Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

As marketers continue to search for (and exploit) places in which you'd never think to find an ad, it makes sense to scroll a few plugs through an item that the vast majority of us spend at least a few hours per week touching. That item, dear friends, is the handle of the tried and true shopping cart, and apparently, Modstream is hoping to install bars with scrolling displays onto buggies and allow companies to beam in messages wirelessly. The system works by allowing outfits to access a web-based profile, enter in a given message, and transmit the ad to participating stores. As an added bonus, the setup enables said companies to change up their messages on a whim and keeps us shoppers guessing as to what clever line is coming next. Now, who's down with hacking this thing to scroll through our favorite RSS feeds?

[Via Textually]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

New service Photrade offers an ad supported photo syndication service that brings photo monetization to a broader audience.

The concept is simple enough and we’ve seen parts of Photrade in other services. Users upload their photos Flickr style then are presented with a variety of options. Like CafePress they can offer T-Shirts and similar items with the photo printed on the said item at a price determined by the user. Where it differs is with the ability to offer digital rights management as well, complete with syndication options. Rights to use a photo can be sold, or can be offered as a embed that comes with an overlaid adsense style ad unit. This provides a CPM revenue stream (you’re paid on how many times your photo is shown) whilst also providing a legal low cost alternative for websites seeking legal quality images. Watermarking support is also available.

Jeremy Schoemaker caught up with the company recently and shot the below video. The site is currently in closed beta and should be opening up to general applications in the new year.

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Filed under: Laptops

Remember that other ultra-portable announced during the month of the Eee Pc and Palm Foleo? Right, the 7-inch Via / FIC (parental unit to Everex) collaboration first shown as the NanoBook reference design or CE260 / CE261 when touted by FIC. Having already cleared the FCC, FIC is saying that US and European shipments of the VIA C7-M device will begin in Q1 of 2008 and will include either Windows XP or Linux preloads on that 1.8-inch 30GB disk. It's supposed to be priced similar to the Eee PC which has carved a nice little niche for itself in the ultra-portable market. With any luck, it'll show up at Wal-Mart with a sub-$300 price tag sporting Everex's lovely new gOS.

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Peripherals

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Toronto, Canada-based Moola has been operating an invite-only beta for a little over 18 months and will on Friday open their site to the public (they'll be officially launching at the TechCrunch Meetup in Boston). Moola has created a multiplayer online game network in which people compete head-to-head for real money. That's nothing new, but Moola's hook is that the site is completely free. You can't deposit money into Moola, instead you earn your starting funds by looking at ads before playing games. Moola is calling their creation a Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game (MMRG).

Here's how it works: Moola fronts users a penny to start, which puts you at the bottom rung of a thirty step ladder. Every time you win a game, you double your money, every time you lose, you fall all the way to the bottom and start over with a penny. If you win 30 times in a row, you walk away with $10.7 million (though you can cash out at any time, so risking a few thousand in an online head-to-head game at the middle levels is probably not that smart).

Moola has grown to 175,000 users since it launched the invite-only beta in 2006. Moola CEO Arlen Ritchie told me that recently the site has been getting a lot more traffic to their home page than they have registered users, which indicated that there is interest from people who don't have invites. So, now seemed like the perfect time to open the doors to the site.

Ritchie acknowledged that it is unlikely anyone will ever win the $10 million prize because most people wouldn't be crazy enough to risk $5 million to try for it -- in fact, two people would have to be that crazy. Of course, you don't have to wager it all on each game. You can play in any bracket below your account balance, and Ritchie told me that most people keep a positive balance rather than wagering all their cash at once. And even if winning the big one may never happen, a lot of real money is being made on Moola. The top player right now has over $8,000 and the highest cash out was in the $5,500 range. Users on the site have exchanged over $4 million so far (though that figure may count the same money being traded back and forth between users multiple times and doesn't represent the amount paid out).

Because it is unlikely anyone will make big money from the games, most users will either stay in a low game bracket (a few cents), which the ads will cover for Moola, or they will make money via Moola's other options -- at which Moola always makes money.

