The London-based live event vertical search engine TickEx has launched its U.S. site yesterday. TickEx, labeled as “Google For Tickets” by a music magazine MusicWeek, was founded with the financial support of some private investors. It allows buyers and sellers to list, search for, bid on and pay for products on their official sites or through resellers such as eBay or StubHub. Moreover, users can use its search engine to browse and compare tickets they find through artist, city, venue, date, seat location and price searches. In fact, there is another factor that drives the company in launching this U.S. site. Most recently, viagogo, also a London-based online ticket company, has expanded into the U.S. market and signed the first-ever secondary ticket deal in the U.S. with NFL’s Cleveland Browns. However, the business model of viagogo seems to be vary with TickEx. TickEx is focused on vertical search but viagogo is an online ticket marketplace. The vertical search features that offered by TickEx enable users to search tickets on StubHub, a startup co-founded by the CEO of viagogo.

TickEx was founded in year 2006, launched its U.K. site, still in beta in June this year. Now its U.S. office is located in Costa Mesa, California.

A new social wagering Website BluBet has been launched today, with the backing of some Web 2.0 elites such as Jawed Karim (cofounder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (cofounder of international money transfer service, Xoom), Joe Greenstein (cofounder of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (former PayPal & LinkedIn executive and current Slide executive). This BluBet is truly a Web 2.0 site, very open from very early on, with some compelling features have been designed in order to entertain their users that want to voice out their opinion about everything, and to bet on certain topic for a virtual currency that so-called BluBucks. In the meantime, this site is opened for public, with every new registered user, 30,000 BluBucks to be rewarded. However, there are no monetary value of the BluBucks, as it was designed for their users to learning about how they use the BluBucks in betting on the topics that they are participate. There are rules in how an user using the BluBucks or how the BluBucks is rewarded such as refer a friend and earn 500 BluBucks per sign up, a bet’s pot is split evenly among the winners, and etc. Also, each registered user will have her own profile on the site.

All the topics found on BluBet are well classified, with categories such as Entertainment, Technology, Science, World News, Business, Sports, Gaming and Personal. Each topics are listed with important input, whom created the topic, and how many of the players involved in that particular topic can be found from each topic. The users also can get their friends’ opinions on bets with a widget that can be embedded on any website, social network, and blog. Based on my observation, this site is founded with the ideas of user-generated content and the medium was the bet that to be exchanged by the BluBucks. BluBet believed that by leveraging the common interest of the gambling games, they can well create a huge Web communities around the world.

BluBet is founded in June this year, with Headquarter in San Francisco, California.

An U.K. based music recommendation startup The Filter has raised $5 million in a round of funding, according to The Independent. This $5 million investment was led by Peter Gabriel, the former Genesis frontman alongside with venture capitalist Eden Ventures, and follows an initial $1.8 million round of investment by the two parties and The Filter’s two founding members Rhett Ryder and Martin Hopkins. Since its first inception in 2004, it has grew steadily and now has identified more than 5 million songs and 150,000 users around the globe. The Filter, first acted as a tool for the founder to manage his own online music collection, has expanded into a free download software that could be worked on Windows, Mac and Nokia mobile phone. An user can use this software to create her own favorite playlists, discover new music as well as refresh her favorite playlists on her iTunes, iPod or any other portable music player. It worked in a similar manner such as iLike and Last.FM, another British music recommendation site.

The Filter was developed by Exabre, a Bath-based firm. They will use this new funding to expand their services into areas such as digital video and film content.

iLike has announced that they’ve attracted more than 10 million users. Thanks to the availability of Facebook platform, now iLike has became a megabrand. I wonder they will be the hottest target that soon to be snapped up for the megamoney? For a startup that was founded in October last year, less than a year, it was a great achievement. That’s explains why there are several sites offered tutorials on how to build a Facebook application recently, such as this one.

Google has quietly launched its China version of blog search engine. Not surprise, I said that they’re going to launch this China blog search since the Hong Kong and Taiwan version has already been on the Web earlier this month. Currently this Google China blog search is still in beta status, while capable in searching the blog entries from Hi Baidu, QQ QZone, Bokee, not barely from Blogger or WordPress. Apparently, the China people are more favor in using the Chinese blog providers, when Google China launched this blog search engine, they need to proved that they’re well sorting out the search results especially from the blogging platform offered by their number one competitor in China, i.e. Baidu.

Meanwhile, the engineers in Google China are well prepared in developing this kind of application. There are even article (in Mandarin) stated that the Russian Google Answers was one of the Web projects of Google China. I’m wondering you notice the similar layout of this Russian’s Google Answers and the Tianya Wenda.

See also my another post entitled, “Google Launches Google Answers in China? An Update.”

Skype is back in business after its service outage last Thursday, for a period up to 36 hours, and this caused million of users can’t logged in to the service last week. Though this morning I read eBay’s explanation (English) and (Mandarin), I believed many users still wondering what was the main reason that caused this worst outage in Skype’s five year history. Unlike any other service disruption, Skype said the disruption was due to a large number of Skype users restarting their computers after installing the routine Windows update on the second Tuesday of every month. In Skype’s post, they didn’t mentioned precisely what in particular about the August’s update has led to the Skype crash and indeed this kind of vague explanation on this issue outlines the necessity of another round of explanation.

“Windows Updates” was the key feature of Microsoft’s OS strategy. It cost Microsoft a certain amount of money to set up their team in developing the security patches in a “periodic” time frame in spite of us, as the users sometimes didn’t realized whether these updates really meet our own computing demand. However, for Skype service outage, and their explanation for this was due to the Windows periodic updates nonetheless remained controversial. Will it served as an unexpected boon to some of the Skype peer-to-peer competitors? Well, time will tell.

A Web-based database platform has been released in the market today. Though it’s not free, required a monthly subscription of $9.95 per user, but this online database has been highly rated by a variety of organizations in the U.S. Trackvia, said their newly release database platform was an application that offers on-demand, online access anytime and anywhere. Their main target of this online database was the small-to-medium sized businesses, albeit that some big corporations were also their clients in the meantime. At this moment, there are more than 1,000 subscribers, and eighty percent of them are came from the Microsoft Excel background.

Trackvia is based in Denver. Founded in 2005, received seed funding from Flywheel Ventures in June this year.

As expected, Google China and Tianya has jointly launched a Web 2.0 portal, a sort of Google Answers in China. In my another post, I discussed that this site was maintained by Tianya and in matter of fact, the back-end technology was provided by Google China. Google China has well-planned in this “Wenda” project, they are competing for the same offering with Baidu in China again. They chosen Tianya because of the latter’s huge group of Web communities. Tianya, founded in 1999, has provided blog, forum, groups’ services to their users in China. Some reports even mentioned Google has stake in Tianya, may it be 10% or 60%, but I think this is a good move. In the world of venture capitalist, good reputation is priceless, invested in an established firm is always a best choice when you have money.