VentureBeat

How to publish on the web? Crowd Fusion, currently in stealth, is promising some fancy-sounding features like “Innovative content management, database management & performance evaluation/optimization tools” that has this web publisher interested in learning more.

The big blogging platforms — Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress — offer easy ways for anyone to create and publish their own blog. But Wordpress and TypePad also offer more complex versions to help larger publishers manage lots of content coming from many authors. Meanwhile, some larger online publishers build their own software using open-source programming languages. And, there are a variety of “content management system” companies out there, as well, that build customized sites for clients. Somewhere, Crowd Fusion fits into this picture.

I’m also interested because of the people involved: The company was founded by seminal blog outfit Weblogs co-creator Brian Alvey, and just raised $3 million in funding from digital media-focused firm Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.

The company isn’t saying much about itself but I signed up to learn more and here’s the automated response I got, with a few more details:

Crowd Fusion’s mission is to revolutionize online publishing with a
unique combination of technology and strategy. Our platform is
engineered to help position topic-focused publications as the leaders
in their verticals by providing publishing engines for the entire web
content lifecycle.

The Crowd Fusion’s infrastructure and data-mining functionality equip
publishers with the ability to automatically scale as demand
increases. We provide a set of easy-to-use and dynamic tools that
accommodate a publisher’s needs as they arise.

The same people who developed, built and scaled Weblogs, Inc., have
optimized web publishing with the Crowd Fusion platform that provides
you with:

* Collaborative development tools & best-of-breed publishing templates
* Automatic, on-demand application scaling.
* Innovative content management, database management & performance evaluation/optimization tools
* Extensive online database & information repository handling.

If you are a potential candidate for our platform, or if you are an
advertiser interested in partnering with us, please contact me by
replying to this email to steve@crowdfusion.com

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.

Buzzd, a location-based mobile startup, has raised a first round of funding from Greycroft Partners and Monitor Ventures. The company isn’t disclosing the size of the round.

Buzzd and competing companies such as Loopt and Google’s Dodgeball allow mobile users to access information and contact friends based on their location. With Buzzd, you send out your address or zip code via SMS message, and the New York startup’s service connects you to listings for nearby events, clubs and restaurants. While you’re out, you can send out a review, and those reviews are featured prominently in the listings. Buzzd bills itself as a mobile social network, and it allows users to create profiles (or import them from Facebook) and send each other private messages.

The big tech companies also have offerings in this market, but Dodgeball, for example, is focused on messaging and doesn’t offer event listings. Silicon Valley’s Loopt has also been getting a lot of positive press, but it only works on GPS-enabled phones. Buzzd, on the other hand, can be used with GPS, but it’s not required — as I mentioned above, the service works with an address or zip code.

Buzzd also announced that it’s partnering with Hornitos Tequila in a deal that allows users to buy SMS coupons for their friends, which can be redeemed for free drinks. Other partners include Flavorpill Productions, CitySearch, Time Out Group and voice search company V-Enable.

Update: I just spoke to chief executive Nihal Mehta, and he emphasized that one of Buzzd’s big advantages is that you it’s free, and you can use it without having it pre-installed or downloading anything (unlike Loopt.)

The company has three offerings right now — platforms for Flavorpill and Time Out, and the Buzzd service itself, which launched in testing mode in February. Mehta declined to offer any exact user numbers, but he says that so far, the most adoption has come through Buzzd’s partnership with troubled mobile company Helio. With around 200,000 subscribers, Helio doesn’t provide a huge market, but there’s good overlap between Helio’s users and the Buzzd target demographic, Mehta says.

Buzzd plans to roll out some new features in the coming months, including photo and video posting, as well as integration with the iPhone and Google Android.

Doppelganger, a virtual world site, has just expanded its offering aimed at teenagers and young adults– with an emphasis on music, dance, and chilling out at bars.

The new site, called vSide, finds itself competing against a number of other virtual worlds, from Second Life, IMVU and Habbo Hotel. While it will have to fight for an audience, the market is hot for these companies if they are successful. Disney recently acquired another site, Club Penguin, for $700 million — that one based on a happy world of penguin avatars for kids.

Doppelganger, of San Francisco, hasn’t experienced much buzz since the launch of its initial test version in February. It has yet to register on the radar of traffic measurement company, Hitwise, for example (see chart below for the top virtual/role playing Web sites for July 2007). However, Doppelganger’s proposition in vSide — a sort of hipper, music/video version of Second Life — makes sense. What better way to feel cool than to hang and chat with friends while listening or dancing to music in a virtual world?

Doppelganger also raises $11 million in new financing, bringing its total to $25 million. (See our earlier coverage here). The latest infusion was led by ComVentures, and included existing backers DFJ, Draper Richards, Trident Capital, KPG Ventures and Greycroft Partners

Virtual worlds are a bit of a mystery. I understand the appeal online role playing games like World of Warcraft — where there are missions to do and bad guys to kill. However, Second Life, where, to no particular end, you can walk around, hire prostitutes and barrage other players with flying penises, has always struck me as bizarre. Yet there are apparently millions of people actively using that site.

Doppelganger’s vSide falls somewhere in between the two. Like in any other virtual world, you create and customize an avatar — your digital doppelganger — and can then meet up with friends, go to clubs and so on. In an interesting touch, the site has included a “murder mystery” mini-game. To solve the murder, you have to team up with other users to investigate people and evidence. As you advance, you adorn rare clothing, which you must inspect for clues to open up new parts of the world. Solving the mystery enhances your virtual status, and gives you access to VIP sections of the club.