Other Ways to Make Moola

In addition to games, Moola enables users to make money by searching on their Moola Search page. Powered by Google Custom Search, Moola employs an algorithm that measures how much people search, weeds out illegitimate searches and clicks, and then shares ad revenue with searchers. You might only make a few pennies per day, but that money can be used to play Moola games and bump you into a higher playing bracket.

Moola also lets people make cash via what they call "Boosters" -- or, a cash back program based on affiliate marketing. Shopping at any of Booster's affiliated online stores results in cash deposited in your account. Moola supports a lot of major online retailers including Hotels.com, Buy.com, Travelocity, Skype, Old Navy, and NewEgg.

The final way Moola enables users to make money, is via a 4-level referral program. Refer friends, and take a cut of anything they do on the site, whether that's search payouts, Booster Zone payouts, or game winnings.

BoosterBar

Along with opening the site to the public, Moola will be announcing a toolbar that is really centered around their shopping and search revenue streams. They've built the Moola search into the bar, which makes it more convenient for people. It is the slick shopping integration, however, that will garner more interest. Any site you visit on the Internet that is a Moola affiliate will register on the bar and allow you to log into your account so your shopping is eligible for cash back. That lets people shop on the web as normal, rather than have to first page through the site's directory of affiliates -- something Moola expects most people aren't keen on doing.

If an ecommerce site is not a Moola partner, the BoosterBar will suggest an alternative that is in their affiliate network. Ritchie tells me that initial feedback from partners on this feature is tremendous. They love being able to steal visitors away from competition right at the point of sale.

Eventually, the game playing side of Moola will be integrated into the toolbar, allowing users to set up games and then surf the web while waiting for an opponent -- which can take longer at the higher levels where competition is more thin. Ritchie told me that the plan down the line is to add social features, such as chat or messaging, to the toolbar to augment the community that has grown up around Moola. Apparently, some users have taken to organizing their own tournaments based around Moola's games (you can set up one-on-one matches with specific players on the site).

The Games

For the cornerstone of the site, the games are rather weak. Moola has created three proprietary games for the site, with a fourth currently in development. Moola's line up includes a rock, paper, scissors game (*yawn*), Hi-Lo (*yawn*), and a bidding game where you try to out smart your opponent (not the most thrilling experience, but it held my attention longer than the others). But, Moola is in the planning stages of an API that would allow third-party developers to add games to Moola. They're currently in talks with two unnamed developers to create additional content prior to the release of a public API. (And they are soliciting queries from other interested game developers at gamedev@moola.com.)

Moola developers would be able to make money from both the advertising on the games, as well as take a cut of the money that changes hands between players. Ritchie also told me that the plan is to allow developers to "Moola-ize" their games outside of the site. So, for example, Microsoft could add Moola functionality to Halo 3 on XBox Live and then Moola members could organize Halo matches and play each other for cash.

Conclusion

Nothing at Moola is very revolutionary. Cash back shopping? Seen it. Competitive gaming? Seen it. Revenue share on search? Seen it. Multilevel referral program? Seen it. But they appear to have packaged everything up in a tidy manner, and the coming API for games is exciting. Winning money playing online games without putting any of your own cash up makes it a lot more fun (I'm up to $0.22 -- time to retire!), and the prospect of less snooze-worthy games from third-party developers sounds great.

It took Moola members 10 months to play for the first $1 million. The last million took about 4 months. The next million is on track to cross through Moola in just 55 days. Once the site opens up, those millions will probably be flying about at a more rapid rate.

American toy manufacturers must be the happiest folks in the world right now, given the rate at which toys from China are being discovered to have lead in them. Just about every evening on the local news, they announce a new product recall. This is my second Christmas as a dad, so it hits home with me in particular. My wife and I have come close on more than one occasion to purchasing a toy for our infant that was later revealed to contain lead or a date rape drug (I wish I was making this up).

In steps Facebook application “Toy Recall Alert.” Sure, it’s opportunistic to create an app with a profit model (which this one has) around something like this. But they’re providing a useful service. Just taking a look at the items listed there and the sheer number of toys and children’s items that have been recalled is mind-blowing. There are seven pages of items that have been recalled recently, and even more that show with use of the search function.

The app’s business model is based on a slightly targeted recommendation system. You enter a search term, to check on whether the toy you’ve purchased or are thinking of purchasing is recalled, and on the left will be some recommended toys that aren’t going to kill your child.

