Dhingana is a music service that specifically targets the enormous quantity of Indian music lovers online through a streaming service that has stats comparable to Spotify or Pandora. For Indian music that plays such an important part in the culture of over 1.2 billion people, it’s surprising that it’s an issue that has barely been tackled online. “Dhingana is one of the largest on-demand Indian streaming music services today, on Web and mobile,” says co-founder Snehal Shinde, adding “We are streaming almost 100 million minutes of music every month.”

The Indian music market is tied tightly to the movie industry in the country, particularly in Bollywood, where films are built around the soundtracks. Dhingana has managed to secure licensing with over 500 music labels in India, streaming music in 35 different languages across the country. “Our applications are usually dominated on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia devices,” says Shinde, who started the company with his brother, Swapnil, in 2007 and bootstrapped it until 2010 when they raised a Series A, which Shinde says went entirely to improving their technology – they’ve spent nothing on marketing their service.

Dhingana’s biggest spurt in users has come just since the launch of their Social Radio earlier this year, which saw the user base grow 300 percent. For the Social Radio app, Dhingana partnered with Facebook to pull info from the social graph about users, and their friend’s, listening habits, as well as likes and dislikes, to suggest a music stream dedicated to users’ ears.

The app works on both Web and mobile platforms as well, which covers iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Nokia devices. Dhingana claims that their social streaming offers up better suggestions than Spotify can offer, by digging deeper into listeners’ habits. Last month alone, the service streamed 120 million recommendations.

Dhingana’s mobile penetration is a unique, split with 35 percent of their iPhone users and 80 percent of their Android users based in India, as well 40 percent of their users are located in Canada, the US, UK, and Australia.

“The music labels are quite excited about partnering with us because we are trying to provide a service which is completely free to the end user,” says Shinde, offering up a quick way for companies to market their latest tunes to the audiences in India without it getting lost amid the hundreds of thousands of other songs streaming on their site.

“We want to make sure that 100 percent of the music that you look for, with an Indian perspective, is on Dhingana,” says Shinde. As well, they’re with the blurred lines between India’s music and film industry, Dhingana is looking to foster more partnerships and help music labels get their tunes to the listeners’ ears even faster. As well, they hope to target a more diverse amount of mobile platforms in the region as Java-based phones are still a popular alternative.

One of the issues of Dhingana must deal with is services users from around the world and providing music that’s streamed in 35 different languages. “We do rely on a certain amount of crowd sourcing to improve the content for users,” says Shinde.

“We also listen to the users and what they’re looking for, as well as deep analysis of all our products to figure out what we should be spending more time on. And then we increase the content in that particular genre and language.”

[Image courtesy SamikRC]

Ever since the days of Webvan and HomeGrocer, the tech industry has been sheepish around online grocers. Webvan was an online grocery delivery service that spent over $500 million in the 12 months before bottomed out in 2001, likewise HomeGrocer spent equity to build out a distribution service before it had the scale to support it. Now, offering razor blades, ties, subscription gifts… anything is fine, yet groceries have remained an investment red light. But the time for online grocers seems ripe, says Michael Joseph, the co-founder of Mile High Organics, an organic grocer and flower delivery service that just raised $1.2 million on AngelList from individual investors lead by Alex Khein as well as 500 Startups and TA Ventures in Kiev.

“We’re not Webvan.” says Joseph, “We’re working on scaling something up from the beginning. And we’re developing the parts that consumers are either asking for, or we have the insights to see what they really want. We’re building it from the ground up, but with a vision to be equally as large as what was going on twelve years ago when this industry had its last real bout of attention.”

Mile High Organics offers bundled deliveries of organic groceries, produce, and flowers from farms or suppliers in the region, depending on the season. They’re based in Boulder, Colorado and actively servicing the area around Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, and Colorado Springs as their test bed.

Joseph started the Mile High Organics by writing himself a check from his credit card, and financed a delivery vehicle. The company started with 15 SKUs offering organic produce by delivery, with all the ordering done online. But over the last two years, says Joseph, “[We] went from 15 SKUs to 700 SKUs with thousands of people shopping online. [Mile High Organics] is still operating on the first version of their website, so haven’t really gotten into all the beautiful things we could do on the deck side.”

Joseph garnered his desire to work in organics when he was 12 years old, and his father wrote the federally enforced food labelling legislation for the US. After one attempt at a similar business model that Michael Joseph backed out of, he’s partnered with his long-lost cousin, Steve Markowitz, who Joseph was only reintroduced to when his father moved to California. Markowitz is the co-founder and CEO behind MyPoints.com, one of the first loyalty marketing companies on the Web.

