MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.

All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.

The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.

The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.

The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.

It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market - it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.

MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.

The product is compelling.

But it will quite possibly never launch.

MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.

I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.

More screen shots below - top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.

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But listings are spread across lots of sites - what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

That’s just what Otalo, which just launched, is doing. They are starting off with 200,000 listings. The company was founded by Michael Giles (the founder of Furl) and Baer Tierkel. The name Otalo comes from the Zen symbol enzo - “O” - with the Finnish word for house - “talo.”

The company will earn commissions from the referral of customers to the various vacation rental sites. By the way, if you always stay in hotels on trips, you should try renting a house sometimes. It’s much calmer and usually a lot cheaper. You can also get great deals at the last minute.

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This isn’t much of a surprise - we speculated on his future back in July when he announced (internally) the shuttering of four of his products (Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile). That still left him with AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo, among others. But each of those products seemed to be a better fit in a different organization.

CEO Randy Falco’s memo to AOLers:

Dear AOL colleague,

I’m writing to tell you that Kevin Conroy has accepted a position as President of Interactive Media at Univision. I want to thank Kevin for all he’s done on behalf of AOL during his time here, particularly over the past two years. I’m proud to have worked with Kevin and happy for him as he takes on this new role.

When I arrived here two years ago, I asked Kevin to take on one of the most important and difficult assignments – to completely revamp and revitalize AOL’s suite of products, while at the same time globalizing product development and expanding our reach across the Web. I knew Kevin had the drive and discipline needed to meet and exceed this challenge.

Under Kevin’s leadership, for example, AOL Mail made a dramatic turnaround, with a steady stream of upgrades and globalization (it’s available in 48 locales) that generated a 31% increase in page views last year. Our products are now more open to developers, more widely distributed through widgets and gadgets, and are at long last back on the Mac. The iPhone apps developed under Kevin’s leadership have been huge hits, generating millions of downloads. AOL now has a strong position in video and video search, an innovative partnership with CBS Radio, a strong lineup of toolbars, reinvigorated Winamp and SHOUTcast products, and the all-new AOL Desktop. At the same time, Kevin refined our product lineup so we could devote more resources to our key products.

Having done all this and much more, Kevin told me that he very much wanted to return to his media roots. If you don’t know, Kevin came to AOL eight years ago from BMG Entertainment, and his first assignment at AOL was to build AOL Music, which is now the leading music destination on the Web. At Univision, Kevin will be responsible for developing both online and mobile experiences for the nation’s fastest-growing audience. While we’re saying goodbye to Kevin, it’s my hope that we’ll continue to work with him in his new role.

We’ll be providing transition details about the Products organization soon. In the meantime, please join me in offering Kevin our very best wishes on his future endeavors.

Randy

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Today’s keynote presentation by Phil Schiller has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. That isn’t to say it went badly - I’m genuinely excited about some of the new software updates. But the Macworld keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. Investors have learned to expect big things from Apple every January, and for at least the last four years their reactions to the keynote have weighed heavily on Apple’s stock price.

Except for this year. And that’s no accident.

A site called the Keynote Index Fund has tabulated just how big these stock swings have been over the years. In 2006, Apple launched some of its first Intel-based computers, and was rewarded with gains of 10.3% over the two days following the announcement. The next year, the launch of the iPhone and the Apple TV was met with an increase of a whopping 13.5% over the same time period.

But the stock has taken a major hit whenever the keynote didn’t live up to expectations. Last year, Apple released products including Time Capsule, Movie Rentals, AppleTV 2, and Macbook Air - an impressive lineup to be sure, but nothing that could live up to the iPhone release of the year before. The stock subsequently took a 10.7% loss over the next two days.

In the weeks leading up to Macworld 2009, it looked like this year’s show might be headed for a similar fate. Rumors of new products were few and far between, and it seemed like Apple simply didn’t have much to announce. And then Apple dropped the bomb: this would be the company’s last Macworld, and CEO Steve Jobs wasn’t going to be giving the keynote. This spawned countless distasteful rumors regarding Jobs’ health, but it also served to lower expectations. Leading analysts went on to report that “no significant new products [were] expected“. So when Phil didn’t whip out the third generation iPhone this morning, nobody was surprised. The stock dipped a bit, but little more than it would on a typical day.

