TalkLocal

Marchex's Acquisition of Voicestar to Set Voicestar Apart in the Call Tracking Industry

Marchex's acquisition of Voicestar  enables Voicestar to further differentiate itself from competitors in the Call Tracking industry. Voicestar's media platform clients have tens of thousands of advertisers, many of whom are local yellowpage type advertisers. Marchex has been building content and growing local search traffic across it's 150K + network of domains many of which are local in nature, not to mention all of the ZIPcode.net sites such as 44145.net , go ahead and type in your zipcode follwed by .net and check out the Marchex platform.

The Marchex network of local eyeballs will enable Voicestar to provide their media clients with the option of selling their advertisers more phone leads on top of what they already provide. This further cements the relationship between Voicestar and their media clients, but also allows media clients to be heroes in delivering their advertisers with highly coveted and targeted phone leads.

Voicestar's Call Tracking, Call Measurement Services

Contact Voicestar today !

 

•  Unique Tracking Phone Numbers – Local or Toll Free (Same Rate)
• Call Recording
• Weighted Ringing, Stepped Ringing, Multi Ringing
• Voicestar Voicemail
• Whisper Technology
• Advanced Call Routing
• Real Time metrics and Analytics- Emailable Reports
• Java Script and Proxy- Dynamic Number insertion/rewrite technology
• Click-to-Call
• Form-to-Phone
• VXML Routing of calls
• Detailed Reverse # Lookup 

Contact Voicestar today: 1-800-250-3707

Disconnected Phone Number Re-routing

I heard recently that there are millions of business phone numbers a year that get disconnected, yet calls still happen to many of those #'s because they were listed in the yellowpages or people had the numbers written down or saved somewhere. There should be a way to redirect those calls to similar businesses in the same geographic area. The carrier should know exactly the category and type of business and should be able to get an appropriate business # to re-route the call to. Sounds like a great pay per call revenue generating strategy for somebody. I wonder if there is a way for Voicestar to strike deals with carriers/phone companies to port their #'s into our call tracking platform and also populate our system with the new business and their ring to number. Now the call can be tracked, call recording can happen, reverse # lookup, after hours forwarding, etc as well as the phone company or Voicestar could charge a Per Call fee. HMMMMM.

Call Tracking Explained

Click to Call by Google?

So what is Pay Per Call anyway? Pay Per Call means just what it says, you pay to make your phone ring. Any business that gets business by the phone or can get business started over the phone is a good candidate for using Pay Per Call services. Such target businesses would be direct response advertisers such as:

Dealerships (Automotive, Motorcycle, Boating, Heavy Equipment etc.

Mortgage

Real Estate

Financial/Brokerage/Banking

Insurance

Travel

Hospitality

Education (All Colleges and Learning Centers)

Home Services (Sattelite/Cable, Plumbing, Construction, Cleaning, Electrician.

Voicestar is a Pay Per Call platform company, they do not sell to direct advertisers, but they sell to the marketers, publishers and media companies for businesses looking to make their phone ring. Voicestar sells a private label call tracking platform that allows publishers and SEO/SEM marketers to run there own Pay Per Call call tracking platform and generate calls to clients through their traffic generation strategies. Recently Voicestar was acquired by Marchex(MCHX), Marchex has a large portfolio of local specific domain names and other portals that will eventually drive phone leads up into Voicestar's platform so that the Voicestar Publisher/Media company can then sell those phone calls to their Pay Per call clients, thus enhancing their ability to drive phone calls for their clients. The Pay Per Call industry is just heating up and Voicestar and Marchex are positioned to be a strong player.

If you drive clicks for your clients or you own an online directory site or a site where you provide mini-sites or profile pages for clients, then Voicestar's Dynamic Number Rewrite Technology may be for you. Voicestar has a solution that allows SEM/SEO marketers to have the phone numbers on their clients' web pages/landing pages to be swapped out to call tracking phone numbers before a visitor gets to the page. If the visitor makes a phone call you can take credit for the call and provide your client with a full call tracking for each call that includes recording of the call, reverse number lookup, advanced call routing, whisper tones, after hours play files and many more features. Now you can show a client exactly how effective they are at handling their phone leads.In the past as an SEO/SEM firm you could obviously prove how many clicks that you drove for a client or how many forms were filled out, but if your visitors picked up the phone and called a client, could you prove to your client that the call resulted from your paid or organic search marketing efforts?? Well, now you can.

