Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Social Networking Goes Professional

When radiation oncologist Michael Tomblyn recently saw
a 21-year-old patient whose eye was protruding from its socket, he
turned to his fellow physicians for help. Dozens of doctors offered
suggestions, including fungal infection, HIV-associated lymphoma or a
cocaine-associated sinus problem, eventually steering him toward the
correct answer: rhabdomyosarcoma, a fast-growing cancer most often
observed in young children.


The diagnosis didn't take place in a doctor's lounge. It happened on Sermo.com,
a social-networking site for licensed physicians, which Dr. Tomblyn and
25,000 doctors like him visit regularly to consult with colleagues
specializing in areas from dermatology to psychiatry.


"It is a way for us to commiserate and know we are
still talking to others like us," says 36-year-old Dr. Tomblyn, who
works for the University of Minnesota Medical Center.


[icon]
ONLINE SCHMOOZING


Some DOs and DON'Ts for using professional social-networking sites:

DON'T:


Offer to do business with someone you meet immediately.

Give away information specific to your company.


DO:


Share your perspectives on news that's already public.

Continue more intimate discussions over email and on the phone.



Social networking, popularized by teens sharing
information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook
Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social
networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as
advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.


Millions of professionals already turn to broad-based
networking sites like LinkedIn to swap job details and contact
information, often for recruiting purposes. Business executives also
have turned to online forums, email lists and message boards to sound
off on information related to their industries.


Now, online services are trying to promote a more
personal type of business networking. Unlike relatively simple message
boards that are open to all, these new sites -- including Sermo.com for
doctors and INmobile.org
for the wireless industry -- have features such as profile pages
showing professional credentials; personal blogs that function like a
kind of online diary; links to "friends" online; electronic invitations
to real or online events; and instant-messaging.


[Sermo]

Social networking is just one of many consumer
technologies, including blogs, wikis and virtual worlds, to cross over
into the corporate world. It is happening as social networking is
moving more into the mainstream. Leading consumer social-networking
sites attracted more than 110 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in
July, up more than 40% from the previous July, according to comScore Inc.


For a variety of reasons, social networking has been
slower to take off in the business world. Employees are wary of
disclosing too much to potential competitors, and loose-lipped
executives can easily embarrass themselves and their companies online.
Policing these services' memberships to weed out impostors can be
difficult, and the sites are still in the early stages of turning their
networks into sustainable businesses. Also, business users typically
have less time to devote to socializing online and are willing to do so
only if they believe they are getting a unique benefit from the site.


"Professionals are fairly protective about their
social networks which they spend their whole lives to build," says
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, assistant professor of business administration
at Harvard Business School. He adds that the appeal of social
networking is limited largely to industries where workers are fairly
isolated from their colleagues on a day-to-day basis, like medicine,
construction and sales.


Many of the new services are free to members. Revenue
comes from advertising or charging outside businesses access to data
and member discussions. For example, Sermo Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.,
generally charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to nonmedical businesses
like hedge funds, which use it to research such things as how doctors
feel about new drugs. They can monitor online discussions, with the
doctors' names omitted, or see a tally of topics being discussed on the
site -- like a new medical device or a controversial cancer treatment
-- to determine what's rising or falling in popularity.


The site, founded by Daniel Palestrant while he was a
surgical resident in Boston and launched last year, discloses its
business model to users when they register. Members say they don't mind
that their conversations are accessible to others, particularly since
their identities are concealed. In this, Sermo is different from many
other sites. Doctors are generally more interested in getting treatment
advice and access to other doctors' experiences than in networking for
new business partners. As a result, the site doesn't require users to
use their real names, although Sermo itself verifies and holds the
identities of everyone who registers.


INmobile.org -- a social network for the wireless
industry launched last year by Adam Zawel, former director of the
Yankee Group's Wireless US Research Program and the executive search
firm IdealWave Solutions, based in Harvard, Mass. -- has a different
business model. Its basic services are free to its members, about 730
high-level executives at cellphone makers, wireless operators and media
companies. But members can choose to pay $2,000 a year to list
promotions and ads in a special "marketplace" section.


Some of the new sites simply charge a membership fee. This fall, for example, Reuters Group
PLC is planning to launch a new social-networking service, tentatively
named "Reuters Space," for fund managers, traders and analysts. For a
fee, which hasn't yet been set, they will be able to log on to create
profiles with industry-relevant information like their "asset class"
and "instruments," check financial news feeds and ruminate about the
industry on personal blogs. However, the Reuters service will only
allow employees to join if their companies are Reuters customers. It
also plans to allow companies to block certain features like blogging
and to archive employees' online activities for compliance purposes.


Online networking services are trying to broaden their
appeal with new ways of making sure their members are who they say they
are. For example, Sermo authenticates each of its members by checking
their credentials against several of the 10,000 databases they have
access to. The service also requires users to answer three verifiable
personal questions, ranging from their phone number to where they got
their medical degrees before they can sign up.


INmobile.org relies on member referrals and email
confirmations, but says it is looking into stricter methods, like
calling up the person or their colleagues, since emails can be easily
faked. The service says it turns away more than half who apply,
admitting only director-level employees and above from large companies,
top-level executives from smaller companies and vice-president level
and above from midsize businesses.


Even after these measures, it can be difficult getting
business people to converse freely with each other online. Alexander
Pigeon, vice president of international for MLB Advanced Media LP, the
interactive media and Internet arm of Major League Baseball, is guarded
about what he shares on INmobile.org, which he recently joined to stay
on top of big trends in wireless. "I certainly wouldn't post something
about my company that wasn't publicly released," says Mr. Pigeon, who
instead sticks with "pontifications" on broad trends like the future of
mobile music.