For best results with this app, don’t strictly rely on the announcement list. Most of the stuff I’ve heard of as being hazardous is listed there, but when I tested out the search function on a few toys that I remember as having been on the recall lists, much more showed up. If you’re considering a toy, run it through this list, and you’ll get your answer on whether it’s hazardous, poisonous, or otherwise harmful.

The app is definitely worth having installed on your Facebook profile, if only for the holiday season. Do it for the children.

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Kelly Rodriques and Paul Schiff are creating a new Hollywood studio from scratch called Blowtorch Entertainment. The company is just launching with a $50 million investment from Ignition Partners, Hollywood individuals, and at least one (unnamed) hedge fund. Rodriques was a partner at Ignition, and before that a digital ad executive. Schiff is the Hollywood producer behind Rushmore, My Cousin Vinny, and Date Movie. Rodriques and Schiff came by my office earlier this week to brief me on Blowtorch.

Blowtorch wants to make cult movies that appeal to college kids. It plans to make or acquire 18 feature-length films over the next three years at about $5 million a pop. (That hedge fund will be providing an additional $40 million a year to pay for it all). “We want to be in the Napoleon Dynamite business,” says Rodriques. As it is making these films, it wants to involve the potential audience to a greater degree than ever before through its Website, where people will be able to help cast movies (we’ve heard that idea recently) or pick the songs for the soundtrack, among other ideas. “It can’t be anarchy,” warns Schiff. “We won’t have a movie at the end of the process if everyone’s vote counts and impacts the project equally. But we still want the audience to participate in some way.”

So in addition to helping to steer the development of each movie, Blowtorch audience members will get a shot at having their own videos shown in theaters alongside the feature films. Here’s how it will work: On the site, which is not much more than a placeholder right now, people will be able to watch additional digital shorts made by Blowtorch, as well as upload their own videos. All the videos on the site will be voted on, and spread virally through Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, and other social applications. The audience-made videos that get the most votes then will be professionally reshot and included in a 5-to-15-minute pre-show collection that will be shown in theaters before each of Blowtorch’s feature films.

Blowtorch has already cut deals with 600 theaters nationwide near college campuses and in urban areas that will dedicate one screen to Blowtorch Nights every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Audience members in the theaters will also be able to vote for the digital shorts as they are watching them through their mobile phones and send links to the videos to their friends elsewhere. So you won’t actually have to be in the theater to be connected to the experience. Vivendi will distribute Blowtorch’s feature-length movies once they go to DVD, pay-per-view, cable, TV, and digitally as well through places like iTunes and Amazon.

The first Blowtorch movie, You Are Here, a film-festival darling that the studio bought, will come out next April. The movie is about LA club kids who talk about one particularly insane night. One idea Schiff and Rodriques have is for one of the movie’s actresses, Bijou Phillips, to solicit video confessionals on the the Blowtorch Website from the audience about their craziest night ever. Then the best ones could be packaged with the film when it goes to theaters.

When the full-blown site launches in early December, there will be three main tabs: Front Row, Entourage, and Studio. Front Row will be the place where people can share videos and vote for them. It is where the popular stuff will be. Entourage will be the place where people can organize their social networks around their media preferences, bring in their friends from other social sites to vote on their stuff, or bring in videos from YouTube and elsewhere to throw into the mix. Studio is where they will submit original videos, and where marketing partners will be able to solicit material as well for their own viral video campaigns.

What strikes me about Blowtorch is that it is a movie company that is thinking like a cable channel. But instead of TV shows, it wants to create nichebusters that appeal to the 18-to-24-year-old audience. “One of the things exciting for me,” says Schiff, “is we are targeting a specific audience and narrowcasting to them on a consistent basis.” He talks about “programming that channel.” But there is no channel per se. It is wherever that audience wants to be—on the Web, in the theaters, on their mobile phones. You will notice, though, that Blowtorch is not creating a television channel. There is just so much more opportunity elsewhere.

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Matthew Buckland was at a gathering of “about 100 of some of South Africa’s top geeks Tuesday night” with Wikipedia man Jimmy Wales, where Buckland says that he saw things in Wales’ presentation that clued towards a socialpedia of sorts.

