By admin on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 (MSN, MySpace, iLike)

MySpaceAccording to allthingsd.com Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on Microsoft’s portal. Not all that unlogical, MSN Music scores rather bad in terms of traffic, while MySpace Music is the only part of the former MySpace kingdom doing rather well. (Just to give you an idea, Comscore reported the following numbers for April: MySpace Music had 27.4 million unique monthly visitors while MSN Music had just 7.4 million monthly users.) Instead of reinventing the music wheel, Microsoft would prefer going hand in hand with News Corp.

It’s no coincidence that MySpace recently bought social music service iLike to expand its distribution all over the Web, including on (rivaling) social platforms but also via Google’s newest music search service. Next would be Microsoft’s MSN. MySpace is not a sinking ship after all… it would be without iLike though.

By admin on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 (Danger, Microsoft, Sidekick, Twitter)

october11012009A server failure, the fault of Microsoft/Danger, has resulted in total data loss for T-Mobile Sidekick users. One of those hit by the failure is celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who reportedly would have lost 2,000 address book contacts. Hilton is not finding the situation amusing and has been one of the Sidekick’s harshest critics in recent days, coining the hashtag #TmobileSucks.

Not bad according to singer John Mayer who tweeted the following message:

Perez Hilton loses 2000 contacts in his Sidekick. 2000 people to meet in Griffith Park for biggest group hug ever.

By admin on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 (Microsoft, Submersible)

october09012009Sonoma Wire Works, makers of RiffWorksrecording software and the FourTrack and InstantDrummer iPhone Apps, has acquired the entire Submersible Music product line, including the DrumCore and KitCore software and drum content says The Syndey Morning Herald. The man behind Submersible is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and founder of investment firm Vulcan Capital. Allen Submersible to “help him in his own songwriting”.

Submersible started as a project within Vulcan and was initially meant to be a search engine designed to manage an extensive collection of loop libraries. In the end the company went on to develop its main product DrumCore, which is a combination of a database/browser for musical content, a library of drum content from ‘world-class’ drummers like Matt Cameron (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) and Sly Dunbar (Bob Marley), and software tools for audio content generation and export.