End of Pandora?

Pandora, the "music genome project" and popular web streaming radio service may soon shut down due to risks of copyright infringements and the hight cost of digital music distributions from big record companies.

Founder Tim Westergren said that the site's funds are constantly depleting because of royalty fees. "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Westergren according to the Washington Post report. "This is like a last stand for webcasting." Pandora averages about one million listeners per day and its new iPhone application is one of the Apple's top 10 most downloaded applications.

Other radio music sites are in the same situation as Pandora. This year, Westergren's site has to fork over 70% of its projected $25 million revenue for royalty fees. Although there are current negotiations happening between webcasters and music companies that could eventually lower the fees-per-song, Westergren said that his music site will be "done" if investors fail to see any profit from it.

Really sad news.

Cuil, a New Search Engine

Cuil (pronounced "cool") is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. Cuil is aiming to topple Google by indexing more Web pages than the search giant. It went live on July 28, 2008.

Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches. Unlike other search engines,Cuil's privacy policy states that it does not store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses.

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Another founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others companies.

Yahoo! Music Closing Down

Yahoo! Music will cease operations on September 30 because the music store platform is unable to bear the costs of DRM imposed by the record companies.

This is a sad step back for the online music industry. Microsoft was also forced to close its service a few months ago with the same result: millions of songs were no longer able to listen and finally had to maintain a machine that could validate the purchase music.

After the closing of the store, Yahoo! will no longer be able to support the recovery of license keys for music purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and can no longer authorize reproduction of songs on additional computers.

Although these songs will no be longer functional, at least exists an easy way to migrate to Rhapsody.

Dot Me Domains: Great Success

Dot.me domains have been been the most successful launch of a new domain in the Godaddy history, since only the first 24 hours were recorded over 20000 domains under this extension, at a cost of $ 40 for two years.

The launch was not short of trouble for the registration company . Godaddy suffered some technical issues who were resolved as soon as possible. Bob Parsons, CEO of the company declares that such a situation is justifiable since last Thursday was most active day ever recorded.

Ebay and Buy.com close deal

Ebay has reached an agreement with the store Buy.com. Buy will be able put up for sale electronics, books, DVDs and other products through Ebay, with a fixed price. Since the beginning of the year, have already been put up for sale on eBay about five million of products from Buy.com.

So, Ebay is increasily distancing from auction business model and is approaching to traditional e-commerce (Flat price sales), the formula of the great dominator of electronic commerce, Amazon.com.

But this is not the only "betrayal" to their principles. The agreement has irritated to eBay users because Buy.com will be exempt from paying the fees they are forced to pay if they wish to sell any product on eBay. With this exclusion, Buy.com can offer extras like free shipping, which hurts small businesses.

This agreement is the result of the new eBay ledership , now in the hands of John Donahoe, after the retirement of which was its CEO for ten years, Meg Whitman. Analysts agree that the viability of the business goes through deals with major suppliers who are able to cover all categories of products.