gracenote

Sony shells out $260 million for Gracenote

Nicholas Carlson · 04/23/08 11:00AM

Sony has acquired Gracenote, the company whose software tells digital music listeners what song they're annoying fellow BART riders with. Sony paid $260 million for Emeryville-based digital media identification company Gracenote, and is likely to integrate its services with its digital audio players. [AP]

Real dumps Gracenote music service

Mary Jane Irwin · 09/18/07 07:30PM

Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. Without it, we'd be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has been discreetly dropped by RealNetworks. A tipster alerts us that RealPlayer and Rhaposdy are now using All Media Guide's identification service, Lasso. Real joins a growing list of AMG adopters, including Sony and Apple. It's no surprise that the music services, facing thin margins, are shopping around.

A high-tech CEO's Midwestern megamanse

Tim Faulkner · 08/15/07 12:57PM

Scott Jones, CEO of search engine ChaCha, has built a high-tech wonderland of a mansion in central Indiana to rival any abode in Silicon Valley. The 27,000 sq. ft. English country manor, selected by HGTV as the No. 1 home in America, melds old-world charm with a hardcore nerd's wet dreams. Amenities include the obligatory, and thoroughly geeky, automated lighting, air conditioning, and media systems controlled by touchscreen and a workstation sporting eight large LCDs (one of twenty-six computers in the home). Jones's playthings, however, don't stop with the typical high technology.