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Kelly Rodriques and Paul Schiff are creating a new Hollywood studio from scratch called Blowtorch Entertainment. The company is just launching with a $50 million investment from Ignition Partners, Hollywood individuals, and at least one (unnamed) hedge fund. Rodriques was a partner at Ignition, and before that a digital ad executive. Schiff is the Hollywood producer behind Rushmore, My Cousin Vinny, and Date Movie. Rodriques and Kelly came by my office earlier this week to brief me on Blowtorch.

Blowtorch wants to make cult movies that appeal to college kids. It plans to make or acquire 18 feature-length films over the next three years at about $5 million a pop. (That hedge fund will be providing an additional $40 million a year to pay for it all). “We want to be in the Napoleon Dynamite business,” says Rordriques. As it is making these films, it wants to involve the potential audience to a greater degree than ever before through its Website, where people will be able to help cast movies (we’ve heard that idea recently) or pick the songs for the soundtrack, among other ideas. “It can’t be anarchy,” warns Schiff. “We won’t have a movie at the end of the process if everyone’s vote counts and impacts the project equally. But we still want the audience to participate in some way.”

So in addition to helping to steer the development of each movie, Blowtorch audience members will get a shot at having their own videos shown in theaters alongside the feature films. Here’s how it will work: On the site, which is not much more than a placeholder right now, people will be able to watch additional digital shorts made by Blowtorch, as well as upload their own videos. All the videos on the site will be voted on, and spread virally through Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, and other social applications. The audience-made videos that get the most votes then will be professionally reshot and included in a 5-to-15-minute pre-show collection that will be shown in theaters before each of Blowtorch’s feature films.

Blowtorch has already cut deals with 600 theaters nationwide near college campuses and in urban areas that will dedicate one screen to Blowtorch Nights every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Audience members in the theaters will also be able to vote for the digital shorts as they are watching them through their mobile phones and send links to the videos to their friends elsewhere. So you won’t actually have to be in the theater to be connected to the experience. Vivendi will distribute Blowtorch’s feature-length movies once they go to DVD, pay-per-view, cable, TV, and digitally as well through places like iTunes and Amazon.

The first Blowtorch movie, You Are Here, a film-festival darling that the studio bought, will come out next April. The movie is about LA club kids who talk about one particularly insane night. One idea Kelly and Rodriques have is for one of the movie’s actresses, Bijou Phillips, to solicit video confessionals on the the Blowtorch Website from the audience about their craziest night ever. Then the best ones could be packaged with the film when it goes to theaters.

When the full-blown site launches in early December, there will be three main tabs: Front Row, Entourage, and Studio. Front Row will be the place where people can share videos and vote for them. It is where the popular stuff will be. Entourage will be the place where people can organize their social networks around their media preferences, bring in their friends from other social sites to vote on their stuff, or bring in videos from YouTube and elsewhere to throw into the mix. Studio is where they will submit original videos, and where marketing partners will be able to solicit material as well for their own viral video campaigns.

What strikes me about Blowtorch is that it is a movie company that is thinking like a cable channel. But instead of TV shows, it wants to create nichebusters that appeal to the 18-to-24-year-old audience. “One of the things exciting for me,” says Schiff, “is we are targeting a specific audience and narrowcasting to them on a consistent basis.” He talks about “programming that channel.” But there is no channel per se. It is wherever that audience wants to be—on the Web, in the theaters, on their mobile phones. You will notice, though, that Blowtorch is not creating a television channel. There is just so much more opportunity elsewhere.

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At our TechCrunch Boston MeetUp, a company is launching called Mzinga that brings white-label social networks to consumer research. Mzinga, which means “beehive” in Swahili, is actually the combination and rebranding of two existing companies: Knowledge Planet (Web-based corporate learning) and Shared Insights (Web communities). Right out of the gate, the company already has a healthy business with $17 million in annual revenues and 100 employees. And CEO Rick Faulk says the company is “nearly profitable.”

