Content Economy

Star power is a valuable commodity. As long as celebrity has existed, there has been someone willing to pay handsomely to use its influence to amplify support for a cause or sell more products. Then along came social media, changing the game entirely. Social media has allowed celebrities to take control over that influence, connecting and sharing directly with a massive audience in realtime. Some have turned their star power into a brand, using it to amplify promotion and marketing and sell more CDs, movies, or clothes.

But the game is still new, and with new media now enabling communication at warp speed to a massive, democratized (and now global) audience, there’s as much potential for ill as there is for good. With one poorly worded tweet resulting in millions of angry fans, managing that influence and responsibility is a full-time job. Many celebrities are lost when it comes to how best to leverage their brands on social media, and so they’re increasingly turning to outside sources for help.

If you had to recruit the ideal team to help you navigate the intersection of technology, media, and celebrity, it probably wouldn’t look much different from the partnership behind theAudience. The stealthy social media company, which has flown under the radar until recently, counts Sean Parker, Ari Emanuel, and Oliver Luckett as its co-founders — just your average startup’s triumvirate of tech and entertainment influence.

Just in case you’ve been out of pocket, Parker is best known as the co-founder of Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and most recently Airtime, as well as the founding president of Facebook and as an early investor in Spotify. Emanuel, on the other hand, is probably one of the most well-known talent agents, currently serves as CEO of the William Morris Endeavor, is the of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and former Chief of Staff) — although he may be better known for being parodied as Ari Gold on Entourage. Oliver Luckett, theAudience’s acting CEO, may not have been immortalized on-screen by Jeremy Piven or Justin Timberlake, but he does have some digital media chops.

Prior to theAudience, Luckett co-founded a social media startup called DigiSynd, which Mike covered when it was acquired by Disney in 2008. After the acquisition, Luckett went on to become a senior vice president at Disney, serving as co-head of innovation and, through DigiSynd, managed social media for Disney’s big properties. Before DigiSynd, the Memphian co-founded Revver, a user-generated video site that helped popularize rev sharing in digital video.

Yet, in spite of its co-founding team, theAudience has maintained a low-profile, which is clearly by design. (Under Luckett’s leadership, DigiSynd, too, remained in stealth-mode through its acquisition by Disney.) The startup’s website gives little information about what the team is up to, and theAudience likely would have happily remained under the radar. Stuart Dredge of Music Ally culled together bits and pieces of info on the startup from various sources, including what is the most complete description of the company courtesy of a profile of Luckett in the magazine of his high school alma mater, Memphis University School:

[theAudience] is is the first celebrity-driven content network across Facebook and other social media outlets. TheAudience was born from a partnership between the famous Ari Emanuel (personified on Entourage), The William Morris Endeavor Agency, Sean Parker, and Luckett. TheAudience network manages the social media of more than 60 celebrities who have already accumulated more than 300 million fans on Facebook. They have offices in Los Angeles and London and employ more than 50 people.

Piggy-backing on Dredge’s work, we were able to get the company to confirm that Parker, Emanuel and Luckett are indeed co-founders and that this description is, for the most part, accurate, although the company did say that the numbers are out of date. TheAudience wouldn’t reveal any more, so it’s unclear whether or not the site will be used as a media property or as the base of operations for what is obviously an expanding client roster.

The startups is also actively hiring, which has been made clear by a number of posts on Jobvite for positions like “Content Curator” and “Director of Video Partnerships,” which come with job descriptions like “ideate and recommend to Client team opportunities for increased fan/follower reach via content, applications or other forms of engagement.” And, as Music Ally noted, these listings come on top of its already-sizable roster of employees on LinkedIn, which likely totals more than 60.

What’s more, given these posts, theAudience is clearly doing more than just managing tweets and Facebook posts for celebrities, with employees actively participating in expanding client outreach, and likely more than that. As Hypebot intimated, it seems as if theAudience is quietly trying to build a social media empire fit for the red carpet. Given that DigiSynd described (via paidContent) its mission as “translating brand magic to the social space” for fans and media and was “credited with bringing Disney to Facebook,” including 150 million likes and over 500 million monthly impressions, this makes a lot of sense.

