5 Million

Seattle based RevenueLoan, a new startup founded by Founder’s Co-op, is open for business. Think of them as a friendly loan shark who won’t come to break your legs if you don’t pay up (I don’t think they will, anyway).

A lot of startups that have revenue don’t want to raise venture capital because of the onerous terms – lots of equity, board seats and maybe even overall control of the company. Bank debt is an option but it’s hard to get, usually requires personal guarantees and the repayment schedules can be difficult or impossible to meet. This is RevenueLoan’s sweet spot.

If you have revenue of at least $1 million a year you can qualify to get a loan from them of $100,000 – $500,000 or more. There’s no set repayment schedule. Instead you give them a percentage of your revenue over time until you’ve paid them back 3x – 5x the amount borrowed. That may take 2 years or it may take six years, says chairman Andy Sack, and they’re ok with that.

More importantly, RevenueLoan doesn’t want control of your company, or any board seats. They don’t ask for personal guarantees. There’s no equity component (although in some instances they may ask for warrants), so there is no dilution to shareholders.

And RevenueLoan has money to spend. They’ve just raised $6 million from Voyager Capital, Summit Capital, and Founder’s Co-op, and they’ve earmarked $4.5 million of that for loans.

Press release is below:

RevenueLoan Secures $6MM First Round of Institutional Financing,
The company offers innovative new financing option for small business
Seattle, WA June 4, 2010

For small businesses, raising capital has never been easy, and the recent financial crisis has effectively closed the capital markets to all but the biggest and most high-flying small companies. The gross majority of growing businesses in the northwest have no access to growth capital. These are the businesses that have the greatest potential to create jobs, turn around the economy, and otherwise transform our lives. But help is on the way for business owners in the Pacific Northwest: a new company called RevenueLoan has just opened its doors, backed by $6MM in fresh capital from Voyager Capital, Summit Capital, and Founder’s Co-op.

RevenueLoan was created to address the needs of business owners with an innovative new form of financing growth. Instead of lending money at fixed rates – which can burden young companies with unrealistic monthly payments – RevenueLoan offers loans in exchange for a percentage of future revenues, so payments start small, and only increase as the company is able to grow revenues. This approach, called revenue based finance, is common in the mining and entertainment industries, but has not been applied to the needs of small business.

The company was founded and is being managed by Andy Sack, managing partner at Founder’s Co-op. According to Sack, his experience running venture capital backed companies helped him see the benefits of revenue based finance and prompted him to create RevenueLoan. Sack says, “Revenue loans have a huge number of benefits that I know from first hand experience as an entrepreneur matter a LOT. The benefits of no personal guarantee, no dilution, no valuation negotiation, no active control provisions, and no need for a clear exit strategy make this money very appealing to entrepreneurs trying to grow their businesses. A less obvious benefit, but an important structural benefit is that revenue loans align incentives of entrepreneur and investor. “

RevenueLoan focuses on funding early stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest with trailing revenues of $1MM up to 5MM. In most instances, revenue loan amounts will range from $100K to $500K and beyond depending upon the company.

Erik Benson, of Voyager Capital, says that “Revenue Loan unique approach to use technology and finance to provide growth capital to a large number of businesses attracted his attention. I know first hand that companies off the beaten path geographically and thematically have a really hard time raising equity capital. I think there’s a real opportunity in finding and servicing these companies.”

According to Thomas Thurston, “Revenue Loan is on the forefront of a movement that is quietly beginning to transform the startup landscape as we know it – in an extremely positive way. We’ve seen a more than a 22X jump in the dollars invested through this type of funding over the past decade or so, and it has only begun to scratch the surface.”

“RevenueLoan focuses on a large underserved market of companies. These companies are growing but not fast enough to provide venture capital returns and don’t yet have enough assets to create meaningful availability under a working capital line. I’m excited to see RevenueLoan stepping in to support these businesses.” says Bruce Helberg, Northwest Market Manager of Silicon Valley Bank.

About Voyager Capital

Voyager Capital is a leading Pacific Northwest information technology venture capital firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies. Voyager invests in early and growth stage software, wireless and digital media companies, where the firm’s domain expertise and go-to-market resources help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has offices in Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; and Menlo Park, CA. Additional information found at www.voyagercapital.com.

About Summit Capital

Summit Capital is a multi-strategy, globally-oriented asset management firm, deploying capital in asset classes, investment vehicles and underlying securities deemed most attractive from a fundamental value perspective at various points throughout a full market cycle. Our style is most synonymous with endowments and foundations targeting total return allocated across a
full spectrum of asset classes through both direct and indirect active investment management. Summit Capital is based in Seattle, WA with additional information found at www.summitcapital.com.

About Founder’s Co-op

Founder’s Co-op is a seed- and early-stage investment partnership based in Seattle. The firm is led by experienced entrepreneurs Andy Sack and Chris DeVore, and invests on behalf of a hands-on limited partnership including more than 20 successful startup veterans. Founder’s Co-op helps web and mobile software entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest from the earliest stages of venture formation, with a hands-on approach that emphasizes agility, capital efficiency, creativity and active support from our extended community of investors and portfolio company founders. To learn more, visit us at http://www.founderscoop.com

Apple Has Paid $1 Billion To App Developers. (And Other Key Stats) —

Today at the WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage for his keynote address. During it, he gave some key stats about three key pillars of Apple’s recent strategy: the iPad, the App Store, and the new iBooks store.

First, the key iPad stats:

• There have been 2 million iPads sold in 59 days.
• That’s 1 iPad sold every 3 seconds
• It’s in 10 countries now (9 new ones) — and 19 by the end of July
• There are over 8,500 native iPad apps
• These apps have been downloaded over 35 million times
• That’s about 17 apps per iPad

Next some iBooks stats:

• There are over 5 million book downloads in the first 65 days of the iBooks store
• That means each iPad has about 2.5 iBooks on them
• Apple has 5 of the top 6 book U.S. publishers and they say that Apple has taken about 22% of the U.S. eBooks market

App Store:

• There are over 225,000 apps in the App Store now.
• 15,000 apps submitted every week (both new and updates) across 30 languages
• 95% of all apps are approved in 7 days

Jobs also used the stage early on at WWDC to take his first shot at Google. He notes that the developer of Elements for the iPad recently emailed him to let him know that he earned more money in the first day of sales for the iPad than he did in 5 years from Google ads on his periodictable.com site.

Jobs also highlighted something that Apple has begun pushing recently thanks largely to its war with Adobe: HTML5. “We support two platforms at Apple,” Jobs said — HTML5 and the App Store. “Apple’s browsers are in the lead in supporting the HTML5 standard,” Jobs noted.

Skype 3G iPhone: 5M Downloads — But What’s the Usage? —

Skype says that less than a week after it was made available, nearly 5 million people have downloaded the 3G version of its iPhone app, with the demand distributed across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. I was among them, even though I don’t have a 3G connection, and I’m pretty sure many others without 3G connections did the same. But how many people are actively using the service? Now that’s an important question, and one Reuters forgot to ask.

The company recently told me that the Skype app had been downloaded a total of 12 million times by owners of the iPhone and iPod touch. And while it plans to charge for 3G calls between Skype users starting next year, “We’re not going to want to price ourselves out of the market,” Russ Shaw, Skype’s VP of mobile, told Reuters. “I can’t ignore the fact that consumers (currently) use us for free.”

I wonder if, between AT&T’s new data tariffs and Skype’s charges, there will really be a cost advantage to using Skype. Regardless, we can expect to see its usage climb starting next week, when Apple introduces the newest version of the iPhone with multitasking features. Many people are likely to leave Skype running in the background, especially for IM and Skype-to-Skype call purposes.

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LucidMedia, provider of an online advertising demand-side platform (DSP) with integrated real-time bidding, this morning announced that is has secured $4.5 million in funding, led by MMV Financial (MMV).

The news comes merely a day after word got out that Google reportedly acquired rival Invite Media in a “$70 million range” deal (still unconfirmed at this point), which would significantly narrow down the exit possibilities for LucidMedia.

