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Source:Mashable!

If you’re a tech-savvy guitar player, you’ve heard of Guitar Pro. It’s a desktop application that improves on standard guitar tabs, turning them into midi-playing note sheets which show the exact duration of each note as well as its position on the fretboard. If you want to learn how to play a song exactly to the last note, there’s no better way to do it.

Now, Guitar Pro has an online competitor called Songsterr. On the basic level, it’s the same thing, although Songsterr creators claim their engine is more sophisticated than the one in Guitar Pro. The application lacks many advanced features found in Guitar Pro, but it at least supports various tunings and playing at half at full speed, and overall it looks slick and works great.

The problem with it is that, although it’s an online application, it doesn’t really offer any social features. It’s like a desktop app translated into an online app, and as such it doesn’t offer much additional value over Guitar Pro, except for the fact that it’s free. The developers have some promises in stock, though:

- addition of library of 50 000 songs;

- support of more guitar effects (slides, bends, pull offs, hummer ons, etc);

- electric guitar sound engine and support of more instruments;

- upload of tabs by user (in Guitar Pro format);

- social features.

Yup. The first four are nice, but it’s that last one - very unspecified at this point - that’s going to make a difference. Still, kudos to the developers for good execution and a good idea. It definitely made me dig up my dusty Ibanez (and realize that 5 years of not playing does things to your style).

Source:Mashable!

Online advertising is the key to the future for companies that want to be successful, but a small firm called Lotame has just raised $13 million in Series B funding to take aim at advertisers and provide a unique way of getting in front of the target audience.

Right now, online advertising is being dominated by companies that look to spend money based on the number of visitors to a site.  For publishers, they offer a CPM (cost per thousand) advertising rate, which charges those companies a specified amount per 1,000 pageviews.  Advertisers then hope that their advertising efforts pay off and it gets in front of the right people.

But Lotame tries to do something different.  Aiming to capitalize on social networking, the company has partnered with more than 20 social sites and content producers, including Fotolog, Huffington Post, and Flixster, to place its proprietary technology into the code of the sites.  From there, the company collects anonymous user data and user gender, age, and zip code to develop a full understanding of key demographics each site offers.

After collecting this data, it keeps it on-hand for advertisers that are looking to target a specific audience.  As the company’s CEO, Andy Monfried, explained to me, advertisers will come to Lotame asking to advertise their product to “a 27-year old woman who recently consumed or created content about something similar to their product.“  After analyzing data across all the sites, Lotame then returns to the advertiser with the number of 27-year old women — usually more than 10,000 — that have done just that and sells advertising to them not based on that number, but by the number of minutes they want their ad put in front of those people.  In other words, advertisers can request a three-minute slot to put their ad in front of people they feel are most likely to use their product.

As you can see, Lotame’s take on advertising is extremely different and snubs conventional wisdom on a number of levels.  It should be noted, though, that the company doesn’t work with MySpace or Facebook, or any other major social network, for that matter.  Instead, it focuses on mid-tier services that adequately offer the kind of demographics most major US companies are looking for.

But it begs an important question: is Lotame’s idea the future of online advertising?  At first glance, it looks like a service that might actually change the way things are done forever.  And in an industry that’s expected to grow well into the billions, that’s not such a bad thing.

Think of it this way: right now, advertisers are at the mercy of publisher data in most cases and generally hope that the demographics provided to them are representative of the users when their ads are displayed.  But by working with Lotame, advertisers can be far more specific in their needs and adequately target the exact demographic they want.  And so far, it looks like it has worked — Lotame has a 90 percent retention rate.

That said, it’s working with a variety of second-rate social networks and there’s no indication that major advertisers will really want to work in the mid-tier if they think they can make it big with a major site like Facebook, which is hard at work trying to create a unique and extremely compelling advertising platform.

And we simply can’t forget that some people will complain about privacy problems and claim that Lotame is spying on them and capturing their private information.  And although Lotame contends that it’s in no way stealing private data and everything is anonymous, the debate will rage on regardless.

But I can’t fault Lotame’s intent on innovation.  For the first time, advertisers can capture real data in real-time for a specific demographic that they really want to target.  And although Lotame would be best-served working with larger organizations, it thinks it has found its niche and as it continues to grow, will continue to create a value proposition for advertisers that want to capitalize on the social networking space.

Will Lotame transform the online advertising business?  Right now, it’s too early to tell.  But rest assured that if it does, more companies will jump on this bandwagon in seconds.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Lotame Gets Millions for Behavioral Ad SolutionsUndisclosed Buzzd Funding Amount Finally Comes To LightHuffington Post Raises Another $5 MillionKyte Ups Its Second Round Of FundingMig33 Raises Another $13.5 Million for Mobile Social NetworkTwitter Raises $15 Million in Funding?Peanut Labs Gets $3.2M to Turn Your Users Into Cash

Source:Mashable!

uLocate, the location-based application provider, has teamed up with Garmin to push its Buddy Beacon feature that allows you to find your nearby friends. It works in reverse, too - your friends can find you as well. This was all built on WHERE’s Buddy Beacon network, developed by uLocate, so Garmin’s involvement simply provides another device on which Buddy Beacon can be used.

A select few of Garmin’s current and future GPS devices will be enabled with Buddy Beacon so that Garmin users can connect with friends and share their location, along with their status. Since WHERE is already integrated with a number of existing social networks, updating your location and/or status through a Garmin-enabled device can broadcast this information across your other profiles where you’ve activated WHERE’s service, including Facebook.

As Garmin creates standalone GPS devices, there is some overlap between Garmin’s capabilities and those found on other devices like the iPhone, so integrating with social networking and providing ways in which people can use Garmin’sGPS devices to connect with each other offline means that Garmin is increasing its value and moving towards the support of a more inclusive ecosystem for the use of its devices.

As we’ve seen with Fire Eagle’s launch last week, the applications with which GPS-enabled devices are now being integrated with are increasing in practicality and consumer appeal. We’re sure to see a great deal more development come from this particular space, as more networks, devices and third-party manufacturers for products like vehicles find more ways in which to integrate such developments into their items, giving consumers a highly integrated and connected experience for sharing and connecting with others.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Garmin Teams Up with Google and MapQuest for Simple Data TransfersMicrosoft Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is LiveMicrosoft Takes MSN Direct GPS on the Open RoadWhy I Love Corporate Blogs (And You Should Too)25+ Tools for a Road Trip 2.0The Man Registry: Enhance Your Wedding Gift [The Startup Review]Treasure Hunting with the iPhone 3G

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under News, myspace, Mobile 2.0, myspace music, gps, Garmin, ulocate, Boston, where buddy beacon network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.