VentureBeat

Outside.in, a site for community news and discussion, has raised an additional $3 million and appointed a new chief executive.

The Brooklyn, New York startup named Mark Josephson, former president of marketing company Seevast Corp., as its new CEO. Josephson doesn’t appear to have experience in local news or local content, but that may not be a problem, since sites like Outside.in are still experimenting to find the best approach. His most relevant experience may be his time as general manager of the New York Times-owned advice and information site About.com.

Steve Berlin Johnson, Outside.in’s co-founder and former chief executive, will continue to serve as executive chairman.

There have been some notable failures among companies trying to create local news hubs, including Judy’s Book and BackFence. But co-founder John Geraci has said those sites launched too early. There’s definitely a good opportunity for sites that take advantage of people’s interest in local news, the one kind of news that’s pretty much guaranteed to be relevant (not to mention a great opportunity for targeted advertising). When Outside.in launched more than a year ago, we thought it was was a strong contender, and in March it announced an even smarter approach — a personal portal called Radar, which sorts content based on its relevance and distance to the user. (Without Radar, Outside.in is divided into mini-sites, sorting news and posts by city and neighborhood, which is a less fine-tuned approach.)

The company declined to provide a specific traffic numbers to give us a sense of its traction, but it did say the service now covers 11,680 neighborhoods.

This recent round brings Outside.in’s total funding to $5.4 million. The round included a new investor, the New York City Investment Fund, as well as existing investors Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks and angel investors led by George Crowley.

Behind the online service Songkick is a simple motivation: To make going to a concert as easy as going to a movie.

Some 70 percent of U.S adults did not go to a concert last year, according to Songkick chief executive and co-founder Ian Hogarth, who I met in Austin, TX last week. Does that mean they don’t like music? No, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t like some form of music. Instead, Hogarth surmised that the reason people do not go to concerts is that it takes too much effort. One problem is that the bands you like probably only come to your city once a year — if you’re lucky.

Songkick’s new concert recommendation system, which launches today, allows you to input up to three bands you enjoy, and the service will tell you concert dates for those bands if they happen to be touring near you soon — or if none of your three bands are coming near you soon, the service will recommend some other bands which are, and which you’re likely to enjoy.

In testing out the recommendations, the system works very well. My three bands led me to concerts of a couple other bands I already knew of and really enjoy as well, but hadn’t thought about in a while.

Another interesting feature is the ability to look at your computer’s music library (on iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player) and build a recommended concert schedule from it. Hogarth noted that competitors such as the San Francisco-based SonicLiving require you to re-scan your music to update ticket listing. Songkick’s plugin auto-updates.

At its heart, Songkick is an aggregator of concert ticket information. It can be tedious to go to the various ticket sites (Ticketmaster, StubHub, etc) to try and search for bands’ shows that way. Songkick pulls all that information in and allows you to easily find which service is offering the best price for a show. The service aggregates tickets and prices from 16 different sellers across the United States and the UK. Read the rest of this entry »