VentureBeat

When we wrote about Simplify Media in July, we pointed out the company’s ability to tie together the libraries of iTunes users, allowing them to stream music to their friends or to themselves, when away from their home computer.

The Redwood City, Calif. company has now added support for Winamp, iPhone and iPod Touch. Users can hop onto a WiFi connection with their iPhone, hook up to their home computer and listen to their full collection remotely.

Simplify is interesting because, while iTunes includes native support for streaming, the program restricts sharing to a limited number of authorized computers. The Simplify add-on instead opens your collection to up to 30 other devices on your list, providing full access as long as your computer remains on.

And because it’s built in to other existing applications, Simplify’s app doesn’t require users to learn a new system for sharing. The company’s end-goal is to work across every program, opening up friends’ playlists to each other even when they all have different music players.

While Apple, for one, could build in more streaming abilities, its fragile relationships with music labels will likely prevent it from moving back to a more free-spirited sharing system such as existed on early versions of iTunes.

Nor is Apple likely to add iTunes streaming for the iPhone or iPod, which could be seen as invalidating the different storage limits of the devices. (Why buy an 8 gigabyte iPhone over the 4GB model, when you can stream your full collection from home?)

There are some competitors for Simplify. NuTsie.com, for example, all allow users to upload music to a server and play it back remotely, while Mundu Radio streams music onto your phone. Avvenu, a service allowing remote access to any files on a user’s computer from a mobile phone, was acquired by Nokia about a week ago. And of course, there are always streaming radio services like imeem.

Simplify, which users can download for free, plans to pull in revenue by selling music through affiliate programs linking to the online music stores of Amazon, iTunes and others. “People discover new music using us, but when their friend’s computer turns off, they can’t access it anymore,” co-founder Bill Bradford told us. “There’s a built-in incentive to go buy the music, to have permanent access.”

Although Simplify isn’t disclosing the exact amount of its first funding, Bradford says it was a “modest amount,” between $1 and $5 million. Sierra Ventures was the sole investor. You can check out a video of Simplify being used on the iPhone here.

updated

Izimi.com is another neat little web 2.0 publishing tool • and boasts of an easier way to share video with the world than YouTube.

It does this by letting you share any file on your computer • not just video, but spreadsheet, pdf, whatever — by creating a URL for that file, which you can then send to your friends.

In this way, it is similar to Avvenu (see our earlier coverage). But Izimi goes further. It also creates a public Web page for you, which lists all the content you have created. Let’s say you create URL for some videos to send to your sister. Izimi puts a link to the videos at your Web page too, so other friends can see what you’ve been sharing. That’s where the YouTube-like element comes in.

In other words, Izimi has two heads: One is a straight-forward file sharing application, and the second is a profile-based social network (see partial screen shot below). You can add friends to your profile, for example, and click through to see their content.

Right now, everything is for public viewing. It is all searchable at Izimi’s home page. You can’t share things privately. However, that doesn’t mean once you’ve published something, it is open for all to see forever. You can choose to “unpublish” something, and it goes away. Izimi says it is working on a feature to send things privately, to be released soon.

Izimi launches publicly tomorrow (Monday). We tried it out, and it worked smoothly enough. First you download the Izimi application. Then, when you right-click on a file on your computer desktop, you can select to publish it with Izimi. It then prompts you to tag the content, and then gives you a URL •- which you can send. You can manage your content within the application.

When other people click on the URL you send them, they are calling it up directly from your computer desktop. Like Avvenu, your computer has to be on for them to see it. That’s a significant drawback. However, the advantage is you don’t have to go through the hassle of uploading video to YouTube if you want to share it with the world — because the Izimi Web profile saves a step. Also, Izimi doesn’t degrade your videos, as YouTube does when it converts video into Flash format.

The company was founded in Oct 2005, with offices in Oxford, UK. It has $3 million in funding, mostly from individuals. Some came from a UK investment firm, Blue Star Capital.

The company aim to get users first, before focusing on making money. It will seek advertising revenue eventually, according to Marc Lyne, chief executive, and David Ingram, VP of Product, who spoke with VentureBeat. This is a big company, as start-ups go. It has a couple of dozen employees.

This is worth a look. This will be useful for many users. It’s free. The only downsides: It requires a download, and it requires your computer to be on for people to access the files.

This has been a particularly busy week for remote access software, with SoonR announcing 100MB of storage and better Outlook integration and LogMeIn Hamachi named one of PC Magazine’s best free software downloads.

SoonR, of Campbell, Calif., lets you get to files on your computer via your mobile phone and LogMeIn Hamachi is a free VPN connection. LogMeIn is based in Boston.

If you’ve ever pulled upto your vacation hotel in Hawai, and realized you forgot that presentation you needed to approve quickly for your boss, these tools come in handy. However, no solution has hit the grandslam yet: A service offering remote access, which saves your work, syncs it on all devices, and automatically backs it up. We’re hearing from one company that is coming close to this nirvana, which we hope to report on soon.

Meanwhile, to round out our coverage, take a look at Palo Alto’s Avvenu.

Called Access ‘n Share, Avvenu offers a free service to remotely access files and share them. After installing a small download, you can use any web browser to search through and download every file on your computer. Then, if you decide you want to share something, just type in the recipient’s email address and they’ll be able to download that file or folder. There’s also an application available to download for $20 that lets you copy files between computers.

(Separately, Avvenu’s free music player made news recently; it lets you play your iTunes music collection from any computer or Windows Mobile smart phone. We wrote about it here, and TechCrunch and others have written subsequently here.)

As we covered here, with the remote access service, you don’t need to upload everything you want to share. Files stay on your home computer or laptop. On the one hand, the Avvenu view is immediately updated any time you change a document or save a picture. However, your computer has to be on and connected to the Internet anytime you want to use Avvenu to search it or share anything, which is a significant drawback. Also, the speed at which you share is limited to your home network connection, which typically doesn’t very well support multiple people getting large files at the same time.

There are paid options that give you storage space on the Avvenu servers, from $29.99/year for 5GB to $184.99 for 40GB. This increases sharing speed and doesn’t require your computer to be on.

VentureBeat has looked at a few of the many online storage and sharing companies — Phanfare, Box.net, YouSendIt, MyFabrik, and Omnidrive (which does remote access too), to name a few — here.

Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.