ReadWriteStart

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

When Heroes actor Greg Grunberg tells you to download an iPhone application, you can't help but listen. Best known as television's mind controlling savant Matt Parkman, Grunberg demoed location-based coupon startup Yowza at today's Under the Radar Mobility Conference. Grunberg's iPhone app offers users deals from nearby stores, restaurants and gyms. Now that Foursquare has begun advertising location-based deals it'll be interesting to see if there will be overlap between the two companies. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Grunberg to find out what's keeping him out of the actor's studio.

The problem with most analytics platforms is that we can't see the forest for the trees. Instead of looking for daily spikes in a traffic rating, it's more important for us to know what trends are spiking over time. From there we can make decisions to improve our businesses. In an effort to make a more useful analytics dashboard, the makers of database tool Dabble DB created Trendly.

It's official, money transfer and mobile payment are among the most popular and lucrative mobile applications. In a report released earlier this week, Gartner identified the top 10 consumer mobile applications based on revenue, loyalty, consumer value and market penetration. At today's Under The Radar Mobility Conference four mobile payment players battled for the title of best in show.

At first glance, the phrase "dream achievement service" conjures images of people in head scarves listening to self-help tapes. Nevertheless, in the case of semantic search service Dorthy, "dream achievement" is about getting good results free from the irrelevant fodder of the regular search experience. In August 2009, Dorthy celebrated its Alpha release and as of this evening it's opening access to its data.

Ten days after Google's Sidewiki was accused of lifting features from annotation startup Reframe It, the little company is striking back. In a video interview with Reframe It CEO Bobby Fishkin, ReadWriteWeb learned why this 15-person team thinks they've got a fighting shot at besting the search Goliath.

A few months ago ReadWriteWeb asked the question, "What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?" Our own Sarah Perez covered the rumors surrounding a subscription model, premium services and of course, the much anticipated iPhone application. While Hulu continues to keep mum on its new monetization plans, today's reports reveal that the company is focusing on its music-related content.

In late August Br.st was nothing more than a URL shortener service with link stats and malware filters. While the company allowed users to cross post to social networks like Twitter, Myspace and Digg, it was simply too late to the space to be considered a contender. As of today the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly. Br.st is spreading it's new wings with a slew of features and instead of resembling Bitly, it's looking a lot closer to the current social media reader of choice Brizzly.

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.

It's rare to look at a bookmarking tool and feel convinced that it's going to win a design award. Pearltrees is such a product. The French site offers us a new way to explore and contextualize the web. In what looks like a mind map structure, users collect "pearls" (links to articles, videos and web pages) and drag and drop them to form a body of knowledge that folds and expands upon itself. In an interview with Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe, ReadWriteWeb found that company already has a loyal user base including our friends at ReadWriteFrance.