Snocap Drops 60% Of Staff And On The Market: Looking Good For The Deadpool

B2B digital music distributor company Snocap, the spawn of Napster founder Shawn Fanning, looks like its warming up for a Deadpool entry with confirmation by CNet that the company has let go of 60% of its staff and is on the market.

Snocap has apparently “received interest from several companies” as is pursing these for an asset sale.

Snocap was founded in 2002 and has amongst its investors Ron Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC. The company allows rights owners to place music onto p2p networks and retail sites with DRM, aiming to leverage P2P networks for distribution whilst still charging for music.

Snocap’s last big deal was to provide music sales for MySpace in September 2006 and we wrote about Shawn Fanning’s plans in December 2006 to start a World of Warcraft focused social network called Rapture. According to Snocap’s website the MySpace deal is still in place, which presuming it is transferable to a new owner would provide some value in the Snocap fire sale.

Snocap is now on TechCrunch Deadpool watch.

MySpace Getting A Little Less Chaotic?

Interesting blog post by MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson this morning. He’s proposing a new default layout for MySpace pages that has significantly better organization of user information, and moves from a two column to three column approach.

So we’ve been working on a new home page design here. Thinking of launching this in a few weeks, but I wanted to see what people thought about. Take a look and tell me what you think

The page certainly has more of a Facebook look and feel than the existing default theme, with clearly delineated content areas and modules, and a new horizontal navigation bar across the top.

Unlike Facebook, MySpace allows users to customize the CSS of their profiles. If you really don’t want to leave MySpace but love the clean lines of Facebook, there are templates to customize MySpace to look just like Facebook.

Real Time Coverage Of Apple Announcements

Hop on over to CrunchGear to see the real time coverage of the special Apple press event today that started at 10 am PST. Lots of new iPod news, and a make-your-own ringtone tool in iTunes. And they always save the best stuff for last.