MusikPitch to help songwriters compete for contracts

A startup that allows songwriters to compete for custom music licensing contracts is launching today. The Nashville, Tenn., company, MusikPitch, promises to match songwriters with people or companies looking for custom music via “contests.” A “contest holder” wanting to license a particular piece of music specifies what it’s looking for, including requirements such as song length, genre and budget, and songwriters then compete over a 14-day period to meet those requirements.

Songwriters submit their tracks, … Continue Reading

Criteo brings its personalized banner ads to US, launches new pricing program

Criteo, a company that helps online businesses retarget customers who’ve left their site without making a purchase, relocated its headquarters from Paris, France to Palo Alto, Calif. four months ago and has just launched a new offering, PPC Retargeting Solution.

Criteo lets its customers personalize display ads to re-engage with visitors to their sites. The new PPC Retargeting Solution features a performance-based CPC (cost per click) model. Criteo charges only when users actually click on … Continue Reading

Yelp CEO teams up with event site Eventbrite as investor, strategic advisor

Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of business-recommendation site Yelp, has joined the board of advisors for event-management site Eventbrite. He has also invested an unspecified amount in the company, according to a press release from Eventbrite. Stoppelman will serve as a strategic advisor, contributing his experience in local market development and social media.

Eventbrite, which allows eventholders to create and manage ticketing online, has focused much of its growth strategy on social media. It will … Continue Reading

The Movie Tracker joins crowded movie recommendation space

Movie-recommendation startup The Movie Tracker launched recently, adding to a crowded recommendation and social media space that includes TasteKid, The Auteurs, Trusted Opinion, Jinni, Flixster, and of course Netflix, among others. The site is still working out some of its bugs, but here’s how it works: You sign in and select at least 5 movies you’ve watched — the more you select, the more the service’s algorithm will have more to work with — and … Continue Reading

Hitwise: People get their news from Facebook and Google — not Twitter

The value of Twitter when it comes to breaking news and eyewitness reports has been discussed as length (evidenced by CNN’s race to get the most followers, and the buzz surrounding the site’s role in the Iran protests last year), but its impact on the news and media may be overestimated. According to traffic monitoring service Hitwise, Twitter doesn’t even come close to Google News and Facebook when it comes to where people actually get … Continue Reading

Legal River launches lawyer-to-lawyer referral service

Online legal tool platform Legal River launched Attorney River today to connect attorneys to other attorneys. Attorneys can use the service to post requests for other attorneys. Once a lawyer posts a request, for example for outsourcing work or looking for a specialist in a different state, Attorney River alerts all lawyers with matching profiles and allows them to respond through the service.

Attorneys can register and post issues to the site for free, but … Continue Reading

Cardagin to digitize loyalty cards for local businesses

I have tons of loyalty cards in my wallet and am always forgetting about them or leaving them at home and collecting yet another punch card when I return to the same retailer. While this is annoying for me, it’s costly for businesses, especially small ones.

Cardagin Networks aims to solve that problem. Its mobile platform digitizes loyalty card programs for small businesses, with a focus on college towns. It also allows local businesses to … Continue Reading

Go for a virtual run in Yosemite, hear your own footsteps

Have you ever thought how cool it would be if your treadmill could take you on a virtual jog through nature so you could watch something more scenic than the gym wall while you run? Well, your day is coming.

Virtual Active, which lets you access a library of running, hiking, and biking workouts filmed live in beautiful outdoor locations, is releasing a free half hour sample of its virtual exercise experience for download on … Continue Reading

Robo.to launches video-status update app on Android

Particle, the company that claims to “make massively small products that shorten the distance between the internet and awesome,” is launching its Robo.to Android application today. It can be downloaded here: http://robo.to/welcome/android. Robo.to lets users share 4-second video status updates — without sound but with captions — from their mobile phone, and also syncs their Robo.to profile with mobile address book contacts.

Robo.to launched in May 2009 as a web application with social network integration, … Continue Reading

Eventbrite launches discounted service for non-profits

Event management site Eventbrite launched a new service today for non-profits. Eventbrite for Causes is open to all US-based non-profits with 501(c)(3) status. It will charge non-profits 2% of the event ticket price plus 99 cents per ticket sold (the normal rate is 2.5% of the ticket price plus 99 cents per ticket sold).

