When Gmail went down today, it caused more than a minor panic . People, like me, who use Gmail as their primary email couldn’t get much work done. There’s nothing like an outage to make you realize how much you rely on something.
MySpace Music , which launched a little less than a year ago, is the one bright spot of growth in an otherwise flatlining MySpace. But all that popularity comes at a price - billions of free streaming songs are costing MySpace up to $10 million a month in streaming fees, says a source, and the joint venture may lose $20 million or more this year. To minimize those losses, MySpace has made a big change to it’s product - songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile
One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything.
Famous angel investor Ron Conway’s investment focus on real time startups earned him the moniker “ Real Time Ron ” by his close friends. But he’s certainly not the only venture capitalist out there focusing on this space. New York based betaworks , an incubator/VC, is also right in the thick of things.
Since launching back in 2004, Gmail has set the gold standard for webmail clients, offering a large amount of storage and a highly usable interface, free of charge. But for many people it has remained out of reach - no matter how appealing Gmail might be, they’ve racked up thousands of messages on other services that they simply can’t give up. Today, that changes.