Joseph believes that it was the right time 12 years ago when things went bust, but there were some overly aggressive investors and bad decisions were made. HomeGrocer’s founder and CEO is on Mile High’s advisory board and “very active” in their planning, says Joseph. In 2000, HomeGrocer managed to build an online store that was doing $400 million a year in business. They had eight distribution centers, half of which were profitable, and the other half were getting there. Unfortunately, the investors on both the HomeGrocer and Webvan sides both saw it as an “all or nothing, zero-sum game,” says Joseph. HomeGrocer kept building distribution centers, all with equity financing and the promise that there would be equity coming thereafter. But their funds dried up, and HomeGrocer was sold to Webvan, which packaged up the industry and drove it off a cliff.

Webvan’s failure was considered one of the worst failures of the late ‘90s boom – worse than even Pets.com. Michael believes that it seriously inhibited what became possible, with investors still wary of what happened 12 years ago even though groceries are one of the largest consumer markets in the US.

The USDA measures that the average family spends $12,000 per year on premium groceries, like organics. “So there’s a huge, huge market. But what hasn’t happened since 12 years ago, is that groceries haven’t really been disrupted,” says Joseph.

“People go to the grocery store 88 times per person per year in the US, and there’s no sense of personalization when you want that experience,” says Joseph, “We’re building the company to be able to scale across the country, but we’re not going to do it in a haphazard way that you have to bet the whole company to make that move.”

“There’s still a lot of scar tissue from the Webvan days,” says Joseph. But Mile High Organics, the country’s first online grocer to be certified as organic by the USDA, is taking slow and steady steps to build a solid company. They have no plans to expand without the proper structure. With this round of seed funding, they’re aiming to get their tech platform down and build out a smooth delivery operation that will be easily expandable to other geographic areas.

Twitter’s latest API update has shown one thing – for a communications company, Twitter doesn’t know how to speak to its users. The changes should be relatively trivial to the average daily user, but they’ve been interpreted as an all out poisoning of its developer ecosystem. But are developers really worried?

For the most part, it seems the users are more outraged. Plus, the fact that so long after Michael Sippey posted the updates to the dev blog (the one that enraged the Internet), there still no messages on its user blog soothing the frantic response that saw words like “limiting,” “authentication,” and “Requirements.” Those terms alone seem to have spawned posts about app dev revolts, surveys on the state of Twitter, and angry Tweets aimed at Sippey – and users threatening the impossible (jumping ship for Google Plus).

So to those actively in the midst of a conniption, please relax. Signs of Twitter’s impending doom are not upon us yet.

We reached out to Paul Haddad from Tweetbot, one of the apps in the bad quadrant, to find out what the changes would mean to his company. “In the short term, nothing. From an API standpoint the changes required for v1.1 are trivial,” says Haddad. “Long term, we shouldn’t be in any risk of running out of spots under Twitter’s cap anytime soon.” Bone-chilling.

The new call limits – yes, it sounds confining and not free – is actually an improvement for most on the previous limits. Unfortunately for the fear-stricken, “60 calls per hour per endpoint” sounds significantly less than “350 API requests per hour.”

As Anil Dash states in his post, which outlines what Twitter could – or should – have said, “Endpoints that are really in demand, like Tweet display, profile display, user lookup, and user search, go all the way up to 720 calls per hour.”

If anything, the entire environment was so charged for Twitter to announce an API change that announcing the purchase of a new puppy would have been met with loathing. But such a blunt release by Snippey, who made the misfortune of seemingly saying “Storify bad, Klout good,” sounded treacherous.

Twitter later corrected their stance on Storify. Twitter changing the Rules of the Road for developers isn’t a drastic difference either. If anything, laying down solid structure to offer a better user and developer experience across the platform ensures more consistency for everyone.

The biggest problem here is that the wording was entirely too vague. As for OAuth, sure a few applications that haven’t been updated will drop off next year. But that won’t affect the average user, or companies actively using the service to build out their business. Asking API users to authenticate their programs isn’t much more than a minor update with some testing that most APIs have been doing for years.

So really the worst thing to come out of the update is that Snippey’s post was read by everyone. (Who knew users could access the dev blog?) As TechLand postedthis morning:

It’s highly technical, which is what you’d expect given that it’s on Twitter’s developers blog. But developers aren’t Twitter’s only constituency. Another one is Twitter users — and for them, there’s nothing the least bit clarifying in the post.

