Got a great startup idea and want to get the attention of someone that might be able to make your dream come true?

Then head over to Twitter and tweet your brilliant idea to @PerfectBusiness along with the hashtag #micropitch and you to might get the ear of Richard Branson, or at least some flunky that has the ear of someone who has the ear of someone  … well you get the idea. The main thing though is that this attempt at a viral campaign of some sort is intended to publicize a startup conference called – yup you guessed it – PerfectBusiness; which Branson is helping to get off the ground.

If you can fit your brilliance down to 111 characters you could be a winner which will get you the following

Winners will get two tickets to the conference, airfare to L.A. included, and business coaching to turn the Tweet into a meaningful, complete company plan. There’s even the chance Branson and team will choose your idea and get some VC funding on board.

Source: Fast Company :: Got Biz Idea? Tweet @Richard Branson 4 Chance 2 Turn in 2 Real Company

Got to admit it’s a great way to cut through the public relations bullshit startups like to wrap around themselves.

Related posts:

1. As the Twitter Tweets – the please shoot me now episode
2. Richard Petty Motorsports to merge with Yates Racing
3. Yet another Twitter search company to go public June 18

Since its introduction, FanSnap has expanded to have deals with dozens of different ticket providers (including the big name sellers and places like eBay), thereby bringing their information directly into the site. That means you can check out who’s performing where, look at a map of the actual venue to see which seats are available and how much they cost, and — here’s where the service really shines — do a side-by-side comparison of ticket availability and pricing from different providers, all on the same screen.

You can actually order the tickets right from the site as well.

Today’s post-beta opening comes with a refreshed site design, which boasts a faster search system and a handful of other new features.

FanSnap’s founders, Mike Janes and Mark Towfiq, previously worked at StubHub and Flock, respectively. Janes also previously served as GM of Apple’s online Apple Store. Apple VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue is now on the company’s advisory board as well.

We gave FanSnap the thumbs-up when we initially reviewed it, and its progress since the fall only makes the service stronger. This is one of those startups worth keeping an eye on.

Related posts:

1. Fansnap takes $5 million Series B
2. New Ticket Search Engine Launches
3. Search Monkey Released In Limited Beta

I’ve often thought that one of the major drawbacks for RSS feed adoption within the mainstream is that fact that even for us old-timers in the biz the flood of RSS feeds we read everyday can be daunting enough so imagine how it must be for people just new to RSS. Given that some web news sites can publish anywhere up to 40 or more posts in a day it doesn’t take long to run screaming for the hill. Lucky for them that my good buddy Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins happened to run across a new web service called Feedscrub.

According to Mark the way this works is that you take you high volume feeds, plug them into Feedscrub’s system which will give you a new RSS feed to replace the high volume one with. Apparently it will take a few days for their system to learn by you telling it what items in the feed you read and which you don’t. After a while it builds up a profile based on scanning the words in the posts that you have picked and will provide posts along those patterns.

Unfortunately Feedscrub is in closed testing and only allows the management of 3 feeds so this won’t be really useful to people dealing with hundreds of feeds. Hopefully as they progress with their testing and building out to a public release they will increase the number of feeds they handle. Here’s an interesting thought though considering that we are moving into a new web economy of real business plans – maybe they’ll have a pay plan for more feeds handled.

For those of you who might want to give Feedscrub a try Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins has scored about 500 invites. All you have to do is head over to their site and use the invite code of “rizzn” to get in and check it out.

No related posts.

German-based FeedsR.Us lets you create an automatically-generated graphical signature that shows the last four headlines from an RSS-enabled site. Here’s one I just threw together for The Inquisitr:

The setup is incredibly simple. You enter in the URL of the feed you want. You select a few options as far as design, including the ability to upload your own custom background image to match your blog’s look and feel, as I did above. Then, you just click one button, and the site gives you HTML code to display the GIF image with a link to your site. You could use it in e-mails, forum posts, social network posts — most anywhere that’ll take a basic HTML image tag. There’s no embedding required, as FeedsR.Us actually just updates the image itself on its server whenever it refreshes the feed.

The default configuration only updates the feed a couple of times per day, which is why the sample I posted above may not be up-to-date with the latest headlines here. You do have the option, however, to create a free account with FeedsR.Us and set up a ping service, which would cause the image to update dynamically every time a new entry is posted. This would only work, of course, with your own blog, as you’d have to add a line of code into the WordPress “Services” list to have the pings be sent.

FeedsR.Us is still in beta, so there are some kinks in it. For example, you have to type in the “http://” front of any feed URL or you’ll get an error — something the instructions don’t indicate and I figured out by trial-and-error. It also seems to have trouble interpreting some feeds. A FriendFeed RSS URL, for example, won’t go through. Most straight-forward blog sites seem to work, though. Another oddity is that while the site is mainly in English, there are random bits of text here and there in German — which is a bit confusing from a user perspective. It might make more sense to have a fully English site and a fully German site, if the developers are trying to target both markets.

The startup comes from Diemedien Fabrik, a firm that appears to all sorts of multimedia marketing (from what I can gather via this Web site translation). It launched just within the past few weeks.

No related posts.

HourTown announced the $1 million in new funding today, from NBC along with Baseline Ventures, Hatch Ventures and a handful of Silicon Valley angel investors — some of the same companies, HourTown’s founder points out, that initially got behind Google and PayPal in their early days.

HourTown lets clients manage appointments with small business owners through its Web-based interface — so if you were, say, a music instructor, you could have students log directly onto the site to schedule or change appointments. Founder Ryan Donahue describes it as “Web 2.0 for your yoga instructor.”

The service is available in a limited capacity for free, or with expanded features starting at about $20 per month. HourTown is based in Palo Alto and launched in early 2007.

Related posts:

1. CollegeWikis Wants to Revolutionize Scholastic Communication
2. MySpace COO Leaving to Form New Startup
3. Former Microsoft Exec Joins Online Identity Startup

TinEye uses “sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms” to find any instance of an image anywhere on the Internet. As its creators explain it, the service creates “a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint,’” then compares “its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

A complex system, but put simply: You give it an image and it’ll show you who else has it.

Here’s what happens: You sign up for a free account and wait a few minutes for a confirmation e-mail. Then, you login, upload an image or input an image URL — and within seconds, TinEye will show you every place the same image is being used. Still in beta, the service is still somewhat limited, though already fairly impressive: The database is at just over 700 million images and is growing by the day as its spiders continue to crawl the Web for images.

I first tried a search for The Inquisitr logo, seen in the banner at the top of this site. TinEye says no one else is using it. Next, I tried one certain to deliver plenty of offenders: the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo. Sure enough, TinEye found a few dozen sites that’d lifted the picture and published it themselves.

Some other hot searches TinEye points out include the Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster, the Mona Lisa, the U.S. dollar bill, and the Hello Kitty character.

Canada-based Idee is behind this new startup. The company focuses on image identification software and has created a few other products utilizing similar concepts. Its founders say their technology can handle low-resolution or grainy images and still be able to recognize them.

No related posts.

Adding Diversity

The idea behind Allvoices is to add diversity to the standard news mix. Its creators aren’t aiming to replace traditional news media for any given audience, but rather to enrich it with often overlooked alternative viewpoints.

“Allvoices gives everyone a voice and uses these various forms of content to create multiple perspectives in order to stimulate global discussions,” Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen told The Inquisitr. “Our site is free from traditional editorial oversight and censorship characteristic of global media organizations,” she said.

Once registered, anyone can submit coverage through the Web interface, via e-mail, or over mobile messaging. The service has dedicated numbers set up to receive SMS and MMS content. Much like the meme concept, the site links related stories together to provide broader perspective into widely covered topics. Readers then validate content both from users and from traditional news sources to determine its placement on the site.

“We use our technology to elevate and leverage the individual voice,” Tareen said.

No Human Touch

While Allvoices does have a filter to catch any obscene submissions, it prides itself on being completely unedited by humans — a concept that sets it apart from competitors such as Associated Content and Global Voices, and one that’s close to its founder’s heart.

It was during a trip to her Pakistan that Tareen — who grew up both there and in Australia — was first struck with the inspiration for a community-driven, democratic news source. She saw the effects of the devastating earthquake that claimed nearly 80,000 lives and destroyed millions of homes — and realized there was no centralized global venue for people to report on their experiences. Instead, a small sampling of professional reporters controlled what most of the world saw.

Business Building

With a business and computer-oriented background — she studied engineering and computer science at Australia’s University of New South Wales, got her MBA from Harvard, then went on to work at Silicon Valley firms such as Sevin Rosen Funds and Ascend Communications — Tareen decided to give the idea a go. She secured $4.5 million in funding, recruited a team of industry experts, and set out to build an organization that — by its very nature — could not be biased.

“We want the emotions of our contributors to come through unfiltered,” she told The Inquisitr. “If somebody has a different perspective on a news event, they are free to post their own story next to other accounts of that same event. That allows readers to be exposed to different perspectives and opinions.”

Tough Topics

Allvoices doesn’t shy away from tough topics, either. The front page rivals any news networks’, jam-packed with content ranging from political issues to financial news and global conflict to medical developments. It all plays into Tareen’s goal of becoming a powerhouse for balanced information worldwide.

“Our model of merging user-generated content and professional news sources into one community will create the first true people’s media,” she predicted.

Only time — and, fittingly enough, the people themselves — will tell.

Related posts:

1. SmartSpace Aims to Make Social Media Simple
2. Instablogs Launches Global Report Videocast
3. Dumb has a new name: GateHouse Media sues the NY Times Company over links

Vator.tv has signed a deal with ProQuest, a company that creates microfilm presentations for educational institutions. ProQuest will send out some of Vator.tv’s interviews with entrepreneurs to various universities around America. The interviews focus on starting and managing online businesses and handling the accompanying funding concerns.

Vator.tv describes itself as an “emerging tech company social network.” Today, for example, the front page features an interview with Xobni CEO Matt Brazina. The site aims to help tech start-ups get in touch with investors and become more visible in the public eye through an open ranking system of company profiles.

Related posts:

1. Xobni Takes $7 million, Cisco Leads the Round
2. Disqus lands Mashable, adds social tracking
3. SB Nation relaunches front page as real time aggregator, signs Fanhouse deal