Zimbalam brings mass distibution to indie musicians

Zimbalam, which launched in Europe in 2009 to help artists get their music widely distributed without a lot of work, opened its doors to US stores this week, meaning any artist using Zimbalam can now sell their music in the United States.

Zimbalam promises to distribute an artist’s music across multiple services, from Spotify and eMusic to behemoths like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon. The company is hooked into 35 different outlets, which lead to hundreds … Continue Reading

BeanJar brings real-world rewards for video game winners

BeanJar is a new game awards company that launched in the last week, and competing today as a finalist in the startup competition at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco.

The company’s goal is to create a rewards system for video games, giving real prizes to players for their accomplishments in a game.

The system works a lot like tickets at an arcade, but in this case, they’re called “Beans.” You get a certain number … Continue Reading

DataXu raises $11M to serve the right ad, right now

As the Internet is getting faster, with everything coming and going in real-time, advertising is playing catch-up. DataXu (said like “data zoo”), an advertising startup that optimizes ads in real time, today announced $11 million in funding to continue doing just that.

DataXu’s mission is to optimize the placement of ads on the Web, in real time. Its algorithm considers more than 100 factors for every single impression an ad gets, from time of day … Continue Reading

ShoutEm brings mobile social networking to screaming fans and more

Social networking, on a scale as large as Twitter and Facebook, is great for connecting with people and finding information. It’s not very good for finding people with common interests, and talking about those interests.

That’s why, even with the big players dominating, sites like Ning have found success by letting people create intentionally small social networks, usually designed for people with a common interest –- Twilight books, ska music, microbrew beer, or anything else … Continue Reading

TradeDesk brings trading to more people and platforms

Thanks to sites like E-Trade, more and more people are handling their own investing, trading and tracking their money instead of paying someone else to do it for them. Easy-Forex, a worldwide foreign exchange trading company, is making that even easier with its new product, TradeDesk.

Upon launch today, TradeDesk already has a desktop application and an iPhone application, with Blackberry and Android versions on the way, all designed to make trading easy, quick, and … Continue Reading

Spark Radio launches for iPhone, brings radio and the Internet together at last

By now, most radio stations have started broadcasting online, meaning you can listen from anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection. For whatever reason, though, that fantastic feature hasn’t really found its way to where we normally listen to the radio — in the car or in our living room.

But now Spark Radio, a brand new $6 app in the iPhone App Store, is bringing the advantages of radio and the Internet together to make … Continue Reading

Open standards win again: Google drops Gears for HTML5

Google announced this weekend that it’s going to be ending support for Google Gears, its product for allowing offline access to applications like Gmail and Google Docs.

Instead of developing Gears, Google said in a blog post it will be focusing on using HTML5 to support offline capabilities from within the applications themselves, rather than needing an add-on like Gears.

Google will continue to support Gears, because “Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such … Continue Reading

Cherry Deals lets you buy real goods to get virtual ones

Virtual goods, whether you’re buying raspberries for your Farmville or any number of equivalent purchases, are a gigantic and growing source of revenue for companies trying to make money on Facebook and other social gaming sites.

Taking full advantage, Peanut Labs Media, a company helping social and massively multiplayer game companies monetize, just launched Cherry Deals, to make buying virtual goods a little easier and a little more rewarding. Peanut Labs combines a few elements … Continue Reading

Weopia makes virtual dating more personal, less awkward

Online dating is firmly entrenched as a viable option for meeting potential partners, but it has plenty of drawbacks. Try as they might, profiles, match quotients, and algorithms can’t do nearly what even a few minutes of face-to-face conversation can.

Weopia wants to close that gap by allowing users to go on virtual dates. That gives people the opportunity to chat and talk informally, but without the pressure of a real date, before actually meeting … Continue Reading

Flickr founder launches Glitch, makes the world a game

Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has just opened a massively-multiplayer, browser-based game called Glitch to alpha testers, giving the world a taste of what Glitch might look like.

