If you glance at the top lineup of gaming applications on the Facebook or MySpace platform, you’ll notice an interesting fact. Not one is the product of a major gaming publisher. Instead a group of independent gaming startups have been the leaders in publishing games within social networks.

Co-founders of the gaming publisher Playfish, Kristian Segerstråle and Sebastien de Halleux, chalk up the growth to a profound platform shift social networks have introduced into the gaming marketplace. Traditionally, large publishers have lorded over the $50 billion gaming industry by controlling two things: access and distribution. Be it a console game or the latest PC title, only big companies could shoulder the large costs of distribution deals and advertising involved in bringing a game to market.

Social networks, however, have are an open platform that give away both access and distribution for free (the CBS backlash is an exception that proves the rule).

You may already recognize Playfish from their flashy Facebook games: Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies. The games have a very similar look and feel to the popular Wii, especially their latest game, Bowling Buddies. Playfish developed the 3 games over the past 6 months and has grown to about 6 million monthly users playing an average of 30 minutes a session. The team attributes this to the social infrastructure that both makes the games more enjoyable and easier to spread. For some perspective, EA’s Pogo.com claims about 14 million visitors per month and has been around since 1999.

For the large part, big gaming publishers have only stuck a toe into social networking. Gaming giant EA’s most notable release to date has been the official version of Scrabble, which currently has around 7,000 DAU (it’s also limited to USA and CAN). However, there’s certainly more to come as these networks watch startups work out the kinks. EA has already done some major releases on the iPhone and has larger plans for their latest acquisition, Rupture. Comparatively, Playfish commands 3 of the top ten gaming apps on Facebook, totaling around 1 million daily active users. The others are belong to notables include SGN, Zynga, and Serious Business.

But traditional gaming companies have been beating the startups on one key metric, monetization. PC and console games saw sales up 43% last year to $18.8 billion. Onine gaming is currently a $1 billion a year business. Pogo.com has around 1.5 million members for it’s monthly subscription service, Club Pogo, for which they pay $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. Free players of the main site are upsold to premium features and game downloads.

But Playfish is taking a similar approach, looking to monetize gamers on all points of the demand curve. Gamers who are happy to play the basic game will be subject to advertising, while players looking for more can pay for upgrades and premium games. Just this past week they released $10 paid upgrades for “Who has the Biggest Brain?” and expect these payments outpace their ad sales. Albeit, their only form of advertisement is video ads displayed after a game set is completed.

While Playfish has yet to cross outside of the Facebook platform on to other platforms, they’ve made great strides to cross continents by translating their top game “Who has the Biggest Brain?” into six languages. The London-based startup also has studios in Norway and Beijing. They’re funded by $3 million in angel financing with a $1 million bridge from Accel.

Local businesses have a love/hate relationship with review site Yelp: The site sends new customer leads to the businesses reviewed. But businesses can also be reviewed (and trashed) without even knowing Yelp exists.

Businesses like Oakland coffee shop Cafe Rooz felt slighted by the ratings site when a few vocal customers posted poor reviews. They went so far as to declare No Yelpers. But still others have benefited. According to Yelp, Joe Alexander’s San Francisco based mattress store, Keetsa, gets 80 percent of its total monthly business directly from Yelp.

In either case it’s a sign of the influence the site has over businesses as a lead generation – or degeneration – tool. Now Yelp is releasing a suite of business tools to give business owners tools to participate more directly in the conversation.

The suite is available at biz.yelp.com and lets businesses:

• Message customers who have reviewed their business
• See how many prospective customers viewed their business page
• Update business information instantly (i.e. hours of operation, categories)
• Receive new review email alerts

Yelp, which has raised $31 million in venture capital, continues to grow briskly. Comscore says they have 3.7 million unique monthly visitors; Compete says it’s more like 9 million.

Less than a year ago Alex Le and Siqi Chen were working at one of the web’s most ambitious startups, semantic search engine PowerSet (Due out soon). But last December they made the tough choice to quit it all and go full time for their own side project, a quickly growing little Facebook application called “Friends For Sale”. That project has grown into a full blown venture backed startup ironically named “Serious Business“, which just raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners (double digit pre) and currently draws over 600,000 daily active users on Facebook. Steve Newcomb, formerly of PowerSet, will be taking a seat on their board.

