MVTech MVTech (December 24, 2004)

By Kristine D. Dworkin
An aural feast

Christmas came early at AudioFeast. The startup that sells a portable Internet radio service for MP3 players, mobile devices and PCs, has received $10 million in an initial round of funding.

Instead of requiring users to purchase and download music one tune at a time, AudioFeast offers more than 400 channels of "all you can listen to" music, news, sports and entertainment radio programming that can be enjoyed on a PC or transferred to an MP3 player.

If you still have a music lover on your Christmas shopping list, you might want to check out www.audiofeast.com. Monthly costs are $5.99 to $7.99.

TimesTen in top 100

TimesTen, a data management business, made the Red Herring's list of the 100 Most Innovative Companies out of 1,200 entries.

The companies were rated in seven categories: technology, financing, marketing, sales, service, leadership and business strategy. To view Red Herring's Top 100 list in its entirety, go to www.redherring.com/EventsRhfFinalists.aspx. To find out more about TimesTen, visit www.timesten.com.

Surge in domain name registrations

Domain-name activity is buzzing worldwide for the third quarter of 2004, according to VeriSign's Domain Name Industry Brief.

New domain-name registrations topped 5.1 million, representing the highest quarterly growth in Internet history and that number reached a whopping 66.3 million worldwide.

Renewal rates and percentage of domain names connected to currently functional Web sites saw rapid growth as well. According to VeriSign, this trend alone indicates that organizations are buying domain-name registrations with the intent of putting them to real use. Some of the reasons behind this include a steady improvement in the global economy and growing importance of domain registrations for use in the pay-per-click advertising market.

Get a copy of this quarter's report and peruse previous reports in the series at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

Google's online reading room

Google is planning to establish an online reading room filled with hard-to-find tomes supplied by scholarly libraries including Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, Oxford and the New York Public Library.

Out-of-print documents would be published in full while others might only have bibliographic information available.

Cutting the virtual ribbon on the free-access reading room is still years away though; the Michigan and Stanford libraries are the only two so far to agree to submit all their material to Google's scanners. And Michigan's 7-million-volume library alone could take up to six years to scan.

To keep tabs on Google's ongoing literary quest, visit www.google.com. "MVTech" is a roundup of news from Mountain View's high-tech industry. Please send news items, comments and suggestions to Kristine D. Dworkin at mvvoicetech@yahoo.com.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.