TechCrunch

Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, has just issued a release stating that it is pricing its IPO tomorrow morning at $13.50 per share, which falls into the expected range. The shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol “WIFI.”

Boingo is looking to raise $75 million in its public offering. Boingo claims that it is one of the largest commercial Wi-Fi networks in the world, with 211,000 Wi-Fi locations in over 100 countries. The company installs, manages and operates wireless networks in locations like airports and restaurant chains, which Boing says had more than 800 million visitors in 2009.

Boingo is offering 3,846,800 shares and selling stockholders are offering 1,923,200 shares. In addition, Boingo has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 865,500 shares, on the same terms and conditions. Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, Pacific Crest Securities and William Blair & Company are underwriting the offering.

According to the initial S-1 filing, Boingo had 1.3 million consumers who have purchased its mobile Internet services in the past year. The company’s primary source of revenue is from consumers who purchase month-to-month subscription plans or hotspot specific, single-use access to its network. Boingo also receives money from business partners that pay to allow their consumers to access the network. Other revenue channels include telecom operators and advertisers.

CrunchBase InformationBoingo WirelessInformation provided by CrunchBase

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone. This is notable for an iPad app, especially when compared to other highly publicized iOS app milestones; It took iPhone app Instagram six days to hit 100K, SoundTracking two weeks to hit 250K and FourSquare a whopping seven months to get to 60K users.

Qwiki PR rep CeCe Cheng tells me that Qwiki.com has “millions of users” but that the Qwiki app, which lets users see notable Qwikis around them in map format, has already eclipsed pageview traffic on the Qwiki site by 5x. She estimates that by the end of the day tomorrow that the app will hit 300K users after only two weeks. Individual user sessions on the app are averaging 24 minutes.

Says founder Doug Imbruce, “The Qwiki experience was made for the iPad – an intimate, entertaining, (sexy!) new media format. It’s amazing to see the popularity of the app reinforce our original vision of Qwiki as a multi-platform experience.” The app has 2,170 total ratings, with an average of 4.5 stars per rating. The current build has an average 5 star rating at 688 ratings.

Qwiki sees the future of its visual Wikipedia search product as resting on the mobile platform, and is currently focusing on releasing Qwiki for the Android and the iPhone. It also plans on eventually letting users create their own Qwikis about themselves and their businesses.

CrunchBase InformationQwikiInformation provided by CrunchBase

On April 21st, Facebook celebrated the 1st birthday of its now ubiquitous “Like” button, and promptly shared the news that 10,000 sites are, like, using the plugin every day. The social networking behemoth then continued its parade of social widgets last week, giving the Like button a new partner in crime with the “Send” button, which allows users to directly share content with their Facebook Groups, Facebook friends, or any standard email address. And gives site designers yet another widget to integrate into their code. Huzzah!

With the “Send” button, Facebook seems to be continuing its quest to eventually replace email with some sort of Facebook-related social service. The button is already available on over 50 sites including The Washington Post, last.fm, 1-800 Flowers, Gilt Groupe, The Huffington Post and Orbitz. With more to come, I’m sure.

So, to commemorate Facebook becoming the Big Brother of social widgets, JESS3, a creative interactive agency specializing in UX and data visualization, has created a nifty retrospective — timeline of Facebook’s social widgets, beginning with the launch of Facebook Connect back in 2008.

Warning: Infographics ahead. Oh, and by the way, you should totally “Like” us on Facebook. Sorry, I had to.

CrunchBase InformationFacebookJESS3Information provided by CrunchBase

A few weeks ago, a video entered wide circulation in the tech press for two reasons: 1) it featured lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Apple employees talking about their difficulties growing up. And 2) it was very, very well made. But the truth is that the It Gets Better Project has been around since last September, when columnist and author Dan Savage kicked things off with his own YouTube video with his partner to talk about their experiences. The Apple video simply reinvigorated the project in our circles, helping to keep the message going.

And now Google is doing their part to continue the message as well. Yesterday the Chrome team uploaded a new, great It Gets Better video. Watch it above.