The Voicestar solution allows you to track calls from organic listings or paid listings down to the keyword or search phrase. Many SEO/SEM firms use the Voicestar platform as a revenue stream, because they are charged for minutes of usage and can charge clients on a per call basis, the per call charges range between $2.00 and $100.00 depending on the value of the leads in the vertical. 

For online directory owners that charge a monthly or yearly listing fee, the Number Replacement Technology is an awesome way to take credit for the phone calls that you may already be delivering. If as a directory owner you allow visitors to click from your site to get to a client's site, you can have the phone numbers on the client's site swapped to call tracking numbers "On the Fly". Directory owners also would just replace the client's numbers in the directory as well with call tracking numbers. A perfect example of this revenue bleed that is happening in an online directory site is Wholesalecentral.com they don't take credit for the phone calls that happen on their directory and they can't take credit for the calls that result from their client's websites when they drive a buyer there. I've called Woody Sumner and Lisa Rioni, let's hope they take a look at the opportunity. Not only could Woody Sumner use the Voicestar call tracking in his online directory business, but he could also provide the tracking numbers for the hundreds of print advertisers as well, so that they could place the phone numbers in their print ads and track performance and record call quality. 

I have taken a sales director position with Voicestar, a call tracking company that was recently purchased by Marchex (MCHX). Voicestar provides SEM/SEO agencies, Lead Generation agencies, Direct Marketers, Magazine and Directory Publishers, as well as Online and Offline YellowPage Directories, with a private labeled call tracking platform where they can provision local and toll free tracking phone numbers in real time and provide them for their clients and their marketing campaigns. The phone numbers can provide call recording, reverse number lookup and advanced routing techniques, all allowing our platform clients to prove to their clients the amount and effectiveness of all the phone calls they send for them, as well as charge them per call if they wish. Call me at  800-250-3707, to discuss. Tony Colan.

I have finally launched FranchiseNetworks.com FranchiseNetworks is a Business Opportunity Search Engine that helps opportunity seekers looking to buy a franchise or start a business opportuntiy, connect directly with the offerings available without having to muddle through the cluttered spam filled results at Google or get sidetracked by a broker site trying to collect your info and sell it to 5 different franchisors. FranchiseNetworks will also have a Business Opportunity Weblog where discussion will take place on the topic of business opportunities and franchise opportunities.

Popular categories so far have been: Business Opportunities  and Food Franchises

I really believe the future of social networks is on the handset. Especially when you can tie in geo location services in a safe way. MeetMoi is a location based mobile dating company. Basically you create a profile and then let other singles in the area know you are available. I also imagine it would work well in bars or nightclubs. I'm also thinking that it could be used as a way to notify businesses of your wants and needs and the savvy ones will find you to service you on the run.

 

It's an easy way to add interactivity (zoom, sharing, captions, etc.) to your pictures. You can also optionally add advertising to your pictures to make money.

glumbert.com - Shift Happens

Web 3.0 is a shift from pure algorithmic search to Social Search, where the web is a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. It is about taking 1.0 and 2.0 and making something useful and productive where humans are the algorithm and the more diverse and large the participation, the better the experience will become.

Mozilla Labs announced a new browser based social networking idea called the Coop. Mozilla says the motivation behind the project is:

"that the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link. It's done over IM, email, weblogs, RSS feeds from aggregator sites, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and even over the phone. The desire is the same: "hey, friend, go check out this neat thing and then let's talk about it!" The goal of The Coop is to ease this interaction, and merge it with similar tools provided by a large number of popular web services."

OpenID is a decentralized sign-on system that can be used on Internet websites for signing on with a central username and password from another site that supports OpenID. It gains relevance especially in terms of social networking sites such as Myspace, FaceBook, Bebo, etc. One could be able to log on to FaceBook with their Myspace Logon info., a persons total online identity could be immediately transferred across to the new social networking site. With all the social flavors developing, its getting more difficult to remember all sign ons as well as tedious to fill out identities. What I see developing in social networking sites is some consolidation and more collaboration, we'll see. Check out the example in Video below:

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as the following:

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a philosophy,^[2] a set of design principles,^[3] collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that have yet to be implemented or realized.^[4] Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications.^[5] Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). All of which are intended to formally describe concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Basically, I think users in a tagging,voting, user generated world will create awesome content that beats the content returned by a search algorithm like Google's. If one million people are building a website in real time on a specific topic, how good will that website be compared to what shows in Google's results right now. We the people are the creators of Web 3.0 and the best content on the planet, the only question that remains is if we will be smart enough to get paid for it.

From my buddy at AT&T:

It's official - the carriers are not making money operating Internet backbones.