Eventbrite’s new service lets attendees to an event share their attendance plans and make donations via social networks such as Facebook … Continue Reading

Citrify launches browser-based photo editor

Citrify launched a free, browser-based photo editor earlier this week, that lets you pretty up your headshot by removing blemishes, erasing wrinkles and whitening teeth. It also lets you add effects to pictures — for example, you can Obamify your picture based on Shepard Fairey’s widespread red and blue image. The company launched a desktop version in November 2009, but it didn’t catch on, so the team spent the last few months improving the service … Continue Reading

Pixable launches Photo Mosaics tool

Online photo service Pixable is launching a new Photo Mosaics feature today, which lets users select an image and then use a number of their other photos, in a smaller size, to turn the selected image into a mosaic. This photo mosaic can be shared online for free, but users can also order a higher res print to be delivered to them.

The photo mosaic tool allows users to choose any photo from their Facebook … Continue Reading

Favilous joins crowded social bookmarking space

A young UK-based startup called Favilous has joined the crowded social bookmarking space. It hopes to differentiate itself from the legions of existing bookmarking services by building a community behind the bookmarks, so users can share descriptions of sites and help each other discover new online destinations (see a clip from one of their tour slides below).

On the site, users can see other users’ popular bookmarks as well as the most popular bookmarks in … Continue Reading

Fashion4Home launches social furniture site in the US

Updated.

Furniture site Fashion4Home, which launched in Germany in November of last year, is launching in the US today. The site will offer US shoppers 80 models of contemporary furniture across 12 categories, including exclusive designs, at 30-50% lower than traditional retail prices [update: a spokesperson for the company, tells us its prices are actually 50-70% lower than retail]. The launch comes just a few days after China-based on-demand furniture maker Myfab announced … Continue Reading

ReelSurfer, EduStream partner to enable in-video search of college lectures

ReelSurfer, which lets you search and extract relevant clips from long-form video, has just closed a deal with EduStream, the San Bernardino Community College District’s video portal, to make lectures and other video materials fully searchable by students and faculty.

EduStream is sponsored by the 110 California Community Colleges and their Chancellor’s office. They are working on deploying this fully across 170 institutions across 10 states included in Edustream and plan to launch fully in … Continue Reading

Law site launches online legal tools for entrepreneurs

Today, Legal River and General Counsel, P.C. released a Terms of Service Generator and a Privacy Policy Generator for startups and small businesses.

Legal River’s tools are meant to keep costs low for entrepreneurs as they set up a business; typical terms of service documents can otherwise cost thousands of dollars. An entrepreneur only needs to fill in some basic information, such as the name of the company, information the company receives from a customer … Continue Reading

China-based furniture-on-demand site Myfab expands to US

Myfab, which sells furniture on-demand online, will be launching a US version of its site on February 1. The site already exists in France, where it was first launched in April 2008, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The US site will initially offer shipping only to California, with the 48 contiguous states added in the 4-6 weeks after the soft launch. In anticipation of the launch, the Shanghai, China company opened a US office in San … Continue Reading

Former Ticketmaster CEO joins EventBrite board of directors

Former Ticketmaster President and CEO Sean Moriarty has joined EventBrite’s Board of Directors as a “key strategic advisor.” Moriarty was with Ticketmaster for 12 years, serving in several roles, including COO and Executive Vice President of Product and Technology. Before Ticketmaster, he served as Executive Vice President of Technology and Vice President of Internet Systems at Citysearch.

EventBrite is an events marketplace enabling online event management, promotion and ticket sales.

Since leaving Ticketmaster in March … Continue Reading

Jinni raises $1.6M for online movie "taste engine"

Updated.

Israeli startup Jinni, which calls itself a “Pandora for movies” in reference to popular music-recommendation service Pandora, has raised $1.6M from DFJ Tamir Fishman in a first round of institutional funding. Where Pandora uses subject experts for its music recommendations, Jinni’s technology crawls the web and picks up movie reviews and metadata and uses natural language processing tools to tag films and tv shows according to what’s being said about them.

Users click on … Continue Reading

Gadget advice site Measy will tell you which smartphone to buy

Gadget-recommendation service Measy launched a smartphone tool this week to help users find the perfect smartphone based on their needs. The engine asks users their ideal price as well as the importance of several factors including carrier, functionality (business, texting, apps and software, video/camera), customer service, and speed. It then recommends one of over 60 smartphones in the engine.

Measy’s technology pulls quotes about specific characteristics from review sources their editor-in-chief deems trustworthy, scores each … Continue Reading