Features
Gigs & Bytes: Pet Sounds
MTV Networks isn’t saying, but the word is that the company has purchased NeoPets.com, an interactive Web property which boasts of having close to 25 million users.
At NeoPets, you can create and care for your very own “virtual pet.” You lavish it with virtual attention, you feed it virtual food and you can even teach it virtual tricks. And where does your virtual pet live? In Neopia, of course.
This is one of those deals where both sides come out winners. For NeoPets, it’s an opportunity to expand, via MTV, into television, movies and publishing. For Viacom, which owns MTV Inc, it’s another opp to cultivate those younger demographics, and perhaps pick up a few more juvenile eyeballs that the media giant might have missed with its Nickelodeon cable channel.
“The combination of NeoPets and Nick.com gives us a one-two punch leadership position in the online entertainment space among kids and young adults,” Herb Scannell, VP of MTV Networks and president of Nickelodeon Networks, said in a statement announcing the deal.
We’ve all been there.
You have a song running around in your mind. You don’t know the name of the tune, nor do you know who recorded it. But lately it seems as if that blasted lyric is cranking away on a continuous loop inside your brain.
Now there’s song lyric closure at GoFish.com. The multimedia search engine will not only find the song as well as i.d. the artist, but it will also provide you with a link to purchase the song or album.
We took the “search by lyrics” function for a test spin and found that it was pretty reliable when it came to songs released on major labels, but just a tad spotty when searching for obscure indie material or out-of-print songs. However, if you’re cursed by the song lyric that refuses to die, there’s a good chance you’ll find relief at GoFish.com.
“The search-by-Lyrics function solves the eternal conundrum encountered by millions of innocent people who wake up in the morning humming three to four words of a seemingly un-recognizable and unidentifiable song,” Michael Downing, co-founder and CEO fo GoFish Technologies, said in a statement announcing the new search function. “GoFish Search-by-Lyrics is an important next-step in delivering meaningful search and discovery tools focused on the rapidly expanding universe of online multimedia. It will play an important role in guiding consumers to the content they want – not to mention getting the answer to the nagging question of who sings that song.”
Maybe so. But, try as we might, we couldn’t find a song match when we plugged a couple of lines from two different tunes into the GoFish search engine, namely the lyric where Jimi Hendrix sang “Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” and CCR’s “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Guess it’s more sleepless nights until we figure out the names of those songs.