It is a measure of how far streaming digital music services have come that Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, could be feted by a room full of music industry lawyers during Grammy Awards week.
Ek, the keynote speaker at the Entertainment Law Initiative event at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hinted at the industry’s initial resistance when he pointed out that he had started Spotify in 2006 and it had taken him two years to launch in Europe and a full five years before it hit the US market last July.
Prince Alwaleed talks up Apple, Twitter and the Murdochs – but hasn’t heard of Yuri Milner
The legacy of Steve Jobs will ensure strong results for Apple for up to two more years, according to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi billionaire and major investor in the Cupertino firm.
Prince Alwaleed, whose foundation has also invested in Twitter and News Corp, appeared on the high-class chat show Charlie Rose hosts for PBS and Bloomberg on Tuesday night, where he discussed issues ranging from the Syrian crisis and Iran’s nuclear programme to Citigroup (Vikram Pandit has been “an excellent CEO”, he said).
For other technology and media investors, though, his supportive comments for Rupert and James Murdoch, Twitter’s business model and Apple’s outlook are of most interest.
Facebook’s deal with Bango points to new mobile app payments
Listen carefully in the City of London and, very faintly, you may be able to hear the bell ringing for round two of Facebook’s simmering battle with Apple over mobile apps.
Bango, a small mobile payments firm, quietly announced to the stock market on Wednesday that it has “signed an agreement to provide payment services to Facebook”.
In what the Twittering classes have universally seen as a retrograde step, Sky News introduced a new social media policy on Tuesday, which includes an effective ban on its journalists retweeting non-Sky sources, writes Ben Fenton.
I haven’t seen the email myself, but I am confident from several sources that the offending sentence runs like this: “Do not re-tweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter”.
Apple threatens to boot developers that game the App Store
Ever looked at the iPhone App Store’s list of most popular apps and thought, how did that get so popular?
Apple has been asking the same question – and it has found that not all are quite as popular as they seem. This week it posted a stern warning to developers to stop using shady marketing firms that can artificially drive their apps to the top of the charts.
Samsung, Instagram and Twitter score at Super Bowl
Tech news from around the web, Super Bowl edition:
Although automotive companies were the most prolific advertisers during Sunday’s Super Bowl, many of the $7m-a-minute spots also involved tech companies – large and small.
WikiLeaks could set servers afloat, Fox News reports
Tech news from around the web:
WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, is investigating the possibility of taking its hosting infrastructure offshore to avoid the long arm of the law, reports Fox News. The suggestion is that this would be more than just an island out of the reach of the taxman – WikiLeaks has explored floating its infrastructure on a barge in international waters, Fox claims. Julian Assange is in London’s supreme court this week fighting his extradition to Sweden, while a new legal challenge has also emerged from FSI, his former lawyers, who accuse the WikiLeaks founder of failing to pay his legal fees.
Gov.uk launches one UK government website to rule them all
The first major product of sweeping changes to how the government handles its internal IT systems and public-facing websites is to be unveiled on Wednesday, as a new unified website for online public services goes live for testing.
A new single government domain, at www.gov.uk, will replace Directgov, the portal which launched in 2004, before extending across Whitehall departments’ sites in the coming weeks.
Megaupload users could soon lose all their files
Tech news from around the web:
People who used Megaupload to store files – legitimate or otherwise – could soon find their data has been deleted altogether, reports the WSJ. Federal prosecutors bringing a huge criminal copyright infringement action against the file-sharing site have written to the Virginia judge overseeing the case, saying: “It is our understanding that the hosting companies may begin deleting the contents of the servers beginning as early as February 2, 2012.”
Internet companies dominate EU fundraising in January
Online shopping and renting out spare capacity in flats and cars appeared to be the investment themes in Europe in January, with consumer-facing internet companies once again getting the majority of the money and attention.
Berlin was the fundraising hot-spot with at least four start-ups raising money, from $50m for SoundCloud to a more modest $1.4m for Gidsy.
This is the first of a series of monthly updates on the early-stage technology companies raising money in Europe.
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