True to its name, “Friends for Sale” is an application that lets you virtually buy and sell your friends. The game is an ego driven form of “poking” (virtual nudges) that makes it abundantly clear who the most desirable players are, by listing a leader board of your most expensive friends. Every one of your friends, whether they have the app or not, can be purchased as a “pet”. Everyone starts at a base price that rises with every resale. You get more cash when you log in, are sold, or have one of your pets bought away from you. Users can spend that cash on kicking their pets, give them funny tag lines, or even virtual gifts.

That one game has also been supporting the growing company’s resources (20 Ruby on Rails servers and growing) through a mix of banner advertisements and sponsorships. While the company declined to state their earnings, they estimated the company could grow to 12 engineers without raising any financing. The financing allows the company to significantly ramp up their expansion plans.

But Lightspeed didn’t invest in Serious Business just for a single game. Founder Alex Le cites “Friends for Sale” as the first in a series of of games built directly around your relationships with friends. The idea is to create games for all social networks (Facebook, OpenSocial) that rely on leveraging social skills to win, instead of your twitch reflex or poker proficiency. While they’ll have some games to announce in the next 30 days, the founders briefly threw out the example of a battle game where your friends are the soldiers and success depended on your social skills.

Serious Business is not without competition. Zynga and SGN are well funded social gaming startups. However, Serious Business has a much larger hit than either, so far. “Friends for Sale” has also already been cloned as “Owned”, which draws about the same level of traffic some days. “Friends for Sale” itself is a variation on an earlier game “Human Gifts”. These startups are also in competition with the cycle that most applications follow on Facebook, amongst other potential difficulties. Applications tend to explode for a brief period (if at all) before settling at a lower activity level or completely dying.

Serious business indeed.

There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.

Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.

Grou.ps isn’t the only startup trying to solve the integration problem. Ning and Wetpaint have integrated forums and various forms of media into their community products. Google and Zoho also have have very compelling collaboration suites. A single sign-on can get you chat, email, presentations, documents, wikis, and many other tools.

However, Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.

The blog commenting system Disqus picked up $500,000 in a series A by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, Aydin Senkut. Union Square’s investment isn’t all too surprising considering how Fred Wilson has raved about the service. Including Wilson’s own blog, Disqus is currently used on over 4,000 blogs with nearly 60,000 commenters.

The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.

The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.

OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right?

Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are redirected to a sign in page. And it’s worse for people who already have an account at a website but want to start using their OpenID instead. Linking those two accounts isn’t easy.

That’s where new startup Clickpass comes in, which launches today. We first heard of them last year at a Y Combinator demo day, but the founders, Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund weren’t saying much at the time.

They are an OpenID issuer first. But they are also trying to make using OpenID much simpler for the user. First, they are partnering with sites like Plaxo, GetSatisfaction, Pownce and many of the Y Combinator startups. Those sites will show the ClickPass button, and users can sign in via OpenID with a single click (and they don’t need to remember their OpenID URL). If it’s your first time with OpenID, Clickpass will ask you if you have an existing account at the service you are trying to log into, and pass that information back to the site to join the accounts.

As you add sites to your ClickPass OpenID, you’ll see them listed on the Clickpass site. You are given a distinct OpenID URL for each site that you can use to manage multiple identities, all tied together on ClickPass. And if you choose to fill out profile information on ClickPass, they’ll autofill that information on new sites you join. Clickpass also ensures privacy controls by letting you choose what kind of information you want to share with the site. Conceivably the service could serve as a node for your personal data, connecting it between different website accounts.

In short, ClickPass takes the technical transparency and openness of OpenID and adds a layer of simplicity and familiarity.

Vidoop is approaching OpenID in a similar way, and PassPack is a non-OpenID solution. For launch they’ll be active on hacker news, Plaxo, Disqus, and through a Wordpress plugin.

The user experience is clean. After you sign in to Clickpass, you can sign in to any OpenID-enabled site with a single click of their button.

If you don’t want to use Clickpass as your ID provider, you can link it to any other OpenID provider, but it would really defeat the purpose. If the site has OpenID but not Clickpass you can still sign in using their Firefox plugin or OpenID url from Clickpass.

Naturally some concerns arise with any centralized login system. Doesn’t this mean a thief only has to steal one password, your Clickpass password? Co-founder Peter Nixey says we already have this problem, though. Most services will forward forgotten passwords to your email account making Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail (especially now) the Achilles heel.

