Mentos Takes Social Media to a Whole New Interactive Level
From CenterNetworks, popular since 4 monthsMentos, the freshmaker, is back on the scene after all of those great Mentos in the Coke videos. This time, Mentos has created a new social media campaign that brings interactivity to a whole new level. The site is based in Italy and the terms note that you must be over 18 to play.The site is called the Mentos Kiss Cam. When you enter you select whether you would like to kiss a man or a woman. Make sure you have a webcam connected before you start. If you don't, there is a demo video to show you how it works. Is this a waste of corporate funds or a great social media idea? I will suggest it's the former.Partner Links-- [...]Go to site
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Last year we asked a number of startup entrepreneurs to provide their top tips for success. Today "DebtKid" on the LendingClub blog listed 7 mistakes made when he/she was building out his/her startup. Check out the full blog post for all of the details and apparently later this week will come 7 things done right.Here's the 7 things:I Managed People like Michael Scott from “The Office”I Hired My FriendsI Budgeted Like Britney Spears: TerriblyI Leased A Fancy Office While My Large Basement Went UnusedI Raised Money Before I Had CustomersI Mixed Business with PleasureI Assumed Everything Would Go According to PlanI will get working on the next startup tips ebook. If you would like to participate, send me a note.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
Google has announced this morning that they have opened up their ad serving tool Google Ad Manager to everyone. Google Ad Manager is very similar (nearly identical) to the OpenX ad manager software. Google Ad Manager runs on Google's servers while the main OpenX ad manager requires you to install the software on your server. You only need a Google AdSense account to use Google Ad Manager.I've been using the Google Ad Manager for the last couple of weeks and found it relatively easy to setup and use. You setup your own campaigns, your default ad networks and you can backfill ads with Google AdSense ads so that an ad slot is always filled. It works just like OpenX in that you setup ad slots and ad types and then fill those with your customer ad impressions. This seems perfect for the small to medium size publisher and it does require a bit of basic advertising knowledge to get everything setup to work properly. Their walkthrough could really use some work and would be better as a video instead of a Web overlay.What would be smart is if they hook up Google Ad Manager into Google Checkout and allow publishers to sell ads directly inside of Ad Manager.The Google Ad Manager is much more robust than I expected and could put a hurting on the OpenX hosted platform that is apparently coming soon. Back in January OpenX (formerly OpenAds) announced a $15.5 venture capital round and the upcoming launch of their hosted ad manager. Just remember as with all Google services, the more you use Ad Manager, the more they know.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
This morning Mike Arrington wrote a great advice piece to Amazon on the Kindle.The gist of Mike's argument is that Amazon should offer Kindle up as an operating system and reference design. This would allow third parties to create Kindle compatible devices in the same way that Dell, for example, makes PCs compatible with Windows. This would create an ecosystem around the product which would be incredibly powerful. And at the same time, Amazon would still be doing what it really wants to do, which is to sell books. By offering their own product which they should continue to sell, they get to work out all the kinks without any meddling third party companies telling it what to do. But by opening up the platform, they really get to have their control cake and to eat their large marketplace cake too.Interestingly, this is really what Google should be doing with Android. Google is indeed licensing the Android OS to third party phone manufacturers, but by not creating and controling an initial reference design they are leaving important pieces of the design to third parties, in a field (mobile phones) where important design elements can be critical.Anyway, getting back to Kindle, I have been a fan of the product concept but I do believe it will be very hard for Amazon to build up the kind of market that they really need and should have with such a device without getting some help. I hope they take Mike's advice.This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
If you live, work or play in Manhattan you know that finding a bathroom when you need one is typically not easy. Most signs say either "no bathroom" or "bathroom only for customers" and those bathrooms you do find are normally filthy and probably carry more diseases than a rat. Most NY'ers have their bathroom list in memory. I know that most Starbucks have bathrooms (although there is normally a line) and most McDonalds have semi-clean bathrooms. Outside of those 2 companies, it's hit or miss.A new startup launched last week to help with this problem. The site is named Diaroogle and their mission is simple; help people find a clean bathroom when they need it. Enter an address and find public restrooms with ratings and photos (yuck).
There's a mobile app because when you need to go, you need to go. Josh at Webware says the mobile app lacks a map and any GPS-style positioning so you will be typing with your legs crossed. Clearly in this case the mobile app is what will make or break Diaroogle.The Google Maps integration works but I would prefer that the bathroom list auto-update as you pan around the city and/or zoom in. Similar to how Yelp handles the map movement.Currently Diaroogle is in Beta and only available for Manhattan so if you want to use it, move here. They do have plans to expand outside Manhattan. Competitor MizPee is currently the leader in the public toilet space.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
Yesterday Techcrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld wrote a review of a new service called JustHackIt. Schonfeld called JustHackIt, "a dating site for hackers". Basically it's a classifieds board for hackers and developers to easily post openings and have developers submit interest in those openings.Less than 24 hours later, the JustHackIt service is now up for sale on Sitepoint. The current auction price is $20. In the 24 hours post launch the company reports the following stats:18,258 pageviews8,580 unique visitorsMain traffic sources: TechCrunch, news.ycombinator.com, Reddit and NetvibesThe description notes the reason for the quick sale, "I launched JustHackIt.com last night. I'm really enjoying managing the site but didn't expect the huge amount of traffic and don't quite know how to manage a community site like this. I'm doing my best with it, but thought I'd post it on Sitepoint to see if someone is looking for this type of opportunity." They claim that they will have 600,000 pageviews this month - of course that doesn't take into account that any blogger buzz dies off within a few days max.Anyway, if you are interested in a cheap dat(ing) site for hackers and developers, JustHackIt is the one for you. And upon purchase you can tell VCs and friends, "I was on Techcrunch". Here's their pageviews chart - note that this is by the hour not by the day, week, month or year.
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AOL has announced the launch of a new flash-based instant messaging application today. AIM Express allows you to do everything you can in the normal AIM client inside of a Web browser. In my testing this morning, I found it to work very well. As you chat with more people, tabs show up on the top of the application so you can jump back and forth. Everything is contained inside of the one Flash application.I wonder if they could port this to a desktop app using Adobe AIR as it would allow everything to be contained inside the app instead of opening windows for each current chat. The new AIM Express also allows for text messaging using SMS for friends that are offline.AOL also announced the launch of an updated Windows Mobile client. The new client includes ads from AOL's Platform-A division.
Other companies in the Web IM and chat space include current CN sponsor eBuddy and Meebo.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
NewsCred is a new cross-web newspaper site launching today in beta. What makes NewsCred different from the other "breaking news" sites like Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc. is that NewsCred uses a credibility algorithm for indexing the sources and determining what should rise to the top. Currently the site lists about 100 news sources.I spoke with NewsCred co-founder Shafqat and I asked him how he describes NewsCred. He replied, "NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you all the world's credible news in one place. We aggregate news from hundreds of mainstream media sources, as well as established blogs, and let our users personalize their digital newspaper within seconds, without any fuss. Our community votes on the credibility of articles, authors and news sources. Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity. The credibility data that we collects is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a new source, and the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. We are also building an online track record for journalists. So in summary, we give news readers a platform to voice their opinions about the quality of news and the people writing about the news."Here's my take - NewsCred looks nice and could be a good start page for breaking news across the Web. But it's another full-feed scraper and if they even so much as attempt to put an ad next to the content, all bets are off. What is with these sites scraping full feeds lately? Same thing with fav.or.it. There's no reason why NewsCred needs to scrape full feeds - they can easily link out to the sites that they are indexing. The scraped stories on NewsCred don't pull in any formatting so they are very difficult to read.The other concern I have is similar to one I have with the Outbrain rating widget we have installed on CN. With NewsCred, what makes a story "credible"? There are so many rumors that float around blogs everyday, do people really care what's credible? From my conversations over the past year, the answer is no. In fact, if you look at some of the more popular blogs, stories that are factually inaccurate or biased have done very well for those blogs. What really makes a story credible?I like the concept of NewsCred but they need to stop the full-feed scraping and define for their users specifically what makes a story credible.Svetlana believes NewsCred has potential but the 100 sources will need to grow for the site to work at a broad level. Jason notes that the site has a better ranking algorithm than when it launched in private alpha last year.
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Mint's new design is available today to all of their customers:
Check out our coverage of online personal finance management apps: Mint, Geezeo, Quicken and Wesabe.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
ClickZ has announced that their editorial team will be moving today to a new office downtown at 120 Broadway. The company notes that various teams will be centralized including the law.com team.Search engine Hakia is down in that area along with a variety of other NYC startups. The area seems to be growing in popularity from what I've seen over the past year. Hubs of startups all growing all around Manhattan - it's great to see!More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
As some of you know, I have a Samsung ACE mobile device which runs on the super fast EVDO from Sprint. Before I continue, let me just say how sorry I am that those of you with the iPhone 3G are having trouble. The ACE uses Windows Mobile OS and comes pre-installed with the IE mobile browser. This is a complete piece of crap - Microsoft should be ashamed to have included this with the mobile OS (which overall has been pretty good).I spent $25 for the Opera Mobile browser a couple of months ago and love it. It has allowed me to write posts on CN from anywhere and since I have an actual keyboard, it's easy. The one thing the browser lacks is Flash accessibility. This weekend I have been playing with a new mobile browser from Skyfire. The Skyfire browser opened in beta earlier this year and it's REALLY slick. It can do practically anything a desktop browser can do. And frankly the speed is the fastest I've seen so far. And just last week they announced Microsoft Silverlight support.Skyfire recognized that I don't have a touchscreen and installed the appropriate version. If you have a touchscreen, you get a mac-style menu on the top. Here's my short video demo of the Skyfire browser in action:More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
I am very excited to announce that CenterNetworks has a new look and a completely overhauled backend setup. We've been testing the new setup over the past week and so far it's been solid. The goal was to simplify the frontend and create better content paths. With so much of our traffic going directly to an interior page, we worked hard to make sure that users would be able to see a top-line of what's new across the site.The left menu now features content categories and companies of interest. This list will rotate as topics and companies move up and down the hot list. Our awesome sponsors are now highlighted and NYC now has it's own section. We provide more NYC Web coverage than any other site and we wanted to highlight the growing NYC Web scene. We've also added a list of contributors to the site. Some of our best posts come from our contributors and I felt this was very important to showcase. There's a lot more, poke around and find all the goodies.The new design was created by Mark Langeneck of CMPLT design. Mark is one of the most talented designers I know. He understands more about usability, architecture and the general Web than most of the other 200+ designers I've worked with in my career. His questioning of design strategy also strengthens the final product. Perhaps it comes from his love of Elvis. Whatever it is, he did an awesome job.In case you are wondering about the backend of CenterNetworks, we use Drupal and mySQL. I spent many hours optimizing the heck out of the code to make sure the site loads as quickly as possible. In my testing, the new CN loads 5x quicker than the old CN.This is just the start; we've got more exciting things in the hopper. Thanks as always for reading and engaging with CenterNetworks and thanks to all of our great sponsors (current and past) who help us continue our operations. If you are on the feed, this is a great time to stop by the full site. And please let me know if you find any bugs or have suggestions for improvement.
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We've written about a variety of baby social networks including Kidmondo, babyZbook and LilGrams. I had a chance to chat with Adam Katz back at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. Adam is hte co-founder of another baby/children social network named TotSpot. Below is a discussion we had more recently about TotSpot.Allen: Can we start with a brief bio about yourself?Adam Katz: My co-founder, Michael Broukhim, and I, graduated from college in 2007. At school, we were both involved in a number of different "social media" endeavors. Mike was the Editorial Chair of the Crimson, the school paper, and he led the editorial board's move online introducing blogs and partnering with more than 20 schools on a wikitorial. I ran a company called CampusTap (sold to CoreObjects) that was a student blogging / campus activity aggregation platform.Allen: How do you describe the Totspot service?Adam: TotSpot is a place for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends. It's part online baby journal, parent scrapbook, and social network.Allen: Why did you decide to start Totspot?Adam: Both Mike and I have adorable little cousins named Max - Mike's cousin is now about 6 months-old and mine is 3 years-old - and we both have very tight-knit extended families so that is a lot of sharing (both online and off) that goes on. We both were disappointed with the existing tool-set and thought there must be a better vehicle for parents to share content with family and friends. There is a real desire among families for a safe, secure, and simple place to gather everything (photos, videos, journal entries).Allen: What's the team look like?Adam: We're nine people - myself, Mike, a team of 5 incredibly talented developers, and two amazing Moms - Janice and Kelcey who assist us in community management and outreach and product dev.Allen: How are you marketing Totspot? Since the site is all behind a login, are you looking at any search-engine related traffic?Adam: To date, TotSpot has grown almost entirely organically (definitely been helped by some really positive earned media). We're up to more than 10,000 members and it's been pretty viral - on TotSpot parents can make their children friends with other children, can invite grandparents and cousins to contribute, so there is some real sociability. To date, we have very little search engine traffic and that's something that is (as you note) inherent in the nature of the product. As the TotSpot community develops, we'll be adding some stuff that is more SEO-friendly.
Allen: How do you compare Totspot to other baby startups like Littlegrams and Kidmondo and larger sites like MayasMom?Adam: I think TotSpot is pretty unique. Unlike a lot of the other parenting-sites that are information-centric, editorial content-centric, we're focused on parent/family media sharing and unlike a lot of the "record-keeping" type sites we're social (family can contribute) and I think a lot more fun. In addition, at a very practical level, the storage space we offer each user is (literally) 20x what our competitors offer and we're the only ones that emphasize data portability.Allen: What's the technology look like that powers Totspot?Adam: TotSpot is built on Ruby on Rails.Allen: Can you explain your business model?Adam: We will have four revenue streams - 1) Premium - We'll offer some power-user tools such as HD Video for a small additional subscription fee. 2) Advertising - We're going to do sponsorships, all very tasteful, trying to avoid anything on the children's pages. 3) Virtual Goods - Gifts, e-cards, and things like that. 4) Printing - Our users will be able to take their TotSpot pages and turn them into beautiful personalized babybooks.Allen: Do you find that being located outside of the Valley is an advantage, a disadvantage or neither?Adam: I'm not sure. I haven't yet run (or been employed by) a valley company so I can't really speak to that experience but I do think being in smaller communities (right now we're in NYC and Boston) can be helpful - we've gotten to know a lot of great, successful people in a relatively short amount of time. I think the biggest challenge has been finding talent, but, my hunch is that that challenge exists everywhere.Allen: What's coming next from Totspot?Adam: In the next few weeks, we'll be publicly rolling out the TotSpot API (we're already using it internally). It's part of our company's total commitment to Data Portability. We have a "Your Child, Your Content," policy which means that everything a parent puts into TotSpot they should be able to take out, take with them, and use with other services. Our API is a critical step in that effort. Parents will be able to allow external applications to communicate with TotSpot (both input/output) and easily manage the way their data is being shared/used in order to ensure privacy and safety. We hope parents use TotSpot to establish their child's online identity and then plug external services into that.Allen: What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?Adam: Talk to as many smart people as you can - not just the ones with the flashy success. It's often those who have had challenging experiences that provide the most insight. I bet that's a bit cliché - but it's still true.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
The chart below shows the various request for proposals (RFP) that ad network Burst Media has received in 2008. Rich media campaigns are the most requested followed by behavioral and custom content integration. It will be interesting to see what this chart looks like in 2009. I would guess video (currently at 30%) will move up to at least 2nd behind rich media.Burst Media includes the follow creative types in the rich media category: expandable units, floating units and polite ads. 
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Time management application RescueTime has learned that you don't mess with the red cross. If you mess with the red cross, you will have to mess with the Red Cross. Co-founder Tony Wright notes on the RescueTime blog that the Red Cross logo police were very friendly and helped to make sure their new logo (shown on left) didn't violate any Red Cross logo marks.Today's announcement comes a month after the Red Cross went after Twiddict for using a Red Cross. I just have to wonder if the Red Cross found out about RescueTime because AJ posted a comment pointing to RescueTime's usage of the red cross. If you are curious as to why the Red Cross can protect a plus symbol in red, check out attorney Dan Lewis' explanation.Wright also notes that they are working on scaling RescueTime to handle more users as their open beta has continued to see new users. Apparently there is also some funding news coming soon - we will monitor and report once the news is public.More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter 
The news I am about to share is very exciting. I had to take a deep breath before posting this news. You ready?Dell has selected Twitter for live Q&A during their "Global Mobility Event" tomorrow. The event will be held in San Francisco and will be live-streamed. Rather than use a chat service, Dell has decided that Twitter is the way-to-go for the event. Dell notes:Users of Twitter...will be able to ask questions about Dell’s new products and the company will “tweet” the answers. Reporters and customers on Twitter can direct questions during the news conference to www.twitter.com/Digital_Nomads. Dell will also blog about the Global Mobility Event at Direct2Dell. Dell is among the first major companies to offer reporters and customers the opportunity to ask questions on Twitter during a live news conference."An interactive chat would make more sense as the viewers of the event can chat in real-time. Twitter doesn't provide this type of interactivity and instead will act more like email with the back and forth. We will watch the event live and will report back on any major announcements.In case you are wondering, here's my first question to the Dell Twitter account during the event, "So Dell, what's the status of your trademark claim on Cloud Computing?"More CN Coverage:-- Docstoc-- Scribd-- Twitter