Yesterday, L’Atelier attended the 2010 Mashable U.S. Summer Tour, an event organized by the social media web site.

There, we met an interesting new start-up named Gotelo. Founded by Ray Kasbarian in 2009, Gotelo is a new way to connect to the pages of people you know with just their phone number. Indeed, it simplifies the way people interact with friends, and could also be useful for business.

By creating a link between a phone number and a web page, Gotelo allows users to control their presence on the internet.

How does it work? First, users have to register on www.gotelo.com by giving their phone number. After that, the website will call this number for a validation process. Then, users can add links to their social network profile from places like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, YouTube or their blog.

So with this, when you meet a person, you just need to give your phone number. This person will find you on the Internet by typing your number in Gotelo’s browser. As a phone number is something personal and unique, you will be sure to find the right person.

Currently, Gotelo is in beta version. According to Victor Nappe, co-founder of Gotelo, the service will launch next month.

Since now, this connection engine is free because they need to create a huge database, which is key for success. It’s obvious that Gotelo will be useful only if everybody is registered on it. Maybe that’s why the service is already available in more than 30 countries.

According to Nappe, the company is thinking of releasing premium services in the future with additional functionality. Like flavors, it seems that Gotelo has created a new kind of online business card.

AnyClip won early points by structuring the beginning of their presentation around The Big Lebowski.

The site allows you to easily find any clip from any movie.

This is awesome in theory, especially for people like me who can’t for the life of them drop a movie quote correctly. Their ClipIt dashboard allows users to add metadata so you don’t have to search just dialogue to find the scene.

Many of film’s iconic scenes are already to find with Google. Yesterday when I learned about Patrick Swayze I searched “Pain don’t hurt” in Google and found the scene immediately. Right now,

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As part of YouTube’s monetization strategy, the video site has made the most of its media fingerprinting technology to identify songs and other copyrighted content on its users’ content. Offering viewers a link to purchase the media for download is a way to supplement YouTube advertising revenue.

This strategy is showing that the site may have the right idea - on the slight chance that a tagged video goes viral. With the recent view explosion of an offbeat wedding video in Minnesota, the couple exchanged the classic Wedding March for an upbeat song piped through the church’s speaker system instead. The video is longer than five minutes, stretching to the full length of Chris Brown’s “Forever,” but has been viewed over twelve million times.

Not surprisingly, this popularity has spilled over onto Brown’s purchased song downloads, linking from the video’s page to iTunes or AmazonMP3music video, as well as his music video for “Forever.” According to the Google Blog’s article on the “JK Wedding Entrance” phenomenon, the click-through rate is twice the average for “Click-to-Buy” overlays on the site.

Chris Brown’s song has moved back up the charts since its release one year ago, recently reaching #4 on the iTunes store and #3 on Amazon, coinciding with the popularity of the video. In the same article, Google compares its success to that of Monty Python when they uploaded their content onto YouTube last year.

This seems like a strange comparison for Google to make, since this recent boost in sales was not initiated by the copyright holder, but an independent content creator. Jill and Kevin did not use the song to increase the popularity of the song, and they did not use it to sell copies of the song either. In comparison, the Monty Python channel was created to promote material and generate sales, successfully so.

Despite the conflation, the rise in “Forever” popularity does highlight the power of freely available content to drive sales of paid content.

It’s easy to forget how recently that video became the ubiquitous media of choice on the Web. Just in the span of 2005 through 2006 came the popular proliferation of YouTube in the US, DailyMotion in Europe, and Tudou in China. These sites set the direction of online video with Flash Player technology for streaming instead of downloading, with a simple interface where anyone can upload content, as well as convenient code for sharing and reposting on Web pages and blogs.

According to Lightspeed’s research released yesterday through eMarketer, video is bigger than blogging or social networking - 72 percent of US Internet users watch video clips at least once a month. 62 percent view at least one video per week, which Lightspeed translates to 97 million weekly viewers.

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Skittles has begun an aggressive social Web marketing strategy. Beginning last week, the Mars Snackfood brand began aggregating all things Skittles to its own Web site , including user created content from the Wikipedia entry on the candy, Twitter.com, Facebook.com and more.

Ambitious because of the rather unpredictable nature of user generated content, it remains to be seen whether or not the decision will be problematic. While the Skittles portal claims no responsibility for the material that it collects from other sites in the creation of this campaign, it comes at the price of branding image control.

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User-generated content (UGC) has permeated the Internet, for better or for worse. The stuff can be expected to make up sections of a Web site, such as news content comments, or is the basis for entire sites, as with YouTube. We expect that the number of user-generated content creators will climb from 83 million in 2008 to 115 million in 2013. Those content creators will make up 51.8 percent of all Internet users in 2013, up from 42.8 percent in 2008.

With the increase of creators comes the increase in Internet population consuming some form of UGC: from 116 million in 2008 to 155 million in 2013. With that huge number of potential consumers interacting on some level with this new medium, an eMarketer report from January 28 asks, “Can User-Generated Content Change Your World?”

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Beginning Monday, YouTube has issued an open audition to all classical musicians who have access to the Internet’s largest user-generated video Web site. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra shall be a result of the efforts of Chinese composer Tan Dun, Google, The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and many other classical music institutions worldwide.

Participants are encouraged to download sheet music for Dun’s original composition “Eroica,” practice the piece and one other of the musician’s choice, and upload both to the YouTube Channel by January 28. Resources are available on the orchestra channel of the LSO instrument-specific master classes and conducting videos by Tan Dun. A jury made up of “musical experts from the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and other leading orchestras around the world” will narrow the auditions to a group of semifinalists. These will be voted on by the YouTube public in February.

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YouTube has provided a way that copyright holders can gain revenue on user-posted content: YouTube Video Identification. They have always provided Take-Down options available to flag legally inappropriate material, but this system provides an alternative to content removal.

Video ID (still in beta) will “help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube”  with “technology that can recognize videos based on a variety of factors.” Once material is flagged, the holders can choose to block the video, promote it, or now, share in advertising revenue that the content views create. But the effectiveness of Video ID is strongly in question.

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From an innovation standpoint, Juice’s integration of drag and drop technology with Web-based research is a useful idea. The notion of dragging and dropping a word or phrase into another window that automatically conducts a multi-source Web search is attractive. But after downloading the Beta version, Juice’s service hurt more than it helped. The sidebar cluttered my browser, and the turning in my stomach eventually made me kick the interface to the curb. Perhaps Linkool International’s next release will not be as agitating.

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“Today is Election Day. Go Vote .”

That is the statement on Facebook’s Welcome Page today. An entire Election 2008 page has been created especially for the months leading up to now, and even on its last active day there are useful elements to encourage the gigantic number of newly registered voters to follow through. As a special, last-minute push, the site has made this the default start page for signed-in users.

“Be sure to take the time to vote! Use the map below to find your polling place and what time the polls in your state open and close. You can also see the nearest Ben and Jerry’s where you can get a free ice cream cone on election day.” Election 2008 provides a simple Google Map interface with links to coverage, election maps, and mobile alerts.

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