With the level of influence the startup’s co-founders have in the music industry, Hollywood, and digital media, it will be very interesting to finally get a look at the company’s client roster — and the full picture — when it pulls back the curtain. Which we’ve heard may happen in the next few months.

You can find theAudience at home here, and a record of Intertainment’s $1 million investment in theAudience courtesy of Music Ally here.

Stipple is launching its public beta today, allowing anyone to try out its service, which is supposed to turn online pictures into “intelligent images.”

Stipple images can be tagged with links to anything that has a URL, whether it’s other images, videos, or just a citation for the website where a picture originated. One of the main selling points of a service like Stipple, as well as competitors like Luminate and ThingLink, is monetization — the ability to embed advertising or links to e-commerce. So for example, you can find fashion photos that are full of links allowing you to buy the products featured in the image. Or pictures of food that link to the different ingredients.

The site used to be focused exclusively on letting advertisers tag editorial photos, but today’s launch marks its transformation into social service for consumers too. You can follow other users, “like” their images, and browse the most popular pictures on the site.

And there are plenty of tags that go beyond commerce — they’re more informative or just fun. At the top of my Stipple feed right now, there’s a triumphant graduation photo that’s tagged (cheekily, one assumes) with another photo of a “F”-graded test. There’s also a photo of someone stretching, which is tagged with photos and instructions for related exercises.

Images can be uploaded directly to Stipple, imported from your website, blog, online store, or social network account. You also get analytics around each image, showing how many people viewed it and which pieces of content they interacted with.

Of course, the platform would be pretty limited if it just worked on the Stipple site. In fact, Stipple photos are shareable and embeddable — CEO Rey Flemings says the company is “in the process of connecting every online photo back to its source.

Right now, Stipple tags will work on a partner sites, on any site that embeds the image using the embed code, and for anyone who has installed the Stipple Viewer browser extension (more on that in a second). The company says it’s already working with 4,000 publishers who have enabled Stipple on their sites, and that those publishers “routinely” see engagement rates with the images that are 100 times their the engagement rates of their display ads.

With the Stipple Viewer browser extension, you can see Stipple tags beyond the publisher network. So if you’re a brand, you can upload a Stipple-tagged photo to your Facebook account and know that at least some of your fans will see the links. As Stipple notes, this could be particularly useful on fashion-focused Pinterest, where all the details about a product, including a link to purchase, can be embedded right into an image.

Stipple has raised $7 million in funding from Floodgate, Relevance Capital, Kleiner Perkisn Caufield & Byers, and others.

The ridesharing-disruptive car service space in the U.S. is about to get a little more crowded: Carpooling.com, a ridesharing service out of Germany with one million monthly users, is today announcing a C-round of investment from carmaker Daimler, which it will be using to expand to the other side of the Atlantic. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed but TechCrunch has heard from a reliable source that it is €8 million ($10 million).

The deal makes Daimler a strategic investor in the company. Other existing investors include the European VC firm Earlybird, which has invested in the company’s previous two rounds, as well as Carpooling.com’s founders.

Carpooling.com’s entry into the U.S. comes at a time when services like Uber are expanding fast, and carsharing services that compete more directly with Carpooling are just starting to take off, too. Zimride in April said it had clocked up 26,000 carpools among 350,000 registered users. If Carpooling.com can grow at the same pace as it has done in the 40 countries where it already operates, that would make it potentially a very strong competitor for Zimride. However, a spokesperson notes that in reality it’s great that Zimride exists to help establish the market. “Our real competitors are train companies and other public transport providers,” she noted.

While Carpooling says that some of the funds will also be used to update services like mobile apps, it would not comment on whether it would also be used to expand into new areas of business — like taxi services.

“At this moment we have no plans, no comment, on whether we would explore our own taxi services,” she said, adding that right now the company partners with a few taxi services in Germany to offer this feature to users.

While car-sharing and car-service companies can be thought of as the “OTT” players of the automotive world (akin to companies like Netflix in the video/TV world), the investment by Daimler is an example of how those that are incumbent in that industry are trying to change with the times. Like other car makers, Daimler has been developing products that fall into the category of “mobility services,” to be used in in-car systems, be it their own or those of others. In Daimler’s case that has included an investment in MyTaxi (a European Uber), and the short-term urban pick-up/drop-off car rental service car2go. That latter service now has 130,000 users.

