www.dpingram.com

“London-based OpenAds has supposedly raised $15.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, according to a now invisible report on Paid Content. Participation in this round also comes from existing backers Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. This would be the open-source ad server’s second round of funding, coming less than a year after raising $5 million from Index Ventures and the rest of the previously listed investors, excluding Accel.

… OpenAds lets website publishers inserts image, movie, Flash, popup and other ads, utilizing a targeted campaign method. OpenAds currently reports 30,000 web publishers across 100 countries. With this most recent round of funding, OpenAds is looking to bring on more staff, and will most likely further its move into the commercial realm. It was announced last year that the open-source software would be moving towards commercialization, which is the same route that Mozilla took a couple of years back.”

This and more at Mashable here

(sorry, couldn’t resist that pun). Mashable reports that Tubes (TubesNow) the file sharing and synchronisation service is about to close down (on Jan 31st 08).

Mashable also has a chart showing the user drop-off.

Here are some interesting stats for the use of widgets compared with native website visitors. This is from Meebo (maker of the web-based IM) widgets.

Basically the BULK of Meebo’s traffic comes from their widgets. Widgets allow Meebo’s benefits to be utilised by its users on other websites, meaning customers use Meebo even when their not AT Meebo’s website.

Apparently, according to ConScores Widget Metrix (useful to know that COmScore has a means of measuring this. Important too now that your company’s reach cannot be adequately measured by visitors to your website), in October 2007 6.3m people in the US actively engaged with a Meebo widget, compared with 1.2m people who visited the Meebo website worldwide.

Techcrunch has more info here, also a neat chart that shows the growth of their widget usage/reach.

I just heard news of Proximic which has reportedly signed deals for ad inventory with both eBay’s shopping.com and Yahoo’s Shopping Network.

This is the first time that these two companies have licensed their inventory, and it gives Proximic an inventory of over 50million unique ads (compared with Googles 1million) - 20m from each of those mentioned above and 10m from another un-named source.

Proximic is said to deliver context sensitive ads in a novel mathematical way that is more effcicient and faster than Google’s current methods.

More info is here in Techcrunch

Via Mashable, here

Photobucket is going mobile. The photo-sharing network that was shafted then acquired by MySpace is launching its mobile service, granting users access to Photobucket features on their handheld devices. Get it here. Like most web-based applications that go mobile, you’ll be able to browse, upload, share, search and view photos with Photobucket’s mobile offering.

That means you can access your personal Photobucket account, as well as public content, you can upload photos and videos directly from your mobile, and you can search Photobucket’s images and graphics from your cell phone. Sharing options enable you to send images to your friends using the email tool on your mobile device.

DailyMotion Offering New Video Advertising Methods

Dailymotion, one of the many YouTube-like embedded video websites, and one of the leaders of the pack in the second tier, announced today a number of video advertising options made available in addition to the companies existing ad formats.

Toaster Ads are the first of the three new formats. This particular format gives advertisers the the ability to inject an animated flash mini-commercial overlay into Dailymotion’s library of professional videos, similar to the popup advertisements on YouTube’s player.

They also introduced Home Theater ads, which are explained as being essentially a skin for the player that is hotlinked to the desired site of the advertiser. Finally, they now offer something called the ‘companion logo’ ad, which essentially creates a 3D logo that appears in the left corner for 10 seconds at the beginning of the video. Clicks to the logo will open in a new window, or they can be ignored.

None of the advertisements have been demonstrated or shown examples of yet, and they don’t sound particularly groundbreaking. They do, however, offer some easy ways to monetize embedded video that can more easily take advantage of existing advertising channels on the net, and are ad types that those currently involved in internet advertising can easily wrap their heads around.

Via Mashable - January 14, 2008 — 05:02 AM PST — by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

Bigtent just rased $5m, its a bit like Ning or CollectiveX in that its an online service where you dont need any software install to get started, just set it all up on line. Unlike Ning where you can just get started with a few clicks, Bigtent requires you to apply to them to get approval before you start (interesting - i wonder if that will be too big an obstacle for serious uptake).

It includes all the ‘usual’ social networking and community tools like profile, friends, messaging, plus calendars, events (with RSVPs), message boards, and more.

Very interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg, from 60 Minutes.

Part 1 is here:

Part 2 is here:

Bought 3 new books this weekend. Just popped out to get a book as a Christmas Present for a friend and walked out with two for myself:
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
We Are Smarter Than Me - Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Small Is the New Big: And 183 Other Riffs,… - Seth Godin

See other books on my bookshelf

Saw this on Techcrunch today…

Bebo Snubs Google With Facebook Platform Clone
Erick Schonfeld

Let’s call a spade a spade here. When the third largest social network in the U.S. announces a platform for social applications that mirrors Facebook’s and appeals to Facebook developers, it is a snub to Google. For all the promise of Google’s competing OpenSocial platform (which Bebo is also supporting), it is just not ready yet. Bebo’s embrace of Facebook says a lot about the true state of competition between Google and Facebook. The fact that Bebo will have Facebook apps running on Bebo before OpenSocial apps indicates where its priorities lie.

When OpenSocial launched, we suggested that Facebook might have no choice but to join it as well, given all the initial support from other Websites and application developers that Google was able to muster. But this move suggests otherwise. Facebook is not going to join OpenSocial unless it has to. In fact, Facebook actually helped Bebo with this effort, and for good reason.

How does Facebook crush OpenSocial? By helping to make Facebook applications easily portable to other social networks. It would rather open up its own application platform to other social networks and compete head-to-head with OpenSocial. That’s the game plan. Facebook already has all the developers anyway. This is Facebook’s game to lose. Round Two goes to Facebook. But can it get LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, and others—some of whom have opened up their own platforms to outside developers—to also play ball?

(Read our on-the-scene coverage with full details about Bebo’s platform here).

Update: In fact, what I suggested above is exactly what Facebook is doing. (See this post on the Facebook developers blog). And this was just added to its wiki for developers:

In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.

It is mano-a-mano, folks.

More info on this here