The San Francisco company says publishers just add some code to their site, and the code creates a button for video replies next to every post. Vidly Express also integrates with commenting system Disqus (used by VentureBeat, among many others).

You can see the feature live on the site of Vidly Express’ launch partner, hip hop artist (and tech conference regular) Chamillionaire. It slides in naturally next to the buttons for commenting, Facebook sharing, and retweeting on Twitter. Click on the button and the site asks you to leave a video reply. The design makes it easy to leave a message but relatively difficult to view the other comments — you have to click on a link to a separate page on the Vidly site. I wonder if this approach will encounter the same problems that Facebook/Twitter aggregator Seesmic encountered with its earlier technology, which focused on video chat, or if it will overcome those problems.

Vidly was originally called TwitVid.io. It has raised $500,000 from angel investors including Ron Conway.

The Mountain View-based startup uses an army of taggers to identify products and link them to shopping sites like Amazon or Zappos. For example, you might see a photo of actress Penelope Cruz wearing a new outfit on a fashion blog. If you roll over the image, you’ll see links to similar products that you can buy. Pixazza then turns around and shares the advertising revenue with publishers.

They’ve initially tested their technology on a handful of celebrity gossip web sites like Just Jared and Celebuzz. But they’re taking that technology today, scaling it up and making it available to anyone.

“We have about a dozen sites using it right now out of literally thousands that applied,” said Pixazza chief technology officer James Everingham. “We’re hoping to escalate that very rapidly into 2010.”

He says the company has about 100 taggers who are paid on a commission model, related to whether a shopper actually visits the destination or buys the item. Pixazza’s team is experienced with large, distributed groups of workers — Everingham was the CTO of LiveOps, a call center company with 20,000 independent contractors.

Although the job sounds a bit rote like a mechanical turk’s job, Everingham says the company gets a few hundred inquiries about work a week. They test the prospective taggers out over time, and then give the effective ones more permissions to link content.

“Computers tend not to be good involving judgment and tastes,” Everingham said. “We’ve built a user interface that lets our taggers search through our inventory and narrow it down very quickly.”

Pixazza raised $5.75 million in a first round of funding from August Capital, CMEA Capital, and Google.

That is why I was excited to find a tip about Onepageartist.com in my e-mail. It’s a new startup site that combines things like artist information, tour dates, shows near you, merchandising, wikipedia-like link surfing ability and even YouTube powered video content and twitter from your favorite artists. You can listen to audio clips, too. Want to show your support for Del Tha Funky Homosapien on Facebook?  Two clicks and he’s on your profile, along with a Onepageartist.com link to help promote site traffic.

Starting at Kings of Leon, featured on the front page, you can read about their third album and learn that The Strokes (shown at the top of a side column called “similar artists”) might be fun to go see some time. Click on them, head for their video page and find some live footage.  Yup, they put on a good show – click “Tour Dates” and you’re on your way. Convenient for finding a show as well as wasting hours of time surfing their artist content and video archives. Screenshot of the Kings of Leon page is at bottom.

Onepageartist’s site is powered by Amazon and Google, though it has no corporate involvement with either. When you check out some bio information on Jurassic 5 and decide that these are guys you want to support, you can buy their music from Amazon through onepageartist’s site. Advertising and tour date maps are provided by Google. You’ll recognize a lot of elements in the site — the innovation is in combining them all in one place with an easy to use and aesthetically “cool” layout.

To me, this site is a great improvement over the multiple site music-geeking system of before. No more Wikipedia link surfing, Amazon shopping, Google mapping, MySpace-browsing or pollstar obsession. It’s all in one place.

So, the question becomes: Will it stay in business? I don’t know. I will say that it’s a slick site with a possible business plan involving the ability to shop for tickets, t shirts and albums from within the site. It delivers relevant advertising via Google. The company is taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter’s popularity by making it super-easy to link back and forth, with twitter content being updated real time on the home page.

Spot Runner originally focused on serving local advertisers, letting them use a web-based service to serve ads on TV. But Project Malibu spotlights a shift in technology to a web-based advertising exchange platform. The new platform is supposed to help media sellers and buyers to better manage the increasing fragmented advertising market. Spot Runner generates revenue by charging a transaction fee to the media owner.

Spot Runner lists out some key features the platform will help save time during buying and selling process, including:

Investors include WPP, UK media group Daily Mail, Grupo Televisa, hedge fund Legg Mason Capital Management, French luxury group Groupe Arnault/LVMH, Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Capital Research and Management, CBS, Index Ventures, The Interpublic Group and Tudor Investment Corporation.

The launch of Project Malibu could be considered Spot Runner’s last stand. Not sure how much more bad news this company can take. The products success lingers on convincing media buyers and sellers that the platform is useful and with hundreds of hours consulting with media sellers and buyers in development of Malibu to make sure that it meets their current and future needs – that shouldn’t be a problem.

Right now, Google is actually coming in second to Yahoo in display advertising — having only launched its strategy in earnest last year with the $3.1 billion purchase of online ad service DoubleClick. That company served and managed ads for publishers and brands (making sure the right ads appeared on the right pages). Three-year-old Teracent, based in San Mateo, Calif. — a mere 18 miles from Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters — actually changes the look and feel of ads in order to grab more attention.

Teracent has developed an algorithm that allows ads to change to fit targeted audiences based on web traffic, geography, content they are running alongside, and even time of day. The service changes display ads’ images, designs, products messages and colors automatically. It works with ads incorporating audio and video media as well. Not surprisingly, the company was led by executives from both Yahoo and DoubleClick.

Neither company has released the financial terms of the acquisition. But Google certainly isn’t strapped for cash, recently reporting $22 billion in cash on hand at the end of the third quarter. The company recently announced that it is buying mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million, a major breakthrough for it in the mobile space. And Teracent isn’t likely to be its last acquisition in the near term.

Teracent had raised $5.8 million to date — most recently $2 million in March of this year — almost entirely from New Enterprise Associates.

Here’s an example of some Teracent ads:

When you visit the Feedtrace site and sign up, you sign in with your Twitter username – Feedtrace doesn’t store your password, or really anything about you. Then, once it has your information, Feedtrace shows you a list of what’s popular on Twitter at the moment: the most-discussed, most-retweeted links.

But there are plenty of services that do that – Tweetmeme, Twitturls, and Retweet have all been doing this for a while. Where Feedtrace tries to do one better is in personalizing the information to you, and bringing you a better social circle.

Over time, as you retweet and read links, Feedtrace will figure out what you’re interested IN, and start to personalize recommendations to you. The service also creates a “suggested following” list, full of people who write about the links you click, or tweet similar links. The recommendations FOR ME were generally surprisingly good, though it did occasionally tell me to follow someone I already followed. You can also narrow down your list of popular links to show only links from people you follow, which does wonders at keeping out the stuff you don’t care about.

But the really great thing about Feedtrace, and what will keep both publishers and readers interested in it, is the ability to see only what’s popular on a given website. For a lot of websites, Twitter is an excellent metric of what’s popular and what’s being discussed, and Feedtrace taps into that extremely well.

At the top of the Feedtrace sidebar, users can type in a URL and show popular items only from that site. It works on everything from news sites to blogs, and is essentially a way of creating Trending Topics for any website. It makes sites more accessible, helps users figure out what’s important, and weeds out whatever’s in between.

In January, Feedtrace will launch an API that lets anyone use their real-time filtering engine, meaning that Feedtrace’s way of filtering Twitter, geared toward the individual, could potentially be applied all over the Web–which would do wonders for the problems of information overload.

Feedtrace isn’t perfect, and definitely still has its issues. You have to do all your surfing from feedtrace.com, and the URL bar never changes to let you know where you are. The recommended links are also imperfect, but they’re improving. Generally, though, Feedtrace has potential to be a great way of weeding out informational noise, and making sure you only see and find what you need to know about — whether it’s all over Twitter or on any other site you can think of.

Feedtrace received $200K in funding from Angel Investors this summer.

Feedtrace is still in invite-only private beta TEST, but we’ve got 140 invites especially for VentureBeat readers. The first 140 people to sign up for Feedtrace with the invite code venturebeat will get in before it launches to the public.

Thanks to the popularity of its casual Facebook games such as FarmVille, which has more than 65 million players, the San Francisco company has become the biggest developer on Facebook and the leading company in the emerging social games market.

That’s a pretty good achievement for a startup founded in 2007 and one that is surrounded by multi-billion-dollar video game companies. All of its games are simple two-dimensional titles that are popular because friends can play them with each other, even if they have limited time for games.

The speed of growth for the newest games is amazing. Cafe World, a Zynga game launched in September, has grown to 9 million daily active uses. That means in a given day, 9 million users will log into the game. FishVille, launched earlier this month, already has 6 million daily active users.