As for the more probable phishing attacks, Clickpass plans to implement unique visual or textual cues (photos or quotes) to let you know if you’ve been had. But overall, Clickpass doesn’t aim to start protecting your bank account, rather that plethora of useful services the provide a great deal of personal utility, but little value to hackers (logging in to my news.yc account can’t do much damage).

It’s clear that OpenID really needs a system like this to gain widespread adoption. That’s probably one of the reasons OpenID’s chair, Scott Kveton, joined Clickpass’ board. It’s also clear that the web needs something like Clickpass too.

Jangl is finally turning on a revenue stream across its network of social calling widgets, which reach a potential 80 million social networking profiles (the company hasn’t announced actual active users). People generally use Jangl to place calls or SMSs to other web surfers without exchanging your real number. The new advertising initiative is called Mobile Media Platform and provides a set of APIs for publishers and ad units for advertisers. The strategy is similar to steps other widget providers have taken to finally make some money off their network by tying in advertisements.

Through the APIs, developers can integrate bits of Jangl’s SMS and VOIP calling functionality into their applications. In exchange, Jangl expands its advertising reach a bit further. The monetization side is being handled in partnership with Pudding Media, and Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Group. Jangl will have several different types of ad units for advertisers, such as SMS ads tacked on to messages users send and pre-roll audio ads that play during the time you’d normally spend listening to the phone ring. Advertisers can target the ads by keyword, category, location, and demographics. Jangl’s been running tests of the SMS and pre-roll format on Facebook and Bebo with Pudding Media earlier this quarter and feels confident enough that they won’t turn users off to the service.

Social calling widget Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Their widget, like Jangl’s, provides users with an anonymous number to call each other with the added bonus of cheaper long distance calling.

Up until now, Jaxtr users found each other more or less randomly on social networks of email signatures that listed links to the service. Jaxtr Cafe, however, is a social network of sorts where some 10 million users (50-60% active) of the service can find each other and carry on conversations about whatever they want. It also gives Jaxtr the opportunity to start monetizing their free service through advertising on the site. Jangl, on the other hand, has monetized on a case by case basis (rev share on Match.com, ads on PlentyOfFish).

Every user of Jaxtr is grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database. You can search amongst these profiles based on interests and geography. For instance, if you want to talk to someone who’s an Australian and interested in food, you can easily do a search through the directory for just the right person. You can then call or text them using Jaxtr’s widget.

I was surprised no to see an offering closer to Ingenio’s Ether, but that may be an additional feature in the coming months. Rather the service seems a lot like Skype Live. However there’s the added advantage that while people aren’t always on Skype, but pretty much always have their phones. It does come at the cost of your local calling minutes, but you’ll wind up with a cheaper long distance chat.

If you ever considered yourself a Marv Albert or John Madden in training, YouCastr is the place for you. The site just launched out of a quiet beta. It’s kind of like Ustream or Justin.tv for sports commentary. The site lets anyone stream live broadcasts of game commentary or cut random rants in archived podcasts. Listeners can tune into commentary covering the latest sports games and chat live or leave comments. Here’s an example of a good podcast.

While I’m not quite ready to turn down the volume on my TV to hear Joe Schmo’s coverage of the Superbowl, a place for sports fans to post sports rants for later listening has promise. There’s already a vibrant community of sports bloggers covering news and even live blogging games. These same bloggers would probably love to easily make audio broadcasts like the best of them. YouCastr makes that easy.

With the entry of Yahoo into the live video category and Ustream acquisition rumors, there’s a lot of interest in the live format. YouCastr’s focus on sports strikes me as a good way to inject a sense of purpose and consistency missing from some lifecasting sites. When you go on Justin.tv, you don’t always know what you’re going to get, but YouCastr will always give you something sports related.

YouCastr was built over the past year by a team of four and is funded in the mid six figures by a team of angels.

RocketOn is a San Francisco based startup is making a 2D virtual world you can access across any site through an embeddable widget. They also just raised $5 million from the D. E. Shaw group’s venture capital unit, bringing total investment up to $5.8 million.

In its alpha state, this virtual world is simply a chat widget with some avatars you can walk around the screen with the click of a mouse. You can chat in real time with other people on the network and walk into a variety of themed worlds (chat rooms) with different features. It’s also obviously targeted toward kids, with its fuzzy-looking avatars and chat profanity blocker.