Daimler has also been working on a “mobility platform” called moovel, which it launched this month; and has been piloting ridesharing services in two German cities, Ulm and Aachen.

Carpooling.com says that the investment by Daimler is non-exclusive — meaning that it can also work with other carmakers in future on similar services. But for now this is a sign that “Daimler believes in us and we share the same vision,” says a source at the company.

Stamped, the ex-Googler backed startup for sharing your favorite things, is rolling out a major revamp of its product today, and is adding a buzz-worthy lineup of new strategic investors, including celebrities like Justin Bieber, Ellen Degeneres, Ryan Seacrest, NBA all-star Baron Davis, Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, as well as media companies The New York Times Co. and Columbia Records. Also going in on the round are notable tech industry names like Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (via TomorrowVentures), Brian Lee of ShoeDazzle, LegalZoom, and The Honest Company, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad (his first investment), CrunchFund, and Metamorphic Ventures.

Not surprisingly, current investors Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures also participated, bringing the company’s total raise to date to $3 million. But while the celebs will bring new eyes to the service, it’s the app’s redesign that will be the big draw once the celebrity shine wears off.

The Stamped mobile app first arrived on iOS back in November 2011, as an alternative way to mark and share the things you like in the real world. Instead of giving something one star or five-star rating, for example, you would just “stamp” it, meaning you approve. But the company was soon – and perhaps unfairly – lumped into a growing crowd of “rate everything” apps which included the likes of Kevin Rose’s now-shuttered Oink, and eventually, even a social/local/mobile spoof app Jotly, from UberConference’s maker Firespotter Labs.

“Because of the way other services have been launched around us, we were kind of grouped together, but that was improperly done,” says Stamped co-founder and CEO Robby Stein of the trendy rate-it-all space. “We’re not a way to rate things,” he clarifies. “We’re a way to share your favorite things. We want you to have one beautiful place to stamp your favorite movies, books, restaurants, and anything that you love, and create one home for all that to live.”

With the relaunch of Stamped version 2.0, the service is aligning itself up with that original vision. The new app does feel less like a simplified rating system, and more like a social discovery service. Part of that comes from a new section in the app called “The Guide,” which lets you find new things to “eat/drink,” “watch,” “read,” etc., as recommended by your friends.

“The big thing we’ve always wanted to do is move from the wisdom of ‘the crowds’ to the wisdom of ‘your crowd,’” says Stein. To get closer to that goal, the startup has been staffing up with more ex-Googlers, including Paul Eastlund, a former tech lead from Google Maps, new designer Anthony Cafaro, and new engineer Geoff Liu, also formerly on Google Maps.

Not only has the redesigned app introduced the new “Guide” section, but the overall experience has been improved, and includes things like a richer, more media-rich news feed of shared items, and more notably, integrations from several third-party services to flesh out what you can actually do in the app. Now, you’re not just reading about what friends recommend, you can also stream music from iTunes (previews), Rdio, or Spotify, for example; it connects to OpenTable for reservations, pulls menu data from SinglePlatform, and offers product details from Amazon or, in the case of apps, the iTunes App Store.

Friends can like, comment or add items their friends share to personal to-do lists in the app. These activities are visible to others in the news feed section, in a somewhat Path-like style which uses friends’ profile icons to show engagement at a glance.

Another new component to the service is the expansion to the web, offering an online home for your collection. “I think it really becomes a reason why people keep stamping things,” Stein says of the new website, “because you’re building this beautiful thing…now when people ask you, ‘what are favorite places?,’ ‘what music are you into?,” they can just look at this interest profile that represents all the things you love.”

For celebrity watchers, there’s an obvious draw to the new Stamped (what does Bieber like?), and for others, it may be about seeing what books NYT recommends, perhaps. But where Stamped still needs work is helping regular users build up their own collections of things – something that, while easy enough to do, can still feel like a bit of work to do at scale, in order to really create a holistic picture of your interests. The ability to import data or make suggestions based on your activity on some of these third-party services would be a good addition in the future. Stein says that they’re “still exploring” other integrations right now.

