Posse Raises $500K More For A Local Discovery App That Lets Users Build “Playlists” Of Favorite Shops, Now Live In The U.S.
Posse, a local discovery platform for web and mobile, is today arriving in the U.S. and making its iPhone app debut. The company has also just raised another $500,000 in additional funding from existing investors including Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps creator and currently Facebook’s Director of Engineering, as well as Silicon Valley angel investor Bill Tai. Rasmussen also sits on the company’s board.
TastemakerX, a music discovery mobile application, which previously operated as something of a “stock market for bands,” is today announcing $1.25 million in new funding from Baseline Ventures, True Ventures, Guggenheim Venture Partners and Aol Ventures*. It’s also doing away with the whole stock market analogy, and is instead launching a new feature called “Collections,” allowing users an alternative way to show off their musical tastes. The company first launched into beta last spring around the time of the Coachella Valley music festival. It’s squarely targeted at new music enthusiasts – those people, who in years past, may have spent their time wading their way through MP3 blogs, for example. But these days, music discovery has gone mobile, thanks in part to a large number of streaming music startups like Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG, Slacker, and more. Instead of competing with that competitor lineup head-on, TastemakerX had been developing a niche for itself by rewarding users for their new music finds, via a metric called the “T-Score” which demonstrated their influence based on their trades of “artist shares.” It was very much like a virtual stock market, but apparently, that metaphor wasn’t a big enough hit (ha!) with TastemakerX’s audience. So today, the company is introducing Collections, which still allows users to showcase that they heard of so-and-so first and thereby earn their hipster cred. No one had early access to this feature, but from what we understand (also, see screenshot below) it’s a more visual, perhaps even a Pinterest-like way to display a music collection. And the more music you have in one collection, the larger it appears on your profile. The Collections are tightly integrated with Spotify, and users can create Spotify playlists generated by their Collection that can also be streamed directly in the app. There’s a new listening experience, too, which includes not only that Spotify integration, but also allows music to be pulled in from Songkick, SoundCloud and YouTube. But TastemakerX isn’t apparently done with trying to gamify its app entirely – as it exits beta today, it’s introducing a Fantasy sports-like feature called “Fantasy Leagues for Music.” Frankly, that sounds like a lot more fun than trading stocks of bands, if you ask me, but it has another benefit for the startup as well – users playing Fantasy League games tend to be regularly engaged with their “teams,” making moves and trades, and generally keeping
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Wedding Party, the mobile app that allows wedding guests, friends and family to contribute to a shared, digital album of photos and notes which can later be posted directly to the couple’s Facebook timeline, has raised $1 million in seed funding in a round jointly led by NEA and Felicis Ventures. Also participating were a number of angel investors, including early Dropbox investor Pejman Nozad, plus Ullas Naik, Darian Shirazi, Rich Chen, Zeki and Haroon Mokhtarzada, Doug Pepper, Mark Jung, Kumar Malavalli, Chris Hobbs, Hamid Barkhordar, Sam Ferdows, and Merced Partners. The app, which first launched this summer on iPhone only, was being bootstrapped by Ajay Kamat, Himani Amoli, Gordon McCreight and Dan Perez, three of whom had previous social community building experience from an earlier project called MicroMobs. Dan, meanwhile, came from Coupons.com. Since its original debut, Wedding Party has expanded to Android, where it’s now available in beta. The Android version isn’t yet feature-complete compared with the iPhone app, says co-founder Ajay Kamat, so that will be an immediate focus for the company’s product development efforts. Longer-term, the team is thinking about ways to bring the experience of viewing the collected and photos to the iPad’s bigger screen. “It’s very obvious that the consumption of the content on a tablet would be gorgeous,” Kamat says. “It’s definitely something that we’re thinking about.” Currently, wedding guests and newlyweds can revisit their digital album after the fact either via Facebook (if they choose to publish there) or through an album on the Wedding Party website itself. In addition, thanks to a partnership with MyWedding.com, the album can also be integrated into the couple’s main wedding website. When the team first created the app, they thought of it as something the couple would ask their guests to use on their big day, but they soon found that their users had other ideas. “The biggest surprise for us was that, almost immediately, we saw that people were using us months and months in advance of their wedding,” says Kamat. “They were using it to get their friends and family involved in the wedding experience early on. We’re seeing things like cake tastings, dress fittings, rehearsal dinners,” he adds. To support this slight shift in focus, Wedding Party has been updated with features designed for all the expanded use cases. It now offers things like upgraded guest pages with collages of all the photos the guests were involved in, plus
Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one popular profiles on the site? Then, good news – you’re special. 