Joyride is creating a voice user interface for the smartphone designed to function much like the voice command-and-control systems in your car. Founders Jeff Chen and James Zhang created Skyvi, a voice-assistant app for Android that received 5 million downloads. With the help of $1 million in seed funding, they’re now building similar voice-interaction technology into Joyride with the aim of creating a game, entertainment and education platform that is fully hands-free. Though you could use its app anywhere, Joyride CEO Chen said, it’s most useful within the restrictive confines of the car.

Joyride plans to launch an Android app in the next few months — right now it’s in a private beta — and its first service will be a trivia game Chen described as “a hands-free version of Words With Friends.” But Joyride plans to layer more games and services on top of the app, and will eventually invite outside developers to embed their own applications into the Joyride app framework.

“Think of Joyride as a portal,” Chen said. “It’s an enabling technology intended for people to build things on top of.” Joyride would be the overarching brand and its voice technology would not only power the apps themselves, but allow you to navigate between them. The first Joyride apps will be games, but Chen hopes to layer on any manner of service that lends itself to voice interaction, from audiobooks and music streaming to highly interactive language-learning apps.

Joyride makes use of the car’s stereo system through an auxiliary jack or a Bluetooth connection, though the app doesn’t actually tap into any connected car software or OS — it’s just using the speakers. From there, all interactions are done via voice — it makes use of Google’s speech API — requiring  no actual physical input, Chen said. The approach also has the advantage of making the app car agnostic. If you can connect your iPod to the car, you can connect Joyride.

Joyride’s $1 million seed round comes Cowboy Ventures and Freestyle Capital as well as from angel investor and Turnable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, who is also Joyride’s executive chairman.

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The debate over whether or not Silicon Valley is in a bubble might not be the right question. Instead, we may want to ask whether the fundamental principles of tech investing are shifting, as technology becomes more of a consumer phenomenon. For all the talk of the long tail, the big money is in sites and services that capture a large user base. So how does venture capital and angel investing change to support this model? And should it?

Success in this realm isn’t like success in the old-school Silicon Valley world of building chips or enterprise software. The product still matters, but the audience isn’t the few technically or business-savvy experts at a large company that is evaluating your wares for a multimillion-dollar deal. Today it’s selling to the billion people on Facebook, hoping they will give you a click, a tweet or five minutes of their time to be monetized in the form of ads.

Maybe if you’re good you can build a business actually selling apps, but the name of the game is still driven by hits. The Internet has become a wasteland of lame-duck startups and acqui-hires that couldn’t make it to the next level in popularity. The winners seem to be those who can rise to platform status, and it seems for many segments of the Web, much like in The Highlander, there can only be one. Facebook has won out in social networks while Foursquare is hoping to be the darling of location. Meanwhile the battle plays out for a mobile commerce site, as well as a winner in travel, gifts, gaming (actually there may be more than one here) and so on.

An Inc. magazine profile on the differences between founders of one startup highlights the change that is occurring in tech investing. The article, which details the relationship between the two founders of Turntable.fm, is worth a read. Billy Chasen is the programmer who built the site, while Seth Goldstein is the deal maker. The startup they founded has stopped growing, and the profile explores that and their relationship as they try to tackle their plateau.

Tucked inside the story is a quote that has me wondering if Silicon Valley has moved from developing and promoting real technology to pimping the next hot Web service. And if so, what does that mean for startups and investors?

Goldstein’s latest read is simple: Coders are the new rock stars. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg built sites that attract crowds of millions, but they don’t completely understand how they did it—and neither does the money backing them. It’s not as if they do market research. So venture funds now bet on hackers the way record labels bet on rising pop stars, hoping that someday soon, they will make something wild, new, and insanely lucrative.

Hints of this abound. The difficulty in getting a series-B round unless your startup is the Next Big Thing is something I have covered. Then there is the rise of celebrity investors in tech that help push a product. And there’s the influx of brogrammers who code, work out and live a lifestyle that seems incongruous with building a startup, unless you view them as part of the product being sold to investors and consumers.

None of this is to say the traditional tech investment in the Valley has gone by the wayside. There are still hardware-, software- and data-oriented startups that can raise money and aren’t trying to sell to the masses. But they follow a different trajectory for the most part. Sure, a little of the celebrity founder worship sneaks over (witness the love affair with Martin Casado of Nicira), but for the most part it’s business as usual at slightly higher valuations.

And celebrity or the search for the big hit doesn’t get you through the days when the going gets tough. Or as Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson so eruditely puts it:

So if you are doing the startup game for money, and lots of it, you are in for a plate full of frustration. It must be for more than that.

Which has me thinking that not everyone is pumped about this hit-maker mindset. Even those who stand to benefit.

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The Nasdaq Composite Index is almost twice as high as it was a year ago. Apple shares have also doubled in value in the past year, and its market cap is edging towards $250 billion, making it the third most-valuable company in the world. Meanwhile, Facebook is being valued at anywhere from $20 billion to $50 billion, game maker Zynga is reportedly worth $5 billion, Groupon just closed a financing that values it at $1 billion, and corporate buyers are said to be circling startups like Foursquare with offers of $100 million takeouts. Are things getting a little too bubbly in the tech sector?

Seth Goldstein thinks they might be — the angel investor and founder of SocialMedia.com and Stickybits says that his “spider sense is tingling” and that he feels “something big is about to pop, something on the AOL-buys-Time-Warner richter scale.” He writes:

I remember that Monday morning, January 10, 2000. The day that AOL announced it was buying Time Warner…I was working at Flatiron Partners, and Fred, Jerry, Bob and I had a standing Monday morning breakfast at the Mayrose Diner. We all looked at each other that Monday morning with our mouths agape, shaking our heads in amazement that this was really happening. In retrospect, that deal was a watershed for the Internet. It announced that new media was going to be bigger than old media. It also marked the final inflation of a bubble that popped painfully only a few months down the road.

So are we brewing another bubble of AOL-Time-Warner-like proportions? It’s probably a little early to be ringing the alarm bells, as even Goldstein admits. Facebook and Zynga and Foursquare haven’t even gone public yet, so whatever excessive valuations are occurring (if they are) are happening out of the public markets and in the rarefied air of private venture capital. It’s true that the impetus of those valuations frequently spills over into the public markets and can wind up taking retail investors along for a nasty ride, as it did in the late 1990s, but we are not even close to being there yet. And while the Nasdaq may be up 100 percent from last year, that was a recessionary low — the index is still barely half what it was before the blowout of 2000.

That said, it is worth being reminded of how these bubbles are inflated: a breath of venture capital air here, another over there, and soon the process has taken on a life of its own. Goldstein’s former Flatiron Partners colleague and prominent tech VC, Fred Wilson, says in a comment on the post: “I remember that morning at the Mayrose, Seth. It is gone now, as you know, but Internet mania is not.” We should keep that in mind as we count our virtual Facebook, Zynga and Foursquare winnings.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user zachstern