Imeem Archive

Imeem has announced the launch of their mobile advertising platform today. The new advertising platform is only available on the Android platform so I can only imagine what type of reach it will see. Imeem has signed Kia Motors America to be the first sponsor of the Imeem Android application. Imeem notes that the Kia ads will have a "display presence" — but wouldn’t you need an in-stream presence to be even remotely effective? Music applications mean that the user can keep their mobile in their pocket and so the ability to view and interact with ads has to be lower than if the ads were in-stream.

Imeem has also updated their Android application to be city-sensitive. So you can get a feeling for what music is popular in different cities as you travel. That feature seems pretty interesting for travelers. They have also added artist recommendations which allow you to see similar artists to the ones you already are interested in (e.g. Christina for Britney). Lastly they have launched an exciting seasonal music station for enjoying holiday music.

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, “want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace.” Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a “featured app” – said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt – he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) – the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

MTV Networks is announcing a new batch of online video distribution partners for its shows today. The full lineup of partners (bold are new today): Dailymotion, GoFish, imeem, MeeVee and Veoh, AOL, Bebo, Comcast’s Fancast, Joost and MSN.

"We believe in a targeted approach to online video syndication, which means working with select partners who value our content and have the ability to build deep and interactive experiences around it," said Greg Clayman, Executive Vice President, Digital Distribution and Business Development, MTVN.

All of MTVN’s partner sites will carry individual channels for each participating MTVN brand, streaming ad-supported video clips free to the consumer. Like MTVN’s own branded websites, the partner sites will enable global audiences to embed MTVN clips on their own blogs, social networking pages or websites. The key is in the embedding – this is the power of distribution for their advertising which can help the video clips go viral.

Today’s announcement comes a month after the announcement of the Digital Fusion advertising group within MTV Networks.

MTV Networks is a unit of Viacom (NYSE: VIA).

In the latest lawsuit of the day news, Reuters is reporting that Warner Music Group is suing Imeem for copyright infringement. The press release is listed below.

Warner Music sues social network site for piracy

NEW YORK, May 15 (Reuters) – Warner Music Group Corp. , the world's fourth-largest music company, on Tuesday sued Imeem Inc., a music-based social networking Web site, for copyright infringement.

In a suit filed at the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, Warner accused Imeem of building a base of 16 million users by capitalizing on the "illegal use of 'free music'."

Imeem users can create profiles and connect with each other through their music tastes by uploading MP3s to create 'playlists' which they share with other users.

Imeem's backers include Morgenthaler Ventures.