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Earlybird has alongside existing investor including DuMont Venture and Klaus Wecken invested EUR 3.3 millions into Music Networx.

The Cologne-based company is a very promising startup in the digital music scene and I think they will revolutionize the classic concert experience.
They offer an easy-to-use solution that goes from recording and production to on-and off-line marketing and distribution of live performances. Being live acts the main source of income for artists, the german company tries to make it even easier to profit from concerts and performances.
Artists will be able to sell USB sticks after their concert with the high-quality recording on it as well as create a website with the web based Concert Online platform.

“We have significantly increased our degree of popularity with bands, labels and concert goers over the recent months. International top-acts such as Simply Red, Franz Ferdinand and music festivals such as Rock im Park and Rock am Ring have already successfully partnered with us“, comments Gerrit Schumann, CEO and co-founder of Music Networx. “It is our aim to team up with many further high quality live acts and events in the near future. We will also be working hard on further developing our “Concert Online” platform, to enable music fans even better access to information and music from their favourite artists. We are delighted to have Earlybird as a further strong investor in our growth.”

Earlybird Partner Dr. Hendrik Brandis is convinced of Music Networx’ significant growth potential: “Live shows are again the key source of value creation for music artists. Music Networx offers distribution of and access to a very broad range of high quality live music and is therefore ideally positioned to benefit from this trend. We were also encouraged by the fact that Gerrit Schumann is a successful repeat entrepreneur and we already knew him well from our investment in element5, which was sold to Digital River.”

Seems that every new disruptive music innovation comes from Germany, with SoundCloud leading the way.

We recently covered the release of UberVU’s APIs. Today they told us that they are re-releasing them as a separate product: Context Voice.

They noticed that many developers where using the apis in ways they didn’t think of, and so they are introducing a freemium model for services that will need to generate a lot of calls. There will be no change in the system.

Here is a simple model of how it works:
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I think this is the true expression of the social web, tracking every comment and reaction to a story. The apis are already used by famous commenting system Disqus and by Tweetvisor.

You can get more information reading their announcement

Another bunch of great startup and venture capital articles found around the web..

• Working with VCs part 1 : its not summer camp (nor should it be)

on Leaving The Flock

• The Capital Raising Ladder

on Read Write Start

• 14 startup pitfalls to avoid
• Shocker: Study shows VCs plan to invest in fewer companies

on Venture Beat

• The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

on Wired

• The Five Most promising Dutch Startups

on Tiburon TV

• There is only one currency: it’s called value

on Khuram

• Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial ‘Evangelist’ Guy Kawasaki

on Knowledge@Wharton

• The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

on Inc.

Bonus: List of Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Bonus video: The real time investor

After Massimiliano Magrini’s resignation from Google Italy, the company promptly answered to the italian press. Italian financial website Affaritaliani collected a few sentences.

“We are sorry to hear of Massimiliano Magrini’s resignation, but we have a robust and consolidated organization that will allow us to manage the transition”.
“On the other hand, we are very happy to see Magrini’s entrepreneurial choice, which happens to be focused in the area of internet startups, where Google comes from and still operates in. To sustain economy on the web, the whole ecosystem has to evolve”.

The choice for Magrini’s successor is “in progress”, check back this site for updates on the story.

Breaking News: Massimiliano Magrini, Google Italy’s country manager just resigned from the company.
Magrini, who helped the start up of Google in Italy in 2002 after working with Altavista, announced he will start a venture capital fund and a startup incubator.

“I will develop in Italy what venture capitalists are already doing in Usa”.

Joined by 20 other key players in the italian internet tech scene, he aims to bring to Europe a Silicon Valley-like mindset, providing help as well as funding, to very early stage companies.
From the few sentences we could grab he seems quite determined to do so.

“The timing and the place are right. I’m having great feedback from the financial community. I will create a real new Silicon Valley in Milan”.

We will update you on his projects as soon as we have more news.

Swedish startup Twingly announced today its new top-secret platform for social media: Project Shinobi.

If you were wondering what Shinobi means, it’s the Japanese word for male ninja (忍び).

These are the words announcing their project:

On October 1st, 2009, Twingly will join the ranks of web services working together to improve your experience of social and traditional media. With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use. Not only for people that are early adopters of social media, but accessible and immediately valuable for anyone.

We will have to wait till then to know what they are planning for us, but I’m pretty sure that based on what they did for the traditional blogosphere it’s going to be a game changer.
Head over to their site to read the full announcement.