Google has actually participated in this project before. In October, several Google employees were featured in a video. This was immediately followed by President Obama creating a video as well. There are now thousands of these videos. Great, great stuff.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle ChromeInformation provided by CrunchBase

One upon a time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer interrupted a speech at a developer’s conference with a chant that would set the Internet ablaze. “Developers, developers, developers, developers” was quickly put on the web and just as quickly mixed, remixed, and placed on the mantle of pure Internet gold. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever crafted an actual song around it.

Until now.

Mobile developer Cory Smith shot us an email today pointing us to a song he wrote and recorded. “I’m contrasting developing music and developing software in a hardcore rap kinda way, pretty entertaining,” he notes in his post. “The Steve Ballmer sample is the icing on the cake,” he notes in his message to us. Indeed.

Listen to the song below. It’s awesome. And below that, find Smith’s lyrics.

If Microsoft is smart, they’ll use this to kick of Ballmer’s next speech much like Apple used an awesome song we posted to kick off the Antennagate presser. After all, the talk is that Microsoft is putting a heavy focus back on developers. The song is perfect.

Smixx - Developers (feat. Steve Ballmer) by Smixx

I’m a developer
in many senses of the word
cause I make these applications
but I also use these verbs
to make this music
I construct it line by line
just like when I’m coding
another software design
in both cases
its about design patterns
anyone can get the job done
its the execution that matters
I have many interests
sometimes they conflict
my creativity can usually be a benefit
but sometimes it keeps me
far too busy
but I can’t complain
because my life is hardly gritty
so I think i’ll sit back
and pen myself another ditty
why is it that Linus Torvalds
the only one that Gits me
did you get that reference I was using
or is the thought of source source control too confusing
may just lay myself down a Team Foundation
so I can test the objects of my creation

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

not a fan of jewelry
except for Ruby on Rails
I can use my skills
to increase my online sales
capitalize on the popularity of Facebook
or grill up some beats
so they declare me a great cook
never really been a big fan of insects
so I track down bugs
remove them when in test
make sure they never get pushed to production
but sometimes deadlines decide they get rushed in
I’m the same way
when it comes to my songs
perfection is the goal whenever the mic is on
I don’t want a bad verse to slip in the mix
cause it could look really bad
for Cory or smixx
only a fan of your behaviour
if its driven development
theres no sense of
adding features for the hell of it
complexity is irrelevant
whether its with music or software
your users have stories so you should be telling them

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

seeing my creations
on others devices
after years of concentration
is nothing but priceless
whether its with software
or a song just like this
I put myself out there
so go on and hype this
Running 3 external monitors
off of my macbook
currently reviewer on a Windows Phone Pact book
now I got Steve Ballmer
and he’s bombing on this tracks hook
of course my QA’s on me
cause this app just crashed look
when I write my raps
never use a marker
constantly refactor
like I’m using Resharper
doing ad hoc deploys
and I’m always deliverin’
and I made that choice
regardless of dividends
creating all this noise
in some form
until the bitter end
stating with with my voice
theres no norm
that I can fit within
haven’t been sleeping
but using lots of REST
pass the mic back to who rocked it best

CrunchBase InformationMicrosoftSteve BallmerInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you have even the slightest hint of a creative streak, you may be interested in COLOURlovers, a startup whose products let you easily express yourself using shapes and colors, even if you aren’t particularly good at it. The Y Combinator-backed company has built up a community around creating color palettes, a matching iPhone app, and even a tool for sprucing up your Twitter profile. And now the company has closed its first seed round.

COLOURlovers has raised $1 million from investors including Atlas Venture, Morado Ventures, Founder Collective, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Seraph Group & Zelkova Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Don Hutchison, Dharmesh Shah, Jared Friedman, and Shawn Bercuson (the startup says it got in touch with many of them via Angel List).

Founder Darius A Monsef IV (aka Bubs) didn’t want to talk too much about the company’s future plans, but he did say that it would soon be releasing a more robust version of its vector shapes editor, Seamless. Seamless has been available as a web app until now, but the company will be selling what he describes as an advanced desktop version within the next few weeks. As for the company’s long term goals, he says they’re working “towards a much bigger vision that builds upon all of the great creative content our community has been generating.”