The more complex functionality includes friending, profiles, fame, and items. Each world has an object or character you can interact with (dancing stones, little monster, arcade games). Although, you can unlock more worlds and features by inviting more users.

However, their widget strategy strikes me as odd because it flies in the face of the safety centered walled gardens other kid oriented sites have built to keep kids safe (Club Penguin, Webkinz, and others).

Update: RocketOn updated us, stating that the widget below was part of an experiment in October of last year. Also, the company says “we’re not targeting kids. I know those initial avatars look very Club Penguinesque, but when you see the full system, it will become clear that we’re going for teens and up (15+).” We’ll see how it evolves when the final product is released.

When I first saw Aviary I called it an incredibly ambitious art project. Aviary is creating a online creativity ecosystem that consists of a Flash based graphics suite tied to a marketplace where artists can sell their creations.

For the suite, the New York based team of 12 has been developing over 14 graphics tools ranging from pattern generators to vector based graphic editors. They’ve now put the finishing touches on two of their main programs (image editor Phoenix and pattern maker Peacock) and are letting in TechCrunch readers in to play around with them.

I’ve been really impressed after playing around with the tools. While by no means a Photoshop master, the image editor Pheonix has all the functionality I’ve come to expect from Adobe’s image editor (drawing, smudging, layers, filters, etc.). Founder Avi Muchnick says it has the most important functionality of Photoshop 6 and is not meant to be a total replacement (see other online photo editors as well and even Adobe’s soon).

Instead it’s meant to do the majority of what you want to do with an image editor, but also benefit from easy integration with the other online tools. For instance, you can use their pattern generator, Peacock, to make textures for an image you’re editing in Phoenix. If you share the pattern publicly anyone else can do it too (eventually you’ll be able to sell it).

Public files can also be commented on by other users, and preserve a version history that lets anyone to go back and branch your work in a different direction. All the files generated with the tools are saved as .egg files on Aviary’s servers, making them easy to share and track the intellectual property rights of files generated from scratch or uploaded to the system.

Here’s a link to what people have already created on the platform. Here’s an example of the many directions one image can be edited. Below is an example of the suite in action.

Aviary is giving away 100 invites to TechCrunch readers who sign up for an early bird invite here. They’ll be handing them out by tracking referrals, so you need to click through the link. You can also share/put your name down on a waiting list for invites at InviteShare.

When it comes to connecting with new friends safely and privately, Jangl fits the bill. The “Social Communications Widget” lets you make calls, send SMSs, and leave voice mails without exposing anyone’s phone number through a simple widget.

In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months).

Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising.

Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour).

Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com).

I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral.

Mobile social network Mig33 has pulled in a $13.5 million Series B round led by DCM with participation from existing Series A investors Accel, Redpoint and TVP. Mig33 will put the money toward expanding the company in the U.S. and internationally. The company was founded in Perth, Australia, but moved to the valley after their Series A. They currently have over 9 million users (up from 7.5 million last October) in their global user base across more than 200 countries. You can see an earlier roundup of mobile social networks here.

Mig33 is a downloadable mobile social networking application with a bunch of utilities mixed in. Users can not only do the usual profiles and friending, but also includes VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, picture sharing. Long distance calls can be made by using pre-paid Mig33 minutes. They have an affiliate program for selling minutes and have even launched a calling card business in South Africa. Users have been signing on for more than a total of 2 million sessions per day, sending more than 45 million messages each day, and share more than a million pictures a month.

While many of us with “valley blinders” on would look to out ultra-portable laptop or iPhone to carry out most of these tasks, the rest of the world’s 2.6 billion subscribers turn first to a basic cellphone that runs one program at a time. Mig33 wants to be that one program.

Their application will work on most phones, including a long list of Nokias, Sony Ericssons, Motorolas, Samsungs, and others. With their eyes on the U.S. market, Mig33 plans on making smartphones fun and “dumb” phones smart by adding features like email and chat. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with, considering I’ve owned both a Blackberry and iPhone which already deliver on a lot of the features Mig33 has to offer. [Update: TechCrunch UK has a UK/European perspective on this].

Ever since Google options finished vesting, people have been wondering what will become of the Xooglers after they take their money and jump into something new. Google’s former Product Management Director for AdSense, Gokul Rajaram has decided to take a position on the board of Tumri, a display advertising startup that delivers dynamically targeted ads.

