Justin Frankel is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona in 1997 by programmer Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server.
Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.
Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp creator, Justin Frankel and was first shipped in version 2.0a4 with Winamp 2.61. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. AVS is currently at version 2.83 and is included with Winamp, though the distributed version has later been reverted due to compatibility issues. Winamp currently ships with version 2.82 for Windows Vista and 2.81d for older Windows versions.
Ultravox or Ultravox Media On Demand Server (UltraMODS) is a streaming video project by AOL. The goal of the project is to create a service for routers akin to SHOUTcast, aiming to help the data be handled better, to allow for more efficient handling of more users, and to enable much faster channel changing.
Vivendi SE is a French mass-media holding company headquartered in Paris. It owns Groupe Canal+, Havas, Gameloft, Prisma Media, Vivendi Village, and Dailymotion, and is a majority owner of the Lagardère Group. The company has activities in television, film, video games, book publishing, print press, communication, tickets, and video hosting services.
Microsoft Advertising is an online advertising platform developed by Microsoft, where advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offers, product listings and videos to web users. Provides pay per click advertising on search engines Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo, as well as on other websites, mobile apps, and videos.
Ruckus was a free ad-supported online music service available to students at all American colleges.
AOL Radio powered by Slacker was an online radio service available in the United States only. It had over 200 free internet radio stations.
Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video, and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies worldwide. Formerly CDDB, Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. From 2008 to 2014, it was owned by Sony, later sold to Tribune Media, and has been owned since 2017 by Nielsen Holdings. In 2019, Nielsen Holdings announced plans to split into two separate publicly traded companies, Nielsen Global Connect and Nielsen Global Media. In October 2022, Nielsen Holdings, including the Gracenote subsidiary was acquired by a private equity consortium.
TuneIn is a global audio streaming service providing news, radio, sports, music, and podcasts to over 75 million monthly active users.
Bebo was an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013 and relaunched in February 2021. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down. It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social-media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta-testing.
Deezer is a French music streaming service founded in 2007. The company has been a subsidiary of Access Industries since 2016. Deezer is available via web and on various digital platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS and others.
Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company Llama Group, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019.
Timothy M. Armstrong is an American business executive. He was formerly the CEO of Oath Inc., then a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that served as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo!. Previously, he was the CEO of AOL Inc. from 2009 until its purchase by Verizon in 2015.
Audacy, previously known as Radio.com, is a free broadcast and Internet radio platform developed by the namesake company Audacy, Inc.. The Audacy platform functions as a music recommender system and is the national umbrella brand for the company's radio network aggregating its over 235 local radio stations across the United States. In addition, the service includes thousands of podcasts created for the platform, hosted elsewhere or station programming on demand. It was initially developed by CBS Radio and was acquired by the former Entercom as part of the company's takeover of CBS Radio. The service's main competitors are rival station groups iHeartMedia's iHeartRadio and TuneIn. Audacy is available online via mobile devices and devices such as Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV.
Freestyle Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. General Partners Dave Samuel and Jenny Lefcourt are both entrepreneurs who entered venture capital after founding multiple companies. The firm was founded in 2009 and typically invests in 10-12 companies per year with an average investment between $1.5 million to $3 million. Previous investments include Intercom, Patreon, Narvar, Digit, Betterup, Airtable and Snapdocs.
Kevin C. Conroy is an American media, entertainment, and technology executive. He has held senior roles at AOL, Univision and MGM.