The company’s team now consists of three founders and two recently-hired full-time employees, with plans to hire an additional seven in the near future (if you’re interested they’re targeting hires in Portland — Monsef describes the hiring market in San Francisco as “pretty nutty”. The company was actually already profitable prior to the seed round, and on track to do over $500k in revenue this year.

Monsef says that Seamless has been used to create 65,000 patterns thus far, and that 1.5 million color variations have been created as well (users can re-color existing patterns to suit their taste). The Twitter profile designer, which is called Themeleon, is used to design 600,000 profiles per month — and that number will grow once the company launches its upcoming WordPress version and a Themeleon API.

CrunchBase InformationCOLOURloversInformation provided by CrunchBase

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, and Scott Heiferman.

Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding. People can charge for the classes and Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut. Co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn used to be head of product at Hot Potato (since acquired by Facebook), and co-founder Malcolm Ong was the product manager at OMGPOP.

The site is focussing on classes about tech startups, food and drink, and arts & crafts to start out.
Our business model is similar to Eventbrite. For instance, Chris Dixon of Founder Collective is going to teach a class on How To Raise Your First Round for $15 (with proceeds going to charity).

The founders are curating the classes to start out in order to attract the right kind of people and define the culture of the site. They are getting some advice from fellow New York startups. “The guys at Kickstarter have given a lot of advice on how to build our community, especially in the early days of the startup,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “Right now, we don’t allow private one-on-one classes, tutoring sessions, or test preparation services. While we think these classes are great, they don’t really fit into our community as we’re going after the ‘creative, unique, interesting and skill-based’ classes.”

The goal of Skillshare is to make education relevant and more current to what people need to learn. “While it’s great to learn multi-variable calculus or the economics of China during school,,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “What about the other 99% of skills that will never see the light of day? By the time a college starts teaching “Mastery in Online Community Management”, it will become so outdated and irrelevant. Traditional education will never catch up to the skills needed in the market today.”

CrunchBase InformationSkillshareFounder CollectiveSV AngelInformation provided by CrunchBase

Google has seven major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Page took over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally.

Google confirms the change. And, they point out, it was actually publicly announced in an SEC filing made on April 11. Nobody seems to have noticed that someone was named the SVP of a Google product group that previously hadn’t existed.

Why the change? That’s a longer story.

Leadership of Google search, like most other Google products, was previously split between Marissa Mayer as product lead and Udi Manber as engineering lead. Late last year Mayer moved over to run Local. Alan Eustace now runs the group, and Manber reports to him. There’s a single leader of the group, and he reports to Page.

Page, say our sources, has for a long while been thinking of search as much more than Google’s original mission to “organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” His goal is about more than organizing that information, though. It’s also about enhancing people’s understanding and facilitating the creation of knowledge.

The problem is, “search” still means “search.” And as Google has expanded that product over the years, first bringing in results from Google’s vertical search engines via Universal Search in 2007, and later via Google Squared, which structures information on the Internet.

And there have been other experiments as well. Google Base, for example, as well as Google Knol.

In fact, look back at this 2007 Google blog post about Knol, where Manber says “The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”

These product efforts have generally been led by Manber in the past. And they remain in the search/knowledge group today.

Here’s how Google currently views the group. Remember that previously they split it up between Mayer (product) and Manber (engineering). But today Eustace is the overall lead. Manber reports to Eustace and focuses on finding ways to improve the knowledge out there and to encourage more high quality content creation, whether it’s on Google’s servers (Knol) or not.

Amit Singhal, Manber’s peer, focuses on the more traditional goals of search, such as the recent algorithm changes called Panda targeting content farms.

One way of thinking of this, says a source with knowledge of the group, is this. Singhal does the weeding (removing and pushing down low quality content in search), and Manber is focused on the seeding (encouraging “good stuff” to grow).

This isn’t supposed to be information that helps outsiders understand how Google operates, which is probably why Google made the SEC statement in as few words as possible and didn’t publicize it at all. Instead, it’s to make sure that the team inside Google understands that they aren’t just working on search. It’s not just about organization, it’s about enhancement of knowledge.

