VentureBeat

ImageSpan hopes to make a mint by counting up the pennies that artists and media companies are owed every time someone downloads a song or plays a video over the internet.

One of the nightmares of the digital age is how to track what an artist is owed by all of the people who use that artist’s work online. Currently, that problem of tracking usage and royalties is solved using an army of attorneys. It often takes a year to settle the books.

Now, Sausalito, Calif.-based ImageSpan promises to automate that process so that royalties can be calculated in seconds instead of a year using internet standards such as XML to track content usage. Its product, LicenseStream Creator, is available for a subscription of $40 a year; a pro version is $99. The improvement in efficiency explains why one of the world’s biggest media companies, Bertelsmann, has led an $11 million second round of investment in ImageSpan.

Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann AG, led the deal. Existing investors also participating included Greycroft Partners (headed by Alan Patricof) and Village Ventures. Also joining were the New York City Investment Fund, City Light Capital Management and Ackerley Partners.

Iain Scholnick, chief executive of ImageSpan, said in an interview that the company was built for the age of Web 2.0 and mashups of media content, where multiple copyright holders and licensing schemes make it extremely difficult to calculate royalties for things such as digital photos, illustrations, and videos.

“We help media companies get their arms around their intellectual property and who is using it,” Scholnick said. “This is getting so complicated it’s like managing an air traffic control system.”

The problem is a big one. Contestants on TV shows such as “American Idol” aren’t always shown singing songs in part because the songs they choose aren’t licensed ahead of time. When someone buys a song for 99 cents on Apple’s iTunes, the number of people who get a piece of that pie is astounding, Scholnick said. The result is that not nearly as many transactions happen.

Michael McGuire, an analyst at market researcher Gartner, believes that many content companies are holding back because they don’t understand the unfamiliar world of distribution on the internet. While they want to distribute content widely to reach consumers, that often means a loss of control of content to pirates, hackers and consumers who simply want free stuff. He said the recent Hollywood writer’s strike focused on this problem of how to pay directors, screenwriters and actors for content distributed on the internet. The challenge for ImageSpan will be in convincing media companies — and their many byzantine departments — that it has a real solution to a longstanding problem.

Scholnick contends that ImageSpan can cut anywhere from 40 to 90 percent of royalty settlement costs. Customers include Omnicom’s Zimmerman Partners, Sports Illustrated, Takkle, Dealer.com, and Visible World. To date, ImageSpan has raised $16 million and it has 25 employees. The company was founded in 2002. McGuire said there are competitors who do pieces of the puzzle, but ImageSpan is looking to replace those vendors with an end-to-end solution.

Buzzlogic, the San Francisco company that tries to help marketers and others gauge which blogs are the most influential for specific topics, has raised an extra $2.5 million in financing to help it promote its new advertising product.

The company launched its blog analysis product in May (our coverage), but earlier this month additionally launched a way to target advertising against those influential blogs. You type in a topic into Buzzlogic’s dashboard, and it provides you a list of the most influential blogs around certain products or product types.

The company has several competitors in the area of tracking of social media. There’s a grid below shows competitors and how they differ. Note the matrix is supplied by Collective Intellect, of Colorado, and so it is somewhat biased toward that company. Buzzlogic would disagree, for example, with the grid’s suggestion that it doesn’t offer real-time analysis. However, we provide it so can you get a feel for the landscape. Collective Intellect’s product, called Media Intellect, only recently launched, and is being used by 70 hedge funds. Radian6 is another player we’ve covered.

Buzzlogic has previously raised $11 million.

Investors so far include Adams Capital Management, Transcosmos and Ackerley Partners.

Jott, the convenient voice-to-text service we reviewed favorably in March, has raised $5.4 million in its latest round of financing.

Jott, of Seattle, allows you to call a number, record a message, and then have that message translated into text and e-mailed to you or one of your contacts.

Bain Capital of Boston led the round with money from its new early-stage fund. The round included previous investors Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners and Atomico.

Founder and chief executive John Pollard won’t disclose numbers of users, but says response has been strong without a penny spent on marketing. People are using Jott to manage soccer teams, communicate with their families, and to send themselves book or movie ideas they’ve schemed up and don’t want to forget, he says.

Jott is still free, and doesn’t plan to be otherwise for at least the next few months, after which it will consider using advertising or an ad-free premium service to bring in cash. Among other reasons we detailed in our earlier post, this makes it more appealing than its competitors SimulScribe and Spinvox.

Jott rocks.

Jott, a company based in Seattle, offers a convenient new service that lets you speak messages and send them to yourself or others — as a transcribed text message.

Or as a voice message, if you prefer.

