Omkarmusic - The Music Site of Omkar

Giant Realm, the entertainment portal geared towards men, has received $2 million in funding from SoftBank Capital. The funds come in addition to the $3.5 million contributed by Comcast Interactive Capital and Edison Venture Fund last month, bringing the total Series A funding to $5.5 million.

Giant Realm is an online media provider that targets men ages 18-34 with content related to video games, movies, television, humor, and music. The company says that it is growing rapidly, with a reach of over 11 million viewers monthly.

As part of the deal, Jordan Levy of SoftBank Capital will join Giant Realm’s board of directors, with SoftBank’s Michael Perlis joining as an observer.

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Sometimes the simplest ideas are best. While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote. They just want an easy way to share their traditional presentation files with others.

So the company took the YouTube strategy of creating a place where people could upload, share, and embed their media. And now it’s getting $3M more from Venrock and a handful of notable angel investors in its first major round of funding, which should help them pursue that strategy further (i.e. build as massive user base as possible). Oh, and fight off future denial of service attacks and increase capacity.

Individual investors include Dave McClure, Ariel Poler, Mark Cuban, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian, Yee Lee, and Saul Klein. Many of them actually came to know SlideShare as normal customers and only decided to invest once realizing how handy it was. David Siminoff will also join SlideShare’s board.

SlideShare is using some of the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, where they’ll have a larger office. It will also grow its team from about 10 people to 18, mostly with local hires even though the bulk of its development occurs in India.

Of course, we’ve been given a press release in the form of an embeddable slideshow, inserted below. Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.

| View | Upload your own

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PlugandPlay’s third annual Expo was held today at their Sunnyvale TechCenter, drawing nearly fifty exhibitors from an array of markets that included mobile advertising, massively multiplayer gaming, and medical technology.

The venue itself was a little strange - a large meeting space/multipurpose room that seemed better suited for a crowd half the size of the expo’s 400 attendees. Seats were in very short supply, though the crowd dwindled as the day progressed.

The expo’s main draw was a 46-company-long elevator pitch marathon that lasted for nearly two hours. Each company was allotted approximately two minutes to impress potential investors, though some didn’t seem to pay much attention to the rule. With very few visual aids (and no breaks) the presentations got a little tedious at times, but there were a few bright stars in the bunch.

Among my favorites:

• Epsodic- Epsodic wants to take events from typical computer games and visualize them with fully rendered cutscenes. The technology will take a supported game’s data and animate pre-fabricated characters.
• Novauris - One of the better-established companies at the expo, Novauris wants to provide speech recognition technology for mobile devices. The on-stage demo featured a cell phone’s voice lookup for Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean. It’s not a new idea, but I want it.

The TechCenter is the unconventional brainchild of entrepreneur Saeed Amidi, who has created a “startup ecosystem� where creativity and competition run rampant. The flagship office, located in Sunnyvale, is currently home to 129 companies, and there are a number of smaller locations across the Valley. With a near-constant stream of VCs and monthly Web 2.0 events, it’s easy to see why the TechCenter appeals to so many startups.

Amidi fosters the community by selectively permitting only “exciting� startups to rent in the building. Of course, his motivations are not exactly charitable - he gets a first look at any company that wants to take space, and has invested in around 20% of them.

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Facebook has posted more details about the upcoming redesign of user profiles, which were supposed to launch early April but are apparently now close at hand.

Profiles will be broken down into 5 main tabs: Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, and “Boxes”. The feed tab appears to contain the News Feed as we know it, except with three new size standards: one line, short, and full.

There’s also a bit of confusion between this Feed tab and the new Wall one. Apparently users will be able to post items to friends’ Feed tabs (and their own) using a new Publisher tool. This is described as meant to replace the old wall attachments feature, so it appears as though the Wall will revert to plain text posts and no longer allow for rich media. But it will also incorporate all mini-feed items somehow.

Some suggest that the new Publisher feature will allow for FriendFeed-like conversations through comments, but the official documentation doesn’t make any reference to such capabilities. Screen shots showing comments appear to be only wall-to-wall conversations.

