Yahoo is said to be in talks with record labels on offering DRM free music to customers.

The options discussed by Yahoo are to sell DRM free music, or offer it ad supported and free to.

According to an AP report, the talks took place last month, but are still at a preliminary stage with Yahoo still working out details. Yahoo has confirmed the talks, but not the details of them.

Yahoo offering DRM free music isn’t ground shaking given Amazon already does and others are headed in this direction. Offering that DRM free music for free however is a big step forward towards the inevitable march to free. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo implements monetization strategies if they go down this path, and how it will be received. For example, will users tolerate advertising in the download itself?

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Spotted by Google Blogscoped is a login page for Google Health, Google’s entry into the online health records space. At the time of writing the site isn’t allowing logins, but it does include this text:

With Google Health, you can:
* Build online health profiles that belong to you
* Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies
* Get personalized health guidance and relevant news
* Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services
* Share selected information with family or caregivers

The other thing to note is the logo (we’ve included it in this post), it would appear that Google Health is going straight to Beta and not through Google Labs.

Google Health has been hampered by chronic fatigue syndrome in terms of its development, with the site being rumored to launch originally in May 2006. Microsoft even beat Google in the space, having launched its own online health product in October 2007.

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EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For EveryBlock, it boils down to three types of information: geographically-relevant news and blog entries, civic information, and “fun from across the web.”

“Hyperlocal” is the buzz-word for this service. Among the data aggregated are geo-tagged images from Flickr, lost/found items from Craigslist, and cafe reviews from Yelp. While EveryBlock aggregates plenty of data from web services such as these, it’s particularly focused on surfacing data managed by the government: liquor licenses, restaurant inspections, and crime reports for example.

To get a taste of EveryBlock’s power, you can check out a map of all photos taken recently in Downtown San Francisco, a list of the vehicles stolen in Chicago, or even a log of the graffiti recently cleaned up in Brooklyn. While EveryBlock does not yet provide an API, RSS feeds for specific neighborhoods are available.

The team of four behind EveryBlock is led by Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the popular Python framework Django. Holovaty is also behind chicagocrime.org, a “freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.” EveryBlock is funded by a $1.1M, two-year grant from the <a href=" http://www.newschallenge.org/winners.html
">Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a competition for making local news more easily obtainable.

EveryBlock competes directly with Outside.in. Yahoo’s OurCity, while still beta and only covering cities in India, has many similar features as well.

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Kerpoof launched its set of picture, story, and movie creation tools for kids at the TechCrunch40 conference this past September. Since then, the company has been working to improve the functionality of these free browser-based products and, in particular, to transform Kerpoof into a platform for kids to communicate and collaborate with each other online.

Kids can now create their own avatars and join groups with other Kerpoof users. Since the site wants to encourage only kids who already know each other to interact online, each group requires a name and password to join. These are either shared by kids themselves or given out by parents who want to regulate their kids’ contacts. Once several kids are in the same group, they can send messages to each other, share their Kerpoof creations, and do other things like gift clip art objects.

The picture creation tool also now allows kids to work on pictures at the same time. Picture edits propagate to every user’s view instantly, allowing kids to make changes together while they chat. Kerpoof is working on making it possible for kids to collaborate over movies and stories, too, and on adding support for games and social puzzles later in the year. A type of virtual currency will be coming soon as well.

There are a lot of smaller enhancements made across Kerpoof’s set of tools, including new special effects for the movie creator and attractive themes representing different styles of art. A new “Super Doodle” tool is also being tested that enables kids to freehand draw and import their drawings into the picture tool. Overall, Kerpoof is shaping up to be a very compelling - if still small - suite of creativity/learning applications for kids.

American kids are not the only ones to notice; Kerpoof has become popular with both teachers and foreigners as well. While the company can’t measure directly how many teachers are using it in the classroom, CEO Krista Marks says that they are seeing usage patterns that suggest many classrooms are signing on as a whole during school hours. Kerpoof is also seeing 32% of its traffic from outside of the United States, with Moscow providing the second highest level of traffic among cities internationally (see the map to the right). Because of this foreign interest, Kerpoof is working on localizing its product for several languages such as Russian, Spanish, Italian, French, and German.

Kerpoof will eventually transition into a subscription-based service, although Marks says that all current offerings will remain free. The company was the Editor’s Choice of Children’s Technology Review for December 2007.

Kerpoof

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Lost in all the news about Apple’s earnings yesterday was a development in the $360 million patent-infringement lawsuit against it and other co-defendants by Klausner Technologies. One of the co-defendants, SimulScribe, settled. SimulScribe offers its own competing visual voicemail for Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones, which it just started selling (prices begin at $10 a month for 40 voicemail messages). Visual voicemail turns your voicemails into text with headlines so you can manage them like e-mail and listen to them, or not, in any order you choose.

So that’s one down for Klausner. Apple has much deeper pockets and more to lose than SimulScribe, but can a settlement be far behind? Or will Apple drag this out in the courts? If the NTP-RIM trial is any precedent (in which RIM lost on a flimsier case and had to pay more than $600 million), Apple might be better off settling now.

In celebration of settling his portion of the lawsuit, SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff is offering a free one-month trial (wipe brow now, James).