Mzinga lets corporations create social networks for their most ardent customers or alumni and retirees. It offers a menu of social modules that companies can add to their sites, including blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, calendars, forums, tag clouds, file uploading tools, individual profile pages, group pages, and idea-management tools with Digg-like voting. Faulk used to be the chief marketing officer at WebEx, and Mziinga already powers the community portion of its site. WebEx’s most hardcore customers can join and give feedback there about future features that WebEx should implementing.

This must be the month that social networks go corporate because last week another white-label social network launched called Networked Insights. Like Mzinga, it lets companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products. But it uses semantic analysis sand concept matching to extract meaning from all the chatter, and ranks conversations or comments based on how many interactions are associated with it. So a loud, whiny customer who complains a lot about a product in comments, but nobody else is joining in or linking off him, counts less than the quiet customer who only made one insightful post that spurred a torrent of other comments, links, ratings, and invitations to others to join the discussion.

Of course, being able to capture all of these discussions and mine them for meaning make them potentially more powerful than any focus group. The trick will be to get a representative sample of a company’s customers to participate, as opposed to just the most opinionated or the ones who are already brand fanatics.

Corporate social networks may not be sexy, but they could be a goldmine. Networked Insights charges $200,000 a year and up to build a social network for your brand (pricing is based on the number of interactions). Mzinga will charge $1,000 a month for its self-serve offerings and $15,000 a month for full service (or $180,000 per year), where Mzinga builds the site, then recruits, and manages the community. Faulk is finding plenty of takers for the more expensive option. “What we are finding is that companies like to write a check to make it successful,” he says, sounding a bit like someone who cannot believe his own luck.

Faulk is also taking a social approach to marketing. Mzinga’s software was used to create a site for the express purpose of crowdsourcing a book. The book, We Are Smarter Than Me, was written by 5,000 different people and published by Wharton. It was released on September 24th, and already the first print run of 15,000 is nearly sold out, says Faulk. The book is about—what else—how to use crowds to help your business.

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Mark this one down as a major PR stunt, but they certainly have our attention: The founder (or more likely, founders) of venture capital gossip site TheFunded, who have been keeping their names anonymous since March when the site launched, will spill the beans tonight and announce themselves.

Staying anonymous was probably smart, since more than a few VC’s have been miffed at all the negative feedback they’ve received from startups who’ve pitched them.

But tonight the group says they’ll be announcing themselves at an event at Stanford. The exact time of the announcement? 6:45 pm.

Clearly Jason Calacanis and Philip Kaplan are either part of it or know who is. Both are now at Stanford, and neither will take my calls.

Both Calacanis and Kaplan are currently at Sequoia-backed startups, by the way. Calacanis at Mahalo, Kapan at Adbrite.

As it’s announced, we’ll update.

Update: The man, “Ted”, behind “The Funded” is Adeo Ressi. Ressi founded and sold casual gaming site Game Trust to RealNetworks this September for around $20 million. He also serves on the board of the X Prize Foundation, best known by their cash prize for civilian space exploration. He was apparently screwed by a number of VCs in the past, which gave him the idea for the site.

The Funded

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This is a huge win for music site iLike - U2’s Bono recorded an interview with the iLike founders talking about the history of a new song called Wave of Sorrow. The song, which is being released on Tuesday next week as part of the remastered Joshua Tree album and DVD, was written in the 80’s but never recorded.

It’s available in two places - on iLike and on iLike’s Facebook application. The Facebook application is particularly interesting - 1.2 million fans have signed up specifically to get new U2 news and were notified as soon as the video went up two days ago. So far, over 2,000 fan messages have been left on the video.

This was an experiment, says a representative of the company. No press was notified when the video went live - they wanted to see how fast it spread virally and without any promotion.

This wasn’t out of the blue - iLike has connections to U2 through Elevation Partners (Mark Bodnick at Elevation is on the board of iLike, and Bono is also a partner at Elevation), and Brooke Hammerling, who handles PR for iLike, is a personal friend of Bono’s.

But regardless of the connections, the success of the viral release will certainly get other artists to consider using iLike to talk directly to fans via the Facebook application. That’s something MySpace and other competitors can’t do yet.

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Can’t keep up with all those magazines piling up in your mailbox, especially the high-brow ones you thought would make you smarter but never have time to read? Well, cancel those subscriptions and head on over to Brijit, a self-styled “Thinking Man’s Digg.”

