The Latest from TechCrunch

Who says nobody will consider paying for streaming music? Thumbplay Music, which offers unlimited music streaming apps for a monthly subscription across iPhone (iTunes link), Android, and Blackberry, reports that its smartphone apps have been downloaded 500,000 times since June. Thumbplay won’t say how many of those downloads turn into paying customers (you get a free trial before having to start paying $9.99 a month), but even if it’s only 10 percent, that’s $500,000 a month in revenues.

What’s even more notable is that Thumbplay’s users are pretty evenly distributed across the three smartphone platforms. The iPhone rules with 39 percent (where Thumbplay is one of the top hundred “free” music apps), but Blackberry is second with 36 percent. Android makes up 25 percent of users. “We are big believers in RIM as an application device,” says CEO Evan Schwartz. (It helps that Thumbplay launched first on Blackberry, has little competition there among music apps, and is often a featured app on the Blackberry marketplace). Schwartz says the conversion rates across each platform is roughly the same.

Thumbplay Music also offers desktop apps, but 90 percent of the songs its streams are on smartphones. It’s customers are 70 percent male, with most of them being 25 to 34 years old. And the top 20 songs only make up 5 percent of all songs played.

Thumbplay got its start in 2004 selling ringtone downloads for feature phones, and then progressing to full songs and videos. Its started Thumbplay Music this year to focus on smartphones, where 70 percent of its new customers are coming from. The established feature phone business, however, is still much larger. In the smartphone music subscription market, it faces competition from Pandora, Rhapsody, Rdio, Sirius, and others.

How did that silly song go? TV killed the radio star? First off, try telling that to Ron Bennington. Second off, whatever. Now we’re getting word that Apple, thanks to all those iOS-powered devices out there, is killing the TV star. Or, in English, that iOS, specifically the Apps, is responsible for recent downward trend in TV ratings. Hmm.

Read more…

Location-based game SCVNGR is announcing a new slew of partnerships today—this time with cities. The startup is officially announcing its Cities program today, in which SCVNGR works directly with tourism boards or entities to build city-specific challenges and treks on the location-based gaming platform.

Over the past few months, SCVNGR has worked with select entities like Philadelphia's Convention and Visitors Bureau and Boston's Freedom Trail Foundation for organization or event-specific treks. But today, the startup is rolling out a city-wide gaming program, with Chicago and Atlanta as initial launch partners.

Chicago’s city tourism entities are launching a number of branded treks on SCVNGR for city visitors and residents. Users can complete challenges in particular neighborhoods, earn points and unlock local rewards.

For example, SCVNGR offers a Chicago Taco trek that leads visitors to authentic taquerias around Chicago. Another trek involves completing challenges on Navy Pier. The Presidential Chicago Trek on SCVNGR asks users to follow President Obama’s Chicago faves and go-to spots.

Partnerships with cities and tourism boards is just one more way that SCVNGR is looking to take its location-based game to a mainstream level. The startup has also struck a number of other high-profile partnerships with companies and organizations, including Gamestop and the Boston Celtics.

The spotlight — or maybe the flood light — shines on bad customer service online. Companies should worry about public complaints and reports of their brand failures more than ever, suggests a new report from RightNow and Harris Interactive. Contrarily, they stand to make more money if they can deliver a superior experience, the report says.

The Customer Experience Impact 2010 report reveals that 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience. Of these, 73% cited rude staff as the primary pain point, and 55% said a company’s failure to resolve their problems in a timely manner drove them away.

Almost everybody surveyed, a full 95%, said after a bad customer experience they would “take action.” 79% of U.S. consumers said they blabbed about their negative customer experiences in public and amongst friends. Of consumers who took to social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to publicly air a complaint, 58% expected a response from the company, 42% expected a response from a company within a day, but only 22% said they’d actually gotten a response as a result of griping there.

RightNow’s chief marketing officer Jason Mittelstaedt shared these insights, which were not published in his company’s 2010 report, exclusively with TechCrunch:

In 2007, 60% of U.S. consumers said when they had a negative customer experience, they wanted to speak to a live agent about it. At that time, 26% preferred email, 5% chat, but Facebook and Twitter weren't used by corporations to handle complaints and resolve problems. This year, 83% of U.S. consumers said they wanted to speak to a live agent, 66% preferred email, 12% chat, and 7% choose social networking sites when trying to resolve a problem.

The more digital communication options that consumers have, apparently, the more they crave human interaction in real time, apparently.