The “Boxes” tab will be where all the current application profile boxes are quarantined, er, showcased. While 5 tabs will show by default, users will be able to add their own tabs that display canvas-like pages for their favorite apps. This appears to be a trade-off Facebook is imposing on developers: isolate their profile boxes in a “boxes” tab but compensate them by allowing for more prominent, full-view pages. That said, Facebook will also be allowing up to 5 app boxes to show up across all tabs in the left-hand column (but they’ll have a severe height restriction).

Unfortunately Facebook has yet to release any screenshots of the new design except for the rather uninformative one above.

More information at Inside Facebook.

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Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe continues its acquisitions spree: they’ve bought troubled Silicon Valley startup MeeVee, we’re heard from multiple sources. This comes less than a month after they announced the acquisition of Pageflakes, another northern California startup.

We do not know the acquisition price, but it is undoubtedly less than the $25 million Meevee has raised in venture capital over the years. The company, which was founded in 2000, let 20% of its staff go in mid-2007, and made more layoffs earlier this year.

Meevee integrates online TV listings with video. In 2006 we compared them favorably to other online tv guides, and the product has evolved significantly since then. Still, they never got the traction they needed for a big liquidity event. Perhaps Meevee will find a comfortable home at Live Universe, which has, among many other properties, a popular online video site called LiveVideo.

The MeeVee team will report to Dan Cohen, the former CEO of Pageflakes, according to our sources.

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I’m proud to announce that Ning’s Marc Andreessen, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha and Google’s Marissa Mayer will join us on September 8 - 10 in San Francisco for the TechCrunch50 conference Panel of Experts. The experts will judge the fifty startups launching at the event, and then discuss each of the demos on stage as a group.

More details on the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is a three day conference where fifty new startups will launch over three days. There will also be a number of topical panels and workshops. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue that can accommodate over 1,000 attendees with ease.

There will be 24 experts in all, more will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets for the event can be purchased here (early bird pricing is available until July 15). The submission process to launch your startup is here.

More on the TechCrunch50 blog.

	Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of Ning, the create-your-own social network platform company that has raised over $100 million in funding. He also serves on the board of Open Media Network. Marc is best known as a co-founder and chief technical mind behind Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely- used web browser.
	Roelof Botha Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY) and worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
	Marissa Mayer Marissa Mayer is VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to 100+ languages and launching numerous features and products. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Before Google, she worked at UBS research lab (Ubilab) and SRI International. Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future�), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch�), Business 2.0, BusinessWeek and Fortune.

Thank you to our early corporate sponsors: Sequoia Capital, Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures and Fenwick & West all returned quickly to support us for the second year in a row. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo reached out as well, and we’re very grateful for their new commitment to our merit-based conference format.

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New startup KickNote, founded by Brian Erickson, will be launching a “Battle Of The Bands” event this summer that will allow people to watch, and vote, online. The actual concerts will be held in the New York city area, so this event will be called “Battle of the Boroughs.”

Thirteen separate events will be held over three rounds; 50 bands in total are expected to participate. The entire process will take seven weeks. KickNote is partnering with Justin.tv to deliver the live video to viewers.

There are various prizes for the winners, although the potential notoriety and exposure will drive participation. The company says they’ll have a second event in the Fall, based in Los Angeles.

Promotional video for the site is below. Artists interested in participating can sign up on their home page.

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You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.

But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted. Jesse Stay explains:

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam�, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:

We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.

I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.

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Web video for intellectuals is a hard sell. The videos on Fora.TV come from speeches given by intellectuals and business people. It competes with Big Think, which has a slightly different format.

Will Hearst and Adobe Ventures believe in it enough to put another $2 million into Fora.TV, along with some other unnamed investors. Together, with the $2 million in seed capital they invested last October, the company is counting the total as a $4 million A round. Back in October, CEO Brian Gruber told me that he was hoping to close an additional $5 million in an A round by the end of January. It is now three months later, and Gruber appears to be $3 million short.

He is still in talks with another strategic investor (a media company) to invest another $2 million or so. When is that going to happen? “In the next 60 to 90 days,” he says. So why is he having so much trouble closing the round?

Everyone has trouble closing the round until they close the round.