While the size of the strategic round is not being revealed for competitive reasons, Stein notes that this is the first time Stamped has confirmed numbers related to its funding. Combined with an earlier seed round, the company has now raised $3 million in total funding to date. Beliebe it or not (yeah, I went there), this isn’t Bieber’s first time out as a V.C., nor Seacrest’s, nor Ellen’s. Celeb investing is the new “I just wanna direct.”

The new Stamped app is rolling out starting now. The updated version will be available in iTunes here.

Below, Bieber:

FundersClub is going to change how companies get funded. Today it launches a website designed to let anyone with as little as $1000 make equity investments in startups and earn money if they succeed.

For now you have to be an accredited investor with a net worth over $1 million or yearly earnings over $200,000 to use FundersClub. But an industry source familiar with the Y Combinator startup gave me an exclusive rundown of its whole roadmap, including that if the JOBS Act goes into effect or FundersClub pays to set up a mutual fund, literally anyone will be allowed to use it to invest and profit if a startup successfully exits.

Put simply, FundersClub could utterly disrupt venture capital, democratize investment in private companies, and ensure any founder has easy access to enough funding to pursue a great idea.

Here’s how FundersClub works and what my source tells me is its big plan:

FundersClub lets potential investors browse a gallery of startups. Today they number six, Tracks.by, Twice, Virool, Coinbase, Sponsorfied, and FundersClub itself, showing the company is dogfooding the product. Each has a profile with a demo video, description, roadmap, team bio, existing investor list, market info, competitive landscape, revenue projections, and as much info as they want to share.

Startups also list the amount of money they’re trying to raise through FundersClub. The software platform lets potential investors process payment and execute the necessary legal documents online, and if the startup’s funding goal is met, the funds are transferred.

If the startup gets bought or goes public, the investors get paid just like an angel would. Several sites like Fundable allow “crowdfunding” of startups, but investors don’t get equity, they’re giving donations or gifts. And this isn’t Kickstarter. You don’t get paid in products or rewards. You get real equity worth real money.

Investors are only charged the small accounting, state entity, and filing fees FundersClub has to pay and nothing more. Otherwise it’s free. It doesn’t even take a commission on the payback if a startup exits. Still there are ways for the startup to make money, but they’re untraditional. It’s also currently backed by Y Combinator, First Round Capital, and Start Fund.

Typically VCs have a “2-20″ arrangement where they collect a 2% per year management fee and 20% of the profits. That means a ten-year $1 billion fund would charge its investors $200 million dollars even if it broke even. Considering most VC firms are currently underperforming the S&P 500 that seems like a rip off that’s worthy of disruption.

To contrast, I’m told FundersClub plans to charge investors for liquidity. If someone invests early, the company increases in value, and someone else wants to buy their share, FundersClub will charge them to transfer their stake.

It also has an even bolder scheme. It wants to work with giant private companies looking to give their long-time employees liquidity. FundersClub would buy stock off of employees and let outside investors buy rights to those shares. This could help companies delay their IPO by staying under the 500-shareholder limit, remove the need for auctions on SecondMarket or SharesPost, but get cash to veteran employees. FundersClub could charge these big private startups for the program.

FundersClub startups don’t have to pull in all their funding there, and probably won’t want to. They’re welcome bring in traditional firms and angels who bring advice, expertise, and connections along with them. But the fact is there are still VCs and angels who’s money is their only value-add, and FundersClub will give startups an alternative to letting them join the cap table.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of value to having 100 or 1000 investors instead of 10. With a real stake in the company, an army of investors might serve as beta testers and evangelists, or bring in recruitment referrals. If FundersClub works right, startups will get these benefits but stay insulated from the noise of the crowd.

The biggest danger to FundersClub might be that those with vested interested in the status quo could lobby to have their whole model made illegal. For starters, they might try make sure the ban on general solicitation doesn’t get lifted when it’s examined by the SEC on August 22nd. If that restriction was removed, startups could advertise and freely encourage people to visit FundersClub and invest in them.

Those who might be disrupted by FundersClub could also try to get the SEC to place heavy rules on the JOBS Act that recently passed but is not yet in effect. If the JOBS Act goes through without a hitch, FundersClub could allow anyone with a spare grand invest, accredited or not. Otherwise, it may have to raise more money so it can establish itself as a mutual fund, which could allow it to drop the accreditation requirement.