What’s a company suffering from a bad customer service rep to do?

Clearly they can’t stop the customer noise online. The complaint of the decade, Dell Hell is still being discussed widely online and by major business news outlets, though Jeff Jarvis and Dell attempted to make peace back in 2007.

This month, Google’s Marissa Mayer noted her displeasure with Delta (see: screen capture below) on Twitter — she has about 47,000 followers there.

Earlier complaints about Delta and Virgin America published here, saw an immediate and passionate response from readers. The Delta Flight 1843 From JFK To Hell post received sympathy in the form of 1,000 Facebook-likes, so far.

And in the interest of fair disclosure: Consumer advocate blogger Christopher Elliot reported that AOL, which recently acquired TechCrunch, is consistently ranked as one of the worst providers of customer service in the U.S. in the Hall of Shame surveys conducted by MSN and Zogby.

RightNow’s Mittelstaedt suggests that companies facing a bad rep for customer service — while they work to improve the customer experience they provide, internally — should focus on generating positive word of mouth online and off most of all, than positive reviews and online feedback secondarily.

In other words, friends and colleagues endorsements, discussed in real life or through Twitter and Facebook updates, are most likely to drive sales than even a positive user review posted on a site like Yelp or Amazon (but those matter too).

MIttelstaedt also suggests companies go ahead and invest serious time and money in customer service. It’s not just an operational thing, anymore. And the investments should come back to the bottom line: 85% of U.S. consumers say they would pay 5% to 25% more to ensure a superior customer experience.

IBM is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of PSS Systems, a company that builds an information management software suite. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. PSS Systems' software helps organizations manage information governance policies across massive amounts of electronic business information while avoiding legal risk, and discovery and data management costs. The company's Atlas Suite provides data management features including legal holds, discovery workflow, regulatory compliance and data governance. Clients include Abbott, BASF, ConocoPhillips, First Data, GE, Pfizer and Williams.

Exclusive – SeatGeek, one of the finalists of TechCrunch50 2009, has raised another $550,000 in funding from previous backers (Founder Collective, NYC Seed, Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group, PKS Capital and angel investors Arie Abecassis, Sunil Hirani, Thomas Lehrman, Allen Levinson and Mark Wachen).

More importantly, the ticket search company has inked an interesting revenue-sharing distribution deal with The Wall Street Journal.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Sports and Local sections of WSJ.com will soon feature ticketing links provided by SeatGeek, giving readers one click access to the best deals in sporting and concert events. This should give SeatGeek some nice exposure.

The additional $550,000 raised from its existing investors brings SeatGeek’s total to $2 million and will be used to grow SeatGeek's product and engineering teams.

In case you’re not familiar with SeatGeek: it’s essentially a new type of ticket search engine that enables fans to quickly and easily find the best price for sports and concert events on the secondary ticket market (which is why we dubbed it the Farecast for such events).

The company uses algorithms to identify the best deals from these providers and to forecast how ticket prices will move over time.

Since the last time we covered SeatGeek, the startup has launched a completely redesigned version of its site, with nifty stadium maps developed in-house. The new event pages are designed to show fans exactly which are the best seats at the best prices (example).

In addition, the company has built out a comprehensive concerts page.

West of House.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

> OPEN MAILBOX

Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

> TAKE LEAFLET

Taken.

> READ LEAFLET

“WELCOME TO ZORK ON THE KINDLE!

If you jailbreak your Kindle you can run Zork and other Infocom games natively on your Kindle. If you’re anything like me, this should make you very, very happy. These kids these days with their Tendas and XStations don’t know how good they have it.

Read more…

Break Media, a social video and entertainment site for guys, is launching another vertical today: Tu Vez. Tu Vez is a Hispanic male-focused website that similar to Break’s other male-focused video sites features video and news content ranging from entertainment and gaming to sports and culture.

Break Media CEO Keith Richman says the launch of Tu Vez made sense considering the Hispanic population is one of the fastest-growing demographics in the U.S. Not only are there few media sites that cater to the male Hispanic demographic, says Richman, but Tu Vez is also a great opportunity for advertisers to reach this group.

Tu Vez’s content focuses on English-language articles and videos covering topics like music, television, movies, sports, games and current events. Sample articles range from ‘Nacional Fan Gets Jersey Tattoo’ to ‘Greg Giraldo's Five Funniest Roasts.’