All told, Zynga has more than 200 million monthly active users. Of those, more than a million users are paying for virtual goods with real money. They’re buying things like FarmVille tractors that allow them to grow crops faster. With FarmVille, more than 26 million users log in every day. In an expansion beyond Facebook, the company has recently launched FarmVille.com, a web site dedicated to the game. It’s for players who want to enhance their FarmVille experience. And it also draws in audiences who don’t use Facebook.

All of the growth is continuing in spite of a scandal around special offers considered to be deceptive. The problem got so bad that Zynga said it was stopping all use of offers until the problem could be fixed. The company has resumed using offers now. Zynga said recently that offers accounted for less than 20 percent of its business. But today, the company said that direct payments from consumers now add up to 90 percent of revenue, leaving offers at 10 percent of the total business.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their own external business applications. The idea is that LinkedIn could become your professional identity across applications, in the same way Facebook wants Facebook Connect to be your social identity across the web.

“We’re very opinionated,” said Adam Nash, vice president of search and platform products. “We believe that any business application that someone builds in 2010 that doesn’t integrate with us is going to be an anachronism.”

You can get some sense of what LinkedIn has in mind with already-announced integrations like its Social Connector in Microsoft’s email and contacts program Outlook. LinkedIn is adding new partners today, including Twitter application TweetDeck, simple blogging startup Posterous, and BT-owned voice-over-Internet company Ribbit. Other application-makers can now register at the developer site.

This move is more consistent than LinkedIn’s previous platform features with how I, at least, use the site. I’m much more interested in accessing my LinkedIn profile and data regardless of what application I’m using than I am in tinkering with a bunch of different applications on the site itself.

Nash said LinkedIn is opening its data via “about a dozen” application programming interfaces (APIs), which will enable three types of applications: Apps that let users view their LinkedIn profiles; apps that allow users to take actions, such as sending a message to a LinkedIn contact; and apps that access LinkedIn’s search. Users will log into LinkedIn using the OAuth authentication standard.

LinkedIn says it has more than 50 million users.

One stat in particular caught our eye. In the US, Android had 20 percent share of smartphone traffic, up from only seven percent six months before. Now that there’s proof that these phones are selling, Android may solidify its spot as a go-to operating system for device makers looking to get into the lucrative smartphone market.

In line with Admob’s findings, last month Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney highlighted for Computerworld a research report spotlighting Android Operating System would be the second most used OS, grabbing 14 percent of the global smartphone market share by 2012. That would be second only to the Symbian Operating System that is widely used by Nokia in countries outside the U.S.

For those methodology junkies, here’s how Admob’s metrics report works.

The page features “ultrathin and light” laptops from Toshiba, Acer and Asus, all of which feature Intel’s latest Core 2 Duo microprocessors. San Francisco-based Sprout has created a technology platform aimed at enabling online conversations through social media.

Carnet Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Sprout, said the campaign exploits the viral-ready nature of the Facebook platform. It’s a clever use of Facebook and shows how the medium itself is changing the way brands interact with their customers. Sprout was created to engage audiences with new kinds of social media. The company is based in Honolulu and is funded by Polaris Ventures.

The site pulls search results from other music sites — including Skreemr, MP3Codes, and 4Shared Music, sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.

Vye collates all of this content for the user and applies a simple, AJAX-based interface to let you build playlists, stream songs, and download them.

Letting users share and download music for free is what got Napster in trouble for copyright violations back in 2001 and led to the end of that free service. But Allatt claims that the distinction between his website and Napster is that his site is legal, despite the download availability. (An inability to download music has been the legal distinction that other sites in the music-sharing space have used to stay out of court. Streaming is considered a broadcast — as in radio — whereas downloading is a product, something that was well-defined during the Napster trials.)

Allatt says that as a search engine, “Vye Music permits users to download the content, operating under the premise that exterior copyright controls (ie. the copyright compliance of our APIs and content hosters) as well as users’ own judgment will let users stay well within the law.”

In other words, Vye doesn’t actually have any direct control over the content that appears on the site. The control is with the ultimate host of the music being streamed or downloaded. Vye merely links to those hosts through a search index. Allatt does say he plans to comply with copyright law: “DMCA takedown notices are forwarded to the relevant API providers, and the direct hosts of content wherever possible.”

It remains to be seen how well Allatt’s legal claims might hold.