If this all sounds like it could usher in a new era of investment, that indicates only that you are still sane. Yesterday it may have taken $20,000 or $250,000 to invest in a startup. Not it takes just $1,000 and a solid nest egg. What’s more, hedge funds, real estate investing, or lending could be the next financial systems upended by a startup like FundersClub.

Technology is making it easier than ever for people to access personal health records, get in shape, and better track and manage their health data. Of course, technology only provides the assist, you’re the one who actually has to make the change happen. While the intersection of fitness and technology gets a lot of buzz in the media, being healthy really starts with diet. (You are what you eat, bub.)

But that one’s not as sexy, and it’s a more challenging play. Ideally everyone wants to eat (and be) healthier, but unfortunately the system and the food industry itself still make it difficult to choose the healthy option. Nutritional facts can be hard to decipher, and the labels we’ve now come to associate with the healthy choice, like “organic” or “natural,” are just another way of saying “too expensive,” or they don’t exist at all. As a result, people take the route with less friction, and, when compounded and taken to the extreme, one starts to understand why more than 1/3 of adults in the U.S. are considered obese.

Jason Langheier founded Zipongo in June 2011 to address this fundamental problem — to make it easier for families to make healthier choices by reducing the costs that so often get in the way. Through a web-based health community and iPhone app, Zipongo essentially combines the best of Mint.com and Groupon to create a service that gives users their own personalized wellness plans (and the ability to manage them), while offering discounts at the grocery stores they shop at the most.

To help it gear up for a full-scale launch later this summer (Zipongo is currently in private beta), the startup recently closed a round of seed capital ($1M+) from a flock of superangels and healthcare, tech and food marketing veterans. Those names include Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake via Founder Collective, Wireless Generation co-founder and CEO Larry Berger, Peter Dolan, the Director of The Partnership for a Healthy America (and former CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb) and Guitar Hero and Blue Goji co-founder Kai Huang — to name a few.

Langheier and team have also recruited a handful of industry veterans to advise Zipongo, including the Director of Adronico’s, the former president of Trader Joe’s, the co-founder of Revolution Foods, and the research director at the Duke Center for Healthy Living, etc.

But what is it about Zipongo that has attracted these players — and why should you care?

During his studies at Duke, Harvard, and UCSF and launching a pediatric weight management clinic at Boston Medical Center, the founder learned a few important lessons: If you truly want to influence healthy behavior, you have to get people involved in their own health. That essentially means creating a business plan for how to get healthy, laying out the process step-by-step with attainable milestones, rewards, incentives, and so on. But it can’t be a copy-and-paste job, it has to be personalized, and the process has to be fun — or else people won’t invest their time.

And secondly, you have to be involved at the transactional level. Personalized health plans can only go so far, the second a parent is in the supermarket at the point of purchase, the phone is ringing and their kid is tugging at their sleeve, if the products are hard to identify or too expensive, it’s game over.

Langheier said that from his experience both as the founder of two healthtech startups and from a clinical perspective, while health-tracking devices and fitness apps are great for a variety of geeky reasons, they tend to really only have significant impact for those who are already in shape — or close to it. Tracking health data to elucidate a risk, or adding gamification, social integration and other forms of motivation — that’s the early part. Personal health plans only work once someone is fired up about changing their behavior, and it’s only then that you can get people investing in the plan and really optimize health and wellness solutions.

So, Zipongo has created a marketplace that will offer users deals, recipes, and healthy meal plans that are personalized based on their health needs, lifestyles, and preferences. Through and opt-in, HIPAA-secure portal, users can connect their electronic medical records and health data, enabling the startup to personalize their health plan and offer relevant deals.

Through this personalized, proprietary health planning technology and grocery marketplace, users can then access and redeem discount through loyalty cards at local stores, and in turn help health players, retailers and care providers get involved in the delivery of a prescription for healthy living. In this regard, the plan is to create a system that is validated by doctors so that eventually, when users go see their doctor for a cholesterol check or whatever it may be, they’ll walk away with a prescription for mom’s vegetable medley based on a plan enabled by Zipongo.

