Google has just participated in a seed round for Miso Media, an iPhone and iPad app maker whose product hasn’t yet launched in the iTunes App Store.

The total funding for this round comes to $600,000; other participating angels include Keith Rabois (COO of Square), film producer Laura Ziskin and others.

Miso makes Guitar Hero-like apps that use real guitar fingering, something that’s a bit more interesting to real musicians and more valuable to folks who want to learn to play. In fact, the company even has the sponsorship of C.F. Martin & Co. and the Fender Music Foundation, both heavyweights in the guitar world.

The apps teach users how to play guitar, bass guitar (both four- and five-string), banjo, mandolin and ukelele. Users can learn through scales and tabs, or they can play their way through new and classic songs. Miso’s note-detection tech “listens for the correct note and delivers real time feedback,” according to a statement from the company.

Miso’s applications, simply called Miso Music, have been submitted to Apple and will be available for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad soon.

The app will be available for the introductory price of $2.99. Users can purchase music and instruments within the app for a few dollars more, which makes for a nice recurring revenue opportunity for Miso.

The seed funding will be used to build a larger library of songs for the apps, create a more structured learning system, add more instruments and make more apps for different platforms — and yes, that includes Android, which is part of Miso’s expansion plans.

We’re looking forward to playing with Miso, ourselves. What do you think of the idea behind this app?

More About: Google, google centures, guitar, iOS, ipad app, iphone app, miso, miso media, mobile app, music, ukelele

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This week, Google acquired app developer Labpixies. App platform provider Conduit (full disclosure: they do advertise with us), who is a partner of Labpixies, is facilitating a great deal of app creation and engagement itself. WebProNews spoke with President Adam Boyden, who discussed the power of marketing with apps the impact Google’s acquisition of Labpixies could have on the industry.

"Labpixies is a great company with fantastic technology," says Boyden. "They are a Conduit partner and their apps are in the Conduit App Marketplace. We are excited to continue our work with them and distribute their apps to our network of more than 220,000 web publishers and 100 million users."

"We see Google’s acquisition of Labpixies as validation for and proof of the massive marketing and revenue opportunity that browser apps represent for businesses of all sizes.  More than 19 new users join our network every second, adding apps to their browsers."

When he says all sizes, he means it. The company’s network includes hundreds of large brands like MLB, Travelocity, Fox News, Time Warner Cable, and the NHL. However, it’s mostly comprised of thousands of smaller entities.

"These small publishers share their content with millions of users via the Conduit App Marketplace and many get huge results – much larger than they could achieve with their own marketing efforts," says Boyden. "For example, Pitsi, a virtual pet mini-game that can be played from the chrome of the browser, was downloaded by more than 5 million users and those users interacted with the game more than 66,000,000 times in the first ten weeks of the year."

Conduit actually announced yesterday that it is driving 2.14 billion user activities and brand interactions a month.

Both Coca-Cola (through their partner Mediatronica) and eBay have created apps using the Conduit Platform. Mediatronica created the Coke Zero/Avatar App to promote their sponsorship of the Avatar movie and increase engagement with fans. Twenty-four hours after the first activation, the app was exposed to a million users in the Conduit Network. Ten days later the campaign had reached 8 million people in over 30 countries and generated nearly a million minutes of total viewing/engagement time. The eBay App in the Conduit App Marketplace generated more than a million active users in less than 3 weeks after launch, according to Boyden.

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Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust, and Whole Foods are among the early adopters, which is quite impressive.  Another interesting detail is that CoTweet isn’t exactly begging for clients; the program’s existence was discovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew LaVallee, and businesses in fact have to request an invitation to scope out the new offering.

As for what their interest (and monthly payments of $1,500) will net them, the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program offers engagement, influence, and reach analytics, along with archives of customer interactions and a couple other things.

Anyway, this development could provide a number of clues concerning the future of Twitter.  One point in the site’s favor is that corporate users are so fascinated by it.  This should give Twitter some staying power.

Also, although the launch of the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program might seem like yet another missed revenue opportunity (Twitter’s indicated before that it might try to make money by selling premium accounts and analytics services), Twitter could still presumably join the game at any point in time.

The interesting thing is that these well-connected companies didn’t wait for it to do so.  Microsoft and the others almost surely would have heard if Twitter had a service in the pipeline, and then would have held out another couple of weeks or months to use it.  So any sort of official offering may be quite a ways off.

One last item of note: a post on the CoTweet Blog made clear, "The CoTweet public beta remains free for consumers and enterprises."

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