Tu Vez adds to Break Media’s nine entertainment destination sites, which include Break.com, MadeMan, Chickipedia, Cage Potato, Holy Taco, Screen Junkies, and All Left Turns (Break also operates an ad network). The network of sites reaches nearly 110 million unique viewers monthly, according to comScore. The startup recently launched a 3D programming-focused video channel, and acquired gaming site FileFront.

Local mobile advertising network xAD has raised $4 million in new funding from Emergence Capital Partners. While the company is already profitable, xAD is going to be using the new funding expand and its technology platform more quickly.

xAD offers a local mobile search and advertising network in the U.S. The company's patented mobile optimization technology identifies who, what, and where an end user is, and serves the most relevant click, call and check in based advertising.

The platform is currently serving 200 million local search ad requests per month and partners with large mobile ad networks like Millennial Media to provide local ad inventory. The ads themselves are more informative, giving users a full description of the business along with images, offers, reviews, maps, and driving directions.

For example, on the White Pages iPhone and Android apps, xAD will serve an ad for a local restaurant when a user searches for a restaurant within the app. The startup promises to return relevant ad results 80% of the time.

Of course, xAD faces competition in local mobile ads from Google. But with the U.S. local mobile advertising market expected to exceed $2 billion by 2014, there’s plenty of room for a number of players.

Exclusive - Gamervision, a news, entertainment and networking site for gamers, has raised $1.5 million from a group of private investors and also unnamed “veteran Hollywood financiers”, bringing the total of capital injected into the company to a nice round $10 million.

Founded by chief exec Andrew Reisini, Chairman Ed Cohen and Vice-Chairman Freddie Bauer back in 2001, Gamervision was built on first-hand video game reviews and reviews. Today, Gamervision publishes a plethora of original video content, podcasts and user reviews.

In a statement, Gamervision informs us that the site has tens of thousands of members and more than one million unique monthly visitors. The startup employs an editorial staff of over twenty gamers and comic lovers to provide that audience with industry news, gossip, rumors and a ton more content.

Recently, Gamervision launched the beta version of its “Swap-n-Sell”, a free service for buying, selling and trading video games, consoles, accessories and collectibles.

Gamervision previously secured a $3.5 million funding round in 2008 and later secured an additional $5 million in ongoing private investment. The company says it intentionally steers clear from Silicon Valley VCs and technology-driven funding sources, preferring to acquire financial backing from the film and movie industry utilizing the long-term personal contacts of its founding management team.

Qualcomm Innovation Center, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, today announced it has acquired iSkoot Technologies, which specializes in the “mobilization” of Internet services such as social networks, consumer email and IM products.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A good number of U.S. operators and device manufacturers offer iSkoot services, such as a free mobile app that aggregates access to various social networks, customizable news feeds and consumer email services within a single tool.

Check out iSkoot’s Kalaida platform product pages for more information about its technology and commercial solutions (or read our earlier post on it). Essentially, it can provide basic phones with smartphone functionalities with minimal usage cost increase.

The Kalaida platform stems from iSkoot’s acquision of Social.im (September 2008).

iSkoot Technologies is actually a newly-formed corporation that has recently received substantially all of the assets of iSkoot, a San Francisco-based service provider at the intersection of mobile and the internet that was founded back in 2005.

iSkoot will now function as a subsidiary of QuIC, Qualcomm’s subsidiary focused on enabling and optimizing open source software with Qualcomm technologies.

According to the press release, the company will focus on continued support of its current customers, integrating its offerings with Qualcomm’s products and developing open source data management contributions for mobile devices.

iSkoot had raised $32.2 million in venture capital from leading investors like Khosla Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

The company is led by Mark Jacobstein, who most recently served as the EVP at Loopt. Before joining Loopt, Jacobstein was the founding President for Digital Chocolate, one of the world's largest publishers of mobile games.

Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm Innovation Center, commented on the buy thusly:

“QuIC’s acquisition of iSkoot provides us with a push data services platform, a social network aggregation solution and voice 2.0 services that dramatically strengthens our ability to continue providing the most effective mobile solutions for operators and device makers as they serve consumers worldwide.”

Sounds like a good fit, although I’d be curious to know what QuIC spent on iSkoot, exactly.

Here’s a video of AT&T’s Social Net service, powered by iSkoot:

Exclusive -When Jason tried out online music streaming startup Grooveshark’s iPhone app in July 2009, he wrote that it was great but that he "wouldn't expect this to pop up in the App Store any time soon". He was right, and last February the company got so fed up with waiting for Apple that they released the app for jailbroken iPhones on third-party application store Cydia.