Rajaram served at Google from January 2003 to November 2007 and played a major role in developing AdSense in early 2003 and on. According to his bio:

He also helped drive a number of Google’s acquisitions, including DoubleClick, AdScape, and dMarc. Earlier in his career, Rajaram worked as a technical architect at Juno Online, where he developed the back-end advertising system that drove much of Juno’s revenues and helped it go public in 1999. Rajaram has an M.B.A. from MIT Sloan, a M.S. in Computer Science from UT Austin, and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur where he received the President’s Gold Medal for being Class Valedictorian.

No doubt Tumri is excited to have him on board. Their current products include Adpod and Publisher, which let website owners pair relevant offers with their content. Rajaram’s experience at Google couldn’t be more relevant.

You’re probably familiar with the “recommended items” lists on sites like Amazon or Barnes and Noble. They help discover things you’ll probably like based on what you buy and what you view. Redux founder Darian Shirazi wants to apply the same power of discovery to growing communities of people online. The site is launching into beta today.

This site is part social network and part quiz show with the central goal being to learn the most about what you’re like and who you’d like. You fill out a profile with all the standard questions (music, age, sex, books) with the added bonus of an optional Myers-Briggs personality test. The site also lets users post photos, list their location, or chat with each other.

However, the heart of the site is training their algorithm on what people you like. Similar to “I’m In Like With You”, users are periodically asked quiz questions by the site, such as “Do you like sports?” or “Do you have a teddy bear?”. Your answers to the questions coupled with your profile info and whose profiles you view help Redux recommend people like yourself with on a percentage compatibility score.

The algorithm isn’t “dumb” or based purely on matching up people based on answering questions the same. It actually learns what properties signify compatibility based on how people use the site and takes special care to match people up with niche interests (something Shirazi calls the “Anomaly Filter”). For instance, people who play sports will probably get along with people who watch sports. From there, the system could discover that people who play sports get along well with people who enjoy action films or any number of other attributes.

Finally, Redux closes the loop by encouraging compatible people to hang out at any of the thousands of public events they’ve pulled from sites like Upcoming.

While I have yet to make a friend through a random conversation over a website, there are clearly plenty of people who do. Members of social networking sites frequently drop a line to someone they might like to strike up a conversation. A service like Redux that matches based on personality makes the initial impetus behind the introduction more than superficial.

But Darian doesn’t think that Redux is necessarily about finding a life long friend. There has been a growing interest in personalizing the web and recommendations from real people are often the ones users trust. That’s why Redux will be distributing its service as a platform by the end of this year. Websites will be able to integrate with Redux to power all kinds of people driven recommendations. It seems like a smart move, because I can’t see most people logging on every day just to chat with friends and answer some questions. The context of another site can make the process more compelling.

Redux was created by the team behind Flick.IM and is funded by $1.65 million from investors including Peter Thiel.

At times lewd, geeky, disgusting, and most of the time funny, Break.com has managed to pull in an audience of 18 million unique visitors that stay an average of 7.5 minutes each session, says the company. (Comscore says 3.9 million uniques in the U.S.). They’ve also recently launched three new properties hoping to do the same: Cage Potato (covers ultimate fighting news), Chickipedia (chick wiki), Holy Taco (comedy site). Since launching last week Chickipedia is doing 150K uniques. Holy Taco is expected to hit 1 million uniques this month.

So naturally they’ve been selling their fair share of advertising inventory targeting the 18-34 demographic. Break.com and it sales team of 15 have now decided to sell inventory for other similar sites as well as part of their own “Break Men’s Ad Network”. To start, the Network will be selling advertising across their own sites and those of 12 sites focusing on gaming, finance, comedy and sports, each with at least 150,000 visitors per month. Combined the sites are expected to bring in 35 million uniques and 800 million impressions globally, and 25 million uniques and 620 million impressions domestically. Break will be continuing to add more sites targeted at men to the network.

The move bundles a great deal of inventory that smaller publishers couldn’t sell as effectively on their own. Ads will come in a variety of formats and served through Panache, Adify, and DoubleClick. While rates always differ from publisher to publisher, CEO Keith Richman expects rates to fall between $10-$30 eCPMs.