Why should you care? Because defying the laws of economics is a bit like defying the law of gravity -- it appears to work for a while, but you're in for an unpleasant surprise at the end.
Here's the issue: The carriers currently running Internet backbones are subsidising that service from other offerings. Competitive pressures and new technologies, however, are driving the price of these offerings down -- at the same time that IPTV, Internet-based video on demand, and multimedia interactive games are driving Internet bandwidth requirements dramatically up. As a result, carriers will need to beef up their networks to handle the capacity.
And where's the financing for that investment coming from?
There are a couple of possible scenarios. Carriers could fund Internet-backbone investments from the pockets of their customers, but there are signs that gravy train is slowing to a stall. Enterprise users quite rightly object to paying top dollar for network services -- particularly in an environment where Internet services (for the present at least) are far cheaper and almost equally reliable. And consumers are already screaming about the "high" cost of broadband services.
Another option is for carriers to put in place a peering exchange -- similar to stock market trading exchanges -- that lets them pass traffic from one backbone to another at fair market rates. Currently, peering arrangements are one-off deals between individual carriers, and they typically don't differentiate between types of traffic. That's as if, instead of the New York Stock Exchange, you had two guys in a smoky back room making deals without distinguishing between blue chips and penny stocks.
The advantage of a peering exchange would be the ability to trade like for like, at the lowest possible rates -- and thus would make operating Internet backbones profitable. Of course, that would require carriers to be able to charge differentially for different traffic types, something the 'Net neutrality folks adamantly oppose. So what are the other options?
Carriers could bite the bullet and get out of the Internet backbone business altogether. (Frankly, I'm half-expecting this to happen.) The logical next step? Government take-over. There's a long history of private innovations becoming so valuable to society that the government steps in to ensure service continuity. One good example: The New York City subways started out as private services and were taken over by the government.
Personally, I think this is a really bad idea -- and not just because I tend towards the libertarian. Government-operated services tend to slow innovation dramatically, and there are the political implications of having governments (US or others) with a direct window onto the world's communications networks.
What are the other options? Some say that if the current crop of carriers can't operate Internet backbones cost effectively, a new bunch will arise that can. I don't buy it -- the laws of network economics will apply to the new guys, too.
So what happens? Hmm. Brace yourselves for a sharp impact with reality.

Tech Crunch is reporting the Insider Pages acquisition by CitySearch , Citysearch is a division of Inter Active Corp (IAC). Insiderpages was a local reviews platform that has accumulated about 600,000 reviews and gets aprroximately 2.5 million visitors a month. The deal is reportedly worth 13 million dollars.

If I were to compare this to Blogster which has over 200,000 user posts and roughly 300,000 visitors a month, it puts a Blogster valuation at roughly between 1.3 million and 1.5 million.

Check out some of our stats from Blogster.com from last Friday February 16th 2007. Its amazing to see all of the visitors from around the world, and how we can see specific cities and towns from where people are hitting Blogster: ( Click on the images to view the Larger Version)

Blogster is a developed web site that I own that has about 31,000 active registered users. I have decided to sell Blogster and I am going to put it along with Greasy.com and Fishingsupply.com up for auction in Moniker's extremely popular and growing live auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C West in Las Vegas in early March. Since Blogster is more than just a domain name, it should command a higher value. It currently gets about 6,000 unique visitors a day, which is pretty valuable traffic. The Blogster community is unusally active and passionate for such a relatively small amount of traffic. The right owner that wants to take it forward as a social network/community site could really blow it up to be something big. I really wish the members of Blogster could pool their resources together and form a buying group that could purchase Blogster and then run it as an employee owned portal, I'm not sure they have the cash to do it, but maybe it could get done. Moniker gets approximately 30,000-50,000 domains submitted to them for sale. Only the top 300 or so domains make it to the 3-4 hour live auction, while many of the rest get placed in a silent auction that runs for a few days after the live event. There have been some 100,000.00 sales that actually happen in the silent auction. For a domain name to make the cut, Moniker first sends all the names out to a third party company that scrubs the list down based on proprietary criteria. Then those names are sent back to Moniker for further scrubbing by Monte Cahn, their CEO. The hope is that Blogster and Greasy will get to the live auction, because that is where the bigger dollars are and the most attention. Domain names are really realestate investments and property to build on. For interested buyers of domain names at this conference, you can actually borrow up to 60% of the appraised value of a domain name from Domain Capital , so wish us luck.

I haven't really had the energy to post lately. And I just don't feel my posts have been really good. I just need to put more time into my posts before I post them. I've just ended a massive legal battle that I have been fighting for two years and it has taken a bunch out of me mentally and physically, etc. My focus hasn't been 100%. My wife and I also just had our third child Katherine Anne so I've been a bit busy:

The Google Adwords API has apparently begun to charge for calls and usage of their API this month. Ron Drabkin, a contributing editor at VentureBeat sums up the change in direction and what it means for start-ups in this space. Basically Google is saying that they don't want users to be able to manipulate the  high converting, cheap costing long tail keywords that are little nuggets of gold for advertisers and arbitragers. I think this would obviously impact anyone using the API on behalf of a bunch of their long tail clients, particularly in local search. I don't know if this is what happened with TrueLocal.com but it seems to make sense to me, take a look at their Alexa plunge in the beginning of December right around when Google started charging for the API calls:

Businessweek.com has an article  worth reading about  skyhookwireless, here is a snippet from their article:

Skyhook Wireless, a small technology company in Boston, is working to target those kinds of prospective customers with a new software tool that—through partnerships with big search engines—will allow advertisers to restrict their ads to Web surfers who happen to be in the neighborhood. The company, which has mapped the 100 biggest U.S. cities, has pioneered a location technology that determines the latitude and longitude of any device with a Wi-Fi antenna, triangulating the location of individual PCs (and eventually other wireless devices), allowing ads to be served within a specific target area.

And Skyhook Wireless provides a software-only positioning system that leverages a nationwide database of known Wi-Fi access points to calculate the precise location of any Wi-Fi enabled device. This is a great development for local search if it works and I think will bring many new advertisers to the web.

 

Daypop.com appears to be coming back to life. The site has been sited up and running in the last few days. It is still almost impossible to get in touch with Dan Chan, that is, if he still owns Daypop.

Upon further investigation there is another site that resides on the same server called Maedge.com

Registered by a person named Ehren Maedge, this URL (At the time of writing this) points to Daypop. Maybe Ehren is the new owner?

(Update)-Now Maedge no longer points to Daypop, it is also hosted on two servers at the same time, Maedge sits on another server with the following domains:

1.	alchemytechnology.com
2.	angelawhite.org
3.	code-visions.com
4.	collectiveanarchy.com
5.	jessicawhite.org
6.	loughmiller.com
7.	peteandmary.com

Scott Loughmiller and  Phil White appear to have worked together in the past with Corvigo, Tumbleweed and Radiant Inc, Mr. Ehren Maedge also worked with these three companies. Perhaps the three are teaming up to re-launch Daypop in a big way, we can only wait to see.

 

Pixsense announced $5.4 million in funding yesterday from ATA Ventures  and Innovacom as the lead investors. From their press release:

PixSense provides mobile media management infrastructure, software, and
services for wireless carriers. PixSense’s technology enables digital media
management and rich-media messaging services to mobile subscribers who
increasingly rely on their mobile phone as their primary media device.
PixSense’s technology also includes patent-pending, on-device media
compression technology and network optimization technology that ensure fast
transfers, and significantly reduces costs to both end users and wireless
operators. 

My take away on this is that our mobile devices are taking the place of our computers and the mobile device will hold the social networks in the future. Also as we start to use the wireless networks more, their exists an opportunity for wireless providers to charge higher fees for the impending greater usage.

I recently became aware of DiscoverOurTown  which provides comprehensive city guides that include travel information, area attractions and restaurant listings for towns across the United States. They have great content if you are relocating or traveling to a new city. Their strength in content is evident in their relationship with Yahoo travel. They have pretty good visibility in Google, but I think they need to develop syndication strategies that limit their exposure to the whims of Google. They are based in Mississippi and have a sales team selling yearly listings in their results for around $179.00. I really like scrappy properties like this that can really be successful with some hard work and a little strategy.

Back on October 31st  this year I stumbled across Endoxon and I thought their mapping technology was the best I have seen on the net. Google today apparently thought the same and assimilated them. From the Google Endoxon page:

Google acquired Endoxon’s internet, mapping and data processing business units. Unlike the others, these complement Google Earth and Google Maps technologies and services.

You can see the technology in action at Local.ch

Myspace partnered with Cingular today, here are some of the details from Reuters, "

Media and other entertainment services are expected to be a major area of growth for the wireless and media industries, analysts have said.

MySpace, one of the fastest-growing Internet services with more than 130 million user profiles, is also offered on cell phone service carrier Helio. But Cingular's version will be more expansive, MySpace said.

Users will need to download a Java software application to their cell phones. Initially, about 30 cell phone models will be supported, with another 20 models supported in the coming weeks, which will then account for about 90 percent of Cingular's cell phone user base, a MySpace representative said.

Although online videos from MySpace will not be viewable on cell phones at launch, it is likely to be a service offered some time in 2007, she said.

Media conglomerate News Corp. bought MySpace for about $580 million in 2005. Cingular is a joint venture of phone companies AT&T  and BellSouth."

Also take a look at a report from ABI Research on The growth of mobile social networking.

Do any wireless carriers own or have significant stakes in social networking sites? It seems like everybody is after the wirless user and trying to get them to create content and push it up to social networks/local sites. Just Curious.

Pay Per Call

So what is Pay Per Call anyway? Pay Per Call means just what it says, you pay to make your phone ring. Any business that gets business by the phone or can get business started over the phone is a good candidate for using Pay Per Call services. Such target businesses would be direct response advertisers such as:

Dealerships (Automotive, Motorcycle, Boating, Heavy Equipment etc.

Mortgage

Real Estate

Financial/Brokerage/Banking

Insurance

Travel

Hospitality

Education (All Colleges and Learning Centers)

Home Services (Sattelite/Cable, Plumbing, Construction, Cleaning, Electrician.

Voicestar is a Pay Per Call platform company, they do not sell to direct advertisers, but they sell to the marketers, publishers and media companies for businesses looking to make their phone ring. Voicestar sells a private label call tracking platform that allows publishers and SEO/SEM marketers to run there own Pay Per Call call tracking platform and generate calls to clients through their traffic generation strategies. Recently Voicestar was acquired by Marchex(MCHX), Marchex has a large portfolio of local specific domain names and other portals that will eventually drive phone leads up into Voicestar's platform so that the Voicestar Publisher/Media company can then sell those phone calls to their Pay Per call clients, thus enhancing their ability to drive phone calls for their clients. The Pay Per Call industry is just heating up and Voicestar and Marchex are positioned to be a strong player.

Voicestar's Dynamic Number Re-Write Technology

If you drive clicks for your clients or you own an online directory site or a site where you provide mini-sites or profile pages for clients, then Voicestar's Dynamic Number Rewrite Technology may be for you. Voicestar has a solution that allows SEM/SEO marketers to have the phone numbers on their clients' web pages/landing pages to be swapped out to call tracking phone numbers before a visitor gets to the page. If the visitor makes a phone call you can take credit for the call and provide your client with a full call tracking for each call that includes recording of the call, reverse number lookup, advanced call routing, whisper tones, after hours play files and many more features. Now you can show a client exactly how effective they are at handling their phone leads.In the past as an SEO/SEM firm you could obviously prove how many clicks that you drove for a client or how many forms were filled out, but if your visitors picked up the phone and called a client, could you prove to your client that the call resulted from your paid or organic search marketing efforts?? Well, now you can.

The Voicestar solution allows you to track calls from organic listings or paid listings down to the keyword or search phrase. Many SEO/SEM firms use the Voicestar platform as a revenue stream, because they are charged for minutes of usage and can charge clients on a per call basis, the per call charges range between $2.00 and $100.00 depending on the value of the leads in the vertical. 

For online directory owners that charge a monthly or yearly listing fee, the Number Replacement Technology is an awesome way to take credit for the phone calls that you may already be delivering. If as a directory owner you allow visitors to click from your site to get to a client's site, you can have the phone numbers on the client's site swapped to call tracking numbers "On the Fly". Directory owners also would just replace the client's numbers in the directory as well with call tracking numbers. A perfect example of this revenue bleed that is happening in an online directory site is Wholesalecentral.com they don't take credit for the phone calls that happen on their directory and they can't take credit for the calls that result from their client's websites when they drive a buyer there. I've called Woody Sumner and Lisa Rioni, let's hope they take a look at the opportunity. Not only could Woody Sumner use the Voicestar call tracking in his online directory business, but he could also provide the tracking numbers for the hundreds of print advertisers as well, so that they could place the phone numbers in their print ads and track performance and record call quality. 

Voicestar Call Tracking

I have taken a sales director position with Voicestar, a call tracking company that was recently purchased by Marchex (MCHX). Voicestar provides SEM/SEO agencies, Lead Generation agencies, Direct Marketers, Magazine and Directory Publishers, as well as Online and Offline YellowPage Directories, with a private labeled call tracking platform where they can provision local and toll free tracking phone numbers in real time and provide them for their clients and their marketing campaigns. The phone numbers can provide call recording, reverse number lookup and advanced routing techniques, all allowing our platform clients to prove to their clients the amount and effectiveness of all the phone calls they send for them, as well as charge them per call if they wish. Call me at  800-250-3707, to discuss. Tony Colan.

Business Opportunity Search Engine Launches

I have finally launched FranchiseNetworks.com FranchiseNetworks is a Business Opportunity Search Engine that helps opportunity seekers looking to buy a franchise or start a business opportuntiy, connect directly with the offerings available without having to muddle through the cluttered spam filled results at Google or get sidetracked by a broker site trying to collect your info and sell it to 5 different franchisors. FranchiseNetworks will also have a Business Opportunity Weblog where discussion will take place on the topic of business opportunities and franchise opportunities.

Popular categories so far have been: Business Opportunities  and Food Franchises

Mobile Social Networking

I really believe the future of social networks is on the handset. Especially when you can tie in geo location services in a safe way. MeetMoi is a location based mobile dating company. Basically you create a profile and then let other singles in the area know you are available. I also imagine it would work well in bars or nightclubs. I'm also thinking that it could be used as a way to notify businesses of your wants and needs and the savvy ones will find you to service you on the run.

RSS Explained Via Video

 

Pud(Adbrite) Launches A New Product

It's an easy way to add interactivity (zoom, sharing, captions, etc.) to your pictures. You can also optionally add advertising to your pictures to make money.

Exciting and Scary Times

glumbert.com - Shift Happens

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is a shift from pure algorithmic search to Social Search, where the web is a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. It is about taking 1.0 and 2.0 and making something useful and productive where humans are the algorithm and the more diverse and large the participation, the better the experience will become.

Mozilla Launches Browser Social Network

Mozilla Labs announced a new browser based social networking idea called the Coop. Mozilla says the motivation behind the project is:

"that the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link. It's done over IM, email, weblogs, RSS feeds from aggregator sites, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and even over the phone. The desire is the same: "hey, friend, go check out this neat thing and then let's talk about it!" The goal of The Coop is to ease this interaction, and merge it with similar tools provided by a large number of popular web services."

Will OpenID Take Off This Year?

OpenID is a decentralized sign-on system that can be used on Internet websites for signing on with a central username and password from another site that supports OpenID. It gains relevance especially in terms of social networking sites such as Myspace, FaceBook, Bebo, etc. One could be able to log on to FaceBook with their Myspace Logon info., a persons total online identity could be immediately transferred across to the new social networking site. With all the social flavors developing, its getting more difficult to remember all sign ons as well as tedious to fill out identities. What I see developing in social networking sites is some consolidation and more collaboration, we'll see. Check out the example in Video below:

What is the Semantic Web?

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as the following:

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a philosophy,^[2] a set of design principles,^[3] collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that have yet to be implemented or realized.^[4] Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications.^[5] Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). All of which are intended to formally describe concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Basically, I think users in a tagging,voting, user generated world will create awesome content that beats the content returned by a search algorithm like Google's. If one million people are building a website in real time on a specific topic, how good will that website be compared to what shows in Google's results right now. We the people are the creators of Web 3.0 and the best content on the planet, the only question that remains is if we will be smart enough to get paid for it.

Internet Backbone Carriers May Be in Trouble

From my buddy at AT&T:

It's official - the carriers are not making money operating Internet backbones.

Why should you care? Because defying the laws of economics is a bit like defying the law of gravity -- it appears to work for a while, but you're in for an unpleasant surprise at the end.
Here's the issue: The carriers currently running Internet backbones are subsidising that service from other offerings. Competitive pressures and new technologies, however, are driving the price of these offerings down -- at the same time that IPTV, Internet-based video on demand, and multimedia interactive games are driving Internet bandwidth requirements dramatically up. As a result, carriers will need to beef up their networks to handle the capacity.
And where's the financing for that investment coming from?
There are a couple of possible scenarios. Carriers could fund Internet-backbone investments from the pockets of their customers, but there are signs that gravy train is slowing to a stall. Enterprise users quite rightly object to paying top dollar for network services -- particularly in an environment where Internet services (for the present at least) are far cheaper and almost equally reliable. And consumers are already screaming about the "high" cost of broadband services.
Another option is for carriers to put in place a peering exchange -- similar to stock market trading exchanges -- that lets them pass traffic from one backbone to another at fair market rates. Currently, peering arrangements are one-off deals between individual carriers, and they typically don't differentiate between types of traffic. That's as if, instead of the New York Stock Exchange, you had two guys in a smoky back room making deals without distinguishing between blue chips and penny stocks.
The advantage of a peering exchange would be the ability to trade like for like, at the lowest possible rates -- and thus would make operating Internet backbones profitable. Of course, that would require carriers to be able to charge differentially for different traffic types, something the 'Net neutrality folks adamantly oppose. So what are the other options?
Carriers could bite the bullet and get out of the Internet backbone business altogether. (Frankly, I'm half-expecting this to happen.) The logical next step? Government take-over. There's a long history of private innovations becoming so valuable to society that the government steps in to ensure service continuity. One good example: The New York City subways started out as private services and were taken over by the government.
Personally, I think this is a really bad idea -- and not just because I tend towards the libertarian. Government-operated services tend to slow innovation dramatically, and there are the political implications of having governments (US or others) with a direct window onto the world's communications networks.
What are the other options? Some say that if the current crop of carriers can't operate Internet backbones cost effectively, a new bunch will arise that can. I don't buy it -- the laws of network economics will apply to the new guys, too.
So what happens? Hmm. Brace yourselves for a sharp impact with reality.

Insider Pages to Be Acquired by City Search

Tech Crunch is reporting the Insider Pages acquisition by CitySearch , Citysearch is a division of Inter Active Corp (IAC). Insiderpages was a local reviews platform that has accumulated about 600,000 reviews and gets aprroximately 2.5 million visitors a month. The deal is reportedly worth 13 million dollars.

If I were to compare this to Blogster which has over 200,000 user posts and roughly 300,000 visitors a month, it puts a Blogster valuation at roughly between 1.3 million and 1.5 million.

Google Analytics Granularity

Check out some of our stats from Blogster.com from last Friday February 16th 2007. Its amazing to see all of the visitors from around the world, and how we can see specific cities and towns from where people are hitting Blogster: ( Click on the images to view the Larger Version)

Blogster.com at Moniker Live Auction

Blogster is a developed web site that I own that has about 31,000 active registered users. I have decided to sell Blogster and I am going to put it along with Greasy.com and Fishingsupply.com up for auction in Moniker's extremely popular and growing live auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C West in Las Vegas in early March. Since Blogster is more than just a domain name, it should command a higher value. It currently gets about 6,000 unique visitors a day, which is pretty valuable traffic. The Blogster community is unusally active and passionate for such a relatively small amount of traffic. The right owner that wants to take it forward as a social network/community site could really blow it up to be something big. I really wish the members of Blogster could pool their resources together and form a buying group that could purchase Blogster and then run it as an employee owned portal, I'm not sure they have the cash to do it, but maybe it could get done. Moniker gets approximately 30,000-50,000 domains submitted to them for sale. Only the top 300 or so domains make it to the 3-4 hour live auction, while many of the rest get placed in a silent auction that runs for a few days after the live event. There have been some 100,000.00 sales that actually happen in the silent auction. For a domain name to make the cut, Moniker first sends all the names out to a third party company that scrubs the list down based on proprietary criteria. Then those names are sent back to Moniker for further scrubbing by Monte Cahn, their CEO. The hope is that Blogster and Greasy will get to the live auction, because that is where the bigger dollars are and the most attention. Domain names are really realestate investments and property to build on. For interested buyers of domain names at this conference, you can actually borrow up to 60% of the appraised value of a domain name from Domain Capital , so wish us luck.

Posting Block

I haven't really had the energy to post lately. And I just don't feel my posts have been really good. I just need to put more time into my posts before I post them. I've just ended a massive legal battle that I have been fighting for two years and it has taken a bunch out of me mentally and physically, etc. My focus hasn't been 100%. My wife and I also just had our third child Katherine Anne so I've been a bit busy:

Google API Fees Could Damage the Long Tail Advertiser

The Google Adwords API has apparently begun to charge for calls and usage of their API this month. Ron Drabkin, a contributing editor at VentureBeat sums up the change in direction and what it means for start-ups in this space. Basically Google is saying that they don't want users to be able to manipulate the  high converting, cheap costing long tail keywords that are little nuggets of gold for advertisers and arbitragers. I think this would obviously impact anyone using the API on behalf of a bunch of their long tail clients, particularly in local search. I don't know if this is what happened with TrueLocal.com but it seems to make sense to me, take a look at their Alexa plunge in the beginning of December right around when Google started charging for the API calls:

Skyhook Wireless to Bring More Local Business to the Web

Businessweek.com has an article  worth reading about  skyhookwireless, here is a snippet from their article:

Skyhook Wireless, a small technology company in Boston, is working to target those kinds of prospective customers with a new software tool that—through partnerships with big search engines—will allow advertisers to restrict their ads to Web surfers who happen to be in the neighborhood. The company, which has mapped the 100 biggest U.S. cities, has pioneered a location technology that determines the latitude and longitude of any device with a Wi-Fi antenna, triangulating the location of individual PCs (and eventually other wireless devices), allowing ads to be served within a specific target area.

And Skyhook Wireless provides a software-only positioning system that leverages a nationwide database of known Wi-Fi access points to calculate the precise location of any Wi-Fi enabled device. This is a great development for local search if it works and I think will bring many new advertisers to the web.

 

DayPop is Alive

Daypop.com appears to be coming back to life. The site has been sited up and running in the last few days. It is still almost impossible to get in touch with Dan Chan, that is, if he still owns Daypop.

Upon further investigation there is another site that resides on the same server called Maedge.com

Registered by a person named Ehren Maedge, this URL (At the time of writing this) points to Daypop. Maybe Ehren is the new owner?

(Update)-Now Maedge no longer points to Daypop, it is also hosted on two servers at the same time, Maedge sits on another server with the following domains:

1.	alchemytechnology.com
2.	angelawhite.org
3.	code-visions.com
4.	collectiveanarchy.com
5.	jessicawhite.org
6.	loughmiller.com
7.	peteandmary.com

Scott Loughmiller and  Phil White appear to have worked together in the past with Corvigo, Tumbleweed and Radiant Inc, Mr. Ehren Maedge also worked with these three companies. Perhaps the three are teaming up to re-launch Daypop in a big way, we can only wait to see.

 

PixSense Secures $5.4 Million in Series A Funding for Mobile Photo and Video

Pixsense announced $5.4 million in funding yesterday from ATA Ventures  and Innovacom as the lead investors. From their press release:

PixSense provides mobile media management infrastructure, software, and
services for wireless carriers. PixSense’s technology enables digital media
management and rich-media messaging services to mobile subscribers who
increasingly rely on their mobile phone as their primary media device.
PixSense’s technology also includes patent-pending, on-device media
compression technology and network optimization technology that ensure fast
transfers, and significantly reduces costs to both end users and wireless
operators. 

My take away on this is that our mobile devices are taking the place of our computers and the mobile device will hold the social networks in the future. Also as we start to use the wireless networks more, their exists an opportunity for wireless providers to charge higher fees for the impending greater usage.

DiscoverOurTown.com: The Ultimate US Travel, Tourism & Relocation Guide

I recently became aware of DiscoverOurTown  which provides comprehensive city guides that include travel information, area attractions and restaurant listings for towns across the United States. They have great content if you are relocating or traveling to a new city. Their strength in content is evident in their relationship with Yahoo travel. They have pretty good visibility in Google, but I think they need to develop syndication strategies that limit their exposure to the whims of Google. They are based in Mississippi and have a sales team selling yearly listings in their results for around $179.00. I really like scrappy properties like this that can really be successful with some hard work and a little strategy.

Google Buys Endoxon

Back on October 31st  this year I stumbled across Endoxon and I thought their mapping technology was the best I have seen on the net. Google today apparently thought the same and assimilated them. From the Google Endoxon page:

Google acquired Endoxon’s internet, mapping and data processing business units. Unlike the others, these complement Google Earth and Google Maps technologies and services.

You can see the technology in action at Local.ch

Mobile Carriers And Social Networking

Myspace partnered with Cingular today, here are some of the details from Reuters, "

Media and other entertainment services are expected to be a major area of growth for the wireless and media industries, analysts have said.

MySpace, one of the fastest-growing Internet services with more than 130 million user profiles, is also offered on cell phone service carrier Helio. But Cingular's version will be more expansive, MySpace said.

Users will need to download a Java software application to their cell phones. Initially, about 30 cell phone models will be supported, with another 20 models supported in the coming weeks, which will then account for about 90 percent of Cingular's cell phone user base, a MySpace representative said.

Although online videos from MySpace will not be viewable on cell phones at launch, it is likely to be a service offered some time in 2007, she said.

Media conglomerate News Corp. bought MySpace for about $580 million in 2005. Cingular is a joint venture of phone companies AT&T  and BellSouth."

Also take a look at a report from ABI Research on The growth of mobile social networking.

Wireless Carriers

Do any wireless carriers own or have significant stakes in social networking sites? It seems like everybody is after the wirless user and trying to get them to create content and push it up to social networks/local sites. Just Curious.