface with the iDrum apps, Garage Band and other music software.

Both Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe and iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe are great apps. The free Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe will appeal to people who want to play with sounds and get a taste of Depeche Mode’s latest tunes. iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe goes beyond toy and into the realm of remixing and creating electronic music. Both apps do the trick when it comes to marketing: I am going to buy Depeche Mode’s new album on iTunes today.

article written by Wizteq

Depeche Mode lead singer David Gahan is not well enough to perform in Athens on Wednesday, concert organizers said, a day after he was rushed to
hospital moments before he was to appear on stage.
Tuesday night’s concert north of the Greek capital was canceled after
Gahan, who turned 47 last month, fell ill and was hospitalized overnight.
Neither organizers nor the hospital would say what he was suffering from.
About 20,000-30,000 fans who had turned up to hear the British band were
told to retain their tickets in case the singer was well enough to
reschedule the concert for Wednesday.

“Even though everyone hoped for the singer’s speedy recovery and the
rescheduling of the band’s show for today … according to the information
received by the band’s management and the doctor on duty, the artist’s
health condition does not allow it,” the concert organizers, Didi Music,
said in an announcement Wednesday afternoon.
The company said it would make a later announcement as to whether the
concert would be rescheduled for another day or definitively canceled.
There was no immediate word on how Gahan’s illness might affect the band’s
next stops on their tour schedule. They are due to play in Istanbul,
Turkey, on Thursday, before heading to Romania for a Saturday concert in
Bucharest.
The British band emerged in the early 1980s, releasing 46 singles and a
dozen albums.

Their Sounds of the Universe (App Store link) is an iPhone/iPod Touch application that lets you select from 8 sets of audio loops and make your own Sounds of the Universe mix.

Nine Inch Nails’ iPhone app is the most interesting band app that I’ve seen, but the new Depeche Mode app offers some fun, too, with a lower fan rabidity threshold.

Description:

With this application you are able to select from 8 sets of audio loops where you can make your own “Sounds of the Universe” mix by tapping the colored bars on the album artwork of Depeche Mode’s latest studio release Sounds of the Universe.

The application features never heard before audio loops from producer Ben Hillier and Martin Gore. All of the sounds and loops are from the recording sessions for Depeche Mode’s Sounds of the Universe.

Review by synthtopia.com

Lisa Hoover of Computer World writes:

Since its beta launch in 2005, social network-building platform Ning has been a beautiful bridesmaid, but never a bride. The site offers a terrific way for people to create a social network around a particular interest or hobby, but has suffered from a lack of useful tools and a rather bland choice of templates. While the site may have 1 million user-generated networks, many have little traffic or have been abandoned all together. Now Ning plans to offer a host of new apps and features that will make the idea of building a unique social network a whole lot more attractive.

Techcrunch is reporting today the upcoming launch of Ning Apps that will include 90 new modules for network creators to add to their sites. Options include e-commerce and collaboration apps like Shopit and Google Docs, and also new ways to integrate real-time communication tools like Ustream and Twitter Tracker. Ning is even reaching out to philanthropic-minded folks with apps that help with donation collection and fundraising.

Now that social networking seems to be infiltrating every corner of our lives, it’s common to hear people conjecture about what they would do if they ran Facebook or LinkedIn. Ning Apps will let people put their money where their mouth is, and create the network of their dreams.

For entrepreneurs, the days of one-directional Web sites are over and it’s all about establishing an ongoing dialogue and community around your product or service. It’s easy to predict a stampede to Ning and the likelihood that a zillion more niche networks are about to crop up around the Internet.

From what I can tell, it looks like the addition of Ning Apps will make it dead-simple to create interactive sites where people with common interests will congregate, rather than the “jump in a crowded pool” approach of today’s popular social sites. The only trick will be getting people to sign up for Yet Another Networking Site — a common complaint among visitors to many existing Ning networks.

Mashable has an in-depth look at what Ning Apps will offer during it’s private beta roll-out. Check out the list and let me know what you think looks exciting, or what’s still missing.s

MG Siegler of TechCrunch writes:

Twitter Search is easily the most promising aspect of Twitter. People talk about mundane updates, or connecting with companies, or following celebrities — but that’s all small scale. The real power of Twitter lies in its aggregate data. Why do you think Google and every other company out there is interested in them? It’s not just because they are the hot ticket in town right now, despite what some would have you believe. It’s all about the data. And Twitter knows that too — and is apparently on the verge of some interesting moves with Twitter Search that will better highlight that.

Speaking on a panel today, Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, had some very interesting things to say, Webware’s Rafe Needleman who moderated it, reports. The most interesting thing is that Twitter Search will soon begin crawling the links that people tweet out and indexing them. This immediately takes Twitter Search, which is still a very basic service, to the next level. This means that no longer will it just be a stream of textual tweets, but it will include millions of web pages as well — web pages that are more or less already curated by the individuals who tweet them out. Sure, there will be some spam, maybe even a lot of it, but this user curation should help real good content from around the web bubble up.

Apparently, Twitter Search will index the content of these pages as well. Yes, this is what Google does. So it should be no surprise when I say that Jayaram was the former VP of Search Quality for Google.

Of course there is no way Twitter Search will index as many pages as Google, but that’s not the point. Twitter Search isn’t meant to replace Google, that’d be dumb. At this point, no one is going to beat Google at its own game (you hear that Microsoft?). Twitter Search is meant to be a different kind of powerful search engine in its own right. A smaller, potentially curated, real-time search engine.

Twitter’s biggest trump card here is the real-time factor. It’s not entirely real-time right now, and there are often delays, but it’s faster than Google — mainly thanks to the nature of tweets (fast to send) versus the nature of webpages (slow to build). And so it’s not yet clear how indexing these linked pages would impact that aspect of Twitter Search. You’d have to assume it would slow it down, but really there’s not much point in assuming anything because it’s not yet really clear how Twitter would use this webpage data in search results.

One thing that is more clear is that Twitter is also looking at ways to better tailor search results. As I mentioned, right now the results are a very basic collection of tweets with key terms. Jayaram says that the company wants to add some sort of reputation filtering to offer better results. Now before everyone gets in a tizzy about the word “reputation” just like when Loic Le Meur brought up the idea of filtering Twitter Search by “authority,” Jayaram says Twitter’s engineers are still determining the best way to calculate this reputation. That seems to indicate that it wouldn’t be something silly like just being based on the number of followers you have.

Things should get very interesting in this space over the next several months. Unless, of course, Google buys Twitter first.