There are many studies being performed about colors and color psychology, and one theory I enjoy agreeing with is that colors have effects on one’s mood. Have you ever taken a look at a color, and imagined further? As in, for example, you’re looking at a blue billboard and think of the sea, which in turn yields you to think in calm terms? Here, a quote from Bloomberg University:

Color, without our realizing it, can have a profound effect on how we feel both mentally and physically. Dr. Morton Walker, in his book The Power of Color, suggested that the ancient Egyptians as well as the Native American Indians used color and colored light to heal.

The article then goes on to list examples of a variety of colors triggering moods or thoughts, like blue, for example: “Blue represents peace, tranquility, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, confidence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, loyalty, sky, water, cold, technology, and depression.”

So how does one utilize this? Or, even more, how can you turn something involving something as common as color and mood into anything worth venturing into and profiting?

Guitarati seems to have figured all of this out, as founder Sonal Pandey puts it, “Guitarati provides an offbeat, intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. Amidst a world of music discovery dominated by tag clouds, 1-10 rating systems and so forth, we wanted to create something that enabled users to easily find music that others had ‘felt’ the same about.”

The thing that impresses me most about Guitarati is the creativeness of the idea, and how well they’ve pulled it off. Just recently launched in public beta, the service works well with not many visible bugs.

So how does Guitarati make money, and how is it legal? 

Guitarati provides multiple means of revenue for bands and labels, as they get
paid for song downloads as well as streaming. They (bands and labels) decide the
price of their music and retain 75% of the earnings. Record labels can manage
their entire roster and earnings through a single dashboard. Artists can upload
their unsigned as well as released albums. The website is free to use and there
are no hosting or registration fees. We also aim to offer a plethora of
unconventional tools to artists and labels to promote and sell their music.

All in all, a wonderful start-up, a creative idea turned into a profitable new pit-stop for finding music online. Check it out @ Guitarati.com

P.S. – No funding or expenses were disclosed in the e-mail we received, though check back in the comments for something from Pandey possibly.

Vi.sualize.us aims to do for images what del.icio.us did for websites. It’s the brain child of Victor Espigares and was created after a personal need to remember a particular photo within a portfolio. Not happy with the current offerings he decided to do something about it.

Built around similar features as del.icio.us, you see an image you like, you bookmark it (possibly using the firefox plugin pictured below), it’s saved to your vi.sualize.us account for future reference. You can also tag different images and share bookmarked images with your friends.

I’ve been playing around with the site for the past hour or so and there really is a lot of great content over there. I could easily sit for ages just browsing the different tag sections.

What i find most impressive is that Victor built the entire thing himself, to date spending $0, excluding his hosting bill. Almost 7 months old, at the time of writing people have posted more than 35,000 images and there are roughly 1,900 registered users. If you haven’t before heard of this started i suggest you check them out.