Student Loan Blog : Google

Amazon and SpiralFrog Looking to Cut Into iTunes' Market Share

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:03:00 GMT

Spurred by the monolithic popularity of iTunes and the decline of CD sales, veteran online retailers like Amazon.com, start-ups like SpiralFrog and other companies are clamoring to get into the fray of digital music on demand.

With so much competition, consumers can get great deals and music options, depending on what they’re looking for.

Amazon Betting on Flexibility to Lure Consumers

Amazon’s venture into MP3 sales launched last week with an inventory of nearly 2.3 million songs from the catalogs of major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music, as well as thousands of independent labels—and none of these songs are copy-protected with digital rights management technology.

DRM technologies, which have been implemented by the music industry both on CDs and digital files, aim to restrict how consumers can use or distribute their music purchases. In the world of downloadable music, these DRM controls will typically restrict, for example, what kind of hardware (iPod, Zune, etc.) a music file will play on, or how many times a digital file can be burned to a CD.

While the Universal and EMI songs available from Amazon aren’t subject to DRM, they represent only a portion of the labels’ vast music libraries. Nevertheless, Amazon is setting the stage to compete directly with Apple’s iTunes, which has so far dominated the digital music market.

Amazon MP3, as Amazon’s digital-music virtual aisle is called, offers songs for 89 to 99 cents a pop and albums for $5.99 to $9.99 each, a slightly lower price point than iTunes, which sells individual copy-protected songs at a flat rate of 99 cents each and DRM-free songs from EMI for $1.29 apiece. Full album downloads from iTunes typically sell for $9.99.

iTunes uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format with proprietary DRM to encode its downloads, which means, unless you spring for the slightly pricier DRM-free songs or if you want something not on the EMI label (which is the only label currently offering DRM-free songs through Apple), your iTunes downloads will only play on an iTunes platform.

So if you have any portable digital player other than an iPod or an operating system that doesn’t support iTunes (Linux, for example), you won’t be able to listen or watch your iTunes downloads. And your iPod won’t play any DRM-enabled files that you purchased outside of iTunes.

Amazon MP3, on the other hand, by providing all DRM-free content, gives you the freedom to play your purchases on most types of portable devices (including the iPod) and through various desktop media players like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Realizing that flexibility is the convenience factor most music lovers are looking for in their online purchases, Wal-Mart is following in Amazon’s footsteps. The low-cost retailer offers its DRM-free tunes from EMI and Universal Music for 94 cents each and albums for $9.22, which is roughly 27 percent cheaper than iTunes.

Free Songs: Too Good to Be True?

SpiralFrog is taking a different approach, offering its non-DRM downloads free instead of engaging in a price war with online retailers. But the free music comes with a catch: Visitors can download songs at no charge but “have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits,” explains Joseph Menn in the Los Angeles Times (“SpiralFrog Offers Free Songs—With a Catch,” Sept. 17, 2007).

Songs can be stored on your computer but can’t be burned onto a CD. And if you don’t visit the SpiralFrog website at least once a month to watch more ads, your SpiralFrog music library gets digitally locked, and you won’t be able to access your music. You do have the ability to transfer your music files onto two Windows-compatible portable players or mobile phones at a time—but of course, this excludes the Apple iPod, the most popular digital music player out there.

The SpiralFrog website opened with a selection of 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music. According to eFluxMedia, SpiralFrog has also recently signed a deal with digital label/publisher INgrooves to make INgrooves’ full catalog of audio and video files available, which adds close to 100,000 songs and 2,000 videos to SpiralFrog’s library, including 4,000 Brazilian albums from INgrooves’ iMúsica division (“SpiralFrog Opens for Business,” Sept. 17, 2007).

SpiralFrog makes its money from displaying online advertising. The ad revenue, Menn explains, will be split between SpiralFrog and the labels and music publishers, with the music industry getting more than half.

By offering free media downloads, SpiralFrog wants to appeal to customers tired of paying for their entertainment at iTunes or other pay sites.

“This is a very viable alternative to selling music because clearly that mode is broken,” says Scott Stagg, a SpiralFrog investor, in a quote in Menn’s article. “This is very similar to TV: You get it for free and the advertisers pay the money.”

The record labels, for their part, hope that free sites like SpiralFrog will help keep users away from illegal downloading and unauthorized peer-to-peer share services like LimeWire.

Whether you decide to get your music free, by dealing with a few restrictions, or at the best deal you can find by shopping around, SpiralFrog, Amazon and Wal-Mart are just a handful of the companies competing for you. Rumor has it Google may also get into the melee of online music sales.

Let the games begin.

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Could Google Go Obsolete?

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:29:00 GMT

The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.

Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).

Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.

Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.

The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.

A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.

For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.

This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”

Searches Going Au Naturel

Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.

Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.

And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.

Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.

He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says.

Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.

In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same.

For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.

Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).

Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential

The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.

Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.

With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.

But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.

“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”

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Gmail Leads Google-ization of College Campuses

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:47:00 GMT

These days, even most die-hard Hotmail and Yahoo old-schoolers have Gmail accounts. And if you don’t have one, you’re really missing out.