After less than a year in operation, the team at Anywhere.FM reached an early payday today when veteran social music service Imeem gobbled them up for an undisclosed sum, most likely in a cash and stock mix. The iTunes-style web music player had raised under $100,000 in financing from Y Combinator and angels, making an early exit likely below $5 million possible. Anywhere.FM with its 60,000 users and over 9 million uploaded songs will continue to exist as is, but the founders will be joining Imeem to complete their earnout and continue work on their iTunes-style music player at Imeem’s San Francisco office.

Both Imeem and Anywhere.FM saw a lot of synergy in the deal. Anywhere.FM has the best upload and player interfaces I’ve seen, but lacked a solid monetization method. Imeem will bring its music deals and sales team to bear on the service and hopes to leverage Anywhere’s client side iTunes sync uploader, buddy radio, and recommendation technology in particular. Anywhere’s uploader can upload your entire iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player libraries, including personal playlists, song ratings and play counts, with a single click. In an email correspondence, Imeem’s CEO Dalton Caldwell hinted at the company’s future saying, “I think that an excellent and complete product that is fully licensed will win vs. the fragmented market we are seeing out there right now.” I couldn’t agree more.

Although not currently announced, Anywhere.FM will likely have access to the same licensing deals Imeem struck with the major labels. The deals allow users to stream any of 5 million songs from their friends for free. Being included on the deals would mean Anywhere.FM could avoid web broadcasting rules that placed limits on how often and in what order songs could be played.

Inking deals with all the majors marked a major turn around in Imeem’s history by ending the lawsuits that earlier dogged the site. But the deals came with at least Universal exacting a pound of flesh in form of some stock and a large upfront cash payment. The Financial Times said the payment was $20 million, although Imeem disagrees. Michael Robertson of MP3tunes.com, and earlier MP3.com, called it a death sentence.

While the ad supported model by their executives own admission has yet to be proven, Imeem has a major leg up over the competition. They’re legal with a large library and currently have over 20 million monthly uniques and 65,000 new registered users each day according to their own stats. Comscore ranked them the top growing social site last September. If ad supported music is going to succeed, Imeem is the startup to watch.

Keyword search gets you pretty far when looking for pure information, but doesn’t help much on more qualitative searches like trying to find the hippest restaurant in SOHO. Searches like the latter rely on the opinions of people, not webmasters, which is one of the reasons Circo’s has launched their new qualitative search engine. The engine currently lets users search for hotels and restaurants by qualities like size, ambiance, or other qualities pulled from reviews from around the web. They have plans to expand to other categories in the future.

Circos is categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines, which currently includes the likes of Hakia, PowerSet, Kosmix, SemantiNet, Quintura, and TrueKnowledge. However, the engine is most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based on qualities.

While Kango auto-generates tags after pouring through user reviews, Circo lets users search for any qualities they’re interested in. The engine then grades and ranks the results by each quality on an “A” through “F” scale based on how well the description fits for reviewers. For example, a hotel reviewers feel is spacious would rate highly if searching for openness, but poorly if you’re looking for a tiny room.

As with most search engines, Circos’ real test will be whether its application draws users away from other hotel and restaurant sites with less sophisticated search engines. Currently there are a bunch competing in the space. However, Circos says their technology can easily be extended to other categories since their algorithm does all the tough work of pulling the most relevant qualities from reviews. If hotels and restaurants don’t appeal, another category may hold their home run.

Circos is angel funded, based in San Mateo, and has eight employees (4 in Singapore).

We earlier reported that the design collaboration service ConceptShare had landed a distribution deal with another Canadian company, Corel. It turns out the two companies’ integration is a bit tighter than earlier reported. ConceptShare will not only be available through a separate website, but directly from within Corel Draw X4. This is one of the first deals of seen with such close integration between a web startup and established company. While many in the startup community are familiar with Photoshop, Corel Draw gives ConceptShare exposure to millions of designers worldwide and is the #2 design program in the European graphic design market.

Actually integration between the web service and desktop program is handled through a new sidebar that makes it a lot easier to publish files to ConceptShare and import them into Corel Draw.

SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.

While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.

The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.

However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.

Grouply is a startup trying to improve the online “groups” systems (Yahoo/Google Groups) currently used by over 100 million registered users. Their first goal was to create a simple management tool for easily tracking updates across your groups on the two networks. You give Grouply your account credentials and they organize your accounts in a more convenient manner (see our earlier review). Their second goal, has been to bring those systems up to speed with the latest social networking enhancements.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.