Microsoft announced the rebrand of Xbox Music to Groove Music back in early July 2015 and ZDNet.com and many other sites questioned if Microsoft had acquired a company called Zikera, which was founded in 2009 and had over 1.5 Million downloads of its app according to CrunchBase. A Microsoft spokesperson said “we have nothing more to share at this time.” according to the ZDNet article in early July 2015.
Why would Microsoft want to buy Zikera? Well, Zikera already had a music app called Groove: Smart Music Player on both IOS and Windows app store. Potentially confusion?
Well, as of August 18, 2015 the following domain names that were owned by Zikera have transferred ownership to Microsoft Corporation:
GrooveMusicApp.com: which was the main domain name used by Zikera and forwarded to iTunes for the Groove app.
StartGrooving.com
The domain name GrooveMusicApp.com now redirects to the Groove music page on Microsoft.
IMO, this is a very strong indicator that Mircosoft has acquired Zikera the company or at least anything related to the Groove Smart Music Player at a minimum!
Here is a screen shot of whois records showing Microsoft Corporation as the new owners of GrooveMusicApp.com:
Great work, as always, Jamie.
My guess is Microsoft acquired their brand associated with Groove. Most likely not the company/user base/technology & platform – as that probably would have been announced via a press release.
I get confused with these “Grooves”. I thought the GrooveShark music streaming guys at the University of Florida were headed for a great, rather than sad exit via an acquisition, prior to their shutdown for copyright violations. Just shows you what having a treasure chest, with money, can do in certain situations; i.e, YouTube in the post Google acquisitions and Pandora and more….
@Steve,
Thanks! I remember Google buying up things related to the Glass TM issues they had awhile back that I discovered as well 🙂 The Wall Street Journal covered it and linked me (well, not actually my story, but to my whois screen shot (scratching my head) in the article for the info.
Very interesting (and sad) development. Thanks for tracking down the clues. I’m a huge fan of the original Groove music app by Zikera, which still works great on my iPhone. It’s been my default player for years. But now I guess it will never be updated and eventually will be unusable. I just checked and did not see Zikera’s version of Groove in the App store.
Roland Corp. invented Groovebox in 1996, a line of synthesizers/sequencers then abandoned the TM registration in 2011. The generic terms for Groovebox as it relates to Roland’s line would be “drum machine” or “music workstation”.
A firm last week on 8/14/2015 filed a new trademark app for Groovebox (G&S: audio cases, receivers, tuners, players, recorders, controllers, mixers, portable computers, wireless computer peripherals etc). The TM Office has not yet published the app for opposition. The applicant claims First Use began August 1, 2015.
Very sad.
I’ve used this daily for years. It generated a playlist for me this morning, as usual. I tried to generate one this afternoon, and it wouldn’t work. All of the Tags also were gone. It said it did not know enough about my library to show any tags. It obviously has been disconnected from the Last.fm database. It now simply a music player.
I have Moodagent, as well. But they stopped updating their database, so music released this year will not show up in playlists, and will not generate any playlists, either.
Why would Microsoft acquire Zikera, to eliminate the competition? It just makes no sense unless they merge their features into their own music player (Microsoft Groove). It will be just a matter of time when someone else will figure out another algorithm similar to Groove into their Music Player. Let’s wait and see.
Well… It appears that it was only made official today (February 9th, 2016) : https://medium.com/@zikera/we-are-thrilled-to-announce-that-groove-has-been-acquired-by-microsoft-daf29cff85fc#.v8y724298
And they are only talking about Groove, not Zikera itself…