At least that’s what Google seems to be saying to college campuses all over the world. In a quest to take over college campuses—just another step in building its user base—Google’s plugging its Apps Education Suite, led by the increasingly popular Gmail.

The suite includes a calendar program, word processing and spreadsheets, computer-to-computer phone calling, and Web authoring. Joe Dysart at the Greentree Gazette has called the Google suite “a kind of Microsoft Office ‘Lite,’ ” although there seems to be no real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of productivity apps, at least for now, as schools hold on to their Microsoft licensing deals.

However, it does appear that Google has set its sights set on Microsoft territory. Google continues to mass-promote its free Google Apps suite to campuses where the MS Office suite has held sway for so long.

Google’s selling point? The preferences of many faculty and students for Gmail over Microsoft’s Outlook.

More Universities Adopting Google Apps

According to Google’s Blog News Channel, the colleges and universities already using the Google Apps Education Suite include U.S. schools like Arizona State, Hofstra, and Northwestern, as well as overseas institutions as far-flung as Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, Nihon University in Tokyo, and Prem Tinsulanonda International School in Chiang Mai, Thailand (“Google Apps Adds Five Schools,” Aug. 17, 2007).

And Google’s just added five more U.S. universities to its Apps roster: Arkansas State, Clemson, Kennesaw State, University of North Carolina Greensboro and University of Texas at San Antonio.

While these schools are implementing the entire Google Apps suite, at some of the participating U.S. campuses, “the real focus is on improving the existing e-mail experience for students,” according to Todd Haselton at the Ars Technica news desk (“Gmail Driving Google Apps Adoption at College,” Aug. 19, 2007).

At UNC Greensboro, for example, the school isn’t interested “in anything but Gmail,” Haselton writes. “The only offering we’re assessing is the Gmail service,” says Gloria Thornton, assistant vice chancellor for UNCG client services, in Haselton’s article. “There’s no word on whether we’ll use the word processing applications as well.”

Students Ask for Google by Name

Colleges aren’t switching to the Google Apps on their own initiative. Many of them are being pushed by students asking for on-campus Gmail service for their student e-mail accounts.

According to Dysart’s article in the Greentree Gazette, students are demanding Gmail accounts because they’re already using Gmail, they trust Google, and they find Google applications easy to learn and implement (“Google’s Siren Song: Free Apps for Education,” July 2007).

Dysart offers Northwestern University as an example, where, says Wendy Woodward, directory of technology support services, “Our students approached us about a year ago, saying that we needed to improve our email and collaboration services. We actually had our student government tell us, ‘We want you to implement Google Apps.’ ”

Michelle Boule at ALA TechSource envisions the day when college campuses are seamlessly integrated online via Google. “Just imagine a campus where students could easily IM faculty from their e-mail accounts, check a faculty member’s calendar for office hours, or create their own start pages with all of the things they need,” Boule writes (“Google Goes to College,” Dec. 14, 2006).

With thousands of students already using Gmail and lobbying for campus-wide Google Apps, that day may not be too far away.

For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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Recording Industry Goes After College Students

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:49:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Viacom sued Google for $1 billion over YouTube copyright infringement issues.

Now it seems that the recording industry is intent to go after college students for illegally downloading music from the Internet. So, I guess all those years of “freeloading” and downloading to your heart’s content is coming to an abrupt end.

Happy Days are Over

Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out hundreds of letters to different colleges threatening students, but also offering “out-of-court agreements” according to a March 9, 2007 article by Brock Read titled, “Recording Industry Will Sue Students but Let Them Settle” that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Unfortunately, many students thought the association was blowing a lot of smoke and just using scare tactics, but now that does not seem to be the case.

The article stated that the trade group has “sent letters to 13 universities, informing them that it intends to offer the settlements before suing 400 computer users spread across those campuses.” Apparently, your college’s Information Technology department will assist the association in its investigation, revealing the names of those individuals who illegally have downloaded music, according to their computers’ IP address. So, if you are guilty, your time may be short.

If your school is a real bastion of privacy and defender of human rights, you may be in luck, but not for long. If your college refuses to divulge the names behind the IP addresses, a legally binding subpoena will be issued “seeking the student’s name unless the student agrees to an out-of-court settlement,” the article said.

Here Are the 13 Schools that Received the Letters:

Arizona State University

Marshall

North Carolina State

North Dakota State

Northern Illinois

Ohio University

Syracuse University

University of South Florida

University of Southern California

University of Massachusetts at Amherst

University of Nebraska at Lincoln

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

University of Texas at Austin

Settle Online with Your Credit Card

Before you freak, relief is in sight. You will not be hauled into court, forcing your parents to hire an expensive attorney to defend you. Resolving your lawsuit will be as simple and pain-free as pulling out your plastic and paying via a Web site and telephone hotline. You will need your “case identification number.”

And chances are you only will have to pay for the songs you downloaded and not pay some outlandish amount of money. That is, unless you really are smart and decide to plead “innocent” (right) and allow it to go to court.

The Education Finance Advisors at NextStudent can help you figure in all your college expenses so that you get the student loan that best suits your needs. Don’t get caught short. Go to www.nextstudent.com for all your student loan needs.

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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