A shot of the new Exfm Android app.

Exfm, the streaming music startup that began as a wee Chrome extension, hasn't pivoted. But maybe it's changed course by a few degrees. "It's not a pivot, it's—I don't want to say an extension, but it's an extension of the vision," cofounder and COO Charles Smith told Betabeat. "We were betting on two things: the first was the explosion of mp3s posted to the web. And we thought the Chrome operating system was going to be huge. So we're one for two."

They don't think Chrome OS is going to be huge anymore?

"Nooooo," he said.

Over the past few months, Exfm has extended its offerings and added a stack of features to its flagship, ex.fm, a music discovery site that offers curated feeds of music and trending tracks as well as an embeddable player. Today the startup announced the complementary overhaul of its Android and iOS apps. "The main idea is to get them to parity with the web service," Mr. Smith said.

When Exfm first started, remember, it was just a browser extension that noted addresses of audio files as you browsed the web and collected them into a library. But the founders realized it was time to build a tricked-out central hub for that library. Now the experience is much fuller, more like a Hype Machine or Last.fm. (Exfm emphasizes human curation rather than counting listens; also, it does not license any music from labels, although it's not out of the question for the future.) The site focuses on discovery, recommendations and sharing of music over building a library of all the music on the web.

"We're going to what we call a push-play experience," Mr. Smith said. "Go to ex.fm, push play and listen to music. It has completely changed everything for us." In February, the site had 430,000 unique visitors, more than four times the 90,000 who checked in in October when the site launched.

The iPhone app, which was released in June, has about 70,000 downloads. The Android app, launched about six weeks ago, has had about 15,000 downloads. Until today, the apps could only stream tracks. But now mobile users will be able to do everything web users can, including share and "love" tracks as well as watch what's trending.

Exfm is still "about organizing all the music on the web" via its Chrome, Firefox and Safari plugins, Mr. Smith said. The database has collected more than 20 million tracks, no license needed. Exfm still has no revenue stream, but is interested in making a product for bands and artists to make money or promote themselves via streaming music.

The startup, which just raised $1.5 million (and $1), is hiring Python and Android developers and a designer to join its seven employees. Exfm gives its employees monthly gift cards to Gimme Coffee on Mott Street, Mr. Smith noted. "All we really care about in the office is getting the best possible coffee," he said.

Exfm, the little Chrome extension that could, just closed a round of funding for precisely $1,500,001 from existing investor Spark Capital, VentureBeat reports. The company filed its Form D with the SEC yesterday.

Exfm started in 2010 as a Chrome extension that catalogued addresses of audio files as you browsed; today, it's available for Safari, Firefox, Android, iPhone, and as an embeddable player, with ambitions for much more. "It was the right amount for the business now- it fuels our growth and lets us control our own destiny," COO Charles Smith said in an email. "As for the extra $1, I wish I had an explanation that included Jeremy Lin."

Exfm's last raise was in April, for $750,000, prompting this blog to call dub it "delightful product with dubious business model." Exfm is building a music discovery platform somewhere at the nexus of Hype Machine, Pandora Last.fm and Soundcloud, encouraging users to find and share music there. Exfm will bill itself as a platform for bloggers who want to be tastemakers, small and medium bands who want to reach new audiences, and artists and labels who want rich data about their fanbases, Mr. Smith told Betabeat at the time.

Exfm's clever trick was launching first as a browser extension, effectively converting its users into scouts for music files. The extension scans each page for audio, then adds the address of the file to its library. In this way Exfm was able to build up a cache of music fairly rapidly.

But with so many new offerings, we wondered which was meant to be the flagship. "Exfm is our main product," Mr. Smith clarified. "Head there and push play on all types of great music."

VentureBeat reports the service has 300,000 active users. Exfm has raised a total of $2.75 million and is up to seven employees with an office in Soho.

Fitocracy goes mobile.

FITOCRACY MOBILE. "After what seems like an eternity, we've finally released the very first version of our mobile web app. That's right, you can now log your workouts on the go if you have an iPhone or an Android phone!"

