SongBird gets financed
VentureBeat is reporting on Songbird’s $1 mln bridge financing by some heavy weights off Sand Hill Rd, Sequoia included. SongBird is certainly an interesting application, and Pioneers of the Inevitable, its parent company, is even more interesting. They spoke at Yahoo! a while ago, and while the presentation included the demo of the player, and reasons why you would want to use their music player, you couldn’t ignore the large elephant in the room - the question of the business model.
Essentially, just like Firefox, Songbird is an open source cross-platform application, so the users don’t have to switch the music players when they switch platforms. The claim to fame is also being independent and not vendor-specific, like Microsoft’s Windows Media Player or Yahoo!’s Music Engine. The claim is a bit weak, it seems, since there aren’t that many people displeased with the current offerings in the digital music player space, and something like a Firefox plugin FoxyTunes essentially replicates the functionality without requiring a platform-specific install.