Other than confirming the creation of the Knowledge group to supplant the Search group, Google won’t comment on the personnel changes or the subtle shifts in strategy. For now, says one source, all Google wants to do is align everyone internally. When, and if, Google talks about this more publicly is a mystery.

CrunchBase InformationGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

We heard yesterday that Sunday night’s announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death drew the highest sustained rate of tweets ever according to Twitter and Google has revealed an impressive stat showing the impact of the event on Google search.

Google says that between 7:30 and 8:30 pm PST (which was right around the time the news broke over Twitter), Google saw an one million percent increase in searches for the term ‘bin laden.’

For basis of comparison, you can see a chart below comparing searches for the Royal Wedding on Google Trends. The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton also drew massive amounts of web traffic from around the world, but clearly the search volume for news and information around Bin Laden’s death came in at a much higher scale.

Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference, was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems.

But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.”

One advantage consumers will see with streaming over cable settop boxes or DVD players is that upgrades to the quality can happen much faster because they are not dependent on switching out boxes in everyone’s home. While streaming is just now catching up with high-definition streams, that progress should keep advancing and even leapfrog hardware solutions that really only change every ten years or so. Streaming Netflix movies to multiple high-def screens is only a matter of time.

As it turned out, however, the DVD business was not just a way to bide time while the network caught up. It laid the economic groundwork for the streaming business to become established because of the need to license content, which it doesn’t have to do with DVD rentals. “If we had tried to launch streaming in the beginning,” says Hastings, “I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked because we couldn’t have written big checks. Now we can write a $50 million or $100 million check which gets the content flowing. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks.”

Asked whether Netflix threatened the cable companies, Hastings was careful to say that he doesn’t want to replace cable. That is why Netflix continus to focus on older movies rather than new releases, sports, or news. “We have consistently said that would not be profitable for us,” he says. “It would start an Armageddon battle, and we would not emerge alive from that battle. So we are concentrating on our niche.” And yet, Netflix is experimenting with licensing better programming and even original series. You can bet those experiments will continue.

CrunchBase InformationReed HastingsNetflixInformation provided by CrunchBase

Google Ad chief Susan Wojcicki has some advice for Web companies wondering if their products will be a success. Reminiscing about the early days of AdSense to Steven Levy at Wired’s business conference here in New York City, she says: “You know really soon if your product is going to be successful. That is what I love about the Web. When we turned on AdSense, within the first hour we had people signing up every other minute. We were shocked, there was so much demand.”

And this was after a colleague told her it could never come anywhere close to AdWords. He was right in terms of bottom line profitability, but AdSense is part and parcel of the Web at this point. Why did AdSense take off so quickly. “I know this is obvious,” says Wojcicki, “but most people don’t get this. There are more people who want to be paid than actually pay.” In other words, AdSense was a product that promised any Website owner a way to get paid.

Levy mostly lobbed softballs at her, but he did ask one question about Google’s social ambitions. He noted that many people think that social is simply not in Google’s DNA. “I’ve heard that before,” replied Wojcicki. “I’ve heard that advertising is not in our DNA. That was not true. Or that display advertising is not in our DNA. That is not true either. This is such a fast moving market that every company has to be able to learn quickly and adapt, and we will.”

Maybe, but it is obvious that Google is still thinking of social as one more factor to add to its all-encompassing algorithm (Google’s hammer that it applies to every problem). “Social is an important signal,” she notes. “There is an opportunity for us to incorporate that to serve more relevant and useful ads.” So far, it is difficult to determine whether that approach is yielding better results.

Wojcick, a Google veteran, is one of the SVP’s who is part of Larry Page’s new executive team.

CrunchBase InformationSusan WojcickiGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

Way back at TechCrunch 50 2008 we saw the launch of GoPlanIt, a startup that looked to help you generate a travel itinerary in just a few clicks. The company was addressing a problem that everyone has, and while it was entering a crowded space, it looked like it had some potential. And then the market went to hell, startup funding dried up, and people stopped traveling. So founder Steve Chen (not the one who founded YouTube) and the rest of the team decided to put the company — which they’d largely funded using their own money — on the back burner.