Either way, LucidMedia plans to use the funds to expand its recently launched self-service DSP platform, which enables agencies and advertisers manage their online advertising campaigns. The DSP leverages LucidMedia’s contextual targeting technologies, which the company says are patent-protected, to provide more than 14,000 categories.

This funding follows a December 2008 investment from investors like Lake Street Capital and Redleaf Group. LucidMedia has now raised $13.3 million in total, according to CrunchBase data. The company was originally founded in 1999.

(Via press release)

Peer-to-peer lending network Lending Club this morning announced it passed $10 million in monthly loan fundings for May 2010. The company claims that the milestone marks the first time any U.S. peer lending company has funded that amount of loans in a single calendar month.

Main rival Prosper is closing in on $200 million in personal loans funded in total – last time it has broken out the monthly statistics was for February 2010, when the company announced it had reached roughly $1.7 million in loan volume for that month.

In related news, Lending Club has appointed Scott Sanborn as chief marketing officer. The new CMO comes from publicly traded ecommerce company eHealth, where he served as chief marketing and revenue officer. Prior to his role at eHealth, Sanborn was the CMO and interim president of e-commerce and catalog retailer RedEnvelope, where he oversaw the sale of the business to Provide Commerce.

Lending Club, which originally started out as a Facebook app, recently secured a $24.5 million Series C financing round led by Foundation Capital. In total, the amount of capital raised by the company exceeds $52 million.

You’d think if there’s one thing a location-based app can do, it’s getting locations right. But that’s actually proving quite a challenge. Location-based ad company Placecast, says that discrepancies in location can lead to millions of incorrect listings. And there is no single, standardized database for location, nor will there ever be, Placecast believes.

Here’s the issue: An application can access one source for restaurant listings, another for bars and a third one for movie theaters. These sources may have different ways of identifying a location that can be hard for the application to reconcile. Placecast released an application programming interface in March, called MatchAPI, which goes through these different sources and “cleans” them up, trying to make sure all the different references to a location point to the same physical place.

According to Placecast, when MatchAPI cleans a data set, there’s an average fault rate of 8%. This grows to 40% when dealing with data sets that include high proportions of user-generated content. Placecast’s platform has over 20 million records, and these error rates translate into at least 1.5 million incorrect listings.

In the two months MatchAPI has been out, more than 200 developers have signed up for the free API. Placecast sees itself as providing the “plumbing” developers need to monetize their products. “At SXSW in March, we realized the need developers have for clean location data. We had already solved that problem for our business, so we decided to put it out for the community”, said Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman (pictured).

Besides keeping location data sets clean and up-to-date (in the U.S., more than 20,000 business listings change every month in some way; some businesses open, some close, some change locations, some change phone numbers, etc.), there is a bigger question of location-data providers trying to push their proprietary services on developers. Nokia wants developers to use its data, and the upcoming Google Places API is Google’s way to push location data. If a company doesn’t already have location data, that may be all well and good. But if a company is aggregating data from multiple sources, why would it want convert its identification systems to an exclusive system, Goodman asks.

“The thesis is that a company uses an ID system at the expense of somebody else’s ID system, and this creates lock-in.” And as Placecast is a middleman between advertisers and consumers, it makes sense for the company to create a system that’s as frictionless as possible for marketers.

Tags: LBS, location based services

Companies: Placecast

People: Alistair Goodman

Back when Twitter announced its own Promoted Tweets plan, CO Dick Costolo hinted it would “prohibit” third-party alternatives. Now it’s making good on the promise…

In the second recent threat to Twitter’s developer-friendly reputation, Costolo announces in a blog post that: “Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

Costolo’s wordy, big-picture argument about “enduring value” says “third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created” and “the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization”.

This boils down to: Twitter thinks it’s got a better way of advertising than those who use its infrastructure, it wants to safeguard users’ experience on that infrastructure and, if it can push Promoted Tweets instead of other methods, there’s a massive pay-day at the end of some future rainbow.

Several third parties had beaten Twitter to making a nascent ad platform out of the micromessaging service - among them, Magpie, Ad.ly and Tweetup, which Bill Gross started recently having raised £2.44 (£2