But taking a risk on an advertising social-network
paid off for Angela Glenn of Long Beach, Calif. The 40-year-old graphic
designer first joined a free social network created by the blog AdRants
as a "lurker," reading but not contributing to the site. Before long,
she gained the confidence to debate topics like Web-site design, and
she and one sparring partner grew so fond of each other's styles that
they eventually started an ad agency together, the GASP Company LLC.
"You get to hear potential partners out and see how they think about
things," she says. "It's the closest thing you get to a personal
recommendation."

Article Link




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Monday, November 19, 2007

Piczo Offers Russian Teens Social Network for Self-Expression

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Piczo (www.piczo.com), the online
social networking site for safer teen self-expression, today announced
its global expansion into Russia, one of the fastest growing social
networking regions globally, with the launch of Piczo Russia.



Piczo will offer Russian teens a safer, more private social network
where they can express themselves by downloading, creating and sharing
cool digital content.



The launch into the Russian market is part of Piczos
international growth strategy which has already seen exponential growth
in Germany to over 2 million unique users today, up six-fold since
September 2006. Recent launches into new markets have enabled Piczo to
build on its position as the top destination for 13-18 year-olds with
over 28 million registered users globally.



Piczo is already well established across Eastern Europe, where it now
has over 850,000 unique users accessing the site with more than 65
million page views a month.



Piczos focus on privacy and control has been
an important product differentiator since the sites
creation. As Piczo users cannot search for others through the network,
groups are formed more like a private party, with growth happening
virally and through word of mouth.



Piczos launch in
Russia will offer a blank canvas where teens can express themselves the
way they want to. We know what matters to Piczo users the most is a
social network thats relevant to their lives,
innovative, safe and fun, said Jeremy Verba,
CEO of Piczo. Our user base has grown so
rapidly across Europe for precisely these reasons and our Russian site
will continue in the same success.



We are truly excited to be the first major
social media platform to launch in Russian, and with our current user
growth in the region, we are confident we are serving a market need that
will help us take Piczos worldwide growth to
the next level, said Chris Seth, European
Managing Director of Piczo.



Piczo facts
More than 28 million registered user accounts



  • Over 12 million Monthly Unique Visitors generating one billion monthly
    page views

  • Piczo is the 3rd most popular teenage social networking site worldwide
    (Comscore)

  • Created for teenagers worldwide, Piczo users are typically 13-to-16
    years old
Article Link


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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Brijit: A Digg For Dead-Tree Media

Can’t keep up with all those magazines piling up in your mailbox,
especially the high-brow ones you thought would make you smarter but
never have time to read? Well, cancel those subscriptions and head on
over to Brijit, a self-styled “Thinking Man’s Digg.”

There you will find 100-word abstracts on the latest articles from magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Wired, with links to most of them. The site also covers video from 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
Readers vote the best stories up or down, so you can keep up on the
ones most likely to come up during a dinner party. You can even get
paid to write abstracts, $5 apiece if your submissions are accepted.


Brijit is designed to be a filter for the smart set. But it oddly
defines smart only as what’s in print. Where are the blogs? Other than Salon and Slate,
very little online-only media is represented. Perhaps that is because
Brijit is focussed on long-form narrative, and there is not much of
that online. But it makes you wonder whether sifting through the
dead-tree titles will be enough to keep readers coming back to this
site, or whether they will prefer a broader view of the world.


Brijit has raised $1 million from angel investors, including former Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine.


(Disclosure: I worked at Time Inc. when Pearlstine was the editorial boss there).


brijit-screen-2.png

Article Link



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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Extending Microsoft Money - The Web Needs an Alternative to Paypal

last100 has an interesting post on Microsoft Points,
a kind of virtual currency for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune
Marketplace. In a lot of ways, Microsoft Points act just like real
money and functions in a similar way to Paypal.
Mack D. Male wrote that "if you see a movie you want to buy on Xbox
Live, you just need to make sure you have enough points available in
your account. The main difference, of course, is that you don’t
“purchase” money, but you do purchase Microsoft Points."

Mack says that "Microsoft Points can be purchased online using a
credit card, or from a participating retail location in the form of a
Microsoft Points Card. As with airtime minutes on your mobile phone,
you purchase allotments of points at once, ranging from 400 to 5000
points. The price varies all around the world, but in the United States
80 Microsoft Points is equal to $1. If you live in a country with
government sales tax, you’ll pay that on top of the price of the
points."



The
big question is can Microsoft Points be extended and used across
Windows Live in the near future, as an equivalent to the likes of
eBay's Paypal or Google Checkout? Microsoft blogger Robert McLaws wrote about this idea back in January, and speculated that it might be called Windows Live Payments. This was based on a Bill Gates comment in February, in which Gates hinted that that online micropayments is an area Microsoft will pursue.


As last100 noted, almost all of the major forces in the digital living room have a payments system of some sort. Sony has the PlayStation Network Card, Nintendo has Wii Points, Google has Checkout, and Amazon recently launched FPS.
Sony and Nintendo’s systems are virtual currencies, whereas Google and
Amazon’s are payment services. Microsoft could be the first company to
offer both by opening up Microsoft Points to the world.


Probably the first thing that comes to mind when considering such a
system across Windows Live is: look what happened to Passport.
Microsoft's 90's identity system was a failure, with consumers
ultimately not trusting Microsoft to manage their online identities. So
if users don't trust Microsoft with their ID, what chance they will
trust Microsoft with their money?