INCUBATE ME. Blueprint Health recently closed its fund and opened for applications.  "The program will be launching on Jan 9, 2012 with an application deadline of November 13."

FACE ME. Facebook is hiring in New York. Via Inside Startups, the company is seeking a "Strategic Partner Development, Media" with "high levels of creativity and strategic thinking, extensive experience in the media industry, eight-or-more years experience, including 5 years of related partner or partner facing experience, a proven track record of initiating and successfully driving new business opportunities, exceptional communication and presentation skills."

NEW MUSIC. Exfm is about to release its next major version, due out this afternoon. Look for a "push play music experiences available at ex.fm, new extensions for Firefox and Safari, plus a completely revamped one for Chrome" as well as a new embeddable site player for music blogs.

NEW GILT CITY. "Gilt City is excited to announce that we have acquired Joe Bastianich and Jeff Zalaznick’s upscale private dining booking engine, DinePrivate.com. Gilt City’s acquisition of DinePrivate.com will allow members access to over 90 of New York’s top private dining accommodations in restaurants such as Del Posto, Bluefin, Megu, Marc Forgione and Da Silvano."

USERS. "ONE MILLION. That’s how many subscribers have signed up for FanBridge’s Social Digest in just 24 hours. I wanted to reach out again with this update, as it means that Social Digest has established itself as a new, viable revenue channel for FanBridge, especially since they control 4 advertising and partner inventories in the digests, and are now opening the doors, at scale, for advertisers looking to get in."

BINDING. "DIRECTV and GetGlue have partnered together to create a first for the TV industry: people can now share what they are watching with their friends, right through their TV screen. Additionally, GetGlue’s enhanced iPhone app now automatically detects and pairs with DIRECTV customers’ set-top boxes, allowing one-tap check-ins.  The integration enables DIRECTV and GetGlue customers in the U.S. to use their remote control to check-in to their favorite TV show, view the feed of their friends’ check-ins and easily change channels to see the shows their friends are watching, automatically detect what they’re watching on DIRECTV with their iPhone, check-in on GetGlue via DIRECTV’s iPad app."

HOPSTOP GETS A PATENT. The New York-based startup is going to need a patent arsenal to compete with its big cousin Google. "The United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company a patent for its popular location-based service that provides door-to-door mass transit and walking directions. The patent touches on major trends in mobile applications and local navigation."

F&*$ YOU, PAY ME. New Jersey baby startup Takeoff Video is taking off. "We’re turning Takeoff into a paid product," the company writes on the eve of the close of its free beta. "This will allow us to continue our service, feed our families, and ensure Takeoff is the best it can be for years to come. We’ve got great plans in the near future including custom skinning (aka white labeling), native mobile apps, public sharing, editing program integration, and much more!"

NYU STARTUP WEEK. Started Monday. You can still catch "How to Get a Job at a Startup" with Union Square Ventures and others, and "Designers as Entrepreneurs" with Khoi Vinh.

"TuneSat provides rights holders with near-real time visibility into when and where their music is being performed on TV and the Internet. TuneSat utilizes a proprietary audio fingerprint technology and monitors hundreds of broadcasters and millions of websites across the globe.  An intuitive web interface gives its subscribers unprecedented knowledge about their audio performances, even in the noisiest of broadcast environments. Using TuneSat data, content owners can ensure that they are properly paid for licensed music while protecting themselves against its unauthorized use."

Technology like this surely prevents some artists from having their music stolen and used by others for profit. But I can't help but feel that this is innovating in the wrong direction. Music production and distribution has gotten so cheap that there is now such an abundance of music that much of it can be considered a commodity. Therefore it seems like the best way for musicians to support themselves today is by using the internet to build a loyal following of superfans who will go their shows and buy all their t-shirts, rather than trying to get paid every time a track is played. Start-ups like Hype Machine, ExFM, GrooveShark and FanBridge seem to understand this, but TuneSAT (based in New York) and efforts like it strike me as pandering to corporate interests in the music industry.

