TwitPwr.com: More Than a Short URL Service

April 12th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, featured, social media | 1 Comment
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twitpwrscreen1Twitpwr.com was dreamt up when Joel Comm and Dan Nickerson were trying to find a creative way to promote Joel’s book Twitter Power. The basic concept was for a Twitter short url service with stats, but some really cool additions were dreamed up by our dev team.

The original idea was to provide a ranking service that actually ranked people on the amount of users that took action as a result of their tweets rather than number of followers they have. We believe this to be a much more accurate representation of how much influence (or “Twitter power”) an individual Twitter user has.

So taking the original idea we added some additional functional features that give the ranking & URL shortening service additional by both driving followers and traffic to the individual twitter user and the sites and pages that they link to using the service.

TwitPwr uses sound SEO and linking strategies to create a matrix of relevant, interlinked, pages and directories that create a matrix of topically related sections within Twitpwr all linking out to users and websites they promote using twitter. One of the first things you will notice is that when you click on one of the links that someone has created using TwitPwr you will be taken to a profile page for the link.

The first thing you will see at the top of a link profile page is the actual link to the page, this drives traffic and trust to the site that the user linked to. Directly under the link to the page you will see the users name and a link to their profile page on TwitPwr, this connects that user to to this link and passes trust and traffic to our user profile pages.

As you move down the page the next thing you will come across is the actual screenshot of the exact page linked too by the user and Alexa data on the domain. These two features are designed to give basic information about the site to anyone looking at the page. For example: If a users clicks on one of the hot links from the index page they will have a screenshot and alexa data to help them determine whether or not they actually want to visit this link.

Moving further down the link profile page you can see the other recent links by other users to this domain. I am currently looking at the link profile page for a YouTube link and on this page is all the other YouTube videos that users have linked to recently which is pretty cool in that I can check out the other popular videos. This feature also links to the profile pages for those links and is creating a content relevant section within TwitPwr driving SEO for our users and the sites they are linking too. The last few things you see on the link profile page provide some technical data for those who would like to see it and a list of sites relative to the one that the user is viewing.

The user profile pages call the Twitter API for all of the users Twitter data including: name, number of followers, background images, user image, etc. We also include our some TwitPwr data on this screen. This first piece of TwitPwr data is the rank, or overall TwitPwr ranking. Your rank is calculated by the amount of “juice” that you have accumulated using the service over a set period of time (juice is calculated using a finite period of recent time because if it were “all time” data then it would be virtually impossible for new users to catch up in the rankings).

“Juice” is calculated using the number of unique clicks on the links that a user creates, clicks are only recorded from Twitter and reputable twitter API sources. A list of the sites that record clicks in TwitPwr is not available to the public as we feel it could be used to manipulate numbers and rankings. There is also a relatively complex click fraud detection algorithym to prevent click fraud and facilitate automatic user banning. If you would like to submit a legitimate twitter site to be considered in TwitPwr rankings then you can do so using the feedback form at TwitPwr.com. The sites that TwitPwr tracks are also updately periodically based on incoming referral data.

Finally we get to the ranking system that is a directory of TwitPwr users with the top 25 ranks getting a spot on the main TwitPwr page. This directory links to the profile pages, which in-turn link to all the URL profile pages creating the master map for all of the content in TwitPwr. TwitPwr is a new service and we will continue to improve and grow it but the assumption that is is strictly a short URL service is way off base.

The AdMob Ugly

April 10th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, business and finance, featured, mobile, sales and marketing | 4 Comments

iphone-admobWe started using AdMob to deliver advertising inside our iPhone applications shortly after the launch of the app store. The mobile advertising network deserves praise for being one of the front runners in the race to deliver effective mobile advertising but the system is far from perfect. There are a lot of things I really like about AdMob but frankly until some things improve and change the network will not be profitable for a large portion of mobile publishers and advertisers. To be clear I have much respect for companies that build solutions capitalizing on cutting edge technologies, I also understand how hard it can be to try to bring those solutions to “blue ocean markets”.

Case #1: Where’s the Clicks?

In testing we setup several external landing pages and some basic ads to looks at the analytics. What we found was pretty scary in this world where numbers mean everything. Of the clicks we paid for we only saw about 60% of them actually ever hit the page at all. After a few variations of all settings we came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the missing clicks were “misclicks” on the device and the user closed the mobile safari window before it actually loaded the page, thus we pay for the clicks but the analytics pixel on the page never fires because the page does not load.

This is obviously a huge problem and many factors contribute to this case. Developers are far from mastering the mobile user interface, bad interfaces and bad ad placements will result in misclicks on a system with so little real estate available in the UI.

Another contributing factor is that AdMob advertisers cannot target specific mobile sites or applications for ad delivery, this means that you cannot filter out the sites or apps sending “misclicks” or bad traffic in general.

In summary AdMob must allow advertisers to target and filter the applications and sites that display their ads. In addition AdMob must develop better controls to protect against click fraud, misclicks, and other types of generally bad traffic.