To differentiate and make its model more difficult to replicate and enable scale — unlike standard deal sites — Zipongo is building a digital partner network so that users will eventually be able to swipe a loyalty card that is integrated with retailers to get those organic garbanzo beans and carrots at their local grocery store of choice. Their activity plans and grocery lists will be delivered via email, social network, or through the startup’s mobile app, which users can access on the go, swiping their loyalty card at checkout to pay less for the items on their list.

And that’s really the key: It’s no easy feat to integrate with and work with the existing good supply infrastructure, but that’s why the team has recruited mentors who have experience working for and with these big national chains. But many of these grocery outlets see that their customer base is being cannibalized by companies like Whole Foods, and have started to develop or carry healthy options as a result. They want to better help their customers find those products and get healthy, which increases loyalty. Zipongo wants to enable that and offer them a willing audience.

Of course, while it’s essential for Zipongo to get commitment from retailers, the company doesn’t just want to be a niche healthy deals or promotions company. So it’s taken on this new seed round to develop the technology that will allow users to sync their shopping history, health records, and medical history automatically, so that it can make smart, contextualized recommendations. Building this Mint.com health management system and sweetening the deal with rewards, badges, and loyalty programs integrated with national grocery chains could give the company the opportunity to actually effect real change. Only time will tell, but it’s a worthwhile goal to be sure.

For more, Zipongo at home here.

Flurry just announced that it’s getting into the mobile app infrastructure business with a new service called Flurry AppCloud.

To make that happen, the company acquired a mobile startup called Trestle. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but Flurry’s vice president of marketing Peter Farago says “all Trestle employees happily stayed on and form the core team driving Flurry AppCloud forward.”

Why acquire this company in particular? Farago says it’s because, like Flurry itself, the Trestle team started out as app developers. He also pointed to the engineering talent and platform, and he says their views on the market are sympatico: “We believe that data driven applications built on cloud infrastructure are the future. … Companies that don’t think about the possibility of scaling aren’t approaching the explosive mobile app market the right way.”

For the past two months, Flurry has been working to transform Trestle into AppCloud, which is supposed to take much of the backend services for mobile apps, including user account management, scalable cloud storage, and push notifications. AppCloud is also integrated with Flurry’s Analytics, which means, for example, that companies can now track whether their push notifications are driving desired behaviors like in-app purchases.

Farago says the Trestle platform has been migrated to Flurry’s infrastructure, so that AppCloud can “support any sized app audience to enormous scale.”

AppCloud is currently in beta testing for iOS and Android apps. Flurry plans to make it generally available later this summer. In recent months, the company has been expanding in other ways, including ad analytics and mobile game publishing.

30 million slaves in the world need help, but startups are more sustainable than charities. So rather than raise donations, Causes.com is crowdfunding anti-slavery group Not For Sale’s new beverage startup REBBL. The company will employ freed slaves in the Amazon, and reinvest proceeds into projects that combat human trafficking.

Two weeks in, REBBL is half way to its goal of raising $150,000 in a month, and today the first bottles of Organic REBBL Hibiscus Mint Tea are coming off the production line. If it can raise another $75,000 in the next 13 days, REBBL will prove that crowdfunding can launch not-for-profit startups, and remake the concept of charity for the digital age.

Since it was founded in 2007, Facebook-based social good fundraising platform Causes has pulled in $45 million for a wide variety of health, education, environmental, and human rights initiatives. Causes itself is a for-profit business, though, and has raised $16.4 million from investors including Founders Fund.

Crowdfunding an actual business is a new experiment for Causes — something that brings it closer to the space Kickstarter operates in. Instead of just letters and photos from people they’ve helped, donors of $35 will receive a four-pack of REBBL. By combining the satisfaction of helping others with a tangible product that contributors can hold, Causes hopes people will be more inclined open their wallets.

REBBL will be manufactured deep in the Peruvian Amazon. This is a place where thousands of residents are seven hours from the nearest marketplace. Without an easy way to sell goods, some become desperate for jobs and fall prey to human traffickers who promise employment but sell them into slavery.

The money raised through Causes will got towards creating a supply chain, warehouses, and training staff. With enough demand, production will fire up and REBBL will be able to hire more locals, protecting them from the slavers.