We want a Paypal competitor


But I think the micropayments infrastructure is due for a shake-up.
Paypal has gotten almost arrogant of late, with their ridiculously high
fees and honey-catching account structure (tip: don't sign up for a
"premium" account, you end up paying much more in fees than a simple
"personal" account). Google Checkout so far has little to offer
ordinary consumers, so right now Paypal enjoys a virtual monopoly. So I
for one would welcome a Windows Live Payments system. OK, this goes
beyond a virtual currency - which Microsoft Points is right now - but
the opportunity is there to extend into micropayments.


What do you think, will Microsoft Points be used in Windows Live services to enable a micropayments system? Would you use it?

Article Link



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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

CircleLending Becomes Virgin Money USA; Gets Makeover and Millions in Funding

Peer-to-peer lending service CircleLending has been taken under the wings of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire and rebranded as Virgin Money USA


Virgin’s US investment firm recently bought a majority stake in the
Waltham, Massachusetts company, which acts as an online middleman for
friends and family who want to loan each other money. The exact amount
of money invested by Virgin has not been disclosed.


Virgin Money USA differs from other online lending services, because
it focuses on loans between people who are familiar with one another. Prosper, Lending Club, Kiva, and Zopa, on the other hand, facilitate loans between relative strangers.

Article Link



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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

MySpace Platform To Launch Next Week

MySpace
is gearing up to launch MySpace Platform, according to a number of
third party developers who’ve been contacted for input on the product.
While this has been rumored since June,
this is the first indication that the service is preparing to actually
launch. And we also have information that suggests that it will be
announced next week at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.


The new developer platform, like Facebook Platform
which was announced in May, will essentially be a set of APIs and a new
markup language that will allow third party developers to create
applications that run within MySpace. Developers will be able to
include Flash applets, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets in their
applications, and access most of the core MySpace resources (profile
information, friend list, activity history, etc.). Applications will
need to be hosted on MySpace servers.


And in a big change in strategy for MySpace, developers will be able
to serve their own advertising within their applications, and keep 100%
of the revenue (Facebook also allows this).


Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has
significant competition around their platform - Within a month both
MySpace and Google (see our post here)
will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is
great for developers, but it also means they need to create and
maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on.
Someone is hopefully working on a startup that will streamline that
process for people. Whoever does it first, and best, can have a winner
on their hands.







Article Link

Monday, October 8, 2007

I'm majoring in Facebook, how about you?

SAN FRANCISCO (Fortune) -- Last Thursday afternoon before the most
hyped class at Stanford University was about to start, instructor B.J.
Fogg and his four teaching assistants attempted to solve this
engineering problem. How do you cram 100 students into a classroom that
only seats 56? Arrange chairs at long tables near the fire exits.

The
students, though, didn't seem to care if they had to sit on the floor
to take the most popular computer science course this fall quarter: how
to create engaging applications for Facebook.







Shelling
out steep tuition fees to take a class on the social network of the
moment may seem like a good payoff in the long-term, but few developers
have yet to turn significant profits from writing Facebook
applications. More than 5,000 applications have been created since
Facebook announced in May that third-party developers could build on
its platform, and only four boast more than 1 million users.

Fogg,
who has a background in Web development and experimental psychology,
polled his students on why Facebook is the most important social
network. "Facebook is the most convenient and respectable way to feel
connected to friends, get updated on existing friends, find new people,
build relationships and express identities," he says. "For me, the
interesting part of the class is to do research with a bunch of
experts."


Students, however, seem
more interested in cashing out. "I want to build a really cool app and
then sell it for some amount of money," says Jennifer Gee, a
21-year-old computer science graduate student. Classmates nearby nod in
agreement.

Others question whether a Facebook-specific
curriculum will be useful to future developers. Social networks like
News Corp's MySpace, Google's Orkut and Bebo are all expected to open
their platforms to third-party developers soon. "From an engineering
perspective, learning to build for the social web on just one platform
seems like a short-sighted educational strategy," says Alex Payne, a
developer for San Francisco-based Twitter, a service that lets users
send short text updates that can be posted to a personal webpage
through IM, SMS or blogging tools.

The ten-week course meets
once a week for three hours and requires students to build two Facebook
applications in three-person teams. They will present their creations
to potential investors at the end of the quarter. Thursday's class
begins with an easy trivia quiz. What month and year did the Facebook
platform launch? According to news articles, which company intends to
invest in Facebook? What are the three basic roles that computers play?

"Hopefully it's our last quiz in the class," Fogg says, "but it
depends on performance." At that pace, it's unlikely that students will
learn any secrets that developers don't already know. However, they
will be treated to special guest speakers. About an hour into the
session, Facebook sent a representative from its nearby Palo Alto
offices. "I'm so excited that you're excited," says Ami Vora, a
Facebook platform product marketing rep. "We can't build the entire
user experience ourselves." Vora gave a 30-minute presentation on the
Facebook platform and highlighted the new FB Fund, a $10 million grant
program that provides up to $250,000 to developers building promising
applications.


The Stanford students had
just hit the jackpot, and they were definitely interested. An
instructor asked for the main contact for the new FB Fund. Vora said
she was, but declined to give her email address. "Your best bet is to
go through your professors," she says. If a winning application doesn't
pan out, there are still other networking opportunities. Jia Shen, a
co-founder of RockYou, which owns 15 Facebook applications at last
count, teaches a supplementary lab session. Shen says he's keeping his
eye to recruit talented students for potential openings at his company.
"It's definitely going to be a breeding ground," he says.