But a new wave of free music start-ups is gaining momentum as the peer-to-peer services die off: ExFM, Hype Machine and Grooveshark, streaming music start-ups that are niggling around the system by keeping files in the cloud, are just a few either based in or with significant presence in New York. Viva la résistance.

But the online music market is a notoriously hard nut to crack, and it's been the demise of many beloved start-ups. Legal challenges recently brought down New York-based Limewire, and the case could also be made that Myspace's downfall was in part due to the fact that it became so mired in trying to court musicians to the platform. While some artists and labels are getting hip to using the web for branding and promotion, many still don't get it--and the music industry's institutionalized giants still look at any distribution channels they don't totally control as untamed seas ruled by criminals.

So what's ExFM's plan?

Well, they're not 100 percent sure. But ExFM's COO Charles Smith got on the phone with Betabeat this morning to explain the possibilities that persuaded investors to give the company its latest round of $750,000.

Betabeat had speculated that the company might try referring users to places where they can buy the music ExFM has unearthed for them--ExFM will do some of that, Mr. Smith said, but he doesn't see that as a major revenue stream. Instead ExFM will bill itself as a platform for bloggers who want to be tastemakers, small and medium bands who want to reach new audiences, and artists and labels who want rich data about their fanbases.

"Music is kind of an unlimited resource," Mr. Smith said. There are almost two million songs to discover on Bandcamp, he said, and Soundcloud has more than two million users--that's a ton of music to digest just between those two sites. If a situation arose where ExFM had to remove a song from its database, they could easily point the user to 50 songs that were just as good. "Bands need to be able to target audiences for what of their goods are scarce," he said. "What's scarce are things like concert tickets, limited vinyl and licensing opportunities. Attracting the right audience to your scarcity, if you will, is something where we see a lot of opportunity in the future."

So, how does ExFM plan to do that? The next step is to develop an iPhone app, Mr. Smith said, which will resemble some of the existing socially-connected music services like Blip.fm in that users can stream a feed of their favorited ("noted," in ExFM parlance) tracks, follow the streams of others, and discover new feeds to follow. It's a more efficient way of finding music than finding music blogs you like and remembering to check them, or relying up that friend who follows this stuff obsessively. ExFM plans to pitch the service to music bloggers and other tastemakers--sort of like Apple's iTunes-shilling music social network Ping.

The company is also working on an Android app and a player that bloggers can embed for their readers, another way to introduce music bloggers to the ExFM network. Eventually, Mr. Smith, who previously worked in business development at Etsy,  hopes the network will be robust enough that ExFM can collect meaningful data on listening habits that can help bands know their audience better.

"If you have a community that is engaged in your art, being able to direct messages at them when you produce new art is a very effective way of marketing yourself. But knowing who that audience is is difficult, especially when you’re one step removed from the transaction when Ticketmaster is selling your tickets or venues are selling your tickets," he said. "If we’re able to provide artists with data about who is actually listening, if we can give them advertising opportunities or packaging opportunities around addressing that audience, that’s data they can use to build their audiences. Any time you have data not just about what’s getting popular, but about who your true fans are, who your core fanbase is, that’s something that gets very interesting for any artist."

ExFM, the Chrome extension that automatically remembers the address of every audio file you come across while browsing the web and saves it in a cloud library, has raised $750,000 from investors including Spark Capital, Betaworks, Founder Collective, and Dave Morgan, TechCrunch reported today.

We love ExFM! The combination of serendipitous music discovery with the convenience of keeping your music in the cloud is compelling, and the fact that ExFM merely remembers the location of music files across the web instead of hosting or facilitating their download is a neat trick that will help it avoid some of the legal challenges that have faced other music start-ups such as Grooveshark, Limewire and all their precedents.

