SmartPointment wants to change the way appointments get made:

Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting with a busy person using Google Calendar? Isn’t it great that it can find a free block of time that works for both of you? SmartPointment is kind of like that, but for businesses — hair–dressers, mechanics, that sort of thing. Businesses can push their available appointment times to SmartPointment, which lets customers select and manage their own appointment information.

This sort of appointment booking functionality would fit together with Yelp in an almost magical way, so I’d like to hope someone else is at least thinking about that. In the meantime, businesses can integrate the SmartPointment widget into their websites without much trouble.

It’s a great idea, and they already have a clear monetization path by charging businesses to manage their appointments. It offers a pretty clear value. Unfortunately, the site itself looks and feels a bit dated, and doesn’t offer a very good mobile experience. That’s an easy enough thing to change, but doesn’t necessarily offer up a good first experience.

Follow them at @smartpointment, and watch their blog for product announcements.

The Great Movie Experiment is a fun way to rediscover movies you like:

It’s sort of like “Am I Hot Or Not” (warning: extremely dated reference!) for movies. You’re shown the posters for two movies that are duking it out for your praise, voting for one of the two being the better movie. (If you haven’t seen one, you can click “I Haven’t Seen It” to have it replaced with another movie.) That’s really all there is to the site, but it’s pretty addictive.

In addition to the main voting interface, you can also see the rankings of all of the movies that have been voted for. The top 20 is a pretty predictable list of popular movies — I guess this means the system works. More interesting is the Up & Coming list, which shows movies that are gaining popularity. Who would’ve thought that Empire Records would suddenly begin streaking towards the top 10?

I find this to be a pretty interesting thing to click through. Movies I haven’t seen in ages pop up and remind me of their existence. At this point, I’m not sure how this goes from being a fun app into a profitable business venture, but I can see an acquisition making sense in their future. This is a much better experience than the current NetFlix onboarding system, and would even be a fun addition to IMDB.

I wish them the best of luck in figuring out where they’re going to shine. In the meantime, check out their blog for fun movie-related entries.

Transloadit wants to raise the bar on file uploads:

File uploading is one of those things that’s completely integral to a lot of web experiences, but very difficult to do well, and not fun at all for developers to spend time on. It’s hard to debug, hard to test, and hard to give progress feedback to users. Transloadit has put the time into making a fantastic uploading service so developers can stop worrying about the mundane details of files and focus on the interesting details of user’s content.

Transloadit is another example of what I like to call service-as-a-service. Just like Zencoder, they’ve focused in on a narrow technical problem that is a pain to deal with, and just developed the hell out of it. Future ventures would do well to leverage these sorts of services: it’s important to focus on the core of what makes an app interesting.

Follow them at @transloadit and check out their blog, which details their attempts to commercialize the service.

Special thanks for Daniel Brusilovsky for this guest post while The Venture Pimp was on vacation.

DODOcase is the ultimate iPad case.

There are tons of iPad cases, so how do you know which one is good. Simple — you get the best one. Check out DODOcase, a case made out of bamboo, and book bindings, the DODOcase is definitely worth your money.

DODOcase has been praised by many, including Twitter CEO Evan Williams, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and many other high profile names.

The price maybe steep at $60, but at the end of day, your iPad will be safe, protected, and looking great.

ChumpDump blurs the line between game and handy-dandy utility:

The idea here is that we all follow too many people on Twitter, and most of them are just wasting our time. ChumpDump presents one of the people you’re following and asks you to save or dump them. If you dump them, you’ll unfollow them immediately. It’s a fun way to cull your follow list. Interestingly, you can see a list of recently dumped followers and “adopt” them if they sound fun. It’s like a friend swamp.

Everything in the app earns you karma points, but dumping people gives more than anything else does. There’s a leaderboard showing the most active users, and you already have a lot of work to do if you want to catch up.

The app has a pretty adorable attitude problem, calling you a chump at every turn. If you decide not to remove someone it picks, you’ll get a bit of verbal harassment. It’s fun! Software should have a personality.

The app is available for Android and iPhone (not high-res for iPhone 4 yet, sadly). Download it and follow them at @chumpdump.

mergefm wants you to get in on the music-creation process:

Here’s a cool idea: take the sort of behind-the-scenes content you’d usually get on special edition concert DVDs, and get it live on the web. Hrm.