Three
hours later, the students spill out of Cordura Hall with their first
class assignment -- to create a Facebook application in two weeks.
Computer science major Dave Koslow, 22, won't reveal what he's
planning. However he's optimistic that a Facebook class will make him
more marketable when he graduates. "I'd never take a class on MySpace,"
he says

Friday, October 5, 2007

PayPal: Phishing, Fundraising, And In The Lab


Are
you sick and tired of phishing attacks, those fraudulent emails
designed to look like trusted corporations but aimed at stealing your
personal account information? Today Yahoo (YHOO), together with eBay
(EBAY) and its PayPal unit, started to roll out an authentication technology
called DomainKeys that supposedly blocks malicious, fake eBay and
PayPal messages from being delivered into the inboxes of Yahoo Mail
users by allowing Internet Service Providers to automatically decide if
messages should be delivered.



Speaking of PayPal, the company has teamed up with News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace
to “virally fundraise” for nonprofits and politicians on
the social networking site. PayPal has developed “fundraising
badges,” which are basically widgets that are a bit fancier than
the typical PayPal “donate” button that could be copied
onto any site to inspire philantrophy via the Internet.





The widget, which can be found on over 20 charity and politician
profiles on MySpace, makes it easy for site visitors to donate money to
their chosen cause. Once users donate funds, their name is added to a
scrolling list that includes the names of other supporters of the
particular campaign. Since each of these widgets can be copied and
pasted into any user profile, web site or blog, the idea is that the
badges will spread virally and subsequently increase the amount of
funds raised. To encourage the viral effect to take place, the widget
also displays a “supporter tree” that tracks the users who
have added the tools to their profiles, and how much each person has
raised.



The fundraising widget was created in “PayPal Labs,”
a new division of the company designed to look for innovative and
creative ways to leverage the online payment service. Launched today,
the PayPal Labs site (which can be found at x.com) also describes a Facebook app that can be used to send and get money from friends.


Friday, September 28, 2007

Brazil Slaughters Sweden In Google Uptime Game

Almost four-fifths of Sweden’s population uses the Internet compared to just over 20 percent of Brazil’s, yet Brazil has beaten Sweden handily on at least one measure: Google availability. Uptime monitoring company Pingdom reports
that from Sept. 1, 2006 to Sept. 1, 2007, Brazilians were only without
Google (GOOG) for three minutes, while those in Sweden had to go
without the popular Internet search giant’s services for almost an hour!

Among other victories, Mexico beat the U.S. (16 minutes compared to
31 minutes), while France edged out the UK (19 minutes to the UK’s 20).
The good news for Internet surfers everywhere is that Google achieved
greater than 99.9 percent uptime across all monitored web sites, which,
Pingdom notes, “has to be considered extremely good, even for a company
with the resources of Google.

Article Link

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Crowdfunding software projects

When it comes to software development, history has shown that niche
products can often lead to profitable new markets. The challenge, of
course, is discovering that the niche is there. microPledge uses the power of crowdfunding to uncover untapped demand and, in the words of its founders, "get software made."



The idea is simple. Anyone with an idea for useful software can
submit it on the site. Others who like it can then pledge money to help
see the vision realized. Developers browsing the site can submit quotes
for creating the software; the one with the best quote after two weeks
is chosen for the job. Those who pledged, meanwhile, get to have a say
in how the product takes form. The New Zealand-based site was launched
in August by three business-minded brothers. They explain: "Being
people with plenty of ideas, we kept wanting to start projects—the kind
we knew people would find interesting. If we could only get people to
pledge to support them ... Then one day it dawned on us that we had to
run the service ourselves."



microPledge currently focuses on open source projects, for which it
receives no payment, but ultimately it plans to diversify to include a
variety of commercial projects and to charge a portion of the funds
pledged. The site also offers a USD 20 "incubator" service to help
protect innovators' ideas. About 160 users and 75 projects have
populated the site so far, and its founders are interested in mutually
beneficial partnerships to help it grow.



In addition to a marketplace for software development, microPledge
reckons its site will come to be viewed as a free market-testing
service to gauge the reception for new software products and features.
Interesting example of the intention economy at work: when consumers
have to put their money where their mouth is, it's a pretty good bet
you can believe what they say. Time to consider how micro-pledging
could be applied to your industry. If not to raise funds, then at least
to find out what your customers really want.


Article link

The Top 5 Viral Facebook Techniques

The dynamic of Facebook application marketing is rapidly changing.
What once was an environment in which your application was practically
guaranteed to go viral has shifted to one in which you need to come up
with creative ways of marketing your application. The MyBucks application
is a perfect example of this. After Aryeh Goldsmith (the creator of the
MyBucks application) added the “Top Referrers” feature, the application
immediately turned viral. After seeing all the applications go viral I
have decided to do a brief overview of a few key features that help
your application go viral. While this is not an exhaustive list, it
covers the majority of tricks of the trade that are currently being
used.


