Welcome back everybody and Happy Father’s day to all of our American readers as well as many others around the world. This week’s Social Mashup reviews music and entertainment app Shazam, Samsung’s social media initiatives for the 2012 London Olympics, Pandora’s upcoming IPO, and social web browser RockMelt.
For nearly two years, Shazam was known as the innovative app used to identify the artist of songs heard on the radio, but moving forward it’s about to be known for so much more.
Earlier this week, the London company added a real-time lyrics feature into Encore, its premium paid application, by acquiring their first company—Tunezee. The synchronized lyric technology, powered by Tunezee’s LyricPlay, shows scrolling lyrics as a tune is playing on the radio.
Useful as the new lyrics feature is to many, Shazam has its mind set on becoming a much bigger player in the social sphere as a platform for the discovery of many different types of entertainment, not just music.
Similar to the music application, consumers can use the new Shazam application to hold their phone up to the television during their favorite shows or or advertisements to unlock new online content when the Shazam logo appears on the screen. In fact, some shows on MTV and Bravo have already started experimenting with the new app.
Old Navy is one the first big brands to pilot the new Shazam capability in relation to advertisements. The retailer’s latest television ads feature music videos with limited Old Navy branding but viewers can ‘Shazam’ the songs to get more Old Navy info. The music videos are with a fake pop group and when the song is Shazamed, users get info about the Old Navy clothes the band is wearing and the band itself.
According to inside sources, Shazam has aggressive growth plans which is reinforced by their new hire of Jason Titus, the man who led Yahoo’s communication products including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger. Titus wants Shazam to use the ‘woodshavings’ (his term) from core services to be able to create even more services.
The company has started providing data to the music industry related to which songs are Shazamed the most. Titus said that “[Shazam is] a leading indicator of what’s popular, of what will end up on the Billboard charts.” If bands could know exactly who is Shazaming their songs or if users could find out other people who are Shazaming the same sort of music, bands could organize events around their music.
2012 London Olympics and Samsung
Samsung, the official wireless telecommunications partner of the 2012 Olympics in London, unveiled its social networking initiatives for the games this past week at a press conference which featured David Beckham. Samsung has been associated with the Olympic Games for almost 25 years and has been the Official Wireless Telecommunications Partner since 1998.
Next summer’s Olympic games already has the feel of the first ‘Smart Games’ with the expected massive social media and technology push to consumers. Samsung’s primary goal will apparently be to have a social networking program in place aimed at globally conveying the buzz and excitement about the Games. They are going to have 60 ‘young people’ from all over the world in place at the games sharing not only information about the events but also their experiences at the games. Sounds like a pretty good job to us. Samsung is going to begin recruiting these ‘Mobile Explorers’ shortly with the first round to be in the UK.
Beckham was there to announce the Torchbearer nomination campaign where Samsung hopes to select from more nominees than ever before to carry the Olympic Flame as it travels the UK in 2012. To kick off the process, Beckham announced Gabriella Roseje, as Samsung’s first nomination for a bearer of the Olympic Flame. Roseje was commended by Samsung and Mr. Beckham for her outstanding work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds using her sporting talent. Samsung also unveiled its new logo for the Olympic Games, known as the Samsung Olympic Visual Identity System (see above). The design, developed exclusively for Samsung by award winning artist Kate Moross will roll out across all Samsung Olympic campaign and advertising including the Olympic Torch Relay.
Finally Samsung, along with Visa, is looking to have Near Field Communications (NFC) be a huge part of the 2012 games. NFC is the system you may have read about in this space with Google Wallet which allows you to simply wave your phone over one of these NFC systems to pay. Visa and Samsung are far along in talks with London banks to allow this to be instituted. With this being just the beginning of the Social Media and technology announcements for the Olympic games, what else do you expect to see and would you ideally like to see at the Olympics? We’ll have more for you as the lead up to the games heats up.
Pandora filed for an Initial Public Offering in February, priced around $100 million. Last week the company announced that the price per share is $16 for a total of 14.7 million shares, equalling to $235 million – a much larger figure than the initial estimate. Pandora will offer 6 million shares and the remaining 8.7 million will be offered by the firms who have already invested in the company, the “selling stockholders.” The execs will make roughly $96 million with the company’s tentative value of $3 billion.
Pandora’s revenues have grown 136%, from $21.6 million to $51 million, for the quarter ending in May compared to the same time in 2010. The Net radio service’s registered user base has also jumped up 77% since last year, however the company has reported a net loss of $6.8 million for the 2011 Q1 period a drastic leap compared to a $3 million loss from the same period the previous year. The loss is understandable given the infrastructure investments running up to the IPO, yet Pandora expects to run at a loss through 2010 and potentially after.
This is where things get a little scary. Pandora has shown success through tough periods and is appealing to users due to the music discovery and recommendation algorithm, but competitors are chomping at the bit to gobble up some of the space. Spotify, a European Net streaming music service, may be Pandora’s biggest potential rival. The service is close to signing the final deals with American music labels to let it launch to U.S. customers. While not streaming services, Google, Amazon and Apple are all looking to cloud music services allowing users to access their music online.
Pandora noted in its S1 filing that it must aggressively go after users to capture the market and bring in advertising revenue which made up 86% of its total revenue in early 2011. The company even stated,
Internet radio is an emerging market, and if we are unable to increase the number of listeners and listener hours or to convince advertisers of the benefits of our advertising products, our business and future prospects will be harmed.
Social Web Browser RockMelt Partners with Facebook
RockMelt, a web browser for the social media obsessed with one million downloads, has been left in the dust by the likes of the number two browser, Mozilla Firefox coming in with over 213 million downloads. In an attempt to help boost RockMelt’s user base, the browser has teamed up with Facebook to collaborate on technical and product issues. The RockMelt browser currently offers: a button to share a Web page or link on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more; shows friends’ online activities and makes it easy to chat with them; instant notifications on your favorite social sites and more.
The first piece of the partnership coming to fruition will be seen in the release of the new version of the RockMelt browser with makes it easier to customize the look of the window, improves access to Facebook chat and shows friend requests in the browser. Facebook also had to make changes. When RockMelt browser users visit Facebook they will not see notifications or chat activity because its already built into the browser.
RockMelt’s biggest challenge will be its distribution, which has historically been done by browsers’ pre-installation on Apple and Microsoft or through Google’s promotion on its homepage. Firefox took years to get where it is and Facebook doesn’t have any plans to help with RockMelt’s distribution as of yet. Maybe Facebook will get more behind RockMelt to help it compete against one of Facebook’s main rivals, Google.
