Planetbeta was not an April Fool’s joke!

Sam Harrelson and Wayne Porter announced on the first of april about Vinny Lingham’s Incubeta acquiring Revenews and CostPerNews, For two days, I thought this was an april fool’s joke.

Apparently, it wasn’t. The Planetbeta blog is now live with some clues on what the latest new-media entity is going to be all about.

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Centernetworks offering free advertising in exchange for a video about your startup

Popular blog about all things web 2.0, CenterNetworks, is making an offer startups can’t refuse - you can now promote your startup idea and be talked about at the blog for free.

All startups will need to do is to make a video pitching the startup, the benefits, why do you think it’s going to be the next big thing, etc., and send it to the Centernetworks. In return, Centernetworks will post the video on their blog, review and write about your startup - which has to be less than 2 years old and not a public company to qualify.

Finally, all the videos will go through a competition, a panel of judges will select be best video, the creator of which will win a 2 month advertising slot (May/June) on CenterNetworks

[Via Press Release]

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First Web 2.0 Spam in my inbox

Was just checking my email - and today is the day when I check the “Spam” folder to see if any important emails has accidentally been filtered as spam - There were none, Gmail’s filter is fantastic.

However, there was one email titled “Red Herring Ballmer Trash” that cought my attention, so I decided to click and see what the spam is all about - and the message turns out the be the FIRST EVER Web 2.0 Spam ever received (by me).

If you haven’t seen it in your mailbox yet, here’s what I saw:

Science scoble, scripting? Jboss jobs jotspot joyce jruby js json kawasaki kids.

Grid, groovy gwt hackdays hacks haiku hardware. Ask aspectj atlas atom, attend attention.Email from grave seeks immortal.Presenting preso presos press wordpress pricing print.

Beagle beta, bio biology bitter blog blogging.

Earth ebay eclipse ecommerce! Apps aprilst article ask aspectj atlas? Ads adsapi adsense adverisign adwords.

Evangelist ex exo fashion feed feedback fetcher.

Stress, struts sun, sund sundd sunpeople svg? Http humor in ide. Regexp religion, remix rest restaurant results ria? Stock storage store strategy stress. Oscommerce, oss ossgtp overture ozzie. Local longtail longterm, ma, mac mail man management mano.

Cloud listraquo sort by alpha, freqraquo use minimum. Dorothee, dotnet, drawing, drive, drm dsl dvd earth.

Going, screw them if, they dont, do you.

Pg philosophy, phone, photo photos php. Mapreduce maps, marcou marketing mashup mashupcamp mashups maven medecine?

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Are you (time) rich or (time) poor?

Fantastic article on the Lightspeed venture partners’ blog.

Categorizes Internet users in two categories, the “Time rich” and the “TIme poor”.

I’d speculate that many of the readers of this blog fall into the Time Poor category, but the vast majority of internet users fall into the Time Rich category. If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people guide you wrong.

Rest of the article here …

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Over two million people use StumbleUpon

According to this press release, StumbleUpon is now over two million users strong.

I’ve been reading many bloggers write about how stumbleupon makes up such an important share of their traffic referrers pie.

It’s too bad I haven’t been active at stumbleupon yet - hopefully, this piece of news is enough inspiration for me to go and check out the service and make some use of it’s mammoth potential as a source of traffic.

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Social Marketing - web 0.0

I was reading iCon, a Steve Jobs biography, have only read the first few pages yet, but having already read so much about apple - something passed my mind that I guess is worth sharing here.

There is all this hype over social media, and social networks etc., as if it is the one true way to successful business and brand-development. The way most people are taking this, is they are taking niches and turning them into communities and social networks.

What Apple did, however (and Sony, and BMW, and Reliance and even Microsoft to a certain extent), is that they carried on their business the traditional way, yet they were heavily engaged in what can be noted as “Social marketing”.

How exactly they did this, I am yet to grasp an understanding of, but they did not host social networks, that’s a certain fact.

Let me end this post with a Guruish comment:

Social marketing is not hosting a social network, nor creating one, it is building a sense of community within all those who use your products.

That, IMO is the sure-shot technique of building any business and REAL social marketing - Creating a sense of belonging and passion towards your product in the minds of everyone who uses it, that way, they start bonding with all those who use the same product. This creates a sort of missionary inclination into your users - who try and “convert” more people into using your product.

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Browse goods at the Shopwave mpire

“visual shopping” web-apps are mushrooming around the web; with a hope to offer a better and more unique shopping experience to online buyers (and make money in the process too).

Browsegoods, for example and lets users browse products on amazon as if they were browsing a map on google maps - you can zoom in and out of product category maps. The more you zoom in, the more products you get to see, once you have decided upon a product, zoom into the product to see more information about it. Very interesting concept, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look.

Other visual shopping apps worthy of a mention include BlackDogAir (lets shoppers browse through Books movies and music as if they were browsing a windows explorer window for files) and of course the already popular Like.com that recognizes stuff people are wearing in photos and displays similar products available to buy on various stores in their database (which, it seems is populated with datafeeds from affiliate networks etc.).

Today, yet another “Visual shopping experience” has launched, this time built on top of the shopping.com API, from the labs of mpire, called Shopwave.

(more…)

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Contextual Video advertising - YuMe Launches video ad network

Sam, over at costpernews just blogged about ScanScout - a service that, unlike other video advertising networks out there, displayes contextual ads in videos. Apparently, clickable ads are displayed at the bottom of the video player on the basis of spoken keywords and tags .

As I was reading the costpernews post, The RSS reader popped up a story on GigaOM about the launch of another contextual video ad network - YuMe. Which is probably the only competition to ScanScout as of now.

Unlike ScanScout, however, YuMe targets ads based on tags and metadata and this is not entirely automated - YuMe Staff actually screens user generated video before placing ads in there to ensure “Brand safety”.

Another very interesting feature they are boasting about is geo-targeting, advertisers can select exactly where there ads will be seen and can show different versions of the ad in different zip codes.

Online video advertising (and monetization) is getting real huge real quick, and IMO these two companies - ScanScout and YuMe have come up with some fantastic innovation.

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Google - The AOL of our generation?

Very interesting post on Sam Harrelson’s Blog - Cost Per News

The idea of going to a specific “search engine” or “search site” in a few years will seem as stupid as dialing in to an AOL server to get on the internets. We’re going to be talking about “the good old Google days” soon enough.

Google is our generation’s AOL, I fear.

Read Full Article here

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PayPerPost launches “Review my post” affiliate program

PayPerPost, one of the preferred revenue sources for many bloggers now has an affiliate program, and it’s kind of unique how they plan to implement it.

If you are a ‘Postie’ or a PPP member, you can make $7.50 for every blogger who signs up with them via your referral, but there is a slight difference in how you do this.

Bloggers who plan to promote PayPerPost via the new affiliate program will be required to place a ‘Review My Post’ button on the bottom of their posts. Any non-postie blogger can click on button, join PPP and write a review of your post on their own blog - and get paid $7.50 for doing so. On the other hand, the postie who’s post is reviewed also gets $7.50 as referral commission.

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