There you will find 100-word abstracts on the latest articles from magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Wired, with links to most of them. The site also covers video from 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show. Readers vote the best stories up or down, so you can keep up on the ones most likely to come up during a dinner party. You can even get paid to write abstracts, $5 apiece if your submissions are accepted.

Brijit is designed to be a filter for the smart set. But it oddly defines smart only as what’s in print. Where are the blogs? Other than Salon and Slate, very little online-only media is represented. Perhaps that is because Brijit is focussed on long-form narrative, and there is not much of that online. But it makes you wonder whether sifting through the dead-tree titles will be enough to keep readers coming back to this site, or whether they will prefer a broader view of the world.

Brijit has raised $1 million from angel investors, including former Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine.

(Disclosure: I worked at Time Inc. when Pearlstine was the editorial boss there).

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White label social networking platform CrowdVine, which we have covered a couple of times in this past year, has released a new offering called “CrowdVine for Conferences” that further cements its focus of hosting networks meant for conference attendees.

The free version of CrowdVine for Conferences provides much of the same, simple functionality of a non-conference network (now dubbed “CrowdVine for Groups”). But if you are organizing a conference with 300 attendees or less, you’ll have access to a handful of useful features. Network members can indicate not only their friends but the people they “want to meet” at the conference. Conference organizers can integrate Twitter streams and 3rd-party wikis. And everyone can export the contact information of attendees as vCards after the conference ends (a feature I so wish Facebook and other social networks would adopt).

If you’re willing to pay, you can raise the attendee limit to 1000 ,or unlimited, and gain access to even more features. Advertisements can be removed, you will be given a “dedicated community manager” who helps to foster your network, attendee data can be analyzed to determine who contributed most to the event, speaker information can be imported, sponsorships can be incorporated, and a sessions calendar can be set up. CrowdVine has also partnered with Pathable to create custom, physical badges that show tags and likenesses for each attendee.

For an example of what CrowdVine can do for conferences, check out the Future of Web Apps network and, in particular, its sessions calendar.

CrowdVine

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Yesterday, I had a chance to discuss DC-based FamilyOven with one of its founders, Sean Shadmand. Sean and his co-founder, Isaac Mosquera, are building a thriving community around recipes, and more generally, food.

FamilyOven is by no means the first website for recipes (see iChef, Epicurious, Allrecipes, GroupRecipes, KitchenBug, RecipeZaar, Food Network, AOL Food, Cooks.com and Cooking.com to name a few). However, FamilyOven has been implementing many features that make it preferable to these other sites.

The site indexes over 500,000 recipes, most of which are pulled in from other websites such as Allrecipes and RecipeZaar, but many of which are submitted by FamilyOven users directly to the site. You don’t have to worry about missing out on recipes because they are all included together in the site’s search and browsing results.

Besides bringing a lot of recipes together in one place, FamilyOven has been designed to help users find just which recipes they actually want to use. You can search for recipes not only by using basic keywords but also by using the names of ingredients that you want to include or exclude from the results. Have a craving for Oreo and mint? Search for “desserts” with “oreo mint”. Search results can also be refined with “one-click filters” like “cake” and “christmas” displayed on the right side of the page. The result listing for each recipe displays a good deal of information so you don’t need to click away from the results to decide whether you are interested in the recipe. Hover your cursor over ingredients and a popup will show you all of them. A Digg-like “chomps” rating will also tell you how many other users like the recipe. Once you do find a recipe you like, you can save it to your collection and add just the ingredients you’re missing to a shopping list.

FamilyOven is also a social network and so, naturally, you can check out the recipes that others have contributed or given their stamps of approval. Profile pages highlight users’ favorite recipes, any food-related videos they have contributed, all the recipes they have uploaded, and all the recipes they have “saved for later”. Of course, a standard friends list and a “wall” for posting messages are included, too. Interestingly, the founders of FamilyOven encourage even dining establishments to make profile pages for themselves with which they can share the recipes they use at their restaurants. It’ll be interesting to see how many restaurants take advantage of this opportunity, and how FamilyOven expands functionality to let you search for the recipes of local establishments.

