TastemakerX Raises Another $1.25M To Position Itself As “Fantasy League” For Bands
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
After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched 
Cheers, the app and social network built around giving users the chance to celebrate the good things in their lives, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round led by MindFund and including Charles River Ventures, Trinity Ventures, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and others. The startup launched just over a year ago in February, and is still very much experimenting with its positivity-based social network, according to founder Farhad Mohit.
Back in late 2009, Zynga quietly acquired a startup called MyMiniLife, a maker of virtual worlds that allowed players to outfit their characters and homes with virtual lamps, furniture and so on. You couldn’t see it at the time, but the MyMiniLife acquisition was a company-making deal. It spawned FarmVille, the monster hit that put social gaming and Zynga on the map. At the same time, MyMiniLife was starting to run out of money. Ultimately, it turned out to be a win-win. “While Zynga had some success with Mafia Wars and Poker, they weren’t necessarily in a dominant position,” said Amitt Mahajan, who was one of FarmVille’s co-creators. “They were not yet known for building these isometric worlds. Playfish was catching up, but the reusable game engine behind FarmVille gave them a leg up.” Now Mahajan and another MyMiniLife co-founder, Joel Poloney, are back with a new company called Red Hot Labs. Looking to have the same impact on mobile gaming, they’ve raised seed funding from an all-star cast of investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, General Catalyst, Keith Rabois, Chris Dixon, Bill Tai, and Guitar Hero co-creators Charles Huang and Kai Huang. To be clear, Red Hot Labs is not going to be solely a game developer. Mahajan and Poloney are looking for pain points that are common to all mobile game developers that they can build technology and services around. “As I look at the mobile landscape, there’s this huge gap in developer tools,” he said. “There are all these holes that need to be filled. We’re not going to be just about building games but also figuring out where those holes are.” They’ve duplicated Zynga’s original lean approach toward game development, with a series of several titles in the works all from a team of six people. They’ve got experience in this, as they built the original version of FarmVille in about five weeks. “Our company is founded on Zynga-style product management,” Mahajan said. “We’ve scaled games to hundreds of millions of people and engineered growth and virality in both good times and bad on the Facebook platform.” The first game, a social bingo-style game, should come out shortly. While the rise of Android and iOS have meant big changes for the gaming industry, some things still seem the same. One of the reliably top 5 grossing games over the last six months has been Hay Day from Finland’s
Founded in 2011, Detroit-based startup 
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
After five months of testing, iterating, spit balling and pavement pounding, today 
