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There are a lot of tools out there for indie artists, especially musicians, to break into the biz without waiting for a traditional label to find and adopt them. Worldwide sales of unaffiliated artists are rising steadily as fans become more savvy about finding their favorites and are less likely to visit the big-box music store to find their tunes.

RouteNote is one of those distribution services catering to independent artists and bands. Unlike it’s competition, like Audiolife and CD Baby, though, RouteNote is free to use with no up-front costs. Instead, RouteNote only takes a cut of the sales (about 10%, which is extremely reasonable). By contrast, about ten years ago a friend of mine ran an independent artist portal and sold CDs and downloads for his clients. He paid 10% on every sale to the artist. Quite the switch.

RouteNote is easy to use and one artist, on his blog, wrote that it was dramatically faster in distributing his songs to iTunes than any other he’d used before. In fact, the artist (Chris Bestwick) reports that he had a problem with one of his song uploads and the RouteNote staff was extremely fast and helpful getting it fixed.

Since iTunes is important to the indie artist because it accounts for over 80% of online music sales today, it’s the one most services like RouteNote focus on. RouteNote also distributes to Amazon.com and several other sites as well, though, making it a larger distributor than some of its similar competition.

Of course, RouteNotes is not a full recording label or distributor and so it can’t be compared to sites like The Orchard, which also offer marketing, licensing, and other media like video. For the new and independent artist, however, RouteNotes is definitely a top pick on the list of who to use.

The site itself is clean and fairly straight forward to use. RouteNote is UK-based and still in beta, though probably not for much longer. Since RouteNote charges nothing until you’ve made a sale, there’s not much to lose by trying the service.

TalentSpring announced today that they received funding to the tune of 1.6 million.  Based in Seattle, Washington, Talentspring  is a leading provider of semantic-search technology for talent sourcing. This round of financing was provided by Second Avenue Partners and some private un-named investors.

TalentSpring will use the money to help further their launch of a revolutionary semantic-search technology that they have been developing for two and a half years.  The semantic-search technology they speak of, will enable recruiters and hiring managers with the ability to search through social networking sites, job boards, and corporate applicant tracking systems to find the best matched talent around the web for open positions.  The service will be piloted to 50 organizations and they intend on launching to the public in May 2009.

“We’re solving a huge problem for recruiters by automating the candidate sourcing process of manually
reading and ranking resumes,” says Bryan Starbuck, CEO and Founder of TalentSpring.
TalentSpring uses their semantic-search technology to find resumes around the web that are similarly match to the needs of the job that needs to  be filled. This process greatly increases the pool of potential high-quality candidates and is a major innovation over today’s Boolean search method which only finds candidates whose resumes contain the exact Boolean logic and keyword(s) the recruiter used. If a candidate’s resume doesn’t have the exact keywords used in the search, it is discarded before ever
being read by a recruiter. The result is that organizations are not able to take advantage of the large
available labor pool to find the best matched candidates for their positions.

A long awaited but well needed addition to Gmail is the ability to insert inline images into your message.  For those of you who use Gmail everyday, you sometimes forget that the Gmail Labs are always working on these new features to improve your experience.

To make this feature work you need to follow these steps:  Go to the little lab bottle on the top right of the screen.  Make sure you have rich formatting turned on.  After you go into the labs, find the Inserting Images feature and click Enable.  Then hit Save Changes on the bottom.  Once you do this, you will notice an image icon placed between the emoticon and link icons. Click it and you can upload and see the images you want to attach in the body of your actual message.

Like everything else gmail seems to give us, this feature is simple to use once you enable it.  Maybe one day they will actually come out of beta.  What’s it been….like only 5 years already!

Time management widget developers are trapped in a gutter of irony these days. Their products come packaged with so many newfangled upgrades and fancy, schmancy customized widgets that they’re more trouble than they worth.

In other words, many time management applications are time sucks. Well, it’s time to turn the switch from suck to blow, metaphorically speaking, that is.

The folks at freckle took notice of this time-warped trend and sought to bring something fresh to the marketplace. The result is time management for people who hate time management. Through an intuitive tagging design that limits keystrokes, freckle’s ADD-friendly format favors the multi-tasking consultant without a second to spare.

After organizing your hours, freckle lets you call up the tags you created and run reports without repetitive commands or superfluous data flow. The upshot is that you can quickly unmix and match billable vs. unbillable time, so you can hone in on the true value of your business.

While freckle has a refreshingly conversational voice and its creators seem down to earth, I would have appreciated a better interactive walk-through prior to hitting the purchase path, which many of its competitors offer. But with freckle’s plans beginning at $12 per month and the fact that it’s free for the first 30 days make up for the lack of a true time machine test drive.