To make sure REBBL tastes great and people know it, the company has brought on board Palo Hawkin, who invented the massively popular Zico Choccolate Coconut Water flavor, which I think is delicious even though I generally dislike coconut water. TechCrunch will be getting a “first sip” of the REBBL beverage tonight at its launch event, and will update with our review. The joy of saving the world won’t matter unless people also want to drink it.

If Not For Sale’s spin-off can produce a tea that’s tasty but also feels good to buy, soon you might be closing the loop a contribution to ending slavery with a cool sip of REBBL.

It looks like Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake may have to find a new name for her new product Pinwheel. A New York court has granted a preliminary injunction against Fake’s startup 2bkco, as requested by a similarly named startup Pinweel.

The injunction was posted on Scribd by lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani, and I’ve embedded it below. Fake sent me an email confirming its accuracy, though she declined to say what the company’s response will be, because “we can’t comment on pending legal matters.” The Pinweel team sent a similarly terse statement, saying, “We can confirm that the federal court has issued a preliminary injunction that requires that Caterina Fake’s company immediately cease their use of the Pinwheel name.”

Of the two companies, Pinwheel is almost certainly the better-known, thanks to Fake’s background and the fact that the company raised funding from True Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Redpoint, Betaworks, Obvious Corp., and others. Its app is still in private beta, but it sounds like a way to annotate real-world locations with notes, tips, and photos for friends and other users. Pinweel, meanwhile, is a self-funded photo-sharing app — when I covered Pinweel in February, the company told me that it considered Fake’s use of “Pinwheel” to be trademark infringement and said it would be taking legal action.

There’s a long discussion in the injunction covering a number of legal points — part of Pinwheel’s argument in its defense seems to be that users aren’t likely to confuse the two products. As background, the court notes that Pinweel was distributing promotional material with its name and testing the app with a limited audience back in 2011, while Pinwheel made its “public announcement” in February of this year. The court says “several instances of confusion between the parties’ products followed the launch of Pinwheel,” including users who “became confused, and in some cases angry, when their Pinwheel login information did not work with Plaintiffs’ Pinweel app.”

As for next steps, the court says the two companies need to file a “proposed case management plan” by August 6.

Pinweel v. Pinwheel (S.D.N.Y.) (Order Granting Request for Prelim. Injunction)

If you’ve ever had to think about whether Uncle Phil (the one with the ear hair) should be sitting next to Aunt Clara (the one with the walker) or with the other guys at Frank’s table (“Drunk” Frank), SocialTables has you covered. The site, recently relaunched with an entirely new UI and design, allows party planners to create mockups of their space, plop guests at different tables, and then organize the whole party via an iPad in real time. Never again will you have to cut out little circles and put little scraps of paper on the dining room table with each guest’s name: this thing can do it for you.

The platform is built in HTML5, which makes it easy to use in the browser, and the system pulls social data from each guest in the guest list, allowing party planners to seat like-minded people together or, barring that, create a little frisson by sticking cat lovers with stoat fans. It’s completely collaborative and non-linear so multiple users can work on the same floorplan.

Founded by Dan Berger at Fortify Ventures in DC, the app is live now and received $500,000 in seed funding. They’ve already served up 3,500 events to over 100,000 guests, which suggests they have a heck of a lot of traction.

“A few years ago I was going to a wedding and thought ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if I saw the seating chart so I could know where the cute girls were?’ said Berger. “I added this idea to my list of ideas (like every startup dude has) and didn’t do anything about it. I started working on it early last year.”

What struck me when I first saw it in DC was the smooth interface and sexy graphics. It looks like something you could put in front of a stressed out bride and groom and they could spend a few short minutes dragging folks around the dance floor so Paul “Pervo” Carson doesn’t sit next to the bride’s religious roommate from college.

“This wasn’t about making just another app,” said Lead Designer Brian Pensinger. “Events are beautiful and unique. The software used to plan them should be beautiful as well.”

One of the company’s advisers is the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk, the dude who looks at wine on the Internet.

The service is available now and is free to try. Enterprise versions are available based on customer requirements but start at $500 per event.

If I were getting married or hosting a huge gathering of the North American Buffalo Society again, I’d totally rock out with this service. It’s an interesting way to disrupt the events space and quite attractive to boot.