Extension.fm , a Chrome browser extension we first wrote about in February , has launched to the public and announced that it’s received funding from a group of high-profile investors, including Spark Capital, Betaworks, Founder Collective (Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon and others) and Dave Morgan (founder of Tacoda and Real Media). Extension sits in your browser and automatically grabs the links to any music files you see around the web, rendering them easy to play later through a special interface. Based in New York, the company is lead by Dan Kantor, the creator of AOL-acquired Streampad and the feature in Yahoo’s Delicious that renders links to MP3 files playable. Sponsor With that kind of background and backing, it’s hard to imagine there’s not a whole lot more in the company’s plans than a Chrome extension. That said, the Chrome extension is very impressive and Chrome is the best browser on the desktop. Extension is most appropriately described as a music discovery service. It’s not for listening to bands you already know and love – once you get access to Spotify , there’s no other game in town for that, except perhaps Mog . But if you’re a person who likes to peruse blog posts and other pages where new music is linked to, the Extension makes listening to those songs systematic and very enjoyable. It lets you capture and listen later to all the new music you stumble on while zipping around the web. Separating media from its initial place of discovery, temporal displacement for more conscious media consumption, is probably something that video files could benefit from as well. Time will tell if Extension gets into that business. With the investment, Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet will join the Extension Entertainment Board of Directors. Sabet lead Spark’s previous investments in Twitter, Tumblr, Boxee and more. Discuss

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I’m standing outside a beautiful old building, rich with hidden history. I pull out my phone, expose my location and am shown the online content voted most relevant for that particular spot. Maybe it’s a Wikipedia entry, maybe it’s public records, maybe it’s an old news story about that place. I can read to my heart’s content, I can vote my favorite content up and I can add new webpages to the location I’m at for other people to discover in the future. That kind of vision has long been a dream of mine and now the people at the HP Social Computing Lab have built a proof of concept web application, Android app and API to do exactly that. Called Gloe , the service is very proof-of-concept and the UI needs serious work before many people use it, but it’s pretty awesome already. Sponsor Lead by HP’s Thomas Sandholm , the Gloe project so far includes: Pre-populated content from Wikipedia, review and photo sharing sites. The index of locations and content is already large and smart. Automatic tag-clouds to see content type by category. A bookmarklet lets you add any content from around the web to the database, tied to a specific location on the map. This part is barely usable, but it’s a great idea. Google Gears support to add geolocation to your laptop browser. Facebook Connect integration to provide either universal or friend-network views of what’s most important in a location. Vote budgeting, allowing you to put multiple votes in favor of an item in case it’s extra important to you that it gets voted up. The service is essentially a form of Augmented Reality, augmenting physical locations with geotagged web content. The potential for fun and value here is huge and I’ve long wondered why no one had built an app like this. (See GeoURL , it turns out, for a related project.) The API means that other applications can be built on top of Gloe, using it as a database. HP says the concept is just that, a concept. But the company hopes that people will check it out, build on the API and see what comes of it. It may or may not be commercialized in the future. The idea is awesome and I really hope that the product gets developed and an iPhone app gets built. Bring on the future! Discuss

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Jim Spencer spent the end of the 1990’s as an executive at NBC, AOL and Ask Jeeves when those were all viable media companies, before the dot-com crash. Now he’s taking on the iPad-media-era from an office across the street at his alma mater, the University of Missouri-Columbia. That’s home to what was the world’s first school of journalism, founded more than 100 years ago. Spencer’s new startup Newsy.com has combined an innovative journalistic model, a low-cost Midwest business strategy and a beautiful touchscreen design to rocket to the top 10 of news apps for the iPad in iTunes. Remember how the iPad was supposed to change journalism? Newsy could be an example of how it’s actually working; the resulting app is one you should be sure to check out if you have an iPad. (Links: iPad , iPhone ) Sponsor Last week Newsy announced that it has raised $2 million to extend its work. The 25-person team is headquartered across the street from the university’s journalism school and grabs many of the smartest graduates to come and work for it. Spencer says the low cost of living and the state of Missouri’s tax breaks for tech startups make the location a perfect place to build his team. How Newsy Works Newsy doesn’t cover breaking news and it probably never will. Instead, the team waits until a topic is buzzing, then grabs video clips from multiple sources across the political perspective to combine into a short video segment. The resulting content is very clearly incorporating, with extensive attribution, the work of diverse news production teams from around the world. The breadth of editorial vision seems genuinely diverse, too. Clips from Fox News and Democracy Now! will both appear in the same stories at times. The production value applied to putting these video segments together occasionally has some rough edges, but it is generally quite good and will no doubt improve with the infusion of cash. “People talk about content farms,” Spencer says, “but we’re more like a Farm Team. We’re an analyzer, not an aggregator.” Spencer says that people are increasingly skeptical about bias in the news, but that most media outlets don’t want to report on what other outlets are saying. That gives his organization a unique chance to do it smarter, faster and cheaper. The company’s iPad app was built by the winners of a local student iPhone app design contest. Newsy liked the team’s work and hired them to build what’s shaping up to be a very successful iPad app. Newsy will be using some of its new funds to pursue syndication of its video content out onto portals around the Web, among other business strategies. Drag-and-drop, touchscreen video from multiple sources? Sounds like a great part of the future of journalism to me. Discuss

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Last month Facebook announced a new standardized way to mark up web pages concerning things like books, movies, music and more. It was called the Open Graph Protocol and was ostensibly intended to make the web comprehensible to computers building a profile of your interests across many different websites. Unfortunately, it wasn’t implemented very well, according to GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Iskold, a long-time contributor to this site, penned the most extensive guide to understanding Facebook’s Open Graph and a critique of how it was constructed , implemented by launch partners and by Facebook itself. Yelp, IMDB and Pandora for example were all launch partners but have implemented the system incompletely or not at all, even several weeks after launch. Now Iskold has taken his own company’s competing semantic markup of pages around the web and used it to build a replacement for a large part of the Facebook code in the wild – using Facebook’s own format. Developers interested in understanding the content across 300 major websites, in Facebook’s own terms, can now find a robust source of data at GetGlue. Sponsor Iskold says of the struggles to roll out Facebook’s protocol: “We saw that a lot of initial partners didn’t implement Facebook Open Graph protocol correctly. GetGlue already has over 15 million entities and all these pages indexed. So we decided to add the adapter and use our experience with semantics to help people get the markup done right. What we’ve done is not really a replacement, it is more like an implementation of Facebook Open Graph based on GetGlue index and database.” GetGlue is a 3 year old New York City startup backed by Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures . Its core product provides recommendations of music, books, movies and more based on semantic analysis of the sites a user visits around the web. Discuss

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Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion “like” clicks from visitors to sites all around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook’s growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a “very alpha alternative to FaceBook Like.” Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway, Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is “looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it.” Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we’re sure there’s a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as “an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications.” We’ll share more details if and when this project develops. Discuss

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