The power of the Internet has given a platform for independent artists to market themselves without having a music label behind them.  And TuneSquare is no exception to provide such marketing.  I have seen a few different sites that allow artists to upload their music with some revenue-sharing, but TuneSquare is different from other indie music websites. 

TuneSquare allows customers to buy music that is DRM-free, just like the new Amazon.com MP3 store.  But the most distinguishing feature of TuneSquare is that music on the site is free!  Some of TuneSquares’ competition includes Amie Street and Spiral Frog. 

Users search for songs by categories or by searching, watch a video ad, and that is all.  Musicians can share advertising revenue from TuneSquare.  As Download Squad points out, since the musicians aren’t well known, its rather unlikely that TuneSquare will get a lot of traffic.  But TuneSquare provides music labels a portal to search for fresh talent.

There isn’t really any background information about who created TuneSquare or where they are based on the company website.  The only details that the website gives is that they’re run by several international companies.

NebuAd is a Redwood City, Calif. based behavioral targeting company that works with Internet Service Providers to determine how advertisers should design their media for different markets.  The names of the ISPs they work with seems to be confidential and undisclosed on their website. 

“NebuAd combines this web-wide view of pages navigated, searches performed, ads clicked, etc., with the industry’s most accurate targeting capabilities, matching consumer interests across more than 1,000 categories. And all of this is done without collecting and using any personally identifiable information,” states their Advertisers Overview page.

The investors of NebuAd includes Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures.  NebuAd has roughly $30 million in funding and has ambitious plans for operation expansion.  Considering the market opportunities, its an excellent time to sell services related advertising analytics such as those provided by NebuAd.  Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and AOL have all acquired digital advertising companies for billions of dollars, thus indicating that such opportunities will be around for a long time now.

A lot of expectations have been built-up for Joost: The company raised $45 million in funding in May 2007.  And since the company started, they’ve hired a new CEO and even gone through a name change.  Also while the application is still in development, so many changes have been made in the Internet video market. 

Around the time Joost finally released an invite-only release, Pulse 2.0, GigaOM, and Mashable were sending floods of invites manually.  The biggest problem with Joost is that users have to install an application that requires some of the highest hardware specifications.  It would probably take a half-hour for the application to pull up the video menus in developing countries that recently were introduced to broadband Internet.  There is a lot of aesthetic fluff surrounding the application that isn’t necessary for Joost’s primary purpose either.  There’s all types of flashy swirls and videos just surrounding the loading of the application. 

What is Joost’s primary purpose?

I recently tagged some of my closest friends to a random photo of people I don’t know in India eating ice cream for the sake of adding humor to their day.  Little did I know that my friends would write a lot of comments on that random photo, thus sending a lot of e-mails to everyone that I tagged.  Facebook is a total nuisance for that feature.

So what is Facebook doing about it? 

Yesterday Steve Jobs appeared before 300 Vice Presidents at Yahoo! to give them a pep talk that its okay to be the company that falls once in a while.  After all, Apple made a come-back and so can Yahoo!  However, at the rate that Steve Jobs is angering his many customers, it would come to no surprise that Steve Jobs motivational speeches are simply as effective as Matt Foley, SNL’s lovable character that lives in a van down by the river played by the late Chris Farley.

The effectiveness and realities of Steve Jobs speeches have been questioned to the point that Guy L. “Bud” Tribble, the Vice President of Software Technology at Apple Inc. coined a term after them.  The term is reality distortion field [RDF] and its the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe anything through the mix of charisma, charm, exaggeration, and marketing [Wikipedia].   RDF can also be considered deception.

What the Yahoo! VPs decide to make out of the keynote (also known as Stevenotes), is a mystery.  But I believe if Yahoo! was simply seeking motivation, they should have called upon a Matt Foley-like character to tell them to get back on the right track or they’ll end up living in a van down by the river.  The Matt Foley-like character would also probably tell them to stop creating avatars created by someone that was induced with something:

The Matt Foley video is available on YouTube:
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=EV7j5ZqWgYg[/youtube]

[Information Source: GigaOM]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=bkP_G8AxtIA[/youtube]

Yesterday, Apple released firmware 1.1.1, an application that “neutered the handset” according to Gizmodo.  One of the reasons why iPhone reached popularity so swiftly wasn’t just the technology built-in, but because of the opportunity that software developers had to modify the console.  This is why Gizmodo, a top 1,000 website that focuses on hardware, rated the iPhone from “Wait” in July 2007 to “Buy” and now switched reviews to “‘Don’t hold your breath.’ I’m done with this handset until third-party apps come back.”

Why did Apple release this firmware?  It is believed that there are third party applications that aid in unlocking the iPhone so that it would work with other telecommunications providers.  Currently Apple shares company revenue with solely with AT&T for the iPhone.

“Programs like the faux-GPS, IM clients, Flickr Upload, and NES emulator—what did they ever do but make the iPhone far better than the stock original? They made it far more competitive with open-platform superphones like the Nokia N95, to which I will now be switching” wrote Gizmodo’s Brian Lam.  “I flew back from NY to SF today. While there, I would have liked to have pushed my photos from the trip to flickr; I would have liked to have played NES games on the subway. I would have liked to have used the Navizon GPS thing to figure out where the hell I was at any given moment, and when I used one of those web 2.0 IM clients, my battery took a huge hit, and I missed a lot of messages because Safari couldn’t tell me I was getting IMs while out of the browser. Very annoying.”

The firmware is known to brick some of the phones that have applications installed on them.  Many phones with these applications aren’t repairable after third party applications on them for now.  The new term for these phones that don’t work after the firmware update is called: iBricks now.

Xoom is one of the biggest money transfer companies on the Internet today.   The $20.29 million Series E funding was sent to Xoom from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Fidelity Ventures, and DAG Ventures.

Xoom is based in San Francisco, Calif. and previously raised $15 million in Series D in 2006.  Cumulatively, Xoom raised over $50 million to power its business operations.

Xoom makes money transfer easy in 4 steps:
1.) Enter your contact info, recipient’s info, and the amount of money to be sent.
2.) Select a delivery method.
3.) Select a payment method (Visa/MasterCard/eCheck, Discover, Paypal).
4.) Send your recipient a tracking method.

However, due to all the third parties involved, its rather difficult to support all of the developing countries for their operations.  This is why Xoom is limited to only Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Phillippines, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Vietnam.  I’m assuming that with this new round of funding, Xoom will be able to expand its operations to support other countries. 

Recipients of money transfers for Xoom do not necessarily require a bank account or Internet connection to receive funds because Xoom has money transfer partners to provide ways to send money to family and friends in other countries.

Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates, Anne Mitchell of Fidelity Ventures, Keith Hartz of the founding team of Xoom, and Keith Rabois sit on the Board of Directors for Xoom.