L014: Ian Rogers: The Unsung Hero of Digital Music

Team LAUNCH,

In addition to covering notable product launches, we thought we would also start covering the exceptional folks that actually produce stuff.  

We're starting with Topspin Media's Ian Rogers -- the unsung hero of digital music.

all the best, Jason + LAUNCH Team

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THEN and NOW

Ian Rogers: The Unsung Hero of Digital Music

PRESENCE: @iancr, facebook.com/iancr, fistfulayen.com/blog/, linkedin.com/in/iancrogers. On This Week in Startups.

TAGGED: music, mp3, digital, beastieboys, yahoo, oldskool, skateboarding, santamonica, indiana

WHY HE'S IMPORTANT: Ian has been working in digital music longer than any single person in the Internet industry: 20 years without a break.

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L013: MyLikes -- Monetizing Tweets before Twitter's "Tweetsense"

MyLikes [ mylikes.com ]
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LAUNCHERS: CEO and co-founder Bindu Reddy was a Google Apps product lead and worked on Google Docs, Video, Blogger and Shopping. Co-founder Arvind Sundararajan is dipping his toes into entrepreneurial waters for the first time, coming off a senior staff software engineer position at Google.

WHAT: Essentially "tweetsense," a cost-per-click ad service that matches marketers with anyone with a Twitter account who wants to make a little extra cash. They also provide the ability for marketers to sponsor blog posts and YouTube videos.

WHEN/WHERE: Originally launched in March 2009 as Likaholix (horrible name), they pivoted to MyLikes in January 2010. The company is located in San Francisco.

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L012: Well Receivd, File-sharing Made Dead Simple

Receivd [ http://receivd.com ]
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LAUNCHERS:  Brendan Lim and Pradeep Elankumaran. Both are developers who became good friends while at Intridea, where they worked on Yammer-like Present.ly. Brendan specializes in mobile and desktop apps, Pradeep in real-time messaging.

WHAT: Beautiful and simple real-time, drag-and-drop file sharing via lists (e.g., friends, family, co-workers).

WHEN/WHERE: In beta, Silicon Valley.

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L011: Color.com Stuns Valley with Implied Social Network -- and a $41M Raise

Color [ http://color.com ]
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LAUNCHERS:  CEO Bill Nguyen is a brilliant serial entrepreneur who sold his most recent company, Lala, to Apple for $40M in 2009. Co-founder Peter Pham is the absurdly good business-development founder who is supremely networked after doing BillShrink and Photobucket.

WHAT: An App for smartphones (iPhone & Android at launch) that automatically lets you share your photos with those around you. That sharing becomes a Trojan horse for building an "implied social network" (or ISN as we will call it going forward).

WHEN/WHERE: Wednesday in Palo Alto.

WHY: Facebook's social network is getting long in the tooth for the digerati, who are looking to spend their social cycles somewhere else. Twitter, Path, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yobongo and most recently GroupMe have shown that people are looking for an alternative to "The Facebook."

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LAUNCH Instant 001: Mocavo

Mocavo [ http://mocavo.com/ ]
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LAUNCHER: Cliff Shaw, founder of four companies (Ancestry.com owns one, MyHeritage.com owns two) as well as technologies in the genealogy space. He's thought about building Mocavo for over a decade.

WHAT: Free genealogy search engine that only searches information-rich genealogy sites. Limited to North America right now, worldwide indexing in the works.

WHEN/WHERE: Wednesday in Boulder.

WHY: Google, Bing, etc. don’t give genealogy-specific results, making it difficult to sort through the noise; there’s no free genealogy search.

Cliff tells LAUNCH: "The market has been begging for it for over a decade.  It's tough to say why others haven't tried, but there are definitely some serious technical hurdles to building a large-scale search engine, especially one as fast as Mocavo. Thanks to shows like 'Who Do You Think You Are,' interest in family history has exploded and it's undoubtedly the right time for us to do this."

WHO BACKED IT: David Cohen of TechStars invested in Mocavo because Cliff is a serial entrepreneur in the genealogy space and is probably one of the few people in the world who could have built this.

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