“It’s not a healthy thing that power is in the hands of a couple of companies… the information needs to be out there in the public and people involved,” Wales said to the gathering in Johannesburg. Described as Google’s worst nightmare by Fast Company, Wales intends to take on the Googles of the world by making his new search project a collaborative effort much like Wikipedia.

It has been tried before, to varying degrees of success. The latest effort (or at least most visible) to do this of course is Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo. It is built on the wiki platform, and is human powered, too.  It is unclear at this time what Wales intends to bring to the table that hasn’t already been tried by DMOZ, Mahalo, or other human powered search engines.

Some of the analysis of his intentions leaps to the conclusion that what we think of as traditional social features (like the ones found in Facebook, Friendster or MySpace) will end up in Wikipedia.  I can see why one would make the leap; it’s an attractive thought.  Disrupting the powerbase of all the major players in the social market with the juggernaut of Wikipedia would be a fun thing to watch shake out.

Based on Buckland’s report from Wales’ talk, it seems more likely that such an effort would fall under the for-profit Wikia group.

Jimmy Wales revealed what he said were some of the “first screenshots” of his new project on search.

But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page.

Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?

Wales’ new projects are being created by a new company, Wikia. The company has been the subject of quite a bit of hype and speculation in recent times. Wikia a separate organisation to Wikipedia and aims to take the wiki concept to every other kind of work, book, or community projects that people might build. It also aims to extend the Wikipedia model beyond just nonprofit, educational and research communities.

I don’t think any human-powered search could ever come close to touching Google’s marketshare (Mahalo or something from Wikia). Google is just too good at what it does, and is constantly improving.  That isn’t to say that human-powered search engines don’t have their place as valuable research tools, but in the heirchy of discovery and search, they will always fall into the same category as Wikipedia: mostly supplemental.

But if Wales can help enact the same explosive growth to a search project from Wikia that was able to be conjured up  by Wikipedia, the social and search engine spaces could be in for a wild ride.

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Is Amazon supporting Open Social? If they are, that would be big news. If they have decided not to, that would be big news too. We reported last night that Amazon was announcing support for the Google-led protocol, along with a number of other smaller announcements.

We've been on the phone and email with Amazon's PR department all day today. It's been a great example of the challenges any of these huge companies face in trying to be either Open or Social, much less both.

The long and short of it is this: Amazon has nothing to say; they told us they did, but they don't. If they do have anything to say they would like to say it through words put into my mouth. Thanks, Amazon. I don't think you've got much Openness to bring to my Social even if that is what you intend to do.

Here's the time-line.

1. Amazon approached us a week ago with a draft press release. They told us this release was "big news." It was announcing support for Open Social, the "first ever" access to Unbox and MP3 files for affiliates (actually not true, it's been months since that happened) and the availability of new RSS feeds for things like most popular items in various categories. Did you know that there's been no RSS feeds for top selling items in categories at Amazon.com? Well, there is now - and they were so excited that they figured it out, that they wrote it up in a press release.

2. The press release, though clearly a draft (not uncommon, PR people send us draft releases all the time), is dated November 15th. So 12:00 AM EST on the 15th arrived last night and I wrote up a post - after figuring out at the last minute that the claims in the release about "first ever" access to MP3s are the kind of information that uninformed journalists fall for and power users laugh at us for printing. Typical of too much PR practice, someone's trying to trick me, not make both our jobs easier. I added snark to my post about this, but I took it out just to be decent - it was clearly a draft release and there's no need to be nasty more than I really need to be.

3. Post went up, I had a nice night vacuuming my living room floor.

4. In the morning I woke up to a flurry of emails. According to an email sent to one of our writers at 11:59 PM EST the night before one minute before the release time - they threw on the brakes. Our writer wasn't awake and didn't see it until the morning, when we both received more emails insisting that we remove the post, that the release "was never issued," no statement's been made, it's not true and it's still under embargo anyway. Frustrating, but funny.

5. I then put up an update reading:

"Update: Amazon contacted us this morning to let us know that though they sent us a draft press release, they are not in fact making any such announcement, they are not supporting OpenSocial and if they were it would still be under embargo anyway despite the date on said release."