Now GoPlanIt is back for round two, and it’s tweaking its monetization strategy to be ever-so-2011. That’s right, they’re getting into group deals. But unlike the countless deal site clones, they’re taking a slightly modified approach that might just work — they’re catering primarily to travelers.

Chen explains that most of the existing deal sites are focused on the city you live in. But there’s a big opportunity to help people save on the attractions, restaurants, tours, spas, and other things they’d do while traveling. Currently tourist-oriented businesses can have a tough time reaching customers — they have to rely on classifieds, pamphlets, and hotel concierges. Chen adds that he’s faced this problem himself as co-owner of 5A5 Steak Lounge, a popular San Francisco restaurant that draws plenty of locals but has a hard time targeting tourists. With GoPlanIt’s deals, these businesses gain another channel optimized for reaching people who are only in town for a short stay.

GoPlanIt isn’t scrapping the one-click itinerary generation that it originally launched with. Instead, these deals can be integrated as part of a suggested itinerary (you can also browse through available deals in the city you’re visiting). Each deal will offer a 35-70% discount. At this point deals are only available in San Francisco and NYC, though the company hopes to ramp this up over time. GoPlanIt isn’t sourcing all the deals itself — it’s currently working with HomeRun (which does a rev share) and is in talks with the other daily deal providers.

Chen says that the company now has a team of five and that its founders have infused more of their own capital — they’re currently looking to raise a round of outside funding.

Also see Trip Alertz, which is a ‘Group for Travel’, but focuses primarily on hotel and resort deals.


CrunchBase InformationGoPlanitInformation provided by CrunchBase

Just in time for Mother’s Day, co-founders Antoine Grant and Stuart Felkner are launching responsibly, a gift giving platform with a social good component. responsibly (yes, small “r”) is basically a daily deals site that lets you donate 100% of an item’s purchase price to US public schools in need of project supplies and funds.

responsibly allows you to choose the specific education project you’d like to donate to, and 50% of the original proceeds of every gift purchased will go to the school, matched by another 50% of corporate sponsorship via Donor’s Choose.

The responsibly website integrates with Facebook, and you can send a message announcing the gift to the reciever via Facebook or through email. Right now both its inventory and its project offerings are sparse (currently you can only gift aromatic Stone Candles) but the co-founders are working on building up a queue during the beta.

“The education system is in dire need of our help, and we want to start a movement that spreads awareness, brings people on board with our mission and gives them a really easy way to help directly and contribute to saving America’s  education,” said Grant on the motivation behind the startup’s for profit mission (they take a cut of sales).

The co-founders are committed to the cause, and actually turned an old school bus into a home office, outfitting it with solar panels and makeshift beds in order to take a 15 city tour all around the US in April. The responsibly tour visited schools and leaders from the KIPP, Greendot, Teach for America programs across America, getting a better idea of the issues faced by US educators in order to figure out the best way responsibly could help (watch the video above for an in-depth on-the-bus interview). The bus’ return home to LA coincides with the company’s beta launch.

“Our goal is to be more than a simple commerce platform – we want to connect consumers and companies with charitable giving in an easy and cost-effective way that benefits everyone,” said Felkner.

Interested TechCrunch readers can join the beta here.

CrunchBase InformationResponsiblyInformation provided by CrunchBase

Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, is going to make your Outlook email more productive today with the launch of a Gadget Store with apps from collaboration and productivity services such as Dropbox, Evernote, JIRA, Klout, Salesforce, WebEx, and Yammer.

Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. The company, which has raised over $30 million in funding, also recently debuted a plugin for Gmail as well as iPhone and Android apps. To date, Xobni’s Mirosoft Outlook plugin has seen nearly seven million downloads.

The Gadget Store allows users to access free and paid apps for productivity apps and services from within Xobni for Outlook, enabling developers to integrate their services seamlessly into Outlook’s email workflow. Related to this, the company launched a feature last year that allowed users to integrate Gmail Gadgets within Outlook.

Gadgets are included as part of the Xobni sidebar, and users can choose from nearly 20 services and applications for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, note-taking, and more. Current Xobni gadgets include Dropbox, Evernote, GoldMail, Google Translate, Atlassian JIRA, WebEx, Huddle, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp and Salesforce CRM.