So what was the damage? A loss of $1.56 (-1.65%). Nothing to cheer about, but looking at years past, it could have been much, much worse. Granted, the figures stated above were averaged over two days, so we won’t know until tomorrow just how big the swing was, but given today’s performance I won’t be surprised if any change is relatively modest.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know if Steve Jobs pulled out from the show with the direct intention of lowering expectations. But can you picture him presenting a keynote whose major highlights were an 8-hour laptop battery and some software updates? I don’t think he could either.

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Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I’ve previously called the iPhone’s killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today.

Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).

Pandora has been around for years, offering a very powerful music recommendation engine powered by The Music Genome, which employees professional musicians to describe each song using over 150 attribute (or “genes”). Its iPhone app closed out 2008 ranked as iTunes’ top free application overall, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Update: It looks like you can download the application now here. The application page still shows the older version, but you’ll download the 2.0 version of the app.

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In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can’t afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it’s clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations.

That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out,” said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

Intel also wants to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Some PC companies we’ve spoken with say that Intel doesn’t want Atom chips in devices bigger than 10 inches, and puts incredible pressure on them to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Dell’s Inspiron uses an Atom chip anyway, but Samsung is using Via’s competitive (and less expensive) chip, the Nano.

We asked Intel if they forbid manufacturers to build Netbooks with larger than 10 inch screens, which is what those manufacturers are telling us (Dell notwithstanding). Their answer: “Intel defines a netbook as a 10″ or smaller screen size. We recommend that OEMs and netbook manufacturers use that guideline as well in order to get the best user experience.”

That’s a nice statement but it’s complete rubbish. There is no performance loss with a 12 inch screen v. a smaller screen (other than power usage). A 12 inch Netbook is just as fast or as slow as a 10 inch one. The only difference is that the user is even less likely to buy a low end laptop with a dual core.

Netbooks are clearly here to stay, and the new models with larger screens and larger keyboards solve two of the three problems I have with them (the last issue is Vista and XP, which runs poorly on these devices, but people are fixing that problem, too).

We’ll soon see 13 inch and larger Netbooks, despite the pressure Intel is putting on manufacturers to keep them at 10 inches. Intel may not agree to have their chips in these devices, but Via, with their excellent Nano competitor, seems more than willing to fill the void.

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MixedInk, a document editing site that allows large groups to democratically create a single collaborative document, has launched its service to the public. The service fuses concepts from Digg and popular wiki sites to create a unique document creation tool that is ideal for groups far larger than you’d normally encounter in the workplace. In conjunction with today’s public launch, the site has also partnered with Slate to create a community-written inauguration speech for President Obama, which will be published on the site in two weeks.

While there are quite a few collaborative document services available (including Google Docs, Zoho, and the just-announced new version of iWork), most of these services focus on letting a small group of people interact. Unfortunately, these services are clumsy for large-scale collaboration with groups of more than a dozen or so people, as it becomes difficult to reach a consensus and certain sections are repeatedly overwritten.

MixedInk is taking a different approach to collaboration, allowing users to draft their documents using a Digg-like voting system. Instead of constantly editing the same document, users are invited to submit their own versions, which can then be voted on and rated by their peers. As they they read drafts submitted by others, users can mouse-over the passages they like most and incorporate them into their own submissions (the system will also suggest popular passages as you write using keyword detection). Over time, the most popular passages and versions float to the top until the entire group is satisfied and voting ends.

MixedInk probably won’t be useful for small groups (it would probably be easier to pick up a phone), but for larger scale initiatives it could become a great alternative to traditional Wiki systems, which often use confusing versioning systems. The system has already been put to the test on some very large-scale documents: over the summer the technology was used by the Netroots community to write its platform.

The service is available for free to users who create documents on MixedInk’s site, with a premium version available for branded enterprise solutions and possible integration into other sites.

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ResizeImage is the simplest and most usable tool I’ve seen to handle quick image resizing and cropping. It’s not as useful as Skitch, which a downloadable application for Macs only, but it works in a pinch.

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