Sign up at Jott.com takes a minute, with no hassle. Then all you do is call Jott’s number, 1-877-568-8486. Jott asks who you are sending the message to. You tell Jott (the name of your friend will be contained in the contacts you’ve imported), and then record a message, and hang up. It ends up in their inbox, translated into text. Or you can choose to send voice message instead, by immediately pressing a “1″. The message then shows up as an audio file in their email.

This is a really easy and useful service, and we may be hooked. Here’s the intriguing part: Jott sends your messages to India for transcription. There, cheaply paid workers are listening to your voice message, and typing down the text in an email, which they then shoot off to the recipient. It took us about five minutes to receive our transcribed message tests — and they were perfectly done. A new meaning of the phrase “Passage to India.”

This is perfect for those professional messages you want to send to people, say while driving in your car. You don’t want to bug someone with a phone call, but texting or emailing someone is hard to do • steering with your knees isn’t very safe.

Jott more convenient than Spinvox and Simulscribe. Spinvox is great for people who get power voicemail. It transcribes incoming voicemail, and sends them to your inbox in written form. But we couldn’t get Spinvox to recognize our phone number during the registration process, and besides, it isn’t free. Simulscribe also isn’t free. It asks for more info than Jott during the sign up, and gives you a week’s free trial, but then forces you to cancel if you don’t want to get billed.

Pinger, another service that lets you leave voice messages for people, doesn’t do voice-to-text.

There was a bug in Jott. The contact import process didn’t work for us. Presumably, they’ll fix this soon. It worked when we manually entered our addresses.

So how does the business model work, if Jott pays Indians to subscribe, but offering the service for free? Jott founder and chief executive John Pollard tells VentureBeat he wanted to see how people reacted to the product before charging. Jott plans to support a free version with advertising. They’ll charge for a premium version, for those want to avoid ads.

Our hope is, this isn’t too good to be true. If it stays free, we’ll keep using it, and it may become part of our daily workflow.

The company raised less than $1 million from Draper Richards, Seattle firm Ackerley Partners in Seattle and Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico in London.

BuzzLogic, the San Francisco company that helps you find out which blogs are influential, has raised $9.6 million in a first round of venture capital.

It was led by Adams Capital Management, Ackerley Partners and Transcosmos Investments & Business Development.

We wrote about BuzzLogic when it launched in September after raising a seed round of $1.5 million.

The company seeks to define which blogs are shaping conversations online. It uses four criteria to measure a blog:
•overall traffic and number of inbound links
•contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, such as key words.
•frequency of content publication on such topics
•the traffic it sends back to the marketer

Robert Schettino, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the company has signed up 80 customers for its testing phase, with roughly half of them paying (the basic fee is $500/month).

Updated

San Francisco start-up BuzzLogic is trying to help you sort through the blog clutter. If you’re a marketer or PR person, how do you really know who is an influential blogger and who is not?

BuzzLogic just launched at the DEMO conference, and is homing in on this “influencer” question.

The company seeks to define who is shaping specific conversations in blogs with “algorithms” that analyze relationships, based on four criteria:

–overall traffic and number of inbound links
–contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, such as key words.
–frequency of content publication on such topics
–the traffic it sends back to the marketer

This is a very difficult thing to do through automation, because links can often be deceptive. As the hundreds of PhDs at Google have found, it is not easy to deconstruct the masses of “link-farms” between Web sites, purposefully created to boost each other’s traffic. We seem to always be one step behind the latest statistics tricks, on traffic numbers too. Rob Crumpler, the company’s chief executive officer, tells us the company has done a lot of work to combat this sort of thing.

If you’re not going for perfection, and want to get a good first take on a short list of bloggers you should care about, BuzzLogic may offer a starting point. “Rather than look at thousands or tens of thousands of blogs, we say here are the 10 or 20 most influential [individuals],” Bob Schettino, the company’s chief marketing officer told ClickZ yesterday.

BuzzLogic is selling a subscription service. As ClickZ points out, there are other “listening” services already offered by companies like Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Waggener Edstrom and Umbria.

BuzzLogic recently raised $1.5 million in seed financing from investors including Ackerley Partners and angel Ron Conway, VentureWire reported (sub required) and which we confirmed. Scott Briggs, former president of Ziff Davis, and Crumpler were also investors. Now that it has launched, BuzzLogic is aiming to raise $6 million in a first venture round.

Update: Here is what the company sent us to explain its pricing:

Our pricing is a function of the number of conversations (queries to surface those conversations) and the number of influencers. For example an outbound marketing person might want to focus their listening and engagement on the top 25 influencers. A customer service manager might want to look much deeper into an issue. Small companies may be able to address brand, product and competitive issues across 10 conversations. Larger companies will need a bigger footprint.

With that as context, our first tier of service starts at 10 conversations x 25 influencers, at $500 a month. The pricing goes up from there depending on the mix.

Our beta program includes a 60-day free trial option of four conversations x 25 influencers.