Case #2: Demographic Targeting

Before I start in on this topic I want to give AdMob some credit for their SDK. Software developer kits are a rarity in the Internet advertising and marketing scene as a whole and we were particularly happy to work with it, great code, great documentation, great functionality.

Unfortunately the functionality that the SDK provides us as a developer seems to have little point in the end. The main advantage provided application publishers in the SDK is the ability to provide AdMob demographic and location data for the individual user under the auspicious that AdMob will return highly targeted advertisements for that individual prospect.

Through testing we have seen absolutely no evidence that this data is being used to deliver more relevant advertising in any regard. As we are both a publisher and an advertiser in AdMob I know that there are very little targeting options at all in the advertiser interfaces. There are some great device and location options but nothing for demographics. I suspect the missing ad targeting is the result of a lack of advertisers able to benefit from the targeting and deficiencies in the AdMod software that returns targeted ads dynamically.

Case #3: The Impression Exchange

I love the idea and thinking behind the impression exchange feature that AdMob recently launched. The impression exchange allows publishers to exchange advertising impressions in their applications. I find it peculiar that they enabled it by default in our portal for one of our apps but I understand why they did. Without any impressions in the exchange there is nothing to exchange, the default enable looked like a vehicle to help the exchange reach critical mass and have value sooner.

As I said I really like the idea of being able to back fill my inventory with exchange impressions and even trade out the lowest paying impressions for exchange impressions but in this case the bottom line is that currently it just flat out didn’t get us any results. We saw no noticeable download increases after switching our entire inventory over to the exchange for several days to test. On top of that there is no reporting to facilitate the exchange, it just lumps your exchange clicks in with your overall clicks. You cannot tell your exchange clicks from any other type of click and in this case the total number of clicks went down dramatically even after optimizing the ad text line and graphic.

In Short

AdMob is is leading the way in a very young industry and they deserve credit for overcoming the obstacles that they have overcome to get to this point. The ideas and philosophies behind the platform are right on in my opinion but the immaturity of the industry and lack of attention to critical details hinder the system in it’s current form.

We will continue to use AdMob and continue to test new and existing features but we are making plans to keep the doors open for other solutions. We are currently working on new internal mobile adserver technologies that will give us a layer sitting above AdMob and other providers so that we can dynamically insert and rotate other networks and advertisers with the AdMob inventory.

AdMob is a great way to get a little extra cash out of a free application and if you need downloads to jump start new applications it is one of the few ways to get them. With $350 million in new funding from Sequoia I expect to see improvements in the areas of concern I covered in this article, how fast that might happens is anyone’s guess.

InfoMediaInc, Virtualization and HyperVM

April 9th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, featured, linux | 3 Comments
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hypervmimageWhat is Virtualization?

In the technology world, virtualization generally means the abstraction of computer resources and can often relate to any number of concepts ranging from Platform or OS virtualization to Desktop or resource virtualization.

Virtual hosting is also often used on a large scale for internal purposes to provide a low cost alternative for keeping several separate websites and databases such as customer extranet website, employee extranet, internal intranet and intranets for different departments. This reduces management and administrative overhead and the number of separate servers required to support the business.

Why Virtualization?

There are many reasons why virtualization can be beneficial. Virtualization can allow for expanding hardware capabilities, allowing more simultaneous work to be done per machine. It can also improve efforts to control costs and simplify management through consolidation of servers. This day and age, there is an ever increasing need to control large multiprocessor and cluster installations and virtualization makes this possible. Virtualization allows for the running of complex, OS-dependant applications in different hardware or OS environments. Virtualization also provides improved security, reliability, and device independence possible from hypervisor architectures.

In the case of server consolidation, many small physical servers are replaced by one larger physical server, to increase the utilization of costly hardware resources. The large server can “host” many “guest” virtual machines. A virtual machine can be more easily controlled and inspected from outside than a physical one, and its configuration is more flexible.

A new virtual machine can be provisioned as needed without the need for an up-front hardware purchase. Also, a virtual machine can easily be relocated from one physical machine to another as needed. Unfortunately many networks are burdened with “single points of failure”. Many times it’s more of a cost-prohibitive issue in setting up redundancy than it is a network design problem. Some networks may only have a single mail server, or 1 pipe out to the Internet, 1 firewall, whatever. Because of the easy relocation, virtual machines can be used in disaster recovery scenarios.

How Virtualization?

Virtualization is only possible given the right combination of hardware and software elements. There are a number of software packages available for virtualization. Generally, a virtual machine monitor, also known as a “hypervisor”, is needed for successful virtualization.

A hypervisor is virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently. A hypervisor runs directly on the host’s hardware as a hardware control and guest operating system monitor. This is where HyperVM by Lxlabs comes in.

Why InfoMedia, Inc. went with HyperVM.

HyperVM is a multi-platform, multi-tiered, multi-server, multi-virtualization web based application that allows the creation and management of different Virtual Machines each based on different technologies across machines and platforms.

HyperVM sports advanced features providing the capability to manage entire VPS hosting from a single console. HyperVM has been optimized for cross data-center clusters, allowing one to have servers spread across multiple data centers all over the world.

Some key features that HyperVM provides are the ability to manage an entire data center. HyperVM is successfully used to manage 1000s of VPSes on 100s of servers, centrally, with the slaves spread across different DCs. HyperVM allows efficient windows virtualization with advanced features like backup/restore built in. HyperVM provides support for multiple virtualization technologies and allows live migration. HyperVM centralized backup uses symlinks to provide extreme efficiency in backing up entire hosting. HyperVM provides an advanced browse backup feature in which an entire backup can be browsed and automatically be restored locally, without ever needing to contact the support.

Skype for iPhone causes legal debate, FCC asked to take action

April 8th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, apple, featured, mobile | 2 Comments
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Since the release of Skype for the iPhone and iTouch last week it has been downloaded over 2 million times. That breaks down to about 2-3 downloads per second since it was released on March 31 despite being limited to use on a Wi-Fi connection and not a cellular connection.

Apple forces the Wi-Fi restriction on iPhone software developers but most speculate this is because of pressure from carriers that sell the iPhone and provide service for it. AT&T’s top public policy executive Jim Cicconi was recently quoted as saying, “We absolutely expect our vendors [Apple in this case] not to facilitate the services of our competitors. Skype is a competitor, just like Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile. Skype has no obligation to market AT&T services. Why should the reverse be true?”

Apple has yet to make a comment on the issue because the ability of VOIP apps like Skype to use the 3G network could greatly increase the utility of a device like the iPhone, possibly increasing sales.

There has been a lot of concern about the issue since the opening of the iPhone App Store, but the release of Skype has finally caused action to be taken. An internet advocacy group called Free Press has asked the FCC to investigate whether or not this practice is a violation of federal law. In the letter Free Press asks the commission to clarify if wireless internet service falls into under the same policy standards as traditional broadband internet. The letter cites restrictions on Google Android phones using T-Mobile’s network in addition to the iPhone Skype restrictions.

The FCC released an Internet Policy Statement in 2005 with guidelines on how they will regulate the internet. The policy states that, “To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run application and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.” This isn’t a blanket net neutrality law, but allows the FCC to enforce a neutral internet on a case by case basis. In 2005 the FCC enforced this policy on Madison River Communications for blocking VOIP services over their DSL lines. Madison River was ordered to stop the practice and pay a $15,000 fine to the FCC. This precedent implies that if wireless internet services are categorized under the same policy as traditional broadband then AT&T will have to allow Skype on their network.

Skype has also caused a stir in Europe where T-Mobile, Apple’s iPhone distributor in Germany, has said that in addition to not allowing Skype on their 3G network they will also be banning it on their Wi-Fi hotspot network. T-Mobile Germany has threatened to cancel the accounts of anyone who tries to work around these restrictions. In response a coalition of companies including Skype, Microsoft, and Intel have asked the European Union to enact policy to protect the consumer’s right to use any application they please.

Despite the restrictions there are numerous reports around the internet of hacked iPhones being able to use Skype on AT&T’s 3G network without any problems. This would indicate that network capacity isn’t an issue.

The impact of the FCC and EU’s decision on this issue could have far reaching implications on the future of mobile development as a whole, not just VOIP. A decision will determine what usage restrictions mobile carriers can put on their networks, possibly impacting peer-to-peer applications, video streaming, online gaming, and other applications.

Sneak Peek of May’s Top One Report

April 8th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, featured, internet marketing | No Comments
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May Top One Report Cover

We’re putting the finishing details on May’s Top One Report and it’s going to be an awesome issue. May’s issue centers around innovation and entrepreneurial ingenuity.

We cover all parts of the creative process, from conception of an idea, protecting an idea (Look for a great guest article from Kevin Houchin, our attorney!), even how to know if your idea is profitable.

You won’t want to miss the top secret tutorial that can help you boost your bandwidth to unbelievable speeds.

Look for this issue in your mailbox soon!

Not a subscriber? Visit www.toponereport.com now to make this your trial issue!

Have a topic you want covered in the Top One Report? Drop us a line .

New Infomedia, Inc. Official Site

April 8th, 2009 | Posted in featured | No Comments
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Loveland, Colorado based Infomedia, Inc. is excited to announce the launch of their official site.

Infomedia is a private startup incubator focused on developing leading edge marketing systems and the software needed to support them.

Founded by Joel Comm and Ken Burge in 1995, Infomedia is a growing technology company with over 30 employees.

Infomedia operates dozens of successful web properties from shopping sites to online communities.

The company has also developed popular iphone applications the likes of iFart Mobile (#1 Paid App in iTunes for over 3 weeks), iVote Mobile and its proprietary Mobile Syndication Solution – MSS.

Infomedia is at the forefront of SMS Mobile Marketing with its cutting edge Text Cast Live Platform.

InfomediaInc.com will not only serve as a corporate site, but also as a technology and business blog.