Lucky Voice on Soho's Poland Street in London is already well-known for its private karaoke party rooms, which have proved so popular that the venue has expanded to include three additional locations. Now the chain has expanded even further--right into consumers' living rooms--with a branded karaoke party-planning website and equipment.

Lucky Voice Home, which just launched into beta earlier this month, offers more than 6,300 songs that can be streamed into consumers' living rooms for club-quality karaoke fun. Users can create their own, personal playlists by searching Lucky Voice's catalogue or by browsing the lists of their friends. They can also organize private karaoke parties using the site, with features for jointly planning the playlist, sending out invitations and even sharing photos afterwards. For those in need of karaoke equipment, Lucky Voice also offers a Party Box including mic mixer with echo effect and space for two mics, a fluorescent pink microphone and the cables needed to connect it all up via a computer headphone jack and amplified speakers. For a limited time, access to the Lucky Voice Home catalogue is free, but ultimately there will be a monthly charge for access to the complete list; more than 1,000 songs, however, will always be free, the company says. The Party Box, priced at GBP 35, includes a month's subscription to the full Lucky Voice catalogue.

If there's anything better than an evening of karaoke in a private bar, it just may be an evening of karaoke with comparable quality--and even the same brand--in one's own home. What insperiences can your brand deliver....?

Website: home.luckyvoice.co.uk
Contact: home.luckyvoice.com/feedback

Spotted by: Marko Balabanovic

Earlier this year, we covered WooMe, an initiative that attempted to move online dating away from written profiles and communication, instead offering instant speed dates conducted via webcam. As of September 2008, the San Francisco-based company has upped its game, by inviting the world to watch. Billing itself as 'real reality TV', anyone brave enough to share their flirting with the world can do so, leading to thousands of hours of unedited video clips being uploaded every week for the pleasure of WooMe TV viewers.

Pricing is geared to the site's worldwide target market of 18-24 year-olds: online chat is free, with users paying USD1/GBP1/EUR1 to swap contact details if they both sense a match. Video clips are also free to watch, financed by ads that play while videos load and while daters' scores are calculated at the end of each clip. According to an AFP newswire, testing has shown that practically 100% of users watch the videos and ads to the very end.

With other sites such as SideTaker and checkyourimage.com popping up recently, it seems social voyeurism is being taken to a whole new level. Which begs the question: which social activities previously kept private can now be turned into business opportunities?

Website: www.woome.com/video
Contact: info@woome.com

Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen

Twones is a new online music service that automatically tracks every song a user plays while online—whether via iTunes, YouTube, last.fm or services—and then creates a single timeline of the music they've been listening to. Users can share their timelines and discover new music by exploring a friend's musical history. The service, which launches in December, works via a small browser plug-in.

The innovative aspect? Twones is pushing its offer one step further by collaborating with Tony Player, a system that builds playlists from multiple Twones timelines. When Twones members arrive at a club that uses Tony Player, they register their presence via text message or their phone's bluetooth connection. The tracks they've most recently listened to--as registered by Twones--are then imported to the DJ's playlist. The DJ picks from those tracks and mixes them, building a set based entirely on the crowds' recent musical preferences. To add extra recognition and excitement for people whose songs are played, their headshots and usernames are displayed on a giant screen. The event previewed at the Amsterdam Dance Event last week.

While nights that encourage party-goers to bring their own iPods have been around for a while, this our first exposure to DJs drawing directly from online playlists, and not requiring active crowd participation. Members make their presence known, and the system accesses and broadcasts elements of their online identity. Part of the OFF=ON trend, it's an interesting example of extending online networks and online behaviour to the 'real' world. One to play with!

Website: www.tonyplayer.com -- www.twones.com
Contact: lukas@tonyplayer.com

Spotted by: Jeroen Bouwman

Music fans can now participate in the music industry as never before, whether by funding and promoting their favourite bands or creating and selling custom mixes--to name just a few of the opportunities we've already written about. Now, however, a North Carolina company is giving consumers a way to buy what it calls the ultimate fan collectible: the songs themselves.

Aiming to connect songwriters and fans in a new way, SongVest has developed a platform for live and online auctions of songwriters' rights that lets consumers buy as much as 100 percent of the rights to a given song--including the associated royalty streams. Songwriters determine the terms of each auction, including what percentage of each song they'd like to auction, the reserve price and the auction length. None of the copyright gets released, ensuring that the writers still retain control of usage. But as partial or full owners of the songwriters' rights, buyers are entitled to earn royalties on their songs, and SongVest acts as a clearinghouse (for a fee of between 10 and 20 percent) to manage those payments. Buyers also get a personalized plaque denoting their status as song co-owners along with a one-of-a-kind, RIAA-certified gold or platinum album award, handwritten lyrics and other collectible items. SongVest sellers pay a commission of between 10 and 15 percent when their song sells, while buyers pay a commission of between 15 and 25 percent, depending on the final bid price. The company's first major auction is due to begin 4 October 2008, including songs made famous by Aerosmith, Ringo Starr, Cher, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill and The Monkees.

Besides appealing to consumers' gravanity and giving them some status stories to share, SongVest's concept promises to create a new revenue stream for recording artists and--potentially--provide a model that could be used to help ensure the sustainability of the other arts as well, or even for other types of intellectual property. One to watch!

Website: www.songvest.com
Contact: info@songvest.com

Spotted by: Jan-Olof A.

Buying tickets for concerts, sports events and theatre is typically a matter of paying the set price for a given seat and show. Aiming to put some control back in consumers' hands, however, a new site just launched last week that makes ticket prices negotiable.

Los Angeles-based Zigabid allows ticket buyers and sellers to interact directly with each other to determine a ticket's price. Working on the premise that tickets are commodities--and should be traded as such--the site's process mirrors a Wall Street-style transaction with a system of offers and counter-offers. Both individual sellers and ticket distributors and brokers can list tickets on the site at no charge. Asking prices, however, are not indicated. Rather, users are given a wealth of real-time data showing fluctuations in a ticket's current trading price, which can then be used to make an offer. Buyers and sellers can go through a back-and-forth process of multiple offers and counter-offers before arriving at a selling price; once that happens, tickets are shipped to buyers overnight, backed by Zigabid's own guarantee. Sellers pay Zigabid a 15 percent connection fee, while buyers pay an additional 10 percent.

Zigabid also sets itself apart by directing a portion of each transaction back to the entertainers. Specifically, when a buyer uses Zigabid to purchase tickets that have been issued by another vendor, 10 percent of the buyer's connection fee goes directly back to the artists or athletes in question--or to the charity of their choice. A community section, meanwhile, lets users post event photos, reviews and comments, while the Z-Rewards incentive program rewards them for participation with points redeemable for discounts towards future purchases.

"Zigabid is the first service to address the inefficiencies of tickets sold in both the primary and secondary market," explains Dan Rubendall, Zigabid's founder. "Our system allows ticket distributors and resellers to strive for fair-market value for their tickets and gives buyers the opportunity to make offers based only on what they believe is the right price at any given time." That's pricing transparency, and it's triumphing once again. Still in beta, Zigabid covers events only in the United States. One to bring to the ticketing market near you? (Related: Ticketing, fair and simple.)

Website: www.zigabid.com
Contact: customer.service@zigabid.com

Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann