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SkimLinks’ Alicia Navarro on helping publishers make money (video)
SkimLinks is a startup that automates the process of creating affiliate links, allowing a publisher to link to a product on a site like Amazon and receive a commission from any resulting sales. It’s facing increased competition from a Google Ventures-backed startup called VigLink, but SkimLinks has been pushing forward too, with new products and plans to expand its presence in the United States. The company is based in London, so the South by Southwest conference in Austin seemed like a good chance to check in with chief executive Alicia Navarro. During our short video interview, Navarro talked about SkimLinks’ mission, its new SkimKit tool (which helps publishers find products that they can write about then monetize through affiliate links), and how the industry is evolving. “SkimLinks’ strategy is very much to innovate in the space that helps editors be more efficient in the content creation process, and to create content that can be very easily monetized in this way,” she said. “SkimKit is part of this innovation process, and we’ve got a lot more coming that will take that step even further.” Tags: sxsw Companies: Skimlinks People: Alicia Navarro
Radian6 caps off first year in the black, as social media becomes profitable
An early venture-backed player in the social media marketing space is seeing its foresight pay off. Radian6, a company that helps brands manage online conversations across the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook, capped off its first profitable year and is looking to increase its research and development spending by 50 percent this year. Based far, far away from Silicon Valley in New Brunswick, Canada, the company built a roster of 1,300 clients including MTV, Dell and Walmart as these companies have started spending on serious experimentation with social media marketing. In the last quarter, the company’s customer list grew by a third. “By the end of 2010, there won’t be many brands that don’t have some kind of solution,” said chief executive Marcel LeBrun. “The new paradigm is about building communities and relationship capital around a brand.” Indeed, the largest companies like Facebook and Twitter perceive themselves as a gateway for advertisers to influence consumers earlier in the buying cycle. Facebook is ramping up hiring and spending to boost its brand and self-serve ad offerings while Twitter is anticipated to launch its own advertising network next month. Initially, Radian6 focused on monitoring conversations in the blogosphere, well before it was clear that Twitter and Facebook would be the dominant spaces for social sharing and communication. The company, which now has 90 employees, raised $4 million in 2006 and then another $5.5 million two years later from investors including BCE Capital, Brightspark Ventures and BDC Venture Capital. “While we didn’t necessarily know which platform was going to take off, we knew that the way people were getting information and acting on it was shifting from institutions to personal social networks,” he said. “What we didn’t anticipate was how deep in the enterprise these changes would affect every professional.” The company built a set of tools to help companies track and analyze mentions
LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhone
There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location. In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a list of anyone else who also has LoKast open in your proximity (about 300 feet). When you click on their profile, you can see and download any content they’ve uploaded for sharing, including contacts, photos, songs, videos, and links. For example, if you’re at a conference, you might share the contact information of yourself and business partners, so anyone else at the conference knows how to reach you. Or if you’re at a concert, you could bring a favorite playlist, which all the other concert attendees would be able to view. And users could tailor the content they’re sharing to the occasion. Co-founder Boris Bogatin describes LoKast as a way to link our online and physical activities. “We’re doing all this internet stuff, we do internet or we do physical, but we don’t do both,” Bogatin said. “But the physical stuff is so powerful and rich.” Philadelphia-based NearVerse has paid particular attention to the music side of the app. In most cases, you’re not sharing complete songs, but rather short clips and a link to purchase the song on iTunes. But musicians can also create accounts on LoKast where they make their songs available for free download. So if a band threw a promotional concert, they wouldn’t have to give out demo CDs. Instead they just ask everyone to download the songs from their LoKast portal. Then when all those fans wgo to other events, they could offer those songs as free downloads to other people, allowing the music to spread. As part of its launch, NearVerse is announcing partnerships with music distribut
Google Blogger gives itself a touch-up with template designer
