Microsoft In Talks To Buy Shoutcast And Winamp From AOL
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Winamp has a return on investment (a slow one but still a return), your ideas on the other hand are a gamble. I don't mean to discourage you I just want to save you some time. Also asking random people to invest in your ideas is also illegal. You have to have a pre-existing relationship with someone /or/ join a community like AngleList to solicit investment. Angel investors also must have an income over a certain amount of money. Some of these laws may change in the near future with crowd funding becoming so popular but in the mean time be careful.
1) You learn something new every day.
2) I don't want to live on this planet any more.
If you have $100,000 to buy a software mp3 player chances are you're not the type of person the SEC is trying to protect from bad investments. So shhhhhh, we'll just keep quiet.
Here's an example: https://angel.co/makespace?ref=startup_card
If you set up an event like "demo day" at Y-Combinator where investors and founders meet and discuss equity and terms that's perfectly legal. That's NOT general solicitation. Everyone there knows what they're getting themselves into. No one can be "tricked" into investing like the general public can.
Are my ideas on how to proceed correct? I'm not sure--perhaps I should validate on my own. I can't afford to scale yet (time and money), so perhaps I should seek to "wow" and then seek interest. I can at least do that on my own.
That said, your post was really insightful. As another already mentioned, I wasn't aware about the solicitation rule.
Think of how gullible the average American is (look at all the things infomercials convince them to buy) If it weren't for that rule a lot of innocent people would lose their life savings because a lot of them 1) believe in the goodness of people and 2) don't understand finance or investing.
Those rules were created to prevent your old folks from investing in a miracle snake oil business or a new hair growth tonic business from a traveling salesman.
People can pay $5,000 for a prototype of a drone they helped back on Kickstarter but that $5,000 is not equity, nor a gamble. It's a donation. The backer knows they are kissing that $5,000 good bye and are only given a chance at receiving a prototype drone. It's a donation with a gift.
An investment is when there is an expected return. I put in $5,000 but I expect to one day receive that $5,000 or more back. I own a tiny piece of the company. To help the average person know what they're getting themselves into the SEC has specified rules that a company must follow in order to solicit and accept public investors (aka going public / IPO). They MUST release certain financial information at certain time intervals, they must use certain accounting methods so as to not hide money, not hide profit, not hide losses, and discourage insider trading, etc...
If a company hides losses it causes a huge mess (ENRON).
So is there a Kickstarter for companies that are public and allow the average person to "invest" in them?
Yes, Scottrade & E-trade & stock brokers are basically the kickstarters of public companies. Those companies are all public and registered and you can go and see how they've been doing historically and invest however much you want in them.
But if you are, they did try to join the social-war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So.cl
And failed.. The site actually seems to be down right now, I don't think they announced it being killed off though.
I also emailed you the numerous ways to monetize Winamp by extending it's functionality into the social space. See my email "Winamp Fund - UI UX Designer seeking to join"
There's at least 4-5 ways to monetize Winamp and build it out.
What I'm imaging: http://www.tsemrinpoche.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20060... (a world without ads and bullshit)
What actual Winamp users really want: http://www.avinashtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/winamp...
2) That's because you're negative & disdainful.
3) If you're not growing you're dying. Keeping Winamp the same without changing anything is exactly what has led AOL to sell the property in the first place.
I understand where you're coming from, I've read through some of your past comments. The reason why you've become negative and disdainful is because you're wasting your time arguing with "stupid people" (you know who I'm talking about). Stop doing that because it will destroy you and suck you dry of all your energy. I only had to skim 3 pages into your comment history to see you've been arguing with "people who cannot be changed" (aka "______ fans" and "what's wrong with destroying privacy" type folks) and you have a history of trying to talk them out of their stupidity. Don't do it. Just stop. I stopped and I'm a much happier person.
Open Source projects like PHP, MySQL, Wordpress, FireFox, OpenOffice are all backed by big companies that make a lot of money and can afford to keep the project alive. A lot of other open source software is just dead, going nowhere, without a plan, no source of income, and the community too afraid of money with a hatred of rich people and big corporations. They're more interested in running the software company "not like Microsoft" than making it successful and sustainable. I've seen a lot of good OS software die a miserable death because it's owners refuse to make money. So I refuse to waste my time on them.
That's pretty short sighted as well. I don't want to invest my heart and soul into something only for it to disappear in a few years like so many have. In the long term, a lot of that software will be gone. Looking back at all the open sourced software I used as a teen most of it has decayed. Little by little over the years I'd receive an automated email from the founder who "built it out of love" saying he needs to "move on now, because I have a wife and kid on the way and a full time job".
Am I the one being insulting? Or are these creators who suffocate their own creations the ones who are insulting open source?
Contributing to open source doesn't have to be about pouring your heart into it, nor wasting your time. Bug fixes or improved algorithms are always a good start. But remember, it's open source - you're free to fork a project, dead or alive, and make it your own, to monetize it. The only drawback being that it remains open source, so someone else could just turn and do the same to you.