There are also stores where you can spend real money to buy your avatar designer clothes (Jay-Z’s Roc-a-Wear is a partner). Along with in-game billboards and product placement, selling virtual goods is the way the company aims to make money.

Doppelganger is developing relationships with a number of celebrities and musicians,, most notably Tyra Banks and the successful indie record label, Downtown Records. The virtual neighborhoods are flanked by virtual apartments for celebrities and bands. You can visit these apartments as well as create your own — where you can throw dance parties and control the music.

Since February, Doppelganger claims to have since garnered a couple hundred thousand users. The company won’t say how many of these are active, but notes that those users log an average of 11 hours per month, and 77 minutes per session. Its goal is to become the “next generation of social entertainment.” As Dean Takahashi points out in today’s Merc, “there is so much competition for the leisure time of young people that it will be hard to rise above the noise.” And, as these Hitwise numbers show, Doppelganger will have to rise a lot:

Getty Images has acquired Pump Audio, of company that has built up a catalog of 100,000 songs from musicians not signed with traditional labels, for $42 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Getty, of Seattle, Wa., says it is the largest provider of still and moving images. Earlier this year, it bought MediaVast for $200 million, which added more images to Getty’s huge archive. Its acquisition of Pump, based in New York’s Hudson Valley, extends its reach into other forms of digital media at a time when the industry is in midst of massive change caused by Internet distribution.

The deal also shows how licensed music continues to hold considerable value. The digital media industry is hot for investors. Just last year, three investors — Greycroft Partners LP, Village Ventures and High Peaks Venture Partners — invested an undisclosed amount of cash into Pump, and presumably the rapid sale gives them a quick profit, though this hasn’t been confirmed. The company was six years old.

From the Journal:

A key to Pump’s business is the way it lets clients search its database. The service offers a menu of simple search criteria, such as whether the song has lyrics or not, the kind of instruments used, as well as its genre, tempo and mood. “It opens up the production community to people who play the ukulele,” says Pump Chief Executive Steve Ellis. “Which the major labels don’t offer.”

…Rates range from $25 for use in a podcast to hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a theatrically distributed film or network television show. Pump splits the licensing fees evenly with its artists.

The latest in Silicon Valley:

Doppelganger raise $5M more for virtual world focused on teens — Doppelganger is the San Francisco start-up taking aim at the teen, or MTV audience (see our earlier coverage). It launched last year with a virtual club featuring the band the Pussycat Dolls, and is signing deals with other bands. Teens can design their avatars, chat with other sexy avatars, including of the band members themselves, and dance. Chief executive Andrew Littlefield says (listen to podcast) there’s a void between SecondLife, which he says appeals to a slightly older sci-fi crowd, and Habbo Hotel, which appeals to the Nickelodeon crowd. Doppelganger’s lounges integrate with AOL’s Instant Messenger, allowing teens to use existing Buddy Lists. It has raised $5 million in a third round led by Greycroft Partners, a New York-based firm whose West Coast office is run by former VSP partner Dana Settle. This follows $11 million in earlier rounds from Trident Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Of course, there’s the ongoing legal battles around VSP that are ongoing (Primack has latest).

Draper backs sex toy company — Speaking of DFJ investments, turns out DFJ’s party-hardy extrovert partner Tim Draper is behind the new San Francisco sex-toy company, JimmyJane, we wrote about recently. Alex Haislip has the scoop. Draper is joined by Phil Schlein, a venture partner at U.S. Venture Partners. Things are apparently livening up on traditionally conservative Sand Hill Road.

Another DEMO mention: Jaman — This site, just launched, lets you download a video player so you can watch “world cinema” online, or foreign movies you can’t get easily. We downloaded the player, and it is nice enough. It costs $1.99 to rent the movies, and $4.99 to buy, but we’re not sure how this rises above the noise, or how it got to DEMO. There are lots of other movie companies, and players. More at GigaOM (which links to a full history of this Palo Alto company)

Azureus, a Palo Alto company that delivers a popular application to distribute video files, launched a new service named Zudeo, which it apparently hopes will become the next YouTube for high-quality video.

It has raised $12 million in a second round of capital, led by Redpoint Ventures, which also included Greycroft Partners and previous investors Jarl Mohn, chairman of CNET Networks, BV Capital, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

At Zudeo, users can upload, download and comment on videos in a manner similar to other video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Revver. However, we tried it, and it wasn’t as simple as those other sites. We downloading the software, a minor hassle. At Zudeo, you then have to click on a browsing tab to view content, and once we got there, we couldn’t play the content, for whatever reason. The problem may be on our end. (Update: Indeed, Nag suggests in comment that we may have misunderstood the purpose; we’re apparently not supposed to view the content, which is befuddling). YouTube succeeded because it was so simple. Perhaps Azureus will make this easier for regular users in future. The other question is why they are taking $12 million to, among other things, develop an embedded video player. We’re not certain how much Azureus has raised in total, but it is a lot given how many players are out there already. BitTorrent, the largest file-sharing distributor, just raised $20M. We’ll follow Azureus as it develops. Azureus does have a different strategy from some of the others, targeting publishers of high-end video. Meantime, we’d like to hear from readers what they think.

More details about Azureus here.