There are essentially two schools of multiplayer gaming right now. Massively-multiplayer games, most notably World of Warcraft, have been popular for a long time. They typically have huge worlds, tons of players, and a never-ending number of things you can do and … Continue Reading

Micello guides Valentine's shoppers, and anyone else, through the world's indoors

Micello, an ambitious startup trying to map the world’s indoors and create location-based services around them, is leading the pack of companies mapping the buildings where we spend our time, banking on the fact that getting where you’re going is only half the battle.

Micello’s also promoting itself for Valentine’s Day, providing a way to get to the mall, and search for stores that have chocolates, flowers, or gifts for your loved ones. During a … Continue Reading

PAYware mobilizes credit card buying, takes on Square

As business and commerce go mobile, payment technology is playing catch-up, trying to come up with a simple and powerful way to allow businesses to accept credit card payments on the go (because who even uses cash anymore?).

One possible answer is PAYware, the mobile-payment system coming from point-of-sale giant VeriFone. PAYware finally saw its app go live in the iPhone App Store today, bringing its secure credit card transactions to the iPhone, and making … Continue Reading

Android developers mostly American; Windows Mobile developers mostly greedy

Distimo, a company that sells tools for app store analytics, released today its December Report, a State of the Union of application development, with a number of interesting findings about who’s developing apps and what they’re selling them for.

Much of what Distimo focused on was the geography of application developers. They found some surprising numbers. A full 65% of application developers in the Android Market are in the United States. Distimo thinks the number … Continue Reading

Aloqa 2.0 expands its location-based info app

Aloqa, a mobile application that serves up local information to users based on their location, has released version 2.0 of its offering. The new version brings more local knowledge and social information to its nearly 300,000 users.

Aloqa, available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones, is all about helping you discover the world around you—no matter where you are. Aloqa can find nearby stores, hospitals, movie showtimes and more, … Continue Reading

Meeting facilitator TimeBridge launches pro version

TimeBridge, the company devoted to making business meetings easier by connecting your calendar with others’ regardless of what software they’re using, today launched TimeBridge Business Plus, a premium version of of the service that adds a number of new features for businesses large and small.

TimeBridge’s new offering is all about making your meetings better. In addition to the initial product, which coordinates schedules of employees whether they use Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal or something … Continue Reading

BumpTop launches for Mac, turns your desktop into your desk (+100 free accounts)

Look at your computer desktop. Everything’s clean, rigid, in nice neat rows and columns. Now look at your desk (or at least mine): piles everywhere, mess galore, and yet, somehow, it works much better than the computer version.

BumpTop thinks it can bridge that gap, making your desktop behave more like your desk. An application that launched initially in April of 2009, BumpTop is launching a Mac version today. There’s been a Windows version since … Continue Reading

VEVO, the Web’s MTV, is winning the music wars

VEVO, the music video portal that launched in conjunction with YouTube and a number of music labels in December of 2009, is bringing back the glory days of music videos. And, based on its meteoric rise to the top of the online music charts even after a shaky at best launch, it’s working.

In December, VEVO had 35 million visitors to its site, and 13 billion videos viewed across all of its sites, mostly from … Continue Reading

The best from CES (so far)

CES 2010 is in full swing this week in Las Vegas, with the biggest companies in the tech world showing off their best and newest technologies. And the product releases have certainly not disappointed.

CES tends to be a good barometer for what’s going to be big in the year to come, and if the trend holds true, here’s a look at what we can look forward to this year:

App Stores for everything

Thanks … Continue Reading

MyLikes lets publishers customize ads for their sites

Two ex-Googlers are launching a brand-new advertising system today called MyLikes. The offering is designed to let publishers pick and choose their ads based on what they think their readers will respond to. The idea is to make advertising and marketing a more personal, conversational medium. A form of MyLikes has been in private beta for a while, but the product is being expanded and publicly launched today.

Here’s how it works: MyLikes signs up … Continue Reading

RegaloCard gets $7M to send gift cards via mobile phones

RegaloCard is announcing today a $7 million round of funding for a free, instant way to send gift cards from the US to friends or family in Latin America.

The service works like this: You buy a RegaloCard gift card — redeemable at certain retailers and restaurants in Latin America — here in the US. You provide the recipient’s mobile phone number, and they immediately receive a text message with a PIN number that can … Continue Reading