But last August, Apple suddenly changed its tune and approved Grooveshark for iPhone, which hit the App Store soon after.

But less than a week later, Apple received a complaint from Universal Music Group UK about the app, prompting Cupertino to yank it off the store.

At the time, the company said that it wouldn’t sleep until they figured out exactly how to fix this and get Grooveshark for iPhone back in the App Store. Fast forward two months and Grooveshark is back to where it started: releasing the app on Cydia.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone and this news fills you with joy, let me make you even happier: Grooveshark has continued to work on the music streaming application, and has released a completely new 2.0 version.

What that means:

- a complete redesign, with retina display graphics for iOS 4.
- multitasking support.
- search results can be filtered by song, album, artist, as well as playlists made by other users.
- Instead of/in addition to searching for a song, playing it, and hitting radio off that tune, Grooveshark for iPhone now boasts a bunch of pre-built genre radio stations listeners can get instantly.
- Users can also save radio sessions they’ve listened to and save user-made stations based on an artist they dig that they can come back to.

Grooveshark also just updated its Android app for good measure.

Startup 7 Degrees, the developer of social business application PeopleMaps, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Rho Ventures, vSpring Capital and Parkview Ventures. This investment brings the company’s total funding to $8 million.

Founded in 2007, 7 Degrees has developed a powerful and mature graph database. PeopleMaps is the first application developed by the startup that leverages this technology. PeopleMaps, which launched in October of 2009, aims to give professionals direct visibility into how they are connected to any person or company.

The application allows users to automatically search their personal contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo, while simultaneously searching data from public Internet sources. The application's graph engine then analyzes all of this data to determine "connection paths" to any person or company, which lets you see how you are connected to any person or company. PeopleMaps also pulls in bios of individuals (when they are public info).

The technology is particularly useful in CRM applications, allowing salespeople to determine discover the "key connectors" in their network, and prioritize their sales pipeline based on the strength of relationships so they can focus on the deals most likely to move forward quickly. The startup says that recruiters have also been using the application as well.

So, The Europas are back.We'll be honouring the best in tech across the web and mobile scene from across Europe. The awards will be in London on November 19 - grab a ticket right now. The Europas is all about geting together and celebrating the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own (check out the pictures and video from last year). The categories we'll be judging are:

If you’re going to be testing unmarked automated cars in the field, inevitably people will get curious and – because it’s 2010 and all – whip out their video cameras or cellphones to record them in action. If you’re Robert Scoble, you’ll even do it while driving.

Hence the video of Google’s awesome automated Toyota Prius cars we posted earlier (as well as Scoble’s).

But here’s one that was captured last March at the Googleplex, stopping for a red light, giving the guy who recorded the video (hat tip to Van Tucker) the chance to get some close-ups of the car and the sensor that’s mounted on top.

I’m terribly excited about the prospects of automated cars becoming the trend in, say, a decade or so. And you’ll get to brag that you watched one of the first videos of Google testing the technology on the road back in 2010. Unless it flops, of course, in which case you’ll still get to say you watched a video of another thing Google cooked up but never got anywhere.

Still, kudos for the desire to innovate, you Mountain View idealists you.

Grocery shopping comparison site mySupermarket.co.uk has raised a third round of funding, bringing total financing to date to $21.4M. The $7.4 Series C round came courtesy of existing investors Greylock Israel and Pitango Venture Capital.

The company has also brought on-board Allon Bloch, previously President and Co-CEO at Wix, where he will remain on the company’s board.

Now averaging one million unique monthly users, mySupermarket lets its users compare prices of single items, and more importantly, entire carts, when ordering online in four leading UK supermarket chains. As we noted in our first review of the company:

mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury's, Ocado & ASDA.

It can compare not only identical items (a one-liter bottle of Coke), but also similar non-identical items, such one-liter bottles of mineral water from two separate brands. To accomplish this, mySupermarket classified 100,000 grocery products sold online in the UK according to multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The rules, weightings and relationships between different sub-criteria are incorporated into the company's algorithms.

Along with its third round financing, mySupermarket is also announcing it has brought Allon Bloch on-board to take up the CEO position from the company’s founder, Amir Ofer, who will remain with the company as President. Bloch jumps over from Wix, where he acted as Co-CEO and President. His departure by all accounts is an amicable one and he will remain active with the company as a member of its Board of Directors. Before Wix, Bloch was Partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners where he focused on early-stage software and Web companies.

