Here is an interesting startup idea – a startup to with the ability to churn out many other startups. That’s the idea behind Churn Labs, a venture between Omar Hammoui, Mike Rohwehl, George Chen and Haider Sabri. Similar to a garage operation, the rather well funded Churn Labs aims to attract the best talent that’s got an entrepreneurial spirit and a business idea, put them under one roof and let the magic begin.

While many startup funders and venture capitalists will assess new businesses and fund them, Churn Labs does its own work, hiring brilliant people with their own unique visions. It aims to provide them a platform to realize their dreams, offering flexibility in product and business ownership. The venture aims to work in the mobile and Internet industries.

There are many advantages of such an novel approach that seeks to amalgamate entrepreneurship, business ownership and employment. First of all, the risk associated with owning your own business is greatly diminished. New entrepreneurs don’t have to worry about meeting bottom lines and keeping investors happy. Secondly, new innovators get great leeway to experiment – something they normally wouldn’t get in an employment setting. And finally, business success can provide new entrepreneurs with options on how to capitalize on their newfound investment. With any luck, a new startup could be spun out into an independent company.

A social networking startup aimed at female web surfers called Smaknews has claimed on April Fool’s Day that it managed to raise $5M from Founders Fund. In case you didn’t know, Founders Fund is the same venture capitalist firm that was behind social networking juggernaut Facebook.

Launching on April 5, Smaknews is open for beta invitations. The startup is initially planning to provide members with targeted news on celebrities and womens’ consumer interests. The site is getting mixed reviews from the social spectrum, with some women complaining that it marginalizes female netizens, removing them from the mainstream social networking scene.

The founders of Smaknews of course view women as a specific demographic to cater to. How successful the site will be may be anybody’s guess. Previously launched social networking or social bookmarking sites for women include Sk*rt, later renamed to Kirtsy. Smaknews may yet have some competition from such early birds to the female social networking market.

UPDATE: Smaknews’ Twitter account states that the $5M capital injection was an April Fool’s joke. But the launch is still scheduled for the 5th.

Lala, a new startup based in Palo Alto, California has managed to create a new twist on file sharing. Instead of possibly copyright infringing peer to peer file sharing enabled by the likes of Kazaa and BitTorrent services, Lala attempts to create a legal file sharing system that charges people to both listen and download music at differing rates. So how does it work?

The way Lala operates is that you can sign in to the service, download their desktop application, and then proceed to share the the music on your hard drive with your friends. This will also allow you to move music from one PC to an Internet “cloud”, from where it can be accessed anywhere in the world.

If you want to listen to new songs, however, you can listen to any track onces for free, and any subsequent streaming will cost you 10 cents. Downloading a track will cost you about 89 cents.

Download may be avoided altogether in the near future as Lala releases its iPhone application, allowing streaming to your iPhone whereever you are. This might eliminate the need to download mp3s for your iPod as your iPhone becomes your new music player. Lala certainly seems to be promising; lets see what the future holds for this interesting social startup!

Caterina Fake, the co-founder of world-famous photosharing network Flickr, has just launched her latest startup dubbed Hunch. As the name suggests, the service allows people to share useful information about specific knowledge domains. Not unlike other knowledge-based services like Yahoo Answers, Hunch is aimed at professionals looking to aid their decision making processes.

The system sources questions asked by other similar peers in order to help a decision maker elaborate their own thinking processes. Whether it will actually help remain to be seen. However, the beta version is out and is being offered to a lucky few for tryout and evalution.

You can go to the site and sign up for an invitation to try out  the service in beta release.