Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical?and gorgeous?redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are minimized to rollover menus on the upper right, an account-info strip along the lower left, and green arrows to skip to the next or previous songs. You are supposed to just select a type of playlist (top songs, hot, moods) and let it play. Thesixtyone adds Digg-like voting and gaming elements to surface the best indie music. (more…)

Here?s the latest from Venturebeat?s Entrepreneur Corner:

Ask the attorney: Should I be a C-Corp? (And other formation issues) ? Deciding what sort of entity your start-up will be can be tricky ? and that?s just the start of the legal mysteries. Where should you form your business? What issues do you face regarding previous employers? In the first of a two-part series, attorney Scott Walker looks at the hurdles entrepreneurs face when the decide to launch a business.

Why do entrepreneurs flock to loudmouths as mentors? ? Granted there is a lack of mentors for budding start-up owners, but entrepreneur Will Herman wonders why people who are so meticulous about their businesses? details tend to be much less so when it comes to who they take advice from.

China?s VC market may be hitting its stride ? Despite a setback due to the recession, China is once again heating up as a possible investment target for U.S. VCs. Attorney Mark Williams, who has worked on numerous transactions in the area, looks at the hot sectors. (more…)

As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.

Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged. (more…)

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed. (more…)

Voice app provider Truphone is releasing an updated app for Android which is compatible with Google?s Nexus One handset. That makes it the first VoIP client for that phone. In fact it turns out the Nexus One is going to be very important to Truphone’s overall strategy.

The update for Android device (version 3.0.2) also makes Truphone compatible with the T-Mobile Pulse, taking it to five Android devices now. Truphone worked closely with Google on the app.

This looks really, really bad. An avid Facebook user named Harman Bajwa says that his Facebook vanity Url – Facebook.com/Harman – was unceremoniously revoked yesterday for violating Facebook’s policies. His new Facebook URL is the much less memorable facebook.com/profile.php?id=538612932.

Facebook then apparently did a sales deal around the vanity URL with Harman International.

The notice from Facebook (also in image at bottom of post): (more…)

I’ve just changed my default browser from Safari to Chrome. The reason – the official Chrome Google Voice extension, which was updated on Friday. If you’re a Google Voice user (I’m possibly the most rabid one around, I even ported my phone number to Google) you’ll probably make the change, too.

The extension adds click to call functionality to web pages. So if there is a phone number on a web page, like a Yelp page or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will throw you a pop up window asking which phone you want to use (home, mobile, work, etc.). It then calls that phone, and puts you through to the number.

I’m always cutting and pasting phone numbers from websites into Google Voice to make calls. And I’ve asked for web based click to call from the Google Voice team for months. Now we have it, all you have to do is use Chrome.

The extension also adds a small box in the upper right of the browser. You can type in a name or phone number and call or sms it from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed voicemails (Google automatically transcribes voicemails, usually horribly, but it’s fun). (more…)

Anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a few days knows that it’s rife with bots ? accounts that are run by a computer, rather than a human. But while bots may be pretty easy to come by, it isn’t often that you get the chance to read through the code that makes one tick. Tonight, you’ve got your chance. The bot’s name? Jason Thorton. He’s been humming along for months now, sending out over 1250 tweets to some 174 followers. His tweets, while not particularly creative, manage to be both believable and timely. And he’s powered by a single word: Love.

Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own. From Merket’s blog:

Jason tweets A LOT about the word ?love? – that?s because Jason actually steals tweets from the public timeline that contain the word ?love? and posts them as his own.

Jason also @ replies to people who use the word ?love? in their tweets, and asks them random questions or says something arbitrary. (more…)

Google revealed a plan today for co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin to sell off some of their company stock, with the end result that the pair’s voting power will drop below 50 percent.

The news was revealed in a regulatory filing today disclosing a plan that Page and Brin made last November to sell off about 5 million shares each “as part of their respective long-term strategies for individual asset diversification and liquidity.” The sale, which will take place over five years, will decrease their voting power from 59 percent to 48 percent.

So Page and Brin are still going to carry a lot of weight, to say the least, but for the first time it will be possible for the other shareholders to band together and outvote them.

Since the crisis in Haiti began, Twitter has played a big part in helping raise awareness of the tragedy. It’s also helped charities and celebrities reach out to the community to encourage donations toward the Red Cross and the other organizations working hard to help the situation. Today, Twitter is launching a portal at Hope140.org for people looking to help Haiti, but who don’t necessarily know where to start.

The site features a collection of recommended tweeters and Lists, including charities and people who are actually reporting from the field. A stream of recent tweets about the crisis is scrolling by in real time. And a large part of the page is dedicated to helping non-profits connect with the Twitter community, as a sort of best practices guide. It also calls out tonight’s Hope For Haiti Now Telethon, which begins at 8 PM EST and is being hosted by George Clooney, Wyclef Jean, and Anderson Cooper. (more…)