That’s so Zen, I’m going to put that one up on my wall.

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This is an interesting story in light of the discussion yesterday about the fate of the intellectual property of failed startups. Email startup Xobni, which recently turned down a $20 million acquisition offer from Microsoft, says they have acquired the key patents around a product called Zaplets which originally launched in 2000.

Zaplets was an email product that put synchronized applications into email messages. The goal was to reduce email back and forth around things like scheduling meetings, coordinating events, etc. Any time an email turned into a thread, Zaplets may be more useful - all those responses would be brought right back into the original email. The Zaplet automatically updated itself in the original email, so long threads were avoided.

If Zaplets launched today, they’d call them email widgets.

Zaplets parent company, FireDrop, raised over $100 million from a slew of investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Their 2000 Series D round alone was reportedly $90 million. USA Today called it “one of the Valley’s most sizzling start-ups.” Dave Winer, by contrast, failed to find it interesting. As an aside, I remember being in their offices and seeing a demo of the product, but I can’t remember why (I had my own company then, and certainly wasn’t running around getting startup demos). I liked it.

But Zaplets were not to be it seems. Eventually Firedrop shut down, the employees dispersed and the assets eventually made their way to MetricStream.

Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte says the Zaplet idea was a good one, just too early. And that’s why they’ve acquired much of the intellectual property of FireDrop from MetricStream. He won’t say what they paid, but hinted that it was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the portfolio of ten key patents.

Bonforte says reducing email threads down to a single active message is a key factor in solving the email problem I wrote about last month. And he thinks Xobni will eventually be able to do that with the IP they’ve just acquired.

Some screen shots of the old Zaplet website are below.

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Biomusique

The 10,000 Steps  (Kosmic Music, 2008)

Combining the talents of singer/songwriter Lisbeth Scott, known for her musical collaborations on such movies as The Chronicles of Narnia, Munich  and ...

Sa Dingding

Alive (Universal/Shanghai To-Wing Culture Development, 2008)

Chinese singer Sa Dingding is beginning to get well deserved worldwide attention thanks to her recent BBC World Music Award in the Asia/Pacific category. The key to her success is her captivating vocal style, together with Chinese and Tibetan traditions and instrumentation combined with cutting edge global grooves and electronica.

The photogenic vocalist sings in Mandarin Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan and also in an imaginary language she created. Sa Dingding is fascinated by Sanskrit and also incorporates evocative Tibetan Buddhism elements, such as mantras, adding vocal ensembles and chill out ambience as a counterbalance to the dance ori...

World Music Central's Angel Romero recently visited Madrid, where he interviewed Manuel Domínguez, one of the key figures in the development of world music in Spain. Manuel Domínguez runs, together with Zazie Wurr, the renowned Nubenegra world music label. 

Nubenegra has been a key label in the production of world music and folk in Spain. Which is it the current focus of the label?

It has not changed. Simply, we try to run less risks knowing that sales are going to be lower and that the majority of sales will be at concerts. This means that it is becoming more difficult to record singers who need to hire musicians, arrangers, etc. Therefore, our priority are groups that help with promotion by willing to tour for a promotional fee. Neither do I record anyone that doesn'...

Music Crossroads - Africa’s largest youth-music program – has launched its first official website. The site is now live and will definitely surprise audiences with the wealth of Southern African musical talent pouring from over 10 years of musical empowerment in Southern Africa.

The Music Crossroads website is packed full of information, enabling anybody to get involved:  Participants can register for festivals, competitions and training programs; fans can find info on bands, tours, news and events; music lovers can sample the undiscovered music scenes of Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Supporters wanting to contribute can become active volunteers or make a donation to Southern African music; andt those looking for an unique African music festival experience can get all th...

Shastriya Syndicate

Syndicated  (Sense World Music, 2008)

Shastriya Syndicate is Purbayan Chatterjee's project. On the outstanding CD Syndicated (Sense World Music) he has brought together a group of young Indian masters, who are bringing new blood to Indian classical music. The virtuoso musicians fuse the music of North India (HIndistani) and South Inda (Carnatic).

While many Indian artists follow the traditional format of...