  • Forced Invite - The first instance that I saw this implemented was by David Gentzel when he launched the Happy Hour application.
    Within a matter of weeks the application has already become the 13th
    most popular application on Facebook, which is no easy feat. This
    method was duplicated by other applications with varying success within
    a matter of hours. What exactly is this method you ask? As soon as
    someone decides to add the application they are forced to invite 10
    friends. This is a risky tactic but David Gentzel was able to leverage
    his other highly popular applications to drive traffic to this
    application. Personally, I don’t recommend this tactic. It is a brute
    force method that can be used by those with popular applications that
    don’t have rich feature sets. I have a feeling that most happy hour
    users don’t return to the app on a daily basis, but then again I don’t
    have statistics to back that up.
  • Invite after action - When the Facebook platform first
    launched there were no restrictions as to how many people an
    application user could invite per day. As a result many of the initial
    applications that took advantage of the checkbox invite forms grew
    rapidly. Since the launch, there is now a limit of 10 friends per day
    by each application user. While it has been significantly limited by
    Facebook, it is still a useful form of marketing. When building your
    application you should definitely come up with an effective way of
    allowing users to invite other people.
  • News feed - The news feed is the most powerful component
    of Facebook. Period. There are two ways that applications can leverage
    the news feed. The first is naturally built in. Most of the time, when
    a user adds an application it is displayed in their friends’ news
    feeds. While it is not a guarantee that it will show up in other
    people’s news feeds (due to a number of factors pertaining to news feed
    optimization), this is the primary thing that helps applications spread
    virally. When I launched my Bush Countdown clock
    I added no viral components and relied completely on people’s news
    feeds. This has spread the application to close to 8,500 users. While
    not spectacular, it is hardly something to sneeze at. The second way of
    using a news feed is by leveraging the news feed API calls that
    Facebook has provided. Within reason, you can regularly post news items
    to a user’s mini-feed within their profile. A small percentage of the
    time that item will end up on their friends’ news feeds. While this is
    severely limited, at least you can get it on to your users’ mini-feeds.
    Every form of exposure you can get (within reason) for your
    application, you should strive for.
  • Referrals/Giveaways - This is the most recent form of
    viral marketing on Facebook. I am seeing a number of applications
    adopting this technique. The referrals tactic is to come up with an
    effective way of encouraging your applications users to market your
    application for you. They can market your application on blogs,
    websites, forums, Facebook walls, messages to friends and more. The
    bottom line is that you end up with your application users being the
    ones that get scrappy with the marketing, not you. Giveaways are
    usually combined with this to provide an incentive for users to promote
    your application. There is a risk though in making your application
    look cheap, but for now I think this is a great technique.
  • One-on-One - Used alone, this technique may not result in
    viral growth of your application but combining this technique with one
    of the others I have listed can result in exceptional results. The
    concept is straight forward. Reach out to people that you think will
    find your application useful. This technique is more for targeted
    applications, not for generic applications such as poke wars or zombie
    biting or any of the other generic applications out there. Reach out to
    those individuals that you think will benefit from your application and
    then follow-up with them once they’ve added it. The result is
    passionate users that become your own brand evangelists. This technique
    has been used by countless communities to help generate passionate
    users. If you nurture your application users you will see positive
    results in the long-term.

While each of these techniques can provide varying results, all of
them are targeted at creating the viral effect. Ultimately that is what
makes the Facebook platform so appealing currently. You can rapidly
reach thousands to millions of individuals in a short span of time at
minimal cost. The problem with these viral techniques are that many of
them will become practically useless soon after I release this post.
That is the nature of viral marketing. Viral marketing techniques lose
their appeal after they become adopted by the masses. While the
techniques that have been used until now are far from revolutionary, I
have a feeling that we will begin to see truly creative techniques in
the coming months.

Article Link

The Hidden Cost of Facebook Applications

Every day I talk with clients and prospective clients about
developing Facebook applications and the best way to go about it. The
reality of the matter is that unless you have some insanely catchy idea
that naturally goes viral, chances are you are going to need some help.
That help comes in the form of marketing. All the larger applications
have been launching new apps which they the cross promote. For all the
remaining applications (who now make up the majority), it is frequently
close to impossible to gain significant traction.


While minimal traffic on Facebook still amounts to more than most
websites drive in the first day, there is nothing that can be done to
increase traffic except for the following:


  • Build in viral features (invites, news feed postings, catchy profile boxes … see top 5 viral techniques)
  • Invite all of your friends on a daily basis
  • Share the about page of your application so that it ends up in your news feed
  • Pay for advertising

Aside from that there is not much else you can do. This contrasts to
websites which once picked up by search engines can immediately start
getting traffic and as content is added can grow in size. On this blog
for instance, over 50 percent of my traffic comes from search engines.
This is not the case for Facebook applications since they can’t be
crawled. The result?


As the application market becomes saturated it is going to become
increasingly challenging to make your application go viral. Not that it
wasn’t already challenging to make things go viral (see the book “Made to Stick“),
but without search engines, driving traffic suddenly became a lot more
expensive. In contrast to a website, your only hope of success is
having your application go viral. While your odds of going viral are
significantly increased on Facebook, I question the long-term
sustainability. The number of applications that go viral without the
assistance of marketing are going to decrease significantly in a short
period of time. What do you think?

Article Link

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The Startup King's new gig

Bill Gross has more than 50 disruptive
Internet companies under his belt. Now he's looking for moneymaking
opportunities in the physical world.


By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 editor-at-large

(Business
2.0 Magazine) -- Some people can't stop thinking about food. Bill Gross
can't stop thinking about new businesses. One of the world's great
serial entrepreneurs, he's launched more than 50 startups through
Idealab, his incubator in Pasadena, Calif. His track record includes
both winners (CitySearch, Cooking.com, NetZero/United Online) and
losers (eToys, Eve.com, Free-PC). But he's best known for inventing the
pay-per-click advertising model behind Overture Services (formerly
GoTo.com), the pioneering search engine he sold to Yahoo! in 2003 for
$1.6 billion.

Now, after more than a decade of launching
dotcoms, Gross has rediscovered the pleasures - and profitability - of
the physical world. Idealab's current lineup is crowded with companies
that make actual products: robots, 3-D printers, electric cars, rooftop
solar collectors. As Gross puts it, he's much more interested today in
"atoms businesses" than "bits businesses." He recently sat down with
Business 2.0 Editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld to talk about why.

Article Link

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Facebook graduating on

Facebook - graduating on




Few websites can reach the status of Google and have their name be used
as multiple parts of speech. But "Facebook Friends" from around the
world have been "Facebook-ing" each other—sharing photos, keeping in
touch, and finding long-lost friends—via the uber-popular social
networking site since it was founded in 2004.
