For example, you can add the Evernote gadget to Xobni to allow users to access their notes directly from the inbox. Or you could access data from your Salesforce CRM or Chatter account within your Xobni Outlook inbox.

While the Gadget Store is exclusive to the Xobni’s Outlook version, it will eventually extend to the Gmail plugin.

We’ve covered Booshaka, a startup that takes Facebook search and adding a few bells and whistles to allow users to segment search by topic and provide trending topics around what people on Facebook are talking about. Today, Booshaka is bringing an intelligent layer to your likes, by ranking and classifying all of your activity on Facebook Pages using social signals such as posts, comments and likes.

Booshaka has indexed over a million pages on Facebook, and matches this against your activity on these pages. So when you login to Booshaka with Facebook connect, the site will categorize all of your likes of Facebook pages, as well as posts and comments on these pages, showing you a list of these pages. Booshaka also categorizes the types of pages you’ve liked by TV Shows, Musicians, Public Figures and more.

You can then click on these pages to see where you and your friends rank on leaderboard that measures activity and quality of activity. You can also view a particular fan’s stats and activity by clicking on them in the leaderboard. Brands, individuals and companies can also register their Facebook page with Boshaka if it is not already indexed.

And Booshaka is offering a brand-focused product that allows Facebook page owners to install an app that will create a leaderboard tab on their page, allowing fans to see who is commenting, and posting the most on a page.

You can check out our top fans on our Facebook page here.

CrunchBase InformationBooshakaInformation provided by CrunchBase

By now, you may have run across a SoundCloud audio track somewhere out there in the wild, wooly Interwebs — perhaps during one of your mad, late-night music searches. In which case, you’re familiar with the tell-tale signs: The scrolling orange cursor, the messages tagged mid-song, and that distinctive social waveform layout.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, SoundCloud is the fast-scaling, Berlin-based audio sharing platform that enables music-makers and audio-lovers to upload and share audio tracks. Because of SoundCloud’s somewhat unique visualization (tracks are laid out horizontally in waveform, as they might appear were they fresh out of the studio, or playing in GarageBand or some other music creation app), users can add comments to the waveform at specific times during the track. (Like, “you clearly stole this guitar riff from Steve Vie, loser”, for example.) You can then share your tracks privately with your family, publish to social networks, or embed your sounds on your site — all the while allowing your listeners to tag tracks with their comments.

SoundCloud has grown steadily since its launch in 2006, and just a few weeks ago, crossed 4 million users, according to SoundCloud Evangelist David Noel. That’s 3 million new listeners since this time last year. I first came across SoundCloud when I was attempting to review an album by an Argentinian musician that had not yet been released on CD or on iTunes, nor was it available in the U.S. But, luckily, the artist had posted the album on his SoundCloud page to test the proverbial waters among his local fans.

For this very reason, many lesser-known musicians are using the platform as a way to test fan reactions to new music, and it’s become a great tool for the many amateur music-makers producing tunes around the globe to share their music and interact with their audience.

Up-and-coming musicians have more distribution tools at their disposal thanks to the Web than ever before, but aside from those lucky few who see their videos go viral on YouTube, it remains difficult for the lesser knowns to manage all those social networks, and have their music heard by their target audience.

With so much music out there, finding the right listener is still largely serendipitous — hence the growing popularity of music discovery tools, like Pandora. But sites like Pandora don’t necessarily cater to the little guy or girl, and, sure, building an audience one-fan-at-a-time can be rewarding, but it seems like it’s much more effective to have other well-establish bands reaching the audiences you want to reach, promote your band for you.

So, today, SoundCloud is announcing a partnership with Headliner.fm, a realtime social media recommendation exchange for artists and bands. Headliner’s exchange platform enables bands to reach their target audience by encouraging them to promote their fellow musicians by using a reward system of “Band Bucks”.

Essentially, the more you promote other, similar musicians, the more Band Bucks you receive, which you can then use to have your favorite big acts promote your band on their social media pages. As soon as you join Headliner, you connect with your band’s Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace pages, and the Band Bucks you earn will allow you to have artists like Diddy or Maroon 5 (who are already using the platform) promote your band on one of their social media accounts.