I hope I don't come off too much like a zealot. Open source is important to me because it's how I learned, and how I in turn made a good living for myself. So I feel compelled to give back, to perhaps help others one day as they've done me. But I do understand it's easier for me - someone gainfully employed, than someone not. In other circumstances, I'd probably value my time a bit more.
What we need are contacts at AOL and AOL Music. If you know anyone that works at AOL or anyone that has a relationship with someone at AOL let me know.
PS. Had two offers with BTC pledges, unfortunately that would make things more difficult so please just help with USD or personal contacts.
But I do think your venture is much more interesting! :)
"picked up through its 1999, $80 million acquisition of Nullsoft in 1999. But today Techcrunch has learned that AOL is talks with Microsoft"
I would venture that doing this exact same thing for Foobar2k is going to have a higher possibility of success than for Winamp. Secondly, while Winamp has mostly been in maintenance, Foobar is now considered an audiophile grade player (bitperfect?) (e.g. [1]) . There's also this team that has built a stripped down version of Windows 8 with Foobar for audiophiles ([2]) There is usually a post every now and then on Hydrogenaudio forums, asking if Foobar2k can be opensource/ported to linux, and the answer is the same - the authors have no plan to make it so, because in all probability they are waiting for a financial outcome of all this work.
Be warned that the authors can come off a bit... prickly. But I suspect that is the side effect of handling a huge freeloading community for many years.
Disclaimer - I have moved off PC audio for a while now. I prefer listening to my audio on the phone streaming from my laptop over Plex (however, I got interested in Foobar again while trying to build a stripped down Windows 8 using AudiophileOptimizer[2])
[1] http://archimago.blogspot.ca/2013/06/measurements-part-ii-bi... [2] http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/iso-usb-key-i...
The post regarding Winamp closing has 892 points and 520 comments now, which I think it's the largest number of comments I've seen in a HN history - although it's probably not the overall largest, it's a clear sign that the Winamp brand is still incredibly valuable.
Compare that to Foobar2k. In that thread it was consistently rated as the best alternative, and yet how do the users see it? "Closed source, confusing at best, current authors come off a bit prickly".
Winamp is not just a media player - I'd argue that by now it's closer to an ideal. Getting the rights for that brand sounds to me like the best idea.
IMO, every passing day SME-sized consumer software companies are going to find it harder to survive. I wish there was a consumer market for well written compact software that just does its job well, doesnt mine your data, doesnt try to push some shitty subscription model or advertisement crap onto users.
In the first case, your only solution is to stick with one of the older versions that are offered for download on some OldVersions page (since AOL is apparently removing their download links). In the latter, you still have that solution, but now there's also the possibility of Microsoft keeping it available, or screwing up newer versions.
All I can see is hope.
What'll most likely happen is that they'll buy it and let it hang on in its current state like some half-wounded animal, kind of like Skype.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSpace
Winamp probably has a huge userbase compared to Caligari though.
As a 3d modeling and animation package, it served as a poor man's Lightwave 3D or Maya. The interface would probably give some designers fits. Still, it was a useful and nimble application and one of my first experiences with CGI. If I could get it to reliably run on an XP SP3 box or in a VM, I'd probably still be playing with it.
I know that's a very high school view but it does make things more interesting.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-i...
http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/microsofts-bing-us...
(never used them since my linux boxen are all either networking or imaging focused, not desktop)
However there is broken feature by design on ALL those streaming services: they stop for whatever reason.
As a listener it’s a terrible experience. It’s alaways when you start listening something you really like that it stops.
And you could think it stops because I try to listen on the mobile, so that’s normal. NO it stops even at home on your desktop. When you start listening a stream, you’re 100% of one thing : it will stop but NOT when you decide to stop it.
But it wouldn’t be that hard to build a system that actually use a better caching system and pretend to be live instead of trying to stream a live content.
Listeners already grasped the idea of listening events which are not “live” thanks to podcasts.
In fact what is streamed nowadays is mainly pre-recorded songs/stories. So the notion of “live” is absolutely not necessary unless you’re broadcasting sports or once-in-a-lifetime events. And then TV / FM does a much better job.
That said, Shoutcast services are mainly non-live type of streams anyways.
So there is a great opportunity to buy the installed base of Shoutcast creators and listeners and Winamp userbase (pro-anti itunes).
The main idea is you change the sofwtare to make it work even when there is no internet connection.
A better caching system needs to be made on the device itself and on the server side.
In terms of monetization, it’s easy: audio adverts have already proved financial success.
It does work only because of their repetition AND their relation with the audience.
The best example of audio adverts are the songs with high rotation counts: they are the adverts of the big labels.
Here you got a system of dedicated listeners that you can target repetitively, endlessly, fairly (you don’t have to stream blocks of minutes of adverts)
Audio ads on webcast radio start to catch up with Radionomy systems by example.
AOL proved they couldn’t leverage that community. I don’t think Microsoft will do any better job as their main focus will be “integrate”. A strategy that rarely works.
Of course “a non-stop stream even without internet connection“ can happen without buying Shoutcast & Winamp, but what a fantastic opportunity and shortcut for those who can.
It is something that is not available in the Netflix-es, and Hulus of the world (and something that Cable still has).