Originally only available to college students, Facebook opened its
doors to high schoolers in September 2005, then to work networks in May
2006, and finally, in September 2006, to anyone and everyone. Now, the
site has more than 31 million active users and is growing at a rate
three times that of rival social networking website MySpace.com.
Facebook's constant growth and popularity with a younger audience gives
the site a reputation that is hip, welcoming, and increasingly huge.

Article Link

Thursday, September 20, 2007

12 Year Old Gets $6.5M for Gaming Company

A Silicon Valley company co-founded by a 12-year-old has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital.
PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a
technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It
calls itself the first "publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network."
Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate
about software that can make the game experience more "rewarding," and
that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it
from earnings made from selling online game items he won."

Article Link

Monday, September 17, 2007

Club Penguin: Re-imaging Game Mechanics With Tip The Iceberg

club penguin

The first thing you notice is that everyone is really
dressed up. When you click on another penguin, their “Player Card”
appears. This shows all of the pins, hats, props, and accessories that
the penguin has acquired by completing various missions and shopping at
various stores. The net result is that a lot of penguins end up looking
like Elton John. (As Emily Yoffe points out, you must have a paid
subscription to Club Penguin to properly outfit your penguin.) Many
initial penguin-to-penguin comments are sartorial in nature, such as
“Where did you get that hat?” or “Nice outfit.” A common opener,
though, is the one that the pink penguin directed my way: “boy or girl?”


…Going to someone’s igloo usually means admiring how they’ve
decorated it with three flatscreen TVs, an aquarium, and a drum set.
You might do a little dancing to the booming rock soundtrack (penguins
can acquire special dance moves) and then go your separate ways. After
all, there are constant parties to attend.


…The iceberg is the site of Club Penguin’s most resilient urban
legend: If enough penguins gather on one side of the iceberg, it will
tip… The iceberg has never tipped, yet the idea will not die. If you
hang around for a bit, a penguin might show up and start drilling, or a
penguin would appear and shout, “TIP THE ICEBERG,” and start corralling
everyone to one side. One tipping theory held that all penguins on the
iceberg had to be the same color, leading to some incidents of
colorism: “Get out of here blue!” A legend like this is a sign of a
healthy game. Players are so invested in trying to figure out how the
world works that they go beyond what the designers have intended.

Article Link

Friday, September 14, 2007

Raising Money

One of the primary directives of a non-profit organization is to raise money. For accedited US non-profits Firstgiving (which we profiled yesterday),
makes it easy for members of your organization to set up donation pages
and collect donations from friends, family, colleagues -- or total
strangers. Non-profit groups can also use the service to manage fund
drives of their own.



Fundable and ChipIn are two other fundraising web applications that work very well for charities that are not accredited non-profit organizations.



There are a large number of for-pay payment processing solutions --
many of which include offline software packages as part of the product.
PaySimple is one of the more affordable packages, costing not too much more than a normal merchant account. Blackbaud is one of the more well-known enterprise solutions for non-profit fundraising (they offer other services as well, such as CRM).

Article Link

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Lending Club Breaks $1 Million, Expanding

lendingclub.pngLending Club, the Facebook exclusive person-to-person lending service has passed the $1 million mark in loans to Facebook users.

The milestone comes just short of 3 months since the the site hit the $100,000 mark, and 3 1/2 months since going live as an original Facebook Platform partner.


Lending Club will also announce today that it is expanding beyond
Facebook and will now offer similar ways to connect borrowers and
lenders through thousands of alumni associations and professional
organizations via LendingClub.com.


The new site includes tools for building diversified loan portfolios
composed of pieces of 20 to 30 individual loans, hosts a forum for
financial experts to share their knowledge with the Lending Club
community, and “Better Rates Together,” a blog community that features
expert advice on P2P lending and personal finance.


Lending Club recently secured $10.26M in Series A financing led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Article Link

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

In Online World, Pocket Change Is Not Easily Spent

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26 — The idea of micropayments — charging Web
users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content — was
essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In
December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s
interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people
still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea.
Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because “users hate
them.”

But wait. Amid the disdain, and without many
people noticing, micropayments have arrived — just not in the way they
were originally envisioned. The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes
is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small
Web sites earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some
stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.

Article Link

Monetizing YouTube - What About Micropayment Downloads?

Could micropayments be the key to monetizing YouTube? The New York Times has an interesting article
today about the history and future of micropayments. "In December 2000,
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s
interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people
still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea," writes the
Times. "Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because 'users hate them.'"



But, says the paper, micropayments are here, just not in the form we
initially thought. Dot-com flameouts like BitPass, DigiCash, and
Peppercoin all tried various methods of micropayments with the hope
that content publishers would be able to charge a few cents to a few
dollars for articles, reports, images, and other downloads. For the
consumer, most of these schemes worked like a prepaid calling card --
load money into your account and buy stuff with credits.


"But
wait. Amid the disdain, and without many people noticing, micropayments
have arrived -- just not in the way they were originally envisioned.
The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes is a micropayment. So are the
tiny amounts that some operators of small Web sites earn whenever
someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography
companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each."



Certainly, it is far too early to judge YouTube's just launched video overlay ads, but early user reviews are mixed, at best. Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker estimates (after some revised math) that YouTube's ads will pull in between $75 and $189 million gross revenue per year -- which, with the astronomical cost of streaming video, won't really cut it.



So what about charging small amounts for high quality, downloadable
versions of commercial content on YouTube as a way to bring in money?
Sure, Google already tried that with Google Video, and shut that service down
citing an "effort to improve all Google services." But Apple has had a
lot of success selling TV shows and movies (they sold a million of them
in the first 20 days, and move tens of millions of video downloads per
year through iTunes), so the model is sustainable.



