Thumbplay Music launches offline play for iPhone
Thumbplay is now offering caching on all major smartphone platforms ? iPhone, Android and BlackBerry ? enabling users to access selected playlists and albums, even without a connection. 

Thumbplay Music is the most widely-available cloud-based streaming music service in the U.S. and works on all major smartphone platforms ? iPhone, Android and BlackBerry ? as well as PCs/Macs. 

Thumbplay Music has more than ten million songs under license.

Fan Appz integrates with Facebook Places to enable LBS
Fan Appz announced that it has integrated its platform with Facebook Places.

Fan Appz Offers for Facebook Places gives businesses a powerful way to create relevant offers based on a customer's offline activities. 

One of the first social marketing platforms to integrate with Facebook Places, Fan Appz Offers allows consumer brands, retailers and local businesses to reach, engage and reward any customer that checks-in via Facebook Places. 

Using Fan Appz Offers for Facebook Places, brands can create and publish offers linked to the "point of check-in," including discounts and rewards, to provide a significant incentive for consumers to interact with the brand.

Fan Appz Offers can also be customized and configured based on the unique requirements of a brand's digital marketing program, such as requiring a customer to check-in a minimum number of times during a chosen period in order to earn a reward. 

For example, a local restaurant can use Fan Appz to offer a free menu item to those customers who check-in at their establishment four times during the course of a month. 

Fan Appz will automatically verify that the customer has met this criteria and unlock the offer for the client to print out or display during their next visit.

Motribe raises funding to advance social media
Motribe, a platform enabling users, brands, agencies and publishers across the world to build and manage their own mobile social communities, has successfully raised an initial round of venture capital financing from 4DI Capital.

People using the Internet on their mobile phones will be able to build and own a fully-featured social network optimized for the mobile Internet.

They will be able to activate plug-ins for their network including blogs, photo sharing, real-time chatrooms, user rankings and customizable HTML snippets amongst various other plugins.

Various themes will be available to premium account holders for their networks as well as the ability to earn revenue from advertising within a community.

CityGrid Media taps Location Labs to bring mobile developers access to location content, advertising
Location Labs Inc., a provider of mobile location-based services, and CityGrid Media, an operating business of IAC, have partnered to help mobile application developers access and monetize local business information.

As part of the distribution agreement, CityGrid Media will provide Location Labs access to information on over 15 million local businesses through its local content and advertising network, CityGrid.

Location Labs will use this data alongside its Location platform and marry it with the end user?s mobile location.

The result is a new form of mobile intelligence built around end user movements and geo-behavioral patterns that can generate place-based predictive models for serving the right content and contextual advertizing to the end user.

Using geo-location pattern information and collaborative filtering methodologies, Location Labs can generate place-based predictive models with analytics to help developers and publishers better target key customers or prospects.

This in turn will allow them to monetize their applications faster and serve ad content with a greater degree of relevance, according to the partners.

Mashery helps deliver geolocation, local apps for Quova, CityGrid, Homefinder.com, WeatherBug, Allmenus
Mashery, a provider of API (Application Programming Interface) management and strategic services, is powering geographically relevant applications for various clients.

From providers of location-based information such as Quova to location-specific databases such as Homefinder.com and CityGrid to local-subject-specific services such as WeatherBug and Allmenus, APIs provide a platform approach to fostering an ecosystem of developers and multitude of applications leveraging highly relevant data.

Mashery is helping provide the API infrastructure that allows for more localized content for popular tools, including:

? HomeFinder.com is a popular real estate site with 3.5 million property listings that connects home buyers, sellers and real estate professionals. HomeFinder.com uses Mashery?s API services to enable its 130+ online newspaper partners, including the Chicago Tribune, Arizona Republic and Miami Herald, to weave local property listings, community data and school statistics into their Web sites and print real estate sections.  

? CityGrid is the largest content and ad network for local, aggregating more than 700K paying advertisers, enhanced listings and content for 18M businesses, and reaching more than 140M unique users across 250 web and mobile sites. CityGrid® utilizes Mashery?s API management services to give developers access to their content rich set of APIs which enable them to access CityGrid?s content and its monetization platform.

? WeatherBug, a brand of AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc., manages and operates the largest global weather network and provides products and services for consumer and professional use. WeatherBug is launching a set of new APIs with Mashery that include tile-based raster images for radar, satellite, temperatures, humidity, pressure and winds that can be easily added to Google and Bing maps.

? Allmenus, the leading national resource for restaurant menus and online ordering, along with sister site Campusfood, is part of the Dotmenu network.  Mashery?s API service will be used to syndicate Allmenus? trove of content, covering 8,000 US cities, to local content partners.  APIs made available will include restaurant menu links, content, and online food ordering.

? Quova geo-data powers businesses, large and small, around the globe. This data enables them to instantly identify where a visitor to their site is geographically located; to geotarget advertising and content; detect card-not-present fraud; manage distribution of digital content; and comply with local laws. Quova invites developers to play with its data for free, in order to see what can be created using the most detailed demographic and accurate network characteristic data about an IP address available.