Last July, I signed up for Last.fm’s streaming radio service. I played around with it for a while but eventually left it alone, because I don’t like proprietary players.
At any rate, the other day I picked up on Joi Ito’s investment in the British firm.
I’ve generally stopped making new investments other than in particularly exceptional situations. However, last.fm is one of those exceptions and I wanted to let you know that I invested together with Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and Stefan Glänzer, CEO of 20six Weblog Services AG in the UK in October. It is the first time I’ve invested in this trilateral formation, but with the company in the UK, a lot of potential partners in the US and a big market in Japan, this team seems to make sense.
Ito is a Japanese-born, American-educated, activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is also one of the more impressive characters on the interweb, so his financial support for the last.fm project is a key indicator that there’s much in store for this Web 2.0 company.