As for his new role at mySupermarket, Bloch has expressed to me his excitement over the company’s future product roadmap which will take advantage of what he claimed to be a ‘tremendous data layer’ of user behavior. We’ll be sure to keep tabs on mySupermarket as it rolls out service enhancements in the coming months.

Today the US Patent and Trademark Office approved a patent Apple filed in 2008, which, get this, prevents users from sending or receiving “objectionable” text messages.  The patent’s official title? “Text-based communication control for personal communication device” which actually doesn’t use the pretty ridiculous noun/verb “Sexting,” but come on, we all know what they mean.

The “Sexting” patent background info states that the problem it solves is that there is currently “No way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.”

And the patent itself:

In one embodiment, the control application includes a parental control application. The parental control application evaluates whether or not the communication contains approved text based on, for example, objective ratings criteria or a user’s age or grade level, and, if unauthorized, prevents such text from being included in the text-based communication.

If the control contains unauthorized text, the control application may alert the user, the administrator or other designated individuals of the presence of such text. The control application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text or may automatically delete the text or the entire communication.

Ladies and gentlemen this means that Jobs and company have just sealed the deal on a solution to the number one fear of parents across America, kids sending “unauthorized texts.” As it looks like whatever algorithm or control the system is comprised of will basically censor the transmission of R-rated content on iPhones, is this the first sign of the end of “Sexting” as we know it?

Yes and no, as those interesting in “Sexting” will probably find some clever workaround to express how much they want to bang, screw, hit it or a myriad of other words that don’t immediately set off the censorship sensors.

On a positive note, it looks like whatever it is preventing kids from sending salacious texts will also help them learn languages, just not the perverted words.

 

Image: Skampy

One thing you have to respect about Yahoo’s board of directors – no matter how much the press criticizes them for making painfully awful strategic decisions, they keep their chin up and at least maintain some level of basic decorum. The Hewlett Packard board has no such qualms. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard must be turning in their graves.

Clearly the board feels as though they are unjustifiably under fire from the press over the firing of CEO Mark Hurd, and the New York Times in particular. But they’re fighting back in a way that is unbecoming. And the fight seems to be more about making the board of directors feel better about themselves as individuals, rather than acting in the best interest of the company that they have a duty to serve.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera has been the guy in front of the Anti-HP parade. In this zinger – titled H.P.’s Blundering Board – Nocera doesn’t criticize the H.P. board for firing Hurd, but he does criticize them for suing Hurd after he joined Oracle as president.

And H.P. deserved that criticism. They really stepped in it with the lawsuit.

And Nocera put a target squarely on his chest with that post. Soon Ben Horowitz, business partner to H.P. board member Marc Andreessen, was preaching about business ethics and how right H.P. was to fire Hurd. Nocera was named in that blog post, but nowhere was there a discussion of the lawsuit that most irked Nocera.

Horowitz disclosed his conflict of interest, which was the correct thing to do – that post was the H.P. board’s first volley against press that had been critical of them.

Then came incoming chairman Ray Lane’s complaint to the New York Times, strategically leaked to press, that claims Nocera “grossly mischaracterizes the facts about why Mark Hurd had to leave HP.” This letter referred to a second article by Nocera, mostly questioning H.P.’s decision to hire Léo Apotheker as their new CEO.

And once again Hurd was dragged through the mud. And called a liar. Classy.

That was the second attack by the H.P. board against Nocera.

But they’re not done. And this time they’ve got a real hook. Nocera screwed up and didn’t disclose a rather large conflict of interest, that his fiance is the director of communications for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm that represents Oracle in its suit against SAP.

That was the knockout punch. Nocera is done talking about H.P., I’d wager. And a statement has been added to the end of his last article by the New York Times:

In the Talking Business column in Business Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera wrote about a lawsuit by Oracle against a division of SAP, claiming theft of intellectual property. Mr. Nocera learned after the column was published that Oracle was represented by the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where his fiancée works as director of communications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Mr. Nocera would not have written about the case if he had known of the law firm's involvement.

Nocera’s conflict of interest aside (this is the gotcha type of conflict, not something that likely had any real impact on what he wrote), one thing is clear. If you’re press and you’re criticizing H.P., watch out. They’ll hit you back, and keep hitting until you’re done.