But the online music industry is a notoriously tough market. The company has already raised $500,000 to build... a Chrome extension. The majority of internet users do not install browser plug-ins, and even if they did, how do you sell a Chrome extension? Reportedly, ExFM will be using the new cash to add employees and launch mobile apps for iOS and Android, leaving two obvious roads to profitability: Selling apps and funneling listeners to buy music. We could maybe see some users paying a few bucks for an app, but why would they buy songs when ExFM makes streaming music so convenient? We only say this, ExFM, because we don't want you to go away!

(We've emailed ExFM for their thoughts on how they plan to stick around.)

AdKeeper's 'Keep' button makes sense for coupons and meme-y ads.

This week in New York start-ups:

ADSTRUC WANTS YOU. The company that made it onto Betabeat's list of 10 Disruptive New York Start-Ups for giving outdoor billboard advertising the Adsense treatment is looking for a front-end dev.

TUMBLR DOWN. That is all.

FOURSQUARE STOPPING UP THE CRACKS. Foursquare went all https:// today, a process that started more than seven months ago. The more secure protocol will safeguard users against simple hacks like Firesheep, a Firefox plugin released in the fall that made it easy even for non-hackers to steal passwords submitted over an unencrypted connection. To be fair to Tumblr, Betabeat did notice that Foursquare's servers were down earlier today as well.

ROCK THE SKIRBALL. Also tonight! At New York Tech Meetup! Brand new managing director Jessica Lawrence will speak and more press than usual will be there. Companies presenting include Ex.Fm (awesome!), Readability (awesome!), IMUP4 (meh), MessageParty (meh UPDATE: MessageParty will be presenting a total pivot), and some ones we've never heard of: Runens, RezScore, Ask Local, BrainScape, MeeGenius, Corkboard.me.

FACTS. Startup Bus company The Lemonade Stand is also presenting at tonight's New York Tech Meetup for the NY Hacker Hack of the Month portion of the event. Jonathon Gottfried will demo. He is 20 years old.

UPSTARTS. The first official meeting of the Silicon Alley Job Fair, formed after the New York Startup Job Fair semi-publicly snubbed some 60 companies will come to order tonight, and 95 people have registered to attend. The meeting is at 160 Varick Street, 12th Floor at 5:30 p.m. Deadline to register is 4 p.m.

THE KEEPER. AdKeeper CEO Scott Kurnit says he's secured about 20 percent of the all the available internet advertising inventory, including ads from Pepsi, which committed 100 percent of its ads starting in May, MediaPost reports. "In the first five weeks since public release on February 14th, AdKeeper’s technology has run on more than thirty thousand unique websites, an unprecedented response to a new advertising technology," a release said. Some, like Betabeat's Ben Popper, are extremely skeptical of the idea of building a business on a "read it later" button for advertisements, but this reporter thinks it's like so crazy it just might work! Especially when you consider that PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET ARE CRAZY. It'll mean advertisers will have to make more entertaining ads, but why can't all the internet's mememakers on /b/, Reddit and so on go work in the advertising industry? Reddit has a "Reddit This" button on their ads.

Thanks for tuning in, guys! This has been your Wednesday afternoon Betabeat New York Tech News Start-Up Rundown, brought to you by iced dirty chai.

Music in the cloud wants to be free!

Four guys in New York have released the second version of ExtensionFM, or exfm, a browser add-on that lets you tag music all over the web for streaming, tweeting, favoriting and playlisting, TechCrunch reported yesterday.

Exfm detects music files on websites and saves them for you, building up a library of songs you can stream from the web. "The web is now your music library" is the description of the extension, which is only available for Chrome but coming to other browsers soon.

Also neat: If someone tweets an exfm link, you can play the song without leaving Twitter.

Exfm is a good way to discover and share music (and listen to it for free). It'll start to look even more attractive once Google releases its browser-based operating system for netbooks, Chrome OS, set to release later this year. Why have music take up space on your machine when you can keep it in the cloud?

Exfm has raised $500,000 from various investors, including the New York-based incubator Betaworks.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries