For those that are unaware, Songza is a streaming internet jukebox and music search and recommendation engine (for the record, they are in full compliance with music download laws and they do pay royalties where necessary).

They’ve launched a facebook app that tracks what you’re listening to, shows the songs on your profile and shares them with your friends through your minifeed. It also includes direct links to the specific songs on Songza so that your friends can go listen to the songs and add them to their playlist as well; a sort of social music recommendation system if you will.

In addition to the Facebook app, the site now also generates rss feeds for your personal playlist, the site’s most popular songs, and the featured music list where up-and-coming acts pay a small fee to get their songs exposed to Songza’s users. The obvious advantage here being that you can know push what you’re listening to to places like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Finally, they’ve opened their API, giving developers access to site data for the featured songs list, user playlists, and the last ten songs a user has added. It will be especially cool to see the types of mashups that come from this. Maybe, down the road, they’ll allow users to indicate their location and enable the type of mashup that would allow tracking of music trends across the country.

Songza looks like its becoming another great addition to the already startup-strong Ravenswood corridor.

(Songza Company Profile)

Billed as an online marketplace that “brings the power of choice to individuals and businesses and creates a community for untapped creative talent,” the site is taking the interesting approach of trying to fill gaps that are left in the marketplace by niche sites like Threadless, iStockPhoto, and Pixish by dealing mainly in the market of people and companies who are looking to have specific creative services performed; aiming to simplify the process of connecting them with talented freelancers.

If at this point you’re beginning to wonder what separates this site from things like oDesk and 99Designs, the best features seem to be the quality of the protection in place for all parties involved and the guarantee of results. The site offers stringent legal protection the buyers and for the participating creatives and offers a guarantee that all requests will receive at least 25 entries.

Founded by Ross Kimbarovsky a former intellectual propery attorney and Mike Sampson a former movie producer, the site enters an already crowded and competitive space. Though if risks like crowd sourcing the design of their website are any indication of what they have in store, we look forward to seeing what else they have planned to differentiate themselves from the crowd.

They’ve used the information they’ve gleaned through building their business to provide parents with a pretty comprehensive guide to the process from a parent’s perspective; everything from planning for college, to paying for college, to finding the right schools and choosing between them.

We think this is a pretty important feature to highlight here as its a great example of what companies with web-based services can do to provide more value to their users and bring more people into the site. The line between content site and webapp is blurring and the companies that are combining both are finding out that it works pretty well.

(uSphere Company Profile)

The plugin shows you what the product that you’re after costs at other merchants across the web as you shop.

For example, surf to BestBuy.com and look at a flat screen TV and PriceAdvance will show you what that same TV costs at Buy.com, Amazon and others. If you see a lower price, just click on it and you’ll be taken directly to the product page on that store’s site.

Right now PriceAdvance supports 19 online merchants (with more in the works) and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Since it launched in beta this December the plugin has saved its users over $100,000. I’d imagine the major impediment to a rapid increase in stores supported by the plugin is the quality of some merchant sites and the availability of their data. Check out the demo below:

The site was founded by Andrew Huff and Naz Hamid and bills itself as “an antidote to all those sites infatuated with the coasts.”

Merge is the news feed, Slowdown chronicles the city’s events, daily columns show up in Airbags, a daily Flickr photo gets posted to Rearview, and people ponder the mysteries of the universe while talking with their neighbors in Fuel. Along with the main sections, they have the seperate blogs A/C, Book Club, Drive Thru, Tailgate, and Transmission devoted to covering the city’s Arts, Literary, Culinary, Sports, and Music scenes respectively.

Since we think its one of the cleanest designs on the web, we thought we’d take a trip on the Wayback Machine and show you what it looked like on May 7th, 2003: Here.

The Gapers Block 5th Anniversary Party will be at the Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia) on May 30th at 9pm. Bossa Saravah, the Revelettes go-go troupe, DJ Arpad and DJ James Vane will all be there. For more info head over to GB.

The company which produces hpc systems management and data center visualization software raised the round from new investor River Cities Capital Funds as well as several investors that participated in the company’s first funding round, including ARCH Venture Partners, New World Ventures, Appian Ventures and OCA Ventures.

They plan to use the money to further build out their development team in order to meet the goals of their product roadmap (and full coffers are always nice in a slacking economy).

The amount of the funding remains undisclosed.

The event promises to be a one of a kind event for Chicago’s startup community and has what appears to be a great line up of panelists with Dick Costolo (FeedBurner), Jason Fried (37Signals), Mike Domek (TicketsNow), Matt McCall (DFJ Portage Ventures), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), and many more scheduled to present.

The main themes of the Conference will be: building a business anywhere (not just Silicon Valley), leveraging new technologies and social media to help your business, getting your business funded, discovering your inner CEO, and growing a community around a traditional business.

Tickets are still available and you can register here: http://techconference1.eventbrite.com/

As an added bonus the 8th Tech Cocktail Mixer will take place afterwards at the usual spot, John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville.

(Conference Link)

Thomas Ryan will take the post being vacated by Jake Nickell, one of the site’s founding duo, who now becomes skinnyCorp’s Chief Strategy Officer. Ryan was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer Venture Partners with previous stints at EMI in the global digital music department, Virgin Mobile USA, eMusic, and Cductive where he was a co-founder before he sold the company to eMusic.

This appears to be a logical next-step for the company that saw the recent departure of co-founder Jacob DeHart, opened its first store (announced plans for more as well), is opening an office in Boulder, and is in the process of growing its new kids section.

(skinnyCorp Company Profile)
(skinnyCorp Announcement)