Much like competitor LaunchSet, startup support system Prefinery offers beta management software, allowing time-pressed entrepreneurs to buy rather than build these critical systems without reinventing the wheel.

A company rep contacted us to tout the service's "feature set that lets entrepreneurs and technologists focus on building a great product, especially, as we all know, because these kinds of capabilities are always a last-minute thing, and messily handled."

While talking to musically inclined entrepreneurs Jimmy Winter of RockDex and Shannon Schlappi of Locker Partner, I was reminded of something startup-scene veteran Robert Scoble mentioned in passing at Gnomedex. "I want to see a CEO who is passionate about what that startup is doing," he said. Business acumen be damned, Scoble and I agreed that a true fan makes for a great leader.

Winter is undoubtedly a huge music fan; moreover, he's got the web and business experience to make his own music-related web endeavors successful. Music Arsenal is one of his online-music-promotion-and-planning tools; we spoke tonight about RockDex, a tool bands can use to measure their social media clout and growth, as well as his upcoming merger with Locker Partner, which will allow those bands to take marketing actions based on the analytics RockDex already provides.

Like Guru.com or 99designs, MyMusicCircle is a niche marketplace for an industry notorious for being saturated with broke amateurs.

Finding good talent and, on the flip side of the music industry coin, finding paying gigs can both be excruciatingly difficult tasks wherein both parties in a project rely on word-of-mouth referrals or Craigslist classifieds to find one another and collaborate; in general, we feel that the more online tools music industry pros have to get their various jobs done cheaper, faster, and simpler, the better off we'll all be. The site was pitched to us as "the new way the music industry does business." And with enough user adoption and content creation, MyMusicCircle could actually prove to be a great resource for finding talent and gigs online.

Micah Baldwin has heard his share of pitches, and at Gnomedex in Seattle, he spouted off to us about startup failure, including bad ideas, saturated verticals, the "rule of three," YASE (yet another search engine) syndrome, and changing jets mid-runway.

All in all, Micah is overwhelmingly positive. For someone who preaches the virtues of failure, he has a lot of faith in ideas others would consider doomed. Watch the video below, and hear his words of wisdom.

For anyone who deals with large files or multimedia content, file sharing can be the bane of one's existence sometimes. And trying to find workable solutions for these individuals involves a ton of capital expense and overhead in terms of server storage and bandwidth.

S4ve.as has a nice stopgap solution: They'll host any file, any size, for up to 24 hours. Sometimes, 24 hours is just enough time to get that 5GB video footage from one hard drive to another. For this reason, we like S4ve.as. They're so l337.

There doesn't seem to be a week that goes by without someone lamenting the sorry state of the venture capital market or our favorite exit ramp: the IPO market. Granted, the overall number of offerings in the past 7 to 8 years has been paltry. Notable individual exceptions are Google (2004), SynchronOSS Technologies (2006) and, more recently, Open Table and SolarWinds (both 2009). But let's face it: if yours is a venture-backed company, you have had higher odds of being struck by lightening than going public in this first decade of the 21st century.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There are two schools of thought about founders as CEOs. One school says that founders rarely make good CEOs: the skill sets are simply different. The founders may make more money in the end, but they need to hire professional CEOs. The poster children for this school are Sergey Brin and Larry Page as Google's founders, with Eric Schmidt as CEO. The other school says that no one has as much passion, drive, and deep market and technological understanding as the founder, and so they are best off remaining as CEO. The poster children for this school are Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. As a founder, which school of thought do you belong to? If you have a point of view, how do you make sure your point of view prevails? Above all, make sure you at least have a point of view.

The following is one in a series of guest posts we're running here on ReadWriteWeb. This one is by Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, the global organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs grow successful businesses. Prior to her role at Seedcamp, she was an associate at 3i and Softbank's eVentures India, and Senior Manager in Commercial Strategy at Vodafone.

Having listened to pitches from over 140 startups from all over Europe, working with 14 of our companies during the past two years, and reviewing applications for our annual event in the next few weeks, I am struck by just how different the requirements of early-stage investment are (for both investor and entrepreneur) compared to those of venture capital or private equity.

BitsyBox is a hosted content storage platform that allows developer access through an API and a simple user interface for their clients to edit content without touching the code. It's been described to us as "content storage and management without the CMS."

Co-founded by three West Los Angelenos, the platform's two components work through a free, downloadable PHP client and take a good bit of hassle (read: the penny-ante, back-and-forth of site edits) out of the business of web design and development.

In a fairytale case of ask-and-ye-shall-receive, we issued a call for sports-related apps, and startup FanFeedr answered that call.

FanFeedr allows users to select topics of interest and find (hopefully) relevant scores, photos, news, videos, and blog posts. It also plays nicely with Twitter and Facebook. Their search function was buggy (we kept getting redirected to "all content" rather than info for our search terms), which makes it difficult to adjust the firehose of available information, but the concept is nevertheless intriguing.