I twittered about the absurdity of it all and Valleywag picked up the story. It was Read/WriteWeb's second appearance on Valleywag today and we felt naughty by association.

6. I talked to various Amazon people throughout the day on the phone, refusing (very nicely) to take down the story or remove all references to Open Social. They did not like the update I posted.

They were not happy, but they were nice enough about it. What can you do when dealing with a blogger? We are so irrational and hard to communicate with!

I offered to post a different update if they'd like to send me a statement. I meant a statement from them.

7. They sent me the following.

"Since the publication of this post, an Amazon spokesperson contacted me to clarify that no announcement was made in regards to support for Open Social. The Amazon spokesperson went on to say that Social network developers have been using the Amazon Associates Web Service to merchandise Amazon products (and earn Associates commissions) for some time. She indicated that Amazon would continue to provide developers with tools that allow them to choose the platform that makes the most sense for them regardless of the Social networking site they are building on. She pointed out..." blah blah blah.

I cannot believe they'd send me text written in the first person and expect me to post it under my own name! Not to mention the really uptight language they've got that puppet named Marshall using! I tried to mock them coyly but without cruelty at the top of the original post.

The Grand Finale

The conclusion of this ridiculous story is that I've put up this post here.

In some ways, this isn't about communicating with bloggers at all. When one billion dollar company is considering interacting formally with other billion dollar companies - why would you tell press about it before everyone is sure and why would you just generally drop the ball like this?

In regards to this particular situation, though, Amazon is probably not alone in a group that includes Google, MySpace, Bebo and a long list of other giant companies in not understanding what it means to be Open or Social. If these people can't communicate like human beings with a blogger going out of my way to be nice to them, why on earth should I be excited about their finding religion and embracing the OpenSocial Brand Platform?

At our TechCrunch Boston MeetUp, a company is launching called Mzinga that brings white-label social networks to consumer research. Mzinga, which means “beehive” in Swahili, is actually the combination and rebranding of two existing companies: Knowledge Planet (Web-based corporate learning) and Shared Insights (Web communities). Right out of the gate, the company already has a healthy business with $17 million in annual revenues and 100 employees. And CEO Rick Faulk says the company is “nearly profitable.”

Mzinga lets corporations create social networks for their most ardent customers or alumni and retirees. It offers a menu of social modules that companies can add to their sites, including blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, calendars, forums, tag clouds, file uploading tools, individual profile pages, group pages, and idea-management tools with Digg-like voting. Faulk used to be the chief marketing officer at WebEx, and Mziinga already powers the community portion of its site. WebEx’s most hardcore customers can join and give feedback there about future features that WebEx should implementing.

This must be the month that social networks go corporate because last week another white-label social network launched called Networked Insights. Like Mzinga, it lets companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products. But it uses semantic analysis sand concept matching to extract meaning from all the chatter, and ranks conversations or comments based on how many interactions are associated with it. So a loud, whiny customer who complains a lot about a product in comments, but nobody else is joining in or linking off him, counts less than the quiet customer who only made one insightful post that spurred a torrent of other comments, links, ratings, and invitations to others to join the discussion.

Of course, being able to capture all of these discussions and mine them for meaning make them potentially more powerful than any focus group. The trick will be to get a representative sample of a company’s customers to participate, as opposed to just the most opinionated or the ones who are already brand fanatics.

Corporate social networks may not be sexy, but they could be a goldmine. Networked Insights charges $200,000 a year and up to build a social network for your brand (pricing is based on the number of interactions). Mzinga will charge $1,000 a month for its self-serve offerings and $15,000 a month for full service (or $180,000 per year), where Mzinga builds the site, then recruits, and manages the community. Faulk is finding plenty of takers for the more expensive option. “What we are finding is that companies like to write a check to make it successful,” he says, sounding a bit like someone who cannot believe his own luck.

Faulk is also taking a social approach to marketing. Mzinga’s software was used to create a site for the express purpose of crowdsourcing a book. The book, We Are Smarter Than Me, was written by 5,000 different people and published by Wharton. It was released on September 24th, and already the first print run of 15,000 is nearly sold out, says Faulk. The book is about—what else—how to use crowds to help your business.

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