YouTube is already the web's most recognizable video brand, and Google could take pains not to repeat the mistakes they made
when launching the Google Video Store a year and half ago. This also
seems like a good opportunity to tie in another Google service,
Checkout, and put some heat on PayPal, which has become the web's most
successful micropayment processor (though it is also used for
macropayments).



YouTube could further offer a way for user generated content
creators to monetize content other than ads. While it's unlikely that
people would pay for single episodes of Lonelygirl15, die-hard fans of
the web show might pay a nominal fee for high quality, DVD-burnable
downloads of the entire series. Similarly, NBC has had great success
with their YouTube channel showing clips of Saturday Night Live
(including owning the 5th most watched all time), and they could use that popularity to sell DVDs like "The Best of Chris Farley" in a YouTube download store.



The biggest hurdle to a download store would be DRM. Apple has had
some success convincing music labels to sell songs sans-DRM, but their
video downloads are annoyingly locked into iTunes (I'm still sore I
can't burn my 2006 Fiesta Bowl download to DVD). Any download service
that can figure out how to convince the studios to do away with DRM --
or at least make it a whole lot less intrusive -- will be an instant
hit with users.

Article Link

Sunday, August 26, 2007

The Facebook economy

Four ways to make money

1: Sell ads

The play

Just
about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with
the biggest audiences will earn serious money. Several easy-to-use ad
networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.(See
"Tools," below.)

The front-runners

Graffiti (5.9 million users). This highly viral drawing tool spread quickly because of its simplicity and originality.

iLike (5.4 million users). Users can set up their music and video libraries in mere minutes.

The Simpsons Photos, Quotes, and Trivia (60,000 users). Pearls of wisdom from the first family of Springfield.

The payoff

Apps
currently generate less than $1 for every 1,000 pageviews. But that
amount will likely increase as demographic targeting becomes more
refined and the ad models move from simply racking up pageviews to
measuring users' engagement.

Tricks of the trade

1.
Establish your base. Hold off on serving ads until you have at least
10,000 users. Bombarding users with too much advertising can scare them
away and hurt your growth in the long run.

2. Test different ad
networks. Putting up ads is a simple cut-and-paste operation, so you
can afford to be choosy and pick the network that gives you the best
deal.

3. Don't clutter up app pages. "This is definitely a
challenge for developers," says Mark Kantor, one of three developers
behind Graffiti. "The most important thing is to preserve user
experience."

4. Renegotiate as you grow. Demand a bigger cut of
the revenue share as your traffic jumps. Says Kantor, "It might be
better to go with a small ad network if you think you'll stand out."

Tools

Dozens of ad networks are cropping up to serve the Facebook developers. Here are a few.

1.
Lookery (lookery.com). This new Facebook-specific ad network aims to
offer developers demographic profiles of their user bases. More
targeted advertising could soon fetch a higher price.

2.
Userplane (userplane.com). AOL-owned Userplane pays per minute of
exposure rather than just per pageview, so it's good for applications
like games that keep users highly engaged.

3. Google AdSense. Not new, but many developers consider it the best means of supplying relevant ads.

2: Attract sponsors

The play

Advertisers
are already sponsoring apps. Besides being widely used, your
application needs to offer companies a natural way to interact with
their customers.

The front-runners

Likeness (2.9
million users). Offers quizzes that generate top-10 lists - an ideal
branding vehicle - and matches them with those of friends with similar
preferences.

FoodFight (2 million users). Virtual lunch money
buys you food to throw at friends. Next up on its menu: chicken wings
from a major food chain.

HotLists (1.6 million users). This app
lets users define their personas by posting brands' logos, cleverly
dubbed "stylepix," on their profiles.

The payoff

Building
direct relationships with brands takes more time and effort, but it
means higher-quality advertising and more control over how your users
interact with it. Expect to earn multiple-dollar CPMs instead of the
pocket change you'd get from the ad networks.

Tricks of the trade

1.
Don't pitch big brands without big numbers. You'll need a large traffic
base - at least a few million users - before top brands will pay
attention.

2. Know who's looking at your pages and why. Analyze
your user demographics so you can pitch your audience effectively to
sponsors.(See "Tools," below.)

3. Let your users do the work. Incorporate brands that your users identify with, and they'll willingly spread the word.

4. Don't overdo it. Too much brand presence will scare away Facebook's sometimes advertising-averse audience.

Tools

Where to find help analyzing your traffic and users.

1.
Google Analytics. Embedding Analytics into your apps is easy, and it
churns out useful stats about where users are coming from.

2. Gigya (gigya.com). This startup tracks metrics like app stickiness and user adoption rates.

3.
Appaholic (appaholic.com). This site tracks traffic growth by the hour,
day, or week - critical when launching a new ad campaign.

3: Sell services

The play

As
apps become more about utility and less about fun, opportunities will
arise to sell digital services of lasting value to users. Eventually,
they'll make purchases without leaving their profiles.

The front-runners

Files
(43,000 users). Offered by Box.net, this online file-storage service
turns a Facebook profile into a repository for members' digital media.

Picnik
(206,000 users). A Facebook version of Photoshop.(Hello, Adobe?) Basic
tools are free; advanced features are offered for an additional fee.

The payoff

If
you're selling a real service, then you can have your cake and eat it
too- try selling subscriptions and ads to double-dip on your traffic.

Tricks of the trade

1.
Start with a free version. And make switching to a paid offering an
easy process. Don't force users to leave Facebook to sign up.

2.
Set logical limits. Decide carefully what you'll give for free and what
you won't. And even the freebies must be valuable enough for customers
to be willing to spend their time.