Those of us in the news business love to cat fight occasionally, and I’ve taken more than a few jabs at the New York Times over the years. But this is different. It smells like bullying, and I don’t like it one bit.

Tonight, social network platform Ning is giving users a new, more customizable way to interact with their social networks with the launch of Ning Everywhere.

Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal says that network creators were asking for three major improvements in the Ning experience. First, users wanted to be able to take experience of Ning and bring it to any device. Second, creators wanted to take data and content from their networks and use this data outside of Ning. And third, users wanted to be able to write custom apps on top of networks that add functionality and features to networks that Ning doesn’t provide. Thus, Ning Everywhere was born.

The first part of Ning Everywhere involves mobile applications. Ning has developed partnerships with several mobile application creation platforms, including Mobile Roadie, Double Dutch and AppMakr, to allow network creators to create branded iPhone and Android apps for Ning Networks. For example, Mobile Roadie developed the Linkin Park iPhone app that includes integration with the band’s Ning network.

Ning Everywhere’s second pillar involves Ning Extensions which allows network creators to integrated Seesmic, Constant Contact, Aviary, and Skimlinks on Ning Networks. Ning already added branded product creator Cafepress and social gaming startup HeyZap as ways for creators to monetize off of the site.

Seesmic’s integration allows users to follow a Ning network activity from Seesmic’s desktop application as well as post status updates to networks. Email marketing software Constant Contact allows network creators to integrate member contact information into the service and also enabled delivery of email newsletters. Design suite application Aviary gives network creators graphic design and audio and effects editing tools. And Skimlinks will give users the ability to run affiliate marketing campaigns, giving creators the ability to automatically convert words and normal links into affiliate links.

Lastly, with a new version of the Ning API, Network Creators can build their own applications off of the platform.

Ning has been through a tumultuous year, suffering layoffs and shuttering its free service. In May, Ning rolled out the different paid models for its platform, Ning Pro, Ning Plus and Ning Mini. But the dust has finally settled and Ning is seeing a large uptick in its paid subscribers.

The platform now has over 70,000 paid subscribers, up from 15,000 from before transition from the freemium model. Rosenthal says that the network is currently seeing 80 million monthly unique visitors globally.

Here at the i/o Ventures incubator, a.k.a “a really geeky cafe” on Valencia Street in San Francisco six i/o Ventures companies have just wrapped up giving their demo presentations to press and investors. While the companies are comprised of some that we’ve written about before and some that haven’t yet launched (we’re looking at you Skyara), because I couldn’t wait I’ve decided to publish my rough notes on the companies presenting below, with links to our previous coverage provided:

Appbistro — Our coverage —  A marketplace for Facebook business related apps, Appbistro attempts to circumvent some of the challenges around Facebook fan pages. Appbistro, which eventually wants to build an app store for any service that has an API gives brands an alternative to spending thousands of dollars to market their apps, through an app store that lets users rate and review apps for businesses, which Facebook does not yet provide. The market is huge: Currently there are 20 million Facebook fan pages and half of them are for local businesses. App Bistro intends to monetize with a 70/30 revenue split with the companies as well as listing fees and sponsored placement.

Socialvision — Our coverage — SocialVision believes that the future of video viewing is in what they call “Viewing Parties” and their consumer app, YouTube Social allows you to invite your friends through Facebook in order to watch a video simultaneously. Currently partnering with Direct TV, Social Vision intends to monetize by providing platforms for content companies to hold their own viewing parties.

Anomaly — Anomaly is an attempt to “make the web personal” by providing an algorithm that serves up users with a personalized curated evolution of the web, which is a never ending firehose of information. The Anomaly algorithm finds out what you’re interested and serves it up in order of relevance. Their recent Twitter application thecadmus.com was hailed as “a newsfeed for Twitter” and apparently increased Twitter user stream engagement by a multiple of three.

Damntheradio — Our coverage –“If you’re going to promote anything you need to have a social media presence,” says Johnny Hwin founder of rewards-based marketing platform Damntheradio, which has been cash flow positive since July. Capitalizing on the universal need to GET MORE FANS, Damntheradio helps businesses reward fans in exchange for their social actions such as “liking” a fan page. Currently just on Facebook, the Damntheradio social reward platform eventually wants to help businesses connect across all consumer touch points, social networks like Foursquare and Twitter, mobile, Google TV, and eventually the Google car. :-)

Skyara — Skyara, which hasn’t launched yet is an Etsy/Airbnb for experiences, targeting people who ask, “What is there to do?” Businesses who have experiences to offer can connect with people looking for things to do. An experience recommendation engine, Skyara has the potential to offer cool food experiences in SF beyond Opentable, like going go to a beer tasting with i/o Ventures partner Paul Bragiel for example. Despite it’s still being in stealth mode, Skyara has already has a populated marketplace and bevy of business offerings.