The site interface and features are, however, nicely done. You can use the simple, intuitive interface without login, but you’ll need a username if you want to access more advanced sharing and storing features. Supposedly DRM-free music tracks can be downloaded directly from their links as well. I say “supposedly” because a search for Metallica brings up several download-able tunes whose only connection to Metallica is that it was the front band for the RIAA lawsuits that covered the news a couple of years ago.

As with most search tools of this nature, some of what is returned is not what you asked for and, I found, is also often not the full song. Worse yet, songs are often “Rick Rolled” to be something entirely different from their titles. This, of course, is not necessarily Vye’s problem, but it is a problem endemic to search-based apps.

As for potential competitors, the site’s closest competitors are the very same sites it pulls content from.

Allatt, who’s Australian and based on Australia’s Gold Coast, developed and maintains the site under the auspices of his company VEXiS Media. He self-funded the company, and several friends and family members assist him with the site for free.

He previously started failed music site iZaRia.us. It’s possible he’ll have better luck with this newest venture, since there are some indications the music industry may take more kindly to free online downloads than it has in the past.

Many around the Web have been saying that the RIAA lawsuits were a turning point in which the paradigm of artist-label-distributor was broken and shown to be outdated. Some artists, most notably Pearl Jam, have foregone the larger record label almost entirely, pursuing a more open approach. Up-and-coming bands often put free copies of entire albums online for download and dissemination, making money through paying gigs, concerts, and donations. The Isosceles Project in Canada is an example of that model. With the advent of high-speed data connections for most of the modern world, the days of the album and record label may be coming to a close. These new models of music distribution are likely the early versions of the new paradigm. So, perhaps Vye Music is part of those beginnings.

The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.

In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature today, the ability to translate tweets with a single click using Google Translate.

Thing Labs also announced a new hire — Ben Darnell, an early Google employee who worked on Reader with Thing Labs chief executive Jason Shellen. He left for FriendFeed, all of two weeks before it was sold to Facebook. Thing Labs is backed by Polaris Venture Partners and Ron Conway.

And one last easter egg, if you tweet ‘#jacob’ or ‘#edward’ into Brizzly, it will change to a Twilight theme.

The startup, which creates those green ‘Retweet’ buttons you see everywhere (including on this site), is rolling out the same feature for ads. They’re partnering with Federated Media to insert retweet buttons into their advertising two weeks from now, enabling people to share compelling ads with others.

Advertising in social streams has historically been a touchy issue (see: Facebook Beacon in 2007). Users logged into Twitter and Facebook want to see what their friends are up to, and they don’t want those personal messages to be conflated with advertising. There have also been other advertising efforts launched around Twitter, like Sponsored Tweets, which pays people to send out commercial messages. But those haven’t gained widespread traction for the very simple reason that if you pollute your stream with too many boring messages, you risk losing followers.

But Tweetmeme’s product is interesting because it returns advertising to its roots in some ways. Great advertising has always been about connecting with people — remember Apple’s “Think Different” campaign or the never-ending “Got Milk” print and TV ads. They’ve become cultural touchstones in some ways. This could incentivize online advertisers to create material that’s more engaging or social.

It’s also the direction in which advertising is headed on other social networking platforms. Facebook, for example, sends detailed metrics back to its advertisers on how many shares, likes and comments their campaigns receive. They also send how many “Hides” an advertiser’s content gets if users find it uninteresting.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do something similar on your iPhone. You choose a style (such as E Piano Pop or Dub Tone) and tempo, sing into the iPhone, and LaDiDa adds the music. You can also share the recordings on Facebook or Twitter. A $0.99-version of LaDiDa was first released last month, and Khu.sh added a free version (with fewer musical styles) called LaDiDa Lite (iTunes link) this week. You can check out the results in the video below.

This may seem like little more than a novelty, but if musical iPhone app developer Smule can have a hit with something like I am T-Pain (which overlays your singing with Auto Tune technology), I could see plenty of iPhone owners embracing this, too — though it’s a little more challenging without the help of a hip hop star like T-Pain.

Khu.sh is based in Atlanta and has raised $120,000 in seed funding, including $20,000 from incubator Shotput Ventures.

Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.

You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others to see.

All the content is curated by “likes” and “comments”, so Hot Potato can surface the most engaging posts. You can also specify that you’re “attending”, “watching” or “following” an event someone else has created like a concert.

You can look at people’s profiles and scroll through their stream of activity. Hot Potato uses Facebook Connect for log-ins, so you can pull in your existing friends. The company is backed by Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and launched at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today.