Google Blogger, a venerable player in the space after celebrating its 10th birthday last fall, is giving itself a touchup. The company has launched Blogger Template Designer, which gives users a lot more freedom to design the look and feel of their Google-hosted blogs. Users can change colors, titles, background images from hundreds of stock photos and there’s a drag-and-drop interface to shuffle pieces of the layout. There are 15 templates to start with and custom blog layouts with one, two or three columns. “Blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice,” said the company in a statement. It’s a much-needed overhaul for the service, which attracts 300 million readers a month. Younger upstarts in the microblogging space like Union Square Ventures-backed Tumblr gained traction in part they’ve focus on elegant design. Tags: blogs, design, google blogger Companies: Google
Redbeacon socializes local service listings
Redbeacon, a startup that helps you find local service providers, has been pretty quiet since it won the top prize at the TechCrunch50 conference last September. Co-founder Ethan Anderson told me that’s intentional — the San Mateo, Calif. company has been keeping its head down as it works out the early kinks. Now Redbeacon is announcing a wave of new features, most notably integration with Facebook. On Redbeacon, when you need a service (say a repairperson, or a cleaner, or a mover) you post a listing specifying the job and the window of time when it needs to be done. Different providers can bid on the job, and you choose from the bids based on the price, the providers’ profiles, and the ratings they’ve received from past customers. Now, with the new Facebook integration, users can share their service listings with friends. Your friends can click through your news feed to Redbeacon, where they can comment on the service providers who have bid on your listing and can also recommend other providers who might be good for the job. Redbeacon uses Facebook Connect to identify which friend made which comment, so service providers aren’t sneaking in to boost their own ratings. Obviously, this benefits Redbeacon by raising its visibility whenever anyone uses the site and is willing to share that on Facebook. But it should also benefit users, since you probably care more about what a friend says about a local business than some random person on the Internet. The company’s other announcement is a partnership with BigTent, a company that offers tools for creating forums and other group features. BigTent apparently has a big audience among mothers’ groups, so now those mothers’ group sites will feature links to a Redbeacon page co-branded with BigTent. That page will include all the normal Redbeacon features and will also allow BigTent members to recommend and comment on service providers. There are more distribution deals in the works, Anderson said, which shoul
Site creation startup Weebly opens up to user-designed themes
Today, user-friendly web site builder Weebly is launching what it says has been its No. 1 most-requested feature: The ability for users and third-party designers to create themes for Weebly web sites and have them listed in the general catalog for any one of the service’s 3.5 million users to choose. Not only can anyone submit a theme to the Weebly listing now (as long as it is approved), users can rate and comment on themes, provide feedback to their creators, and vote up the most popular selections. In this way, Weebly’s theme catalog will be similar to Firefox’s listing of applications and personas, making it easier for others to sort and decide between them. All designs, sent as .PSD files, will be approved individually by the Weebly team. But this opens up the site to much more public participation. The company hopes that it will create a sense of community among its users, instead of having them all working on their own individual projects. In order to make a splash with the launch of this new feature, Weebly is hosting a theme design contest. The grand prize winner will receive $10,000; second prize will get $2,000; and third prize will get $1,000. The deadline for entries is April 30, 2010. Submissions will be judged by a panel of six celebrity designers, including Michal Cronan (the man who named Tivo and the Amazon Kindle), Scott Thomas (official designer for the Obama campaign in 2008), Jason Putorti (former lead designer at Mint.com), and Andrew Wilkinson (founder of MetaLab). This is the second big development for Weebly in the last two weeks. Late last month, the site launched versions of its services in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese to give the company a wider global presence. Weebly has raised about $670,000 from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures and Y Combinator. Here is a short video demonstrating how the new theme tools work: Companies: Weebly
Bazaar Labs launches Miso, a Foursquare-style app for TV and movies
A startup called Bazaar Labs just released a new app called Miso, way to share what movies and TV shows you’re watching with your friends. Like the company’s last app, FlixUp, this is a movie-focused spin on an existing social service. The idea is that instead of sharing your location with your friends, like you do on Foursquare, you use Miso to share what movie or TV show you’re watching. Just as in Foursquare, you “check-in” — in this case you’re identifying a show or movie. Just as in Foursquare, you can add a comment, and you can win badges based on different kinds of check-ins. Now, many of my friends in Foursquare already announce what movie they’re watching when they check-in at a theater, and the app also rewards you with the “Zoetrope” badge when you check-in at multiple theaters. But Miso is taking a minor use case and fleshing it out into a full-blown app — in the same way that Twitter allows discussion of movies but isn’t ideal for movie-centric