And thanks to this new partnership with SoundCloud, when a Headliner user creates a promotion, they can now easily embed one of their SoundCloud tracks in a Facebook wall post. Instant Facebook promotion with audio! So, if Diddy is promoting my barbershop quartet on Facebook, his post to his fans will no longer just be limited to “Check out this hot new barbershop act”, it will give his fans an opportunity to actually hear my music, too.

Since its founding in 2009, Headliner.fm has grown to over 50,000 artists — ranging from up-and-comers to stars like Maroon 5, Travie McCoy and Rob Thomas, and in the last month alone, over 16,000 artists (reaching 40 million new fans), joined the network. Like SoundCloud, Headliner is growing fast.

Headliner’s exchange is free to use, which is a great start, but it also offers various pay-as-you-go premium services, in which you can not only discover new bands with similar audiences and find them based on location, but use analytics that keep track of the actual reach of your social media promotions — how many new fans you’re reaching, what platform they’re on, and so on.

This social recommendation exchange is a brilliant idea, and now with the integration of SoundCloud tracks (which are already socially-outfitted) directly into that Facebook promotional content, Headliner is starting to look like a business that is offering a truly valuable service to small-time musicians. A group that is always in need of a legup.

And it’s also worth pointing out how easy it’s become to use SoundCloud’s API to integrate audio into your web content. For those building apps, sites, and platforms, and for musicians looking to promote, I’d say this is definitely something to check out. It will be interesting to see if Headliner can bring this SoundCloud integration to other platforms, though it’s hard to imagine this working for Twitter.

It’s a great idea, but can it last?

For more on Headliner, check out the video below:

CrunchBase InformationSoundCloudHeadliner.fmInformation provided by CrunchBase

Late last year, we wrote about ProFounder, a startup that offers entrepreneurs ways to raise money for their startups and ideas. At launch, ProFounder allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time in exchange for an investment. Today, ProFounder is launching another option for fundraising-an equity term sheet.

Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site. The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor.

And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.

Entrepreneurs can customize their equity terms on ProFounder using tools such as pre- money valuation calculators, dynamically-updating graphs to show stock ownership percentages, and more. ProFounder’s equity term sheets currently offer non-voting common shares to investors.

ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, has seen steady traction since its public launch last fall. The platform has coordinated 14 successful raises with over $350,000 raised. The total average individual raise is $26,000 and the average number of investors is 20. Currently 530 startups are in the process of raising funds using ProFounder.

ProFounder faces competition from CapLinked, Angelsoft and others.

CrunchBase InformationProFounderInformation provided by CrunchBase

Hey, remember those Italian guys who spent 2 years trying to get their startup funded in Italy and raised $101K in 19 days when they arrived in the States? There's a tendency on this side of the Atlantic to criticize European investors but it turns out they may not be so different from their American counterparts after all. The proof? It has just surfaced that Jimmy Fairly - a brand new "buy one give one" startup that was born at Startup Weekend Toulouse in November - managed to score €200K in just 3 weeks.

Considering that the Web is changing and evolving every single day, the learning curve for newcomers — and even old-hands alike — can be steep. For those who are starting businesses and looking to learn more about how to use certain sites, products, or tools, the onramp can be difficult to find, not to mention maneuver.

Back in October, a startup called Grovo launched with the goal of tackling this very problem. Dubbing itself “the field guide to the Internet”, Grovo positioned itself as an online education and training platform to enable Web users to find and learn how to use the Web’s most-frequented sites (and vice versa) — beginning with sites like Twitter, Mint, and Amazon.

Hiring an in-house professional team to create high-quality (and free) instructional videos, Grovo focused primarily on Web companies (unlike some nominal competitors like, say, eHow). Today, Grovo offers over 600 video tutorials to everyday consumers looking to increase their Web street cred. And, since its launch, Grovo has begun giving more of that special attention to business owners looking to build a Web presence and make the most out of social media, eCommerce, and business productivity sites and apps.