While FamilyOven does not focus on instructional videos (you can’t search for them), the site does provide a section that aggregates all of the videos uploaded by members. Therefore, it does compete with Cookshow, a cooking website geared towards instructional videos that we’ve covered before.

Sean and Isaac say they are constantly looking for ways to improve FamilyOven and will actively respond to users’ suggestions. Just yesterday they added a feature with which users can recommend beverages that go well with particular recipes. So far their hands-on attention has paid off; only after a few months of full-time work, they have reached 300,000+ monthly uniques with 1.5 million+ monthly page views.

FamilyOven

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Recipezaar

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My blue day
Originally uploaded by LuneValleySnapper

IBM wants some of that Web 2.0 mojo. That is what is behind its announcement today of Blue Cloud, a set of “cloud computing” offerings that will be available to its corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008. Of course, cloud computing is just Web computing by another name. It implies massive server farms, massive storage, and the ability to support Internet-scale applications and usage patterns.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com.com are all examples of cloud computing already available to consumers and businesses today. These are mostly in the form of specific applications, but Amazon offers its suite of Web services, which are a collection of generic cloud computing offerings—computing cycles, storage, communications. Even Salesforce.com offers its cloud computing infrastructure to other companies through its AppExchange. IBM should not have any trouble competing.

Blue Cloud is being billed as more of a distributed computing architecture than what you find in most corporate data centers. It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.

So IBM is basically bringing this massive-scale computing architecture to its corporate customers. That will be good for corporate applications because this sort of distributed architecture lends itself to Web 2.0 apps, which are already invading the enterprise. The question remains as to how exactly IBM is going to implement Blue Cloud. Will it offer it on its own hosted server farms around the world or teach big company CIOs how to build their own mini-Googles across their own data centers?

My guess is it will probably be a little bit of both.

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We’ve been tracking a few emerging mobile-only social networks. All of these services are downloadable applications that run on your mobile phone.

Mobile social network Loopt, however, has had the distinction of being one of two with a automated location updates and deep integration with a U.S. carrier, Sprint (Helio is the other). This opens up a lot of possibilities for location based services. The deal gave them a lot of advantages over other networks. They could easily relay location information — what we call the “Holy Grail” — and came pre-installed on phones. But the deal also meant only your Sprint friends could join and you need a GPS enabled phone. However, Loopt’s exclusivity agreement is up and they’re looking to expand the service across more carriers and services (even Android).

As part of expanding their reach, Loopt has released a new version of their program that integrates with your address book (like Zyb) and sends status updates to your non-Sprint friends over SMS or AIM. The messages can also attach a link to a map online, so a texting “let’s meet for coffee” can also say where you are. As before, it still has the geotagging, messaging, and privacy features we already reported on. I’m sure they’re learning a lot from services like Twitter and the recent Jaiku acquisition.

Loopt has remained tight lipped about who they’re talking to, but the pitch is pretty clear. Competition is driving down mobile voice revenues which Loopt says they can help offset by driving new profits in data plans people pay for to use the program. Currently they make money through $2.99/month subscription plans or by being bundled in with a phone data plan. Location based services and advertising are also other key revenue sources. Loopt says that 51% of all mobile application revenue already comes from location based services.

But it’s not all smooth sailing ahead. While Loopt owns it’s section of the network, other mobile networks with lower barriers to entry have gained a lot of traction. Twitter has kept a high profile (with funding) and Mig33 has claimed over 7 million registered users. Loopt could learn a great deal from following the lead of these lower friction services.

Loopt

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Aka Aki

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Zyb

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Mig33

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From CrunchGear:

Sony’s lackluster PlayStation 3 sales more than doubled recently thanks to the introduction of the new 40GB model and a $100 price cut on the 80GB model.

Well, it is only one week’s data, but sales went from about 40,000 units a week to more than 100,000. Still, it is going to have to do better than that to catch up to the Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii (which have shipped 11.6 million and 9.3 million consoles, respectively, compared to just 5 million for the PS3). It does come with a Blue-ray drive, though.

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