discussions, Miso assumes there are Foursquare users who want want a richer social/gaming experience around this specific topic Somrat Niyogi, chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco-based Bazaar Labs, said his team has spent a lot of time thinking about the gaming mechanics that best fit a movie and TV audience — presumably that’s why he kept pestering me on Twitter about the different Foursquare badges. One of the keys, he said, is to achieve a balance between obvious badges that you know how to win, and other badges that surprise you. (For more on this topic, you can see Niyogi’s thoughts on winning Foursquare’s “Douchebag” badge here.) You can download the app here. A new version should go live sometime this week, before the South by Southwest conference, with the ability to include your location in your check-in. You can auto-follow your friends from Facebook, and Niyogi said he will add similar capabilities for Twitter and your phone contacts list. The app is fre
Daily Show’s Jon Stewart gives ChatRoulette a spin
Daily Show host Jon Stewart did a take on ChatRoulette, the video chat phenomenon started by a 17-year-old in Moscow, and ran into its two main kinds of users — reporters and, er, body parts. We’ve tried ChatRoulette here at VentureBeat and the site has grown to hosting more than 50,000 anonymous chat partners simultaneously on busy nights. ChatRoulette is a site where you get paired with a random video chat partner from somewhere around the world. It attracts lots of curious users and inevitably, perverts. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Tech-Talch – Chatroulette www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform Tags: chatroulette People: jon stewart
Round-up: Topeka, Kansas dubs itself Google, Slide has a resurgence
Here’s the latest action: CereProc helps give Roger Ebert his voice back: The company used old recordings of the film critic and text-to-speech technology to help recreate Ebert’s voice after he lost it to cancer surgery. Key Intel exec has stroke and takes a leave of absence: Sean Maloney, one of Intel’s top three executives below CEO Paul Otellini, suffered a stroke at home and will take a leave of absence. Hot diggity! $156,000 in annualized revenue makes big headlines: TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb say that Edward Kim’s Car Locator Android app is proof that you can make riches off Google’s mobile platform. The developer said he’s earning about $13,000 a month from the app, making for $156,000 in yearly income if he can keep up the pace. Topeka tries to woo the search giant by renaming itself Google, Kansas: In a bid to bring Google’s experiment with ultra-high speed broadband networks to the city, the government decided to temporarily rename itself after the company for a month. Slide posts a strong February: The early leader in social apps before Zynga started hogging the spotlight looks like it may be having a Renaissance. In the last two weeks, the company has doubled its monthly active users to 40 million users, according to Inside Social Games. Facebook’s recent redesign helped while Slide’s new focus on virtual goods helped its users earn $160,000 in January. Google tries to assuage privacy concerns around Chrome: The company highlighted incognito mode, which lets users surf the web without recording their browsing history and deletes all new cookies once incognito windows are closed. Companies: cereproc, Google, Slide
Strings: A recommendation engine that’s transparent about its data mining
It’s no secret that companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google study our behavior to recommend products or push advertising our way. A Bellevue, Washington-based company called Strings is trying to do the exactly that, but with very explicit user permission. Users can track the books they buy on Amazon, songs they enjoy on iTunes or other types of behavior on hundreds of other web sites. Combined with aggregated, anonymized data from other users, Strings can suggest products a person might like using a combination of techniques including collaborative filtering. The product is designed to passively follow online activity like products you browse on Neiman Marcus’s Web site, provided you’ve activated Strings to track you on that property. You can fine-tune Strings to follow different kinds of behavior, whether it’s passive browsing or active behavior “starring”, “liking” or buying items. Users pick the online sites they want to monitor themselves on, and Strings doesn’t reveal information to advertisers. The company earns revenue through affiliate fees when it successfully recommends products that consumers later buy. Strings also has FriendFeed-style sharing, so you can send a feed of items you like to friends on the site. There are also granular privacy controls to manage who sees what. “We believe that we’re an advocate for consumers. That’s precisely the reason we’re being upfront about tracking and why we offer people control over their data,” said Edward Balassanian, Strings’ chief executive and founder. The company has been self-funded to date. Strings is part of a wave of companies like Blippy and Foursquare that try to incentivize and make users feel comfortable sharing their behavior. Provided you feel safe with this type of sharing, Strings might offer useful recommendations for books, music and all sorts of other products. If you’re privacy paranoid, then most online services have some sort of risk, and Strings tries to