In March, the startup launched its first real money-making effort by adding premium content, available at $19 a month, or $190 annually. These premium guides offered beginner roadmaps to sites like Basecamp, Facebook Pages, Google Apps and Analytics, Retargeter and Twitter for Business. While paywalls can sometimes kill a young business, Grovo has apparently benefited: “We’ve have seen triple digit traffic growth since March, and are now delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lessons a day”, said Grovo Founder Jeff Fernandez.

Expanding its reach to enable individual businesses to make how-to and instructional videos for their customer-base is an intelligent move on the company’s part. As a young startup scales, its team often experiences difficulties in educating its customers about new product offerings, new tools available on the site, and so on — while maintaining that critical level of customer service and training. It should be a natural extension for a site that calls itself the “Field Guide to the Internet”, amirite?

To further help young startups with education and business training, the startup is today announcing that it will now be offering an embeddable widget to allow companies to take that user training to the next level. In doing so, Grovo has recruited inDinero, a Mint-competitor which we last covered back in September, and ReTargeter, a re-targeting
platform for online advertising, to embed Grovo’s video lessons on their own sites, to help train, educate and retain their users.

“But, can’t sites just suck it up and do this themselves?” I hear you asking. Of course. If your business is simply looking to create a video explaining why users should use your site or product — say, a single introductory video — it’s probably easier to do it yourself. But for those sites who may have several layers to their company or product, or perhaps software that performs a very specific or complicated task — this can be difficult. Not to mention, Grovo’s training programs are agnostic, so they’re not marketing fluff. And for many startup teams, immersed in their visions, it’s hard to step back and be objective.

For these reasons, Grovo can be fairly handy. You can think of them as your video pit crew, considering they’ve spent their early stages hiring a professional writing team, video production crew, and voice talent. And each Grovo tutorial comes with pre-written notes, quiz questions and glossary terms.

So, what are these startups using Grovo for? inDinero, already with a robust FAQ and customer happiness team, is using the Grovo Widget on its help page to showcase the site’s intuitive financial dashboard and automated data entry. Retargeter is using the widget before the site’s pay wall to help users better understand the experience that awaits them. The Widget presently constitutes Retargeter’s entire “help” section; the site also plans to feature the Widget behind its paywall shortly. The startup is also working with Aviary and Hy.ly to add customized how-tos to their respective sites.

To further help its macro-Web-guide vision, Grovo is also announcing today that it has closed its first round of seed funding, led by Krishna “Kittu” Kolluri, general partner at New Enterprise, who invested personally. Ajay Vashee of New Enterprise, Andy Dunn (Founder and CEO of Bonobos), Mareza Larizadeh (Larizadeh Capital Partners), Jon Emery (Chairman, Linkstorm), Steve Kowarsky, (Cofounder and CFO, CosmoCom), and Ajay Rajani (GEIG Tech Farm), among others, also participated in the round.

The seed funding will be used primarily to drive the startup’s product development, the Grovo CEO said. In the future, Grovo is looking to position itself as an education and training platform that companies can also use to assign courses, track progress and manage employee development.

Eventually, Grovo will have to decide whether it wants to be Joe The Plumber’s Web For Dummies, or whether it will primarily focus on being a full-service video training agency for startups and SMBs. Until then, it may experience a bit of an identity crisis. I could see myself using Grovo under either scenario, especially if it offers me a How-To for WordPress or Drupal or Python, but in the end, it’s one or the other. I’d go with the startups. They could always use more help, those startups.

But either way, you should check ‘em out. Let me know if this sounds like something you’d use.

CrunchBase InformationGrovoinDineroReTargeterInformation provided by CrunchBase

Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint, a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia.

Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see video below) and Real Racing.

EA says the deal is not material to the company, overall. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close within four weeks, were not disclosed.

Firemint was founded in 1999 (as “ndWare”) by CEO Robert Murray, and will now become part of EA Interactive (EAi), a division of Electronic Arts focused on digital business that includes EA Mobile, Pogo and social gaming outfits like Playfish.

The deal follows in the footsteps of EA’s purchase of Mobile Post Production, a specialist in cross-platform development and porting of games for smartphones.

EA also recently bought Angry Birds publisher Chillingo for $20 million in cash.

CrunchBase InformationFiremintElectronic ArtsInformation provided by CrunchBase