3. Research your price
points. Box.net already had storage plans for businesses and
professionals. But when it moved onto Facebook, the company rethought
its pricing models and created a $25-per-year plan that's comparable to
the cost of an external flash drive - the way most college students
store important files.

4. Be tactful and timely. Box.net alerts
its users when they're nearing their file or storage size limits,
politely reminding them about its for-pay premium service.

Tools

Where to find a platform to process payments.

1. PayPal. A starter plan will cost you 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.

2. Google Checkout. The standard processing fee is 2 percent plus 20 cents per transaction.

3. Facebook. The company is rumored to be launching its own payment platform soon.

4: Sell products

The play

As
Facebook increasingly becomes the center of people's digital lives,
it's also becoming a venue for selling things - digital and otherwise -
to its fast-growing audience.

The front-runners

Amazing Giftbox (127,000 users). Sends virtual Amazon merchandise.

Band Tracker (29,000 users). Searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendors.

Visual CD Rack (20,000 users). Lets users browse and buy music from a virtual CD rack.

The payoff

Most
developers are going the affiliate route, offering product wish lists
and then sending users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Others,
however, are directly selling such items as ringtones and T-shirts.

Tricks of the trade

1.
Be a middleman. iLike makes its music-sampling apps simple and hands
off sales to iTunes or Amazon via affiliate partnerships. Those
directly selling hard goods need to prepare for the complexity of
payment and delivery.

2. Keep it simple. Facebook has not yet
become a place where people are likely to buy, say, a digital camera.
But users are starting to purchase items that don't break the bank and
extend Facebook's utility. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is looking to
sell ringtones and wallpaper on Facebook via custom storefront widgets.
"We don't want to bring people to the store," says XLR8 Mobile CEO
Perry Tell. "We prefer to bring the store to the people."

3.
Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get
there is by offering free samples. Whether it's a digital download of a
song or the image of an item, give your customers a taste of what
they'll get before asking them to commit.

4. Don't rule out the
odd. "Sometimes wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge,"
Tell says. "Everyone is looking for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be
willing to try lots of things."

Tools

1.
Clearspring Technologies. This analytics service tracks exactly who's
downloading an app and what they're buying through it. It also suggests
when to double down on an item or sales approach that is working or,
conversely, kill off those that aren't.

2. Garage Sale. Developers can use this Facebook shopping cart system run by Buy.com, which takes a 5 percent cut of sales.

3. Facebook Marketplace. The largest classified-ads community on the network, it's a good place to monitor buying trends.


Article Link

Friday, August 17, 2007

TripAdvisor Acquires Facebook App Where I’ve Been For $3 Million

TripAdvisor has acquired Facebook Application “Where I’ve Been” for a reported $3 million.whereivebeen.png

Where I’ve Been allows users to share where they have been in the
world from their Facebook profiles and has approximately 2.3 million
users.


Inside Facebook notes that the $3 million purchase price values Where I’ve Been users at around $1.30 each.


The purchase is the first major seven figure acquisition for a
dedicated Facebook only application. Where I’ve Been was recently
included on the TechCrunch interns list of favorite Facebook apps.

Article Link

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Extending Microsoft Money - The Web Needs an Alternative to Paypal

last100 has an interesting post on Microsoft Points,
a kind of virtual currency for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune
Marketplace. In a lot of ways, Microsoft Points act just like real
money and functions in a similar way to Paypal.
Mack D. Male wrote that "if you see a movie you want to buy on Xbox
Live, you just need to make sure you have enough points available in
your account. The main difference, of course, is that you don’t
“purchase” money, but you do purchase Microsoft Points."

Mack says that "Microsoft Points can be purchased online using a
credit card, or from a participating retail location in the form of a
Microsoft Points Card. As with airtime minutes on your mobile phone,
you purchase allotments of points at once, ranging from 400 to 5000
points. The price varies all around the world, but in the United States
80 Microsoft Points is equal to $1. If you live in a country with
government sales tax, you’ll pay that on top of the price of the
points."


The
big question is can Microsoft Points be extended and used across
Windows Live in the near future, as an equivalent to the likes of
eBay's Paypal or Google Checkout? Microsoft blogger Robert McLaws wrote about this idea back in January, and speculated that it might be called Windows Live Payments. This was based on a Bill Gates comment in February, in which Gates hinted that that online micropayments is an area Microsoft will pursue.


As last100 noted, almost all of the major forces in the digital living room have a payments system of some sort. Sony has the PlayStation Network Card, Nintendo has Wii Points, Google has Checkout, and Amazon recently launched FPS.
Sony and Nintendo’s systems are virtual currencies, whereas Google and
Amazon’s are payment services. Microsoft could be the first company to
offer both by opening up Microsoft Points to the world.


Probably the first thing that comes to mind when considering such a
system across Windows Live is: look what happened to Passport.
Microsoft's 90's identity system was a failure, with consumers
ultimately not trusting Microsoft to manage their online identities. So
if users don't trust Microsoft with their ID, what chance they will
trust Microsoft with their money?


We want a Paypal competitor


But I think the micropayments infrastructure is due for a shake-up.
Paypal has gotten almost arrogant of late, with their ridiculously high
fees and honey-catching account structure (tip: don't sign up for a
"premium" account, you end up paying much more in fees than a simple
"personal" account). Google Checkout so far has little to offer
ordinary consumers, so right now Paypal enjoys a virtual monopoly. So I
for one would welcome a Windows Live Payments system. OK, this goes
beyond a virtual currency - which Microsoft Points is right now - but
the opportunity is there to extend into micropayments.


What do you think, will Microsoft Points be used in Windows Live services to enable a micropayments system? Would you use it?


Article Link