VentureBeat

Illegal content. That’s why the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) took down the online music mix tape maker Muxtape yesterday, it said in a statement to Portfolio’s Sam Gustin. While this is hardly surprising to many of us, it’s odd that Muxtape said yesterday that it was under the impression that no artist or label had complained about the music sharing service.

The RIAA paints a different picture:

“For the past several months, we have communicated our legal concerns with the site and repeatedly tried to work with them to have illegal content taken down. Muxtape was hosting copies of copyrighted sound recordings without authorization from the copyright owners. Making these recordings available for streaming playback also requires authorization from the copyright owners. Muxtape has not obtained authorization from our member companies to host or stream copies of their sound recordings,” the service told Portfolio.

That may throw a cramp in the site’s promise that it will now be closed indefinitely. However, given the hoopla raised about this shutdown, perhaps the labels, artists and RIAA will work with the site for some sort of legal alternative.

As I went into at length yesterday, the whole situation between the RIAA and the proponents of digital music is becoming farcical. The RIAA shut down Muxtape, but several other alternatives will undoubtedly rise up soon. Some already have, including the startup 8tracks which basically uses Internet radio rules (that copyrighted tracks can be played as long as they are streamed and the user can’t pick what track is next) to circumvent the RIAA.

There are also more questionably legal alternatives in MixWit and Favtape.

VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall and I attended the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday, where we were both pretty blown away.

Okay, so I’m easy to impress, but Matt’s a tougher nut to crack — just ask some of the start-ups who’ve been on the receiving end of his criticism. Yesterday, however, both of us found ourselves constantly saying, “Wow, that looks cool.”

Y Combinator is a Mountain View-based incubator company that funds and nurtures early-stage start-ups, then unveils them twice a year at its demo days. Of today’s 19 presenting companies, here’s our roundup of the 10 most promising, innovative or just plain cool ones (our favorites, from top down), followed by brief descriptions of everyone else.

Matt and I argued this out between ourselves, and we also tried to get some sense of the buzz among others who attended. Still, these are just first impressions. If you’re impressed by any of the companies, let us know in the comments.

The Top 10:

1. Deluux — Deluux’s goal is to bring the functionality of Facebook and other social networks to any page on the web. The company is in stealth, so all we can say is that it’s very promising. Co-founder Paul Mckellar says the company’s goal isn’t to replace Facebook, but rather to extend its “viral mechanisms” to the web at large (which is a vision that Facebook itself has, in some sense). Mckellar previously developed Socialmoth, a freestanding website that became a successful Facebook application last year.

2. 8aweek — 8aweek wants to make you (or, perhaps, your employees) more productive, and tracks your web-browsing habits to do so. There are plenty of other companies claiming to do this, including another one presenting today (see below), but what 8aweek adds is a bunch of other tools that will make greater productivity a reality. For example, you can draw up a list of sites you’ve identified as addictive, but giant time sinks (Myspace, Facebook, for example), and then set a timer that reminds you or even boots you off entirely when you’ve been on for too long (you choose when the timer goes off; see screenshot below). 8aweek does a lot more. It can also filter out a lot of the “noise” on a website by removing the items you’ve already read, and it can point you to those items and links that are the most popular. For a job like mine, where procrastination and research start to bleed into each other, I can definitely use 8aweek to make sure I don’t spend too much time on Valleywag. The service launched last month.

3. Wundrbar — Wundrbar bills itself as a next generation search bar. It looks a lot like the main Google page, but instead of just using the bar to search for results, it makes the bar a command line of sorts: For example, you can type “Amazon Harry Potter” and it’ll take you to the Amazon search results for Harry Potter. It allows you to perform basic tasks on other websites too, interpreting words in a way that is most intuitive. In some cases, you don’t even need to leave the Wundrbar home page — you can type “twitter going to san diego!” and it’ll automatically send out a Twitter message about your trip. The service is available now, and the company hopes others will use Wundrbar as a platform, adding the functionality of other websites. It wants to make money from referrals and targeted advertising.

4. FathomDB — We can’t say anything about this company, because it’s still in stealth mode, but keep an eye out. It’s definitely drawing a lot of buzz. A venture capitalist with DFJ remarked that it was his personal favorite.

5. 280 North — 280 North hopes to create a full suite of online tools that have the richness of desktop applications like Microsoft Office. So far, the company has made a PowerPoint-style presentation creator. The founders cop to the fact that they’ve aped PowerPoint’s interface, but the product benefits from being online. The great thing here is that you can build it all online, but ship presentations as PowerPoint files to people (something you can’t do with, say, a Google presentation).

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