AppRats — AppRats are Facebook apps that cater to different brand of celebrity than that of TV, and radio, on the assumption that YouTube celebrities need different set of skills for the Internet and providing platforms for celebrities who want to engage with fans via Facebook app. AppRats currently works with 50 of the top 100 YouTube celebrities and hopes to add more to the list.

Here’s our interview with i/o Ventures founder Paul Bragiel, below:

We are inundated with so many social streams that it is easy to forget where exactly we read something. For instance, there was a story earlier today on Twitter showing better clickthrough rates than Facebook. I know I saw it somewhere, but was it Twitter, Facebook, or in an email? It’s easy enough to search the open Web, but how do you search all of your personal information streams at once?

Introspectr, a personal search engine still in private beta, is part of a new class of startups trying to tackle this problem. (The first 100 people to click on this link will get an invite). You give Introspectr access to your Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail accounts, and it indexes them for you, along with the content of any email attachments or the underlying pages of any links. Then you can just search for any term and up come all the Tweets, emails, and Facebook messages where that might appear.

Another startup in this class is Greplin, which is a Y Combinator startup we’ve covered before. I’ve tried both. Neither one gets it exactly right, but they both point in the right direction. For instance, Greplin does not index the pages that people you follow are linking to. So unless the keyword you are searching for is in their Tweet, you are out of luck. But if someone Tweets, “Check this out” with a link to an article about clickthrough rates, Introspectr should be able to catch that.

Introspectr, however, doesn’t seem to update its index in realtime. You have to do that manually if you are searching for recent Tweets, or emails. And it doesn’t yet search your Facebook News feed, only your inbox messages. Doing a few random searches of words in my Twitter stream, Introspectr is hit or miss (for some reason Greplin isn’t showing me any Twitter results even though it shows that my Twitter account is supposedly indexed). When it finds the right Tweets or emails, it’s great. But this is really a feature Twitter should have. As part of Twitter search, you should be able to search only your own stream. And Google or Bing should add a similar type of social search functionality to their larger search engines. It’s such an obvious feature. But until they do that (which could be years), startups like Introspectr and Greplin are paving the way.

At least it did me. Touted by co-founder Sachin Agarwal as a one stop shop for all your sharing needs, the Posterous app (now available in the App store) is extremely intuitive to use, and you don’t even need a Posterous to use it to start uploading photos, video and text, which, if you’ve enabled the Posterous “Autopost” feature will also post to your Facebook, Twitter as well as 26 other social sites including Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Vimeo and Tumblr.

While you might be experiencing iPhone share fatigue (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblrette, WordPress and many others allow you to upload content directly from your phone) Posterous has always modeled itself on providing its pretty fanatical userbase with ease of use, the original idea of the service being that you could send an email to post@posterous.com and get a blog back, to which you the could send any other subsequent posts to post@sitename.posterous.com.

The Posterous mobile app takes off on this basic “no need to log in” philosophy, but supports geolocational tags, category tags and various levels of editing and privacy. And despite being buggy at points (one of my test posts posted twice, which was confusing), it’s pretty impressive how much you can actually do from the app (for example I set up my whole Posterous account) as opposed to WordPress, which has the effect of making you feel immobilized when blogging on the go because it does not allow you to upload media other than photos and lacks social sharing functions.

Winning “Keep It Simple Stupid” product strategy aside, it’s really hard not to root for the YC-backed Posterous; Their recent skuffle with Twitpic solidified them as champions of user portability which is always a crowd pleaser. Their user traffic has also risen accordingly boasting a 40% increase since June.

Currently funded at $5.14 million, Posterous’ future plans for the iPhone app include building the ability to directly edit posts from the app, landscape post viewing, multiple photo selection and showing attachments as actual thumbnails.

In the age of location updates, status updates, and tweets, it’s a wonder that more people aren’t out there stalking celebrities. I mean, people were doing that long before any of these services existed, and these new tools make it significantly easier. And now comes another new tool to make celebrity real time tracking even easier: JustSpotted.

