In their words:

House Party makes it easy to have a party in your own home and get exclusive access to awesome products for you and your friends. We provide the fun, you provide food, your friends and feedback and promise to have an amazing time.

Our parties are sponsored by the brands you love. By hosting, you and your guests get to try their products and receive an incredible Party Pack chock full of goodies! You don’t pay anything or sell anything. It’s a no-pressure party. Just tell us what you and your guests think. 

House Party collects location, social, income, interest, family, and other data points to ensure the host is a good fit for the brand.

Brands on board at present include Playstation, HGTV, Huggies, Johnsonville, Dole, Courvoisier, and more.

To learn more, go to HouseParty.com.

For those of you that don’t know, Skillshare is a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. Users can start classes, hold them anywhere, and even get paid to do so. It’s based in NYC, funded by Founder Collective and SV Angel, and is growing like wildfire - although is only available in select cities at present.

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Why is it awesome?

Because it’s fun, affordable, and an exciting way to learn new, and somewhat random skills. For instance, here are a few of the classes:

• Become a Ruby on Rails Developer: An Intensive 5 Week Course
• Mind Mapping: Get Your Ideas Out of Your Head and Into Reality
• Stitch Study: Knitting for Beginners
• Bartending 101 

That’s just a sample though. Classes can be started on any topic.

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How Could Brands Get Involved?

ENCOURAGE YOUR EMPLOYEES TO TEACH!!! Your employees are some of the best and the brightest in their field. They’re trendsetters, innovators, and most importantly they know what’s going on in the real world because they work in it day in and day out. Therefore, they’d be incredible teachers and you should encourage, maybe even incentivize them, to teach classes on Skillshare so that they can educate the masses.

Why? It get your name out there, establishes your employees as thought leaders, and could even become a recruiting funnel. Plus, the tech crowd will probably show you some love in the press.

For publishers, marketplaces, or any interest-based company, you could also start a branded class where you bring in various speakers to teach. For instance, Turntable.fm could start “How to DJ - Hosted by Turntable.fm” and have different DJ’s come through each week to teach different aspects such as mixing mashups, club sets, techno, etc.

To learn more about Skillshare, visit their skillshare.com or reach out to us at the Digital Labs.

Local Response is the world’s first cross-platform “check-in” based ad network. Founded in 2005, it’s based in Chelsea NYC, and is co-founded by digital advertising pioneers Nihal Mehta (founder ipsh!, sold to Omnicom in 2005 & early investor in Admob), Kathy Leake (co-founder Media6Degrees), and Michael Muse. It has received $6.5 million in funding to date.

How It Works?

Local Response aggregates over 1 billion check-ins a month from over 200 million users. These check-ins include Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and more.

Brands and advertisers can deliver real-time messaging to users based on their check-ins for contextually relevant advertising. The service is turn key and has been used by Verizon, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Walgreens, and more.

Who should use it?

Any company looking to activate a mobile audience based upon geographic targeting. It is a solid alternative to promoted tweets and has seen CTRs up to 60%.

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Learn more at LocalResponse.com

My crush on Turntable.fm is no secret. DJ Wooooo’s House/Dance/Electro is where I reside just about every workday. Although it offers no advertising opportunities for brands to date, here’s something they should consider soon…and I’d like to pioneer.

Brands should launch custom branded rooms that offer specials periodically throughout the day for listeners.

For example, Roc Nation could launch their own branded room on Turntable that looks like Jay-Z’s 40/40 club. Within it could be resident DJ’s from the club spinning GOOD Music and Roc Nation artists all day long, which other exclusive mixes as well.

Throughout the day, various specials could pop up on the screen for listeners. Imagine a bottle of champagne appears, and when a user clicks on it, out comes the bubbly along with a link to a special on bottle service for that night only.

This would be a killer integration for hotels, casinos, record labels, independent artists, and just about any nightlife group - allowing them to promote, music, product, and more while increasing engagement and loyalty.

Billion Dollar Idea (#BDI)? I don’t know about that, but it could be something the Turntable.fm biz dev team may want to look into if they aren’t already.

In short, Immersive Labs has facial recognition technology that analyzes a person’s demographics and serves an ad that would be most relevant.

Already impressive, but they go beyond that by providing full analytics and ad optimization. Immersive Labs cross-analyzes the number of glances and average time of glance with their demographic information and optimizes itself automatically to increase engagement.

This data is available to clients, which makes them a perfect match for performance marketers who need to execute out-of-home and other screen displays.

Immersive technology can work on any screen. The only hardware needed is a facial censor, which can be bought third-party.

Immersive Labs is a Techstars NY company and was selected as one of the Top 25 hottest startups to watch in New York City by Business Insider.

Learn more about them at immersivelabs.com and follow them on Twitter @immersivelabs.