Need to download prepared legal documents or business outlines? There’s a digital store for that.

Similar to how Apple sells apps, music and videos, and Amazon sells music and books, Santa Monica’s DocStoc has opened a store for customers to search for and buy documents online.

Anyone can upload their files to DocStore and name a price. Sellers keep 100% of the revenue for purchases within the first 60 days from listing, and revenues are split evenly with DocStoc after that.

Once you’ve signed up, transactions are a one-click process — something that has worked well for Apple and Amazon to encourage impulse buys.

“We’re making the App Store for documents,” said DocStoc Chief Executive Jason Nazar.

The 2-year-old company hopes to introduce some of its 20 million monthly visitors to its premium content. Helped by a partnership with LegalZoom, the DocStore is targeting small businesses and professionals.

Widgets Created with Nokia for Ovi Store Brings Local Mobile News to International Markets

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) February 4, 2010 — Verve Wireless, the leading provider of mobile publishing and advertising technologies to local media companies, today announced its end of year milestones and highlighted its work with Nokia in providing local media companies worldwide with a series of mobile news applications for Nokia’s foremost smartphone, which are available for download from the Ovi Store.

Mobile Access to News Increases by 500% via Verve Network: Apps in Demand
During the month of December 2009:
• 100 Million mobile news pages were served, a 160% increase year over year.
• Over 8 million readers accessed news from mobile devices via Verve’s mobile publishing platform, a 500% increase from the same period a year prior.
• Over 3 Million mobile applications have been downloaded to date.

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On January 4, 2010, Zadspace began running the 200th unique advertising campaign with an offer for the Ab Circle Pro^TM home fitness machine.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Marketwire – January 14, 2010) – On January 4th, Zadspace, Inc. began distribution of its 200th unique ad campaign, a new promotion for Ab Circle Pro, a highly successful home-fitness machine of the same name.  The Ab Circle Pro is exclusively distributed in the US by the Direct Entertainment Media Group, Inc. (DEMG).  With this latest campaign, Ab Circle Pro redoubles its use of the Zadspace network for direct customer acquisition.

“We initially tested the Zadspace solution in Q3, 2009 because we saw a unique way to boost new customer acquisitions,” said Cindy Minionis, Vice-President of Marketing for DEMG. “The ROI for the channel has been positive, so we integrated the Zadspace solution into our overall marketing strategy by getting a second campaign up and running.”

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SANTA MONICA, CA – Dec 2, 2009: GumGum, an analytics and monetization platform for content online, announces the launch of a next-generation ad network. The ad network, called Bedrock, was borne out of GumGum’s own need to monetize non-standard ad- inventory.

Conventional wisdom today is that online advertising dollars cannot sustain the operations of publishers. Declining click-through-rates and mounting banner blindness suggest this. Bedrock believes that these problems are, in part, a failure of existing ad networks to tend to the rapidly evolving needs of advertisers and publishers. Bedrock turns the current system on its head in the following ways:

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Univision & CBS Digital sales veteran to drive adoption of innovative audience-based Hispanic marketing solutions for online advertisers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Oct 26, 2009 – Berkeley, California. – Pulpo Media (www.pulpomedia.com), the leading provider of online audience-based marketing solutions for the global Hispanic markets, today announced that Tiffany Terrazzano has joined the company as Vice President of Sales.  She will lead Pulpo Media’s efforts in the eastern region and Latin America to deliver Pulpo Media’s online Hispanic targeting platform and audience network-allowing online advertisers to more relevantly engage the diverse Hispanic Market worldwide.
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After a year of private beta testing, Zadspace will unveil its innovative medium at the DMA09 Conference in San Diego, California, on October 18, 2009.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Marketwire – October 12, 2009) – Zadspace, Inc, a direct marketing company, has emerged from private beta testing with a new form of direct marketing that utilizes the exterior of delivery packages for targeted messages.  Over the yearlong beta period, Zadspace’s “outside of the box” campaigns produced a 150% higher response rate than direct mail.

Zadspace sidesteps mailbox overload by affixing full color, 4″ x 6″ advertisements – known as “Zads” – to the exterior of cardboard shipping boxes, right next to the shipping label.  To ensure timeliness and relevancy, each peel-off Zad is triggered by recent, targeted transactional data – including demographic and geographic information – and printed on demand at the shipping facility.
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Story by Benjamin F. Kuo

Los Angeles-based Crosscut Ventures (www.crosscutventures.com) is one of the newest venture capital funds in the area, and has quietly been working on funding local companies over the last year. The fund–started by Brian Garrett and Rick Smith–has been focused on digital media investments, and so far has made investments in six companies. The fund has just celebrated its first year in business, so we thought we’d catch up with Brian to hear more about what the firm is investing in, the challenges of raising a venture fund in this market, plus his view on the Los Angeles venture market.

Let’s start with an overview of the fund. What do you invest in?

Brian Garrett: We started Crosscut Ventures about a year ago. We closed our fund in August of 2008. We’re describing ourselves as a micro-cap venture fund, focused on digital media opportunities in the emerging ecosystem of Southern California. For us, digital media means consumer Internet, online advertising, mobile, gaming, and most importantly–this is Rick’s and my background–next generation infrastructure to support the consumption of this media.

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Image licensing network GumGum has raised $2.6 million in and extended Series A funding round led by GRP Venture Partners with First Round Capital participating. This brings GumGum’s total funding to close to $4 million.

GumGum has been seeing fast growth since its launch last year. Measured as an advertising network (but for images), GumGum became a Quantcast Top 100 site, reaching 13.7 million people in the U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide in February. Currently, GumGum reaches 29.8 million people in the U.S. and 50 million people worldwide, according to Quantcast’s lastest stats. More than 2,000 Web publishers license images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how many people see the image or use them for free with embedded advertising.

GumGum current clients include B5Media, gossip site DailyFill, Glam Media, MTV, TMZ, New York Post and Gawker. Sites contract directly with photo agencies, and GumGum keeps track of who is using what images and how many times they are viewed. That is what those Quantcast numbers are counting, thus GumGum acts like an ad network for images. GumGum’s founder Ophir Tanz says the new round of funding will be used to develop additional solutions around image licensing as well as drive new revenue opportunities to publishing partners.

Verve Now Live With Over 450 Local Media Properties, Further Building Largest Local Mobile Network
Published: June 25, 2009 12:00 AM ET

Encinitas, CA – June 25, 2009 – Verve Wireless, the leading provider of mobile publishing technologies to local media companies, today announced partnerships with Media News Group, A.H. Belo Corporation, Hearst Corporation, and Cox Newspapers to mobilize local media properties such as The Denver Post, The Dallas Morning News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Palm Beach Post, and Examiner.com. Verve now mobilizes over 450 local media properties, covering the top 200 designated market areas in the U.S. and continues its international expansion by partnering with the Khaleej Times of the United Arab Emirates. In just three months, Verve increased by 85% the amount of local media companies that it has brought to the mobile web reaching more than three million consumers, serving over 47.5 million monthly page views, and delivering more than a million mobile video streams per month.
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A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide). Read More