SimulScribe

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It is good to see some creative licensing finally taking hold in the music industry. Today, CBS-owned Last.fm announced that you can now stream the full track of any song up to three times for free, in addition to its regular music-discovery service which streams related songs you might like in a random order. This is also the first step towards a future subscription service, which will allow an unlimited number of plays. After the third time you listen to a song, listeners will see a promotion for the upcoming service.

Last.fm has signed deals with all four major record labels and most independents to stream their tracks in the U.S., UK, and Germany, with other countries coming soon. Instead of paying one-time fees per song that don’t make economic sense on the Web, artists and music labels will receive ongoing royalties based on how many times each song is listened to. The details of how much Last.fm is paying per song were not revealed, but moving towards a pay-for-performance model is good for both online music services and the music industry.

Music needs to be sampled before most people want to buy it. The current Web industry norm of the 30-second clip just won’t cut it anymore. Perhaps Last.fm will help to set a new precedent here with limited full-track streams. It might be difficult for iTunes or Amazon to abandon the 30-second preview, however, because neither one has an ongoing revenue stream from advertising or subscriptions with which to pay an ongoing royalty. At least, not yet.

Last.fm

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Online storage provider Box.net has raised $6M in a Series B round of financing led by U.S. Venture Partners and involving Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

According to the release, Box.net currently has over 1.4 million registered users and will use the funding “to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.”

We recently covered the launch of OpenBox, a way for third-party web service developers to build functionality into Box.net. The company raised its $1.5M in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson mid-2006 when it had only 500,000 members.

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At first glance, blog search as a category is oversaturated. Ok, at second glance, too. Not only did Google enter the market directly in late 2005, they’ve also increased the rate that they index blogs and other regularly updated sites for core Google search. TechCrunch, for example, is now indexed multiple times per day by Google, and new posts are often available in a normal Google search within minutes of posting. Most people today say the best blog search engine is, simply, Google.com.

And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones - Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service).

Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine - Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like:

Twingly already has a product - a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver - mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed - everything else is ignored.

Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has some deals with large European publishers completed.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

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Two weeks ago I wrote about Social.im, a new desktop product from Mogad that allows you to instant message with all of your Facebook friends. The initial software was Windows only. Today they just launched a way for Mac users to use it, too.

This isn’t a Mac client, but they’ve provided instructions for using Social.im via ichat or Adium (a popular Mac instant message aggregator). I was not able to configure it properly for iChat, but it’s humming on Adium.

CEO Yanda Erlich says a full Mac client is coming soon, and this is an interim solution for Mac users. It lacks most of the functionality of the Windows version, like message and friend notifications. But it is still an excellent way to chat with Facebook friends.

Mogad

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This morning, Richard Branson’s spaceship startup Virgin Galactic unveiled the second design of its suborbital vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two. I am blogging this from the press conference at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

SpaceShipTwo is what the passengers will actually ride in, and White Knight Two is the launch vehicle that carries it to a high altitude before releasing the rocket. (It takes less energy to launch from 50,000 feet than from the ground). The design is a little bit different than the initial SpaceShipOne and White Knight One. Both are all carbon-composite vehicles, and are designed with an open architecture so that in the future other companies can use it as a foundation to create space vehicles for unmanned missions. White Knight Two is a double-hulled launch plane with four engines from Pratt & Whitney.

Branson suggests that if Virgin Galactic can prove the commercial viability of space flight, it will unlock a “wall of investment that could rival the amount invested in mobile or the Internet.” He also suggests that at some point in the future, in addition to suborbital thrill rides, the vehicle pair could serve as a superfast transport for point-to-point international travel here on Earth. (Forget about supersonic flight, this would be much faster). Looking much further out to a day when next-generation vehicles are flying commercially that can actually deliver small satellites and other payloads, he waxes about the possibilities:

One day we might be able to use space for energy production. While I believe aviation has to get more carbon efficient, seemingly benign industries like IT have outpaced aviation in carbon output. [One promise of a commercial space industry is] the ability to launch low-earth satellites that could literally take some of the heat out of the planet, by serving as a repository for information technology.

Although the flight rate will be low to start, the vehicle is designed to handle high flight rates several years from now. “The spaceship is being designed so that it can be flown twice a day and the launch plane can be flown three times a day,” says designer Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites. Virgin Galactic has ordered five spaceships from Scaled Composites, with an option of seven more. Rutan predicts that if Virgin Galactic is able to build 40 to 45 spaceships over first twelve years, with 15 launch planes, they could fly 100,000 people in the first twelve years of operation.

Virgin Galactic hopes to begin test flights this summer, but no mention of when commercial flights will actually start. With recession fears in the air, you’ve got to wonder what kind of impact that might have on demand for such premium-luxury travel.

And you thought Web 2.0 startups were risky.

On the initial $200,000 price per flight, Branson notes:

Within five years of launching, we hope that price will come down dramatically. We accept that $200,00, even though the dollar is not worth much anymore, is still too expensive for the majority of people.

By comparison, a trans-Atlantic flight in 1939 between New York and England cost the equivalent of $47,000 in today’s dollars. That was one-way and coach.

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