The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Melodeo Inc. has gone nuTsie, with a new mobile music service that allows consumers to get their entire iTunes library on their mobile phone.  The nuTsie free public beta (available immediately at www.nuTsie.com), allows anyone to easily shuffle through all of their iTunes music and playlists in hi-fi quality on their mobile phone or on the Web.nuTsie allows users to access all of their favorite iTunes music on a wide variety of today’s most popular phone models, with no expensive device upgrade required.  nuTsie is built on Melodeo’s proven high-quality, low-bandwidth mobile streaming technology, which means consumers never have to hassle with synching their phone to a computer, downloading music or dealing with limited storage capacity on their phone.

“nuTsie is part of the next generation of music services that will make listening to the stuff you like fun and easy while also taking care of the artists, labels and music publishers,” said Dave Dederer, Vice President of Music Content at Melodeo and a founding member of the GRAMMY-nominated, multi-platinum rock band The Presidents of the United States of America. “nuTsie represents the first mobile music service where everybody wins.” 

From YouTube to Yahoo!, iFilm to vSocial, Father’s Day 2007 is about to be televised. This Father’s Day, Web video-sharing has captured the world’s attention and imagination like never before.For what could be considered to be the Web’s first video-enhanced Father’s Day, Seattle Internet company Efinancial.com has posted a moving tribute to fathers and daughters everywhere. The online music video, starring award-winning R&B recording artist E. Walter Smith and American Idol contestant and StarSeach teen singing sensation, Tatiana McConnico, is being viewed and voted on by Web watchers worldwide on YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, iFilm, Revver, Vimeo, Vsocial and Glumbert, making Dad’s Day a truly multimedia affair.

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Avvo, the new national online rating service for attorneys, opened its doors last week, not with a beta but with a bang. Founder Mark Britton, a former Expedia EVP, was in Italy when he conceived the idea for an attorney referral service and named it for the Italian word for attorneys, Avvocato. His Expedia colleague, Rich Barton, was also in Italy at the same time where he was conjuring the concept for another Seattle-based rating service, that one called Zillow.

If enough lawyers feel slighted by lackluster ratings, Avvo could feel the slings of its targeted audience, as individuals or as a class, for defamation or worse. Perhaps Britton should have started with chiropractors or podiatrists as a group, before ranking and rankling lawyers.

It’s been a long time coming, but Seattle is about to play host to its first, full-fledged search marketing conference, Search Marketing Expo Advanced. As the name suggests, this search marketing confab, which gets underway June 3-5 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center, isn’t for everybody.

When conference organizer, master of ceremonies, and bona fide search engine guru (and analyst), Danny Sullivan, brought a one-day version of his Search Engine Strategies show to Seattle a year ago, he was blown away by the level of expertise in the local audience. The questions were erudite, the inquiries insightful.

So after Danny parted company with the principals behind Search Engine Strategies, he founded his own enterprise, Third Door Media, and launched his own series of symposia, dubbed SMX for Search Marketing Expo. The Seattle edition is SMX Advanced because the subject matter assumes no small degree of search marketing knowledge.

Attendees will include the best and the brightest of the search industry’s cognoscenti who will be coming from far and wide, with a large contingent from Redmond, Sunnyvale, Kirkland and Mountainview, homes of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google respectively.

Befittingly, the SMX name sounds a bit like a high powered, turbo-charged sports car or fuel additive, which is exactly what the SMX brand of search expertise has the power to do for a company’s online marketing program.

SMX Advanced will offer two tracks, Organic, also known as or naturally indexed search, and PPC or sponsored, pay-per-click search. The emphasis in both cases will be on letting the audience take the lead by shaping the conversation and being a part of this historic “best of the best” undertaking.

On a computer screen, the cursor arrow always points to the Northwest. Now the eyes of the search world will be looking in the same direction. At last, in the world of search conferencing, Seattle has been found!

TalentSpring Delivers New Level of Transparency to Job Seekers, Leads Recruiters to Best Candidates in Specific Job Categories

Imagine applying for a new job and, almost immediately, having the ability to see the level of talent you’re competing with and, more importantly, how you stack-up by comparison. Beginning today, that experience becomes a reality with the launch of TalentSpring.

TalentSpring is a new online job board that enables job candidates to submit their resumes for merit scoring by their peers. Once scored, each resume is then sorted to allow for a “best-to-least qualified ranking” in industry-specific job categories including marketing, sales, finance and computer programming.

“Anyone that applies for a job wants to know who they’re competing with and if they’re a leading candidate, particularly if they’re reaching for the next level,” said TalentSpring founder and CEO Bryan Starbuck. “Our service delivers this information in a way that enables job candidates to prepare for potential interviews and, on the flipside, to know when they need to move on to the next opportunity.”

The new service also provides a valuable tool for recruiters and corporate HR teams seeking to expedite the process of identifying top-tier job candidates.

Microsoft has launched a new site named Live Search Club, where you can play games to earn rewards. Some of the prizes you can win include ringtones, earphones, T-shirts, Microsoft Office, Xbox and many other prizes.The LiveSide Blog also reports that Microsoft is going to redirect start.com to live.com on May 22, 2007. Start.com is a personalized portal powered by Microsoft that launched in November 2005.

http://club.live.com/

Trinity Ventures general partner Larry Orr announced the top 10 reasons to invest in Seattle in his keynote address at the recent WSA Investment Forum. 10.) Thirty nine flights a day from the Bay Area.

9.) No need to pack sunscreen.

8.) “It’s the coffee, stupid.”

7.) People can afford to live here, though he quickly added “on a relative basis.”

6.) You can see an NFL playoff game here.

5.) Underserved venture market.

4.) Quality companies with domain expertise.

3.) Technical talent.

2.) Great local partners.

1.) Entrepreneurial values.

A new community guide called Zigogo, has positioned itself as an online concierge who knows all of the best restaurants, clubs and shops in the neighborhood and delivers searchable, relevant and real-time calendars, menus and special events information directly to customers online or on their mobile phone. Customers can watch videos, browse pictures and even get door-to-door driving directions for businesses in their neighborhood–all available wherever they are and whenever they want it! Visit Zigogo today!