That’s sort of what mergefm is like. You can browse participating artists and hear songs as they work on them, starting with rough demos and moving through revisions until you get to the final copy — all in real time, as they post them.

If you’re a fan of an artist who’s on the site, you’ll love this. It’s very fun to compare different versions and hear a song evolve over time. Some artists even have multi-track versions of their songs, which is very cool.

Bonus: there’s a clear profit model here. To access all of the content on the site, you’ll need a subscription, which is pretty reasonably priced. mergefm shares the money 50/50 with artists, which isn’t too bad of a deal. If you’re just poking around casually, each artist has one free item.

Of course, it’s all small indie artists here now, but I think this could have some legs. If mergefm can land a big name or two, this could take off. Follow them at @mergefm or check out their blog.

Today’s challenge: find out how Bolder wants you to make your community a better place.

The idea is sort of like GroupOn mixed with, uh…well, I’m not quite sure. Every few days, a new challenge will appear, sponsored by a local business. If you do the challenge, you can claim a reward. Today’s challenge is to buy local, and if you do that, you can get a free chocolate from Charles Chocolates, an artisan chocolate shop in San Francisco. (Obviously, the “local” part of this equation may have to wait until they expand to more cities.)

So, what’s interesting about it? Well, the idea is that the challenges help build up your community. Local businesses challenge local people to do something interesting, and then people talk about it. You might get to know your neighbours online, or learn about new businesses you haven’t heard of before. It’s a pretty neat idea.

At this point, the only thing holding these guys back is getting enough local communities engaged to draw an audience. If you’re interested, let them know. Follow them at @actbolder, and check out their blog.

CuteFund is a mutual fund and a game:

Well, right now, it’s actually just a game — until they get licensed, CuteFund can’t take your money. But here’s the pitch anyway: you invest your money in CuteFund, where users like you vote on stocks, saying whether you think they’ll beat the standard S&P 500. You can say how long you think your forecast is good for, and change your opinion at any time.

Why is this interesting, you ask? Well, it’s a whole wisdom–of–the–crowds sort of thing. I certainly don’t know anything about the stock market, but I do think there’s some merit to idea of crowdsourcing stock forecasts. If the stock market is jumpy and somewhat irrational, well, so are people. If CuteFund can get a large enough audience, this crazy idea just might work.

Check out the creator at @korobeinik, but note that he’s a bit quiet. Poke him around a bit and let him know you think CuteFund is interesting.

bln.kr wants you to share the music you make (and hear music made by other folks):

The primary audience of the site is artists who want to spread their music around — something like mp3.com or MySpace were, back in their respective heydays. All you have to do is upload your tracks, and away they go. bln.kr tracks how many plays and downloads each track gets, and has popular tracks organized by genr

If you’re just a normal user like myself, it’s a good place to look for some new music. There’s quite a lot to choose from in a wide variety of genres, although based on the “most played” page, it looks like they’re gaining a particular amount of traction with hip hop artists more than any one else.

There’s lots of room for improvement — navigation isn’t particularly graceful, and from a branding standpoint, the site sort of feels like an early version bing.com, which is an odd comparison to have popped into my head. Complaints aside, though, it really does remind me of mp3.com, which was one of my favourite sites of all tim

This one’s on my bookmarks bar already. If bln.kr can get itself onto my iPhone, I’m sold.

Follow them at @blnks for tips about great artists and tracks.

Trendero wants to help you be a trendsetter:

Have you noticed a trend picking up? Are people constantly whipping beverages out of their pockets or endlessly talking about some sort of supernatural-themed novel? You should let Trendero know.

The idea here is that you can report up-and-coming trends, verify that they’re actually happening (“Seen it!”), and most interestingly, find out about new trends spotted by other people. I just learned about the Vapur anti–bottle, for example. Nifty.

The site has a very attractive design and a nice, simple logo. The layout of the home screen works flawlessly: it’s easy to see what trends are coming up, and what’s going on around me. Most importantly, I can report a trend from the welcome page. It works.

It’s not without its issues of course — the colour theme feels a bit odd (the bright blue doesn’t work for me with the red), and I was sad to see Flash used for the map (seriously, lose the Flash) — but overall, it’s fun to use and offers up something I’ve never seen before.

Follow them at @trendero. It’ll be the new trend.