For future use, and as a general rule, if your service update requires a matrix, you’ve probably done a shitty job explaining. Expect a storm of pitchfork-wielding users and bloggers.

Aimlessly wandering through an unknown city is probably one of the best ways to discover what it has to offer – that, or to get mugged. It also cuts off the annoyance of having to schedule tour guides that work on their own schedule – usually ones that involve early mornings – or may not coincide with your plans.

Steven Echtman, the founder of the audiotour app called HearPlanet, had this same idea while travelling in Frankfurt, Germany. Echtman wanted to drift around the city on his own, but didn’t want to miss out on any pertinant information. He ended up on a walking tour, organized after a night out on in Frankfurt. Before his tour even began, he had to walk around picking up the other people. It was worthwhile, but there was too much planning just to be able to pick at the knowledge inside the tour guide’s head.

HearPlanet has since incorporated that process into the phone, have announced that soon they’ll be wrenching the tour guide right into several automotive offerings. This means that, while driving around, you’ll be able to set up and go on a tour tailored to your geolocation and desired topics.

As well, their content partners can now add audio direct from the iPhone app, while pleb users can only do it from the full site. It’s an avenue that, if it’s opened up, could see a vast increase in the amount of content HearPlanet could produce. Their content already covers pretty much everywhere, or the program reads content from Wikipedia to users in a pretty nice automated voice (if it hasn’t been read by one of their voice actors). They’re looking to improve the bit rate as well to make it even clearer.

Lastly, they’ve also recently released a Web version of their app that functions similarly to their native app.

Back in 2006, a year after Echtman visited Germany, he devised a plan to use phone services to connect up with pre-recorded expert information through a 1-800 number. Unfortunately, that wasn’t cheap in those pre-iPhone days. It would have been five cents per minute for Echtman to launch his business at the time. Still, at the time, he at least had a proof of concept, meaning it could work, but would never float unless the prices could be brought down. Not long after, the iPhone launched, and Echtman’s idea had legs.

Now Echtman is working on a platform where everyone can contribute their own audio content. He currently has several partners signed on, as well as 300,000 points of interest serving up over half a million recordings for listeners to tour around a city, museums, or pretty much any area that you could look up on Wikipedia.

One of the greatest HearPlanet recordings in the San Francisco area may be the Pinecrest Diner by Union Square (you need to hear this). It’s surprising to say the least, and definitely not promotional. There’s gunplay, a waitress, and poached eggs involved. Yes, HearPlanet has all kinds of info for your ears.

Echtman says they divide content up into segments of data. So if someone is specifically looking for historical data on a specific site, it’s quite likely they’ll have it. Same goes for food and drink, or just about any other sort of content.

Soon, they’re even considering opening it up to some “graffiti content” as Echtman calls it – audio tours around cities by locals that may have more specific, although not expert, knowledge of sites.

The audio tour segment is an interesting place, which Siri seems to have revived interest in over the past year. (Seems for a while there we forgot about our ears.) Separately, there are now audio hacks of museums in New York City being done by a creative group. The best example being John Chamberlain’s exhibition at MOMA that was hacked by Audio Tour Hack to become an Autobots War Museum exhibit. That’s worth a listen with or without the visual stimuli.

In the next few weeks, Echtman promises there will be some big news for HearPlanet as it seeks to ramp up its content and speed up its distribution methods.

Ben Lerer expressed a desire to adopt a child tonight – under the stipulation that his child is older. Much older. As in older than himself. “I’m going to adopt kids who are significantly older than me,” says Lerer, “I don’t know what the laws are around this, but I’m going to make an attempt to get myself an older kid.” He’s hoping for someone that can do the dishes and walk the dog, maybe clean up around the house in return for his affections, or even maybe buy the first round of beers. Ben asked the audience at Bennett Studio, if he could actually adopt an adult as his child. We looked into it and, yes Ben, you can.

Earlier this year, a 48-year-old Florida millionaire adopted his girlfriend – she herself was 42 years old. The move was in order to avoid paying a hefty settlement in court by offsetting his estate to his girlfriend, making her his beneficiary. Yes – this opened up some questions about incest and just pain weirdness.

That said, there are several reason that Ben Lerer should adopt an older child, apart from just always having someone to grab a beer. This potential adoptee could great business advice, or tell stories about what it was like back in the 80s. It’s a great option for his man-child to inherit his estate, and keeps any sticky-fingered relatives away from contesting his older-child-slash-drinking-friend’s right to the estate.

It’s actually happening so often in the US at the moment that courts are now trying to figure out how to deal with the issues of adopting a reverse-child, as there are several (obvious and weird) issues surrounding the adoptions.

By the way, should Lerer choose to go this route, the author of this post will offer himself up for a trial run.

[Continue watching the fireside chat with Ben Lerer here.]

FTW – apart from scoring the best name ever – has just launched to fix this problem once and for all – as well they’re aiming to raise a first (and final) official funding round on AngelList. “I had an iPhone, and I didn’t want to invest hours and hours and hours into a game,” says FTW’s founder Mark Burstiner, “and then have to redo it all, because you can’t sync up your saved game play with another device.”

It’s an issues specific to the gaming industry. With so many players trying to guard their creative digital sauce, many in the space are trying to force gamers into their own social environment with sign-ups, which just toss the player into a ad laden environment that takes away from game play. FTW hopes to offer a comprehensive OpenID-style platform that allows gamers to get past the doldrums of setting up profiles on numerous devices – or worse, lose your advancements by have devices crash.

FTW’s universal gaming sync is installed by developers which takes no longer than a morning says Burstiner – all the user has to do is log into FTW on their device, and the program recognizes the device, associating it with its user – the login won’t bother the gamer again, leaving them free to blast away at zombies until the end of the world (or work hours). The universal login remembers the user, as well as key figures related to their game play, Also, it cross references the games and devices, allowing the user to backup all their gaming history.

“iOS devices can talk to each other, Android still can’t [...] but none of these devices can talk to your XBox, because it’s something completely separate,” says Burstiner. This is the problem the company wants to fix.

FTW first launched a sync program last year and realized it was a piece of a large part of gamers’ identity. “A big piece, but there’s a lot more,” says Burstiner. Sync is a bigger part of what FTW is releasing now, with the roll out of their universal gaming ID. “[We’ve] got leaderboards and achievements, and it’s just a minimal amount of work that needs to be done to support FTW [by game developers].” Burstiner says they can keep track of game play by keeping track and updating the saved content, which Burstiner says isn’t that difficult. “We know that you want the highest score, the highest level, and the lowest completion time.”

“After logging in, everything in FTW just works,” says Burstiner. For the developers, they’ll also get access to analytics from the users across different platforms. For the gamers, “they’ll have access to all the social stuff,” says Burstiner. But for now, it’s that sort of backbone thinking, syncing all your stuff off your device and into the cloud.

For instance, with EA Origin, although it speaks to their gamers playing irrespective of the platform they’re playing on, it forces users to login on first play – there’s no option to just play without logging in.

“Ubi has something called Uplay, which creates such a shitty experience for the game.” The last thing games want is to be joining different networks just to play a new game. And it gets worse when the studios do it too. “You end up with these silos, inside silos, inside silos,” says Burstiner. There have been some decent attempts as social within mobile gaming, but Burstiner says for the most part, “they tend to focus on the social free-to-play crap, which I and most of the gaming industry abhor.”

FTW contributes to the opening up of what was once a very closed market, something that the Kickstarter game console OUYA aims to blast open – and the users are behind it, judging by the fact that they raised 900 percent of their funding. “The way that we see OUYA, and we are both on the same page, on the same trajectory, after the same exact thing,” says Burstiner. “We really want to be every gamer’s universal identity.”

ClassDojo launched last September as a way for teachers to take control of their classrooms. Their focus is on handling the behavioural management side through a point system, so the teacher can focus on eduction. The site just launched out of beta today and as well as announcing upcoming iPhone and iPad applications, they’re also finally announcing $1.6 million in funding that they raised back in January from Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Paul Graham as well as several education-related funds.

The interesting thing about working in educational technology, says co-founder Sam Chaudhary, is “hitting hard deadlines at the start of the school year, then you get an opportunity too build things over the summer, and then you get that scale again when you go back to school.”

This round of developments is straight from ClassDojo’s users. Teachers provided feedback on what features they wanted. “We took the summer to build the top [features] that they told us would be really valuable to them,” says Chaudhary.

“The type of tool that we’ve made, is the tool that teachers use eight hours a day in the classroom,” says co-founder Liam Don. “So what they’ve started to request are other things that they’ve found useful in a real-time classroom, like attendance, seating arrangements.”

“We started off focusing on teachers, and what we learnt from the year is that – we thought that parents would be important as well – but what teachers told us is that it’s really, really important that students are involved as well, so that they can interact and reflect on how they’re doing.” So they launched a beta sample of student accounts, says Chaudhary.

They realized part way through last year that they were missing two key ingredients in properly taking control of behavioural issues in the classroom – the parents and students. So they’ve really focused on allowing students the chance to look back and reflect on how their behaviour was scored and the effect that had on their general school ability.

In May they rolled out a beta test to allow students access to ClassDojo, something they’ll be building out over the next year.

“When I look back over the year, Liam and I launched ClassDojo last September, and really at the time it was just a test to see if there was a real demand for the product, and establish if there was any kind of product market at all. The strongest bit of feedback over the year, is that it’s really really resonating with teachers. And teachers have really adapted to the problem we’ve set out to solve, which is behaviour management.” says Chaudhary.

Moving forward they’ve found that the key phases of development that ClassDojo needs to target is solid feedback tools, tracking patterns of behaviour and finding the appropriate methods to intervene when things are off-track.

biNu

The beauty of biNu is the simplicity with which they’ve solved the issues of bandwidth, and also how that has allowed them to roll out the application across developing nations. By including sites that have major draw, they’ve managed to quickly increase their user base across geographic regions. It’s the simple increase in connectivity that biNu gives feature phones in areas where Internet access – not to mention a 3G connection are sparse.

“[We] use a variety of techniques to improve the bandwidth efficiency,” says biNu’s co-founder and CEO, Gour Lentell. The most significant aspect that biNu manages, is the amount of processing that’s needed just to engage with a site like Facebook. Whereas there’s been a focus on having the phone, or browser, doing the heavy lifting recently, biNu handles most data processing  in the cloud, so it can package and sending out a smaller data set to the phone.  They use compression, caching and preloads to get pages to the user, and loaded, as quickly as possible. Meaning that the only aspect of their application that really gets updated is the screen and the rest is done by biNu. It’s fast too. On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, Lentell says he was able to load pages faster using his 2G feature phone than on a 3G smartphone.

Lentell says he and co-founder Dave Turner viewed the landscape wondering where they could apply their technology to make the most difference. Their efforts have paid off, with viral growth across these areas that’s interestingly jumping across borders as well.

“[We] started out with some great core technology,” Lentell says, and then they built a social experience around that. On most feature phones, you can only run one application at a time. If you need to switch between two apps, it requires shutting one down just to load up the other. By loading applications into biNu’s platform, it takes the processing away from the phone – and the wonky one-program-at-a-time Java environment.

biNu’s dominant regions are Asia and Africa, with India and Nigeria standing out front. But moving forward, they’re focusing on the next stage of growth. Lentell also hopes that local developers, who know the needs of their local communities, will begin to create apps on their platform, ones that can be tailored to a very specific audience – a very important aspect for a company playing host to such a diverse crowd. As well, Android is very significant already says Gour about the platform’s presence in developing environments. biNu itself is available on Android and usable on any Java enabled feature phones.

biNu opens an enormous gateway to integrating emerging markets into the mobile world. Essentially, almost any app that you run on your smartphone can be built into their environment making it accessible to almost any phone around the world. biNu currently offers up almost all the Google offerings, including Search, YouTube, and Translate as well as some of their own including a chat program called Messenger, and music offerings with biNu Beats.

While the frequency of spamming has increased dramatically over the past few years, Impermium has managed to keep the comment spam under control – and doesn’t discriminate between who’s competing. Be it jewellery-pawning bot or ultra aggro-troll, they all get a fair shake at being eliminated by the company’s platform that runs on over 300,000 sites worldwide and run anti-spam software on several commenting systems such as Livefyre, Disqus, and Echo.

While spam is generally associated with bots sending out tweets and emails on mass, Impermium lumps in trolls and commenters posting profane and hateful content. The company’s technology seeks out and terminates them with extreme prejudice.

The spam industry as a whole deserves some praise for its hard work this year – in the first four days of the Olympics alone, unwanted user generated content increased by 54 percent over the same stretch of the previous week, says Impermium’s CEO and co-founder Mark Risher. Risher first developed the idea while working at Yahoo Mail’s main spam ninja. He says he realized killing spam had wider uses when sub-sections of Yahoo started asking for something similar for public comments.

As for the Olympics, the brands that came out on top for most spam are Samsung, who generated three times more spam than anyone else – both positive and negative – and Adidas bringing up a close second place. Holiday Inn came in dead last – their name was almost no spam at all. Risher attributes Holiday Inn’s lackluster performance in the spam Olympics by saying, “When you’re a relatively vanilla brand, spammers don’t really latch on to you.”

The top countries that came out with the most vicious spam attacks against them were, in this order: Hong Kong, Kazakhstan (blame Sacha Baron Cohen), and Uruguay. As for the athletes involved in the actual Olympics, Michael Phelps and LeBron James were at the top of their games – generating the most, not so much from swimfan bots, but by humans inspired to click away with one-off hate speech and profanity. Strangely, they both placed ahead of NBC, the company that seemed to be the main target for angry commenters.

As the main spambot “you should buy this” item to be pushed into comments – where last year it was boots, this year it was shoes that generated the most spam.

All joking aside, Risher says that spam really is a serious problem, and attributes spam to being the main cause for Web 2.0 never really happened to email. But it does cause some concern for Risher, who notes that in just that last couple weeks, Fox News has drastically tightened up their commenting system – making it nearly uncommentable. That’s something Impermium’s co-founder says could signal tough times ahead for an open Internet, especially with an election on the way. Email, Risher believes, never really developed past its initial design because of all the issues surrounding privacy and companies’ focus on dealing with spam, instead of developing out their product. But as for the spammers, Risher adds, “No one really considers themselves a spammer – just a really clever Internet marketer.”

With that, here is your final list of Top 20 Countries in the Spam Olympics in order (props to Yemen for making it this year):

1.     USA (by far)
2.     Mexico
3.     Brazil
4.     Spain
5.     India
6.     Argentina
7.     Canada
8.     Dominican Republic
9.     China
10.   Bangladesh
11.   Vietnam
12.   Italy
13.   Great Britain (host country)
14.   Philippines
15.   Australia
16.   Russia
17.   Uganda
18.   Venezuela
19.   Chile
20.   Yemen

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Last year, the BumeBox team had a one-off chance. They met Marc Jacobs and told him about their product – a near-perfect integration of social media over video content. They sold the fashion brand on testing out BumeBox during the Marc Jacob’s 20-minute catwalk show at New York Fashion Week. At the end of the show, viewers posted 18,000 Tweets, and the brand was the only one to trend on Twitter during Fashion Week. When Jon Fahrner, CEO of BumeBox got back to his room that day, he check the clickthrough rate. It was 20 percent (0.3 percent is considered average). BumeBox is a pretty neat idea.

“Just having a ‘neat idea’ doesn’t get very far,” says Fahrner, of the team’s success with BumeBox, who “leveraged all [their] contacts along the way to get a shoe in the door.” The company today announces their partnership with B Productions, a company that produces video for 120 brands at Fashion Week. “We’re offering something that’s totally different,” says Fahrner.

“The leaps of faith these people have taken with us” have been enormous says Fahrner. For fashion brands, they hinge their year’s success on those 20 minutes on the catwalk twice a year. The production needs to be perfect in order to get the right message out to fashion buyers in the audience. But BumeBox may be able to help brands get a better read on what customers want. Through the feedback that BumeBox receives they can estimate the interest in differing items throughout fashion shows by who’s posting what. BumeBox, which owns a patent for its tech, offers tiered expenses depending on what the company wants to do and provides stats for a brand’s customers are looking, and Tweeting, about. Their app sits on top of the streaming video so users can post related content to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

While they’re currently focused on this very specific vertical, Farhner says they’re not about the events, but the content, and understand that they must respect the nuances of the different industries. They’ve covered everything including red carpet events in the UK, including the release of Titanic 3D, which set a box office record in China.

The team launched with just $15,000 and leveraged all their contacts along the way to get a shoe in the door, says Farhner. They managed all work for free for the first six months while pushing the product out before raising $300,000 from AngelList. It may have also helped that Jon started out at Zappos and seemingly retains that same culture with his team in their relatively human-intensive app – which when he describes what’s involved in producing a 20-minute catwalk show sounds more like a live television production than a social sharing application.

BumeBox is aiming to disrupt the advertising agencies by pushing actual content in front of real people and receiving live feedback direct from customers.

Fahrner sees BumeBox’s goal now is to try to “[get] more data for the brand, with fun interactions in a premium quality way.” But admits that “[it’s like] a stealth bomber, we’re the only ones who know how fly it.”

As for digital agencies, Farhner belives that brands that only use social media to listen to customers on a daily basis aren’t getting much feedback. He thinks this industry is ripe for disruption by solid technology that listens to real events. BumeBox, says Farhner, listens when something is happening, making it a “real-time mass focus group.”