Obviously, they’re not positioning the tool to be used for stalking. Instead, it’s meant to give fans an idea of what their favorite celebrities are up to at any given moment. Oh look, George Clooney is in Spain right now. Angelina Jolie is in France. And it’s being billed as a way for celebrities to better connect with their fans.

So how does JustSpotted get this celebrity location information? It’s a combination of data from Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, alongside their own data they’ll be collecting from users who actual spot celebrities in the wild.

The service, which is launching in one week, is the latest creation by AJ Asver, Dilan Jarawardane and Benjamin Tauber. If you’ve heard any of their names before, perhaps it’s because you’ve heard of Scoopler, the real time search engine that launched amid some fanfare back in early 2009 and got backing from Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and a few others.

But just like former rival OneRiot this morning, Scoopler is now ditching real time search in favor of this more focused JustSpotted idea. “We’re using the technology we developed while working on real time search to aggregate all the sightings, Twitter updates, status updates, news articles, blog posts — pretty much everything on the web related to a celebrity and put it all on one destination site,” Asver tells us.

“We’re using technology to refresh a space that really hasn’t changed that much since TMZ and Perez Hilton moved in and started blogging.  We’re able to aggregate and produce 100X more content that most of these sites but without having to hire a huge team of reporters,” he continues.

Obviously, celebrity news/information is big business so this pivot seems like a smart one. We should know more about how well it actually works next week, but for now, these are the core features of JustSpotted:

• The JustSpotted "Globe Spotters" map, which shows real-time celebrity sightings from around the world. By aggregating the information available from all other services (Twitter, Foursquare, etc) with the reported sightings by fans, JustSpotted has created a fluid world map that will allow you to easily see where your favorite celebrities are right now.
• One-stop destination for over 700 celebrity sightings everyday; this is 100x more than any other celebrity news site..
• Editorial team to produce engaging breaking news content based on the incoming sightings and updates
• Up to the minute user updates for celebrity fans in real-time

These days, it seems that every startup worth its salt (or at least, a lot of them) are offering some sort of API — an interface that allows third-party developers to interact with the startup’s data. The benefits to offering an API are clear: a developer community can build cool stuff on top of your service faster than your company can, and you can hopefully build a greater userbase as a result.

Once you have a community building on your API it’s obviously a good idea to showcase the apps they’ve built to users, but this can get tricky — it’s not trivial to manage a directory of apps. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist AppBistro wants to make this easier, and tonight it’s previewing a product called AppBistro AppStores at I/O Ventures Demo Day that may be one solution.

CEO Ryan Merket says that companies often consider creating a directory of applications that are tapping into their API, but give up when they realize how much legwork is involved. AppBistro already had to solve this problem to build its core product, which is a Facebook Page app marketplace. And with AppStores, the startup is going to whitelabel this underlying technology so that other companies can quickly launch their own directories.

So what exactly does this technology entail? Merket says that most of the front-end work would be fairly trivial for another company to build itself, but that the AppStores system will include features like threaded commenting to facilitate communication between a service and its third-party dev community, and queues to help ingest new apps. AppBistro will also allow other companies to use its payments system, so they could conceivably monetize by selling these third-party apps built on top of their APIs.

Merket thinks that most services will initially use these AppStores to promote third-party apps for free, but there’s definitely a trend toward selling web apps at a premium (see Google’s upcoming Chrome Web Store, for example). And it isn’t hard to imagine a world where a web service gives a third-party app living on its API some prime directory real estate in exchange for a cut of their proceeds.

The feature isn’t live yet —it will launch in November with a handful of beta partners including email marketing firm Constant Contact (Zappos is in talks with AppBistro as well), with plans to launch the white-label platform more broadly in the next few months (there’s a waiting list here). In addition to the AppStores product, AppBistro also intends to keep pushing forward with its core Facebook app market.

File this under “ask and ye shall receive part two.” Reid Hoffman– uber angel turned Greylock partner– will be my guest on Ask a VC this week.

There are plenty of things to ask Hoffman about. He was an angel investor in some of the most pivotal Web 2.0 companies, including Friendster, Facebook, Six Apart, Digg, Zynga and LinkedIn, which he co-founded.

Hoffman was heavily courted by most top tier VC firms for years, and many people were surprised when he finally capitulated and joined Greylock rather than starting his own firm ala fellow Web mastermind Marc Andreessen. I plan to ask him what was so special about Greylock, and about the new seed fund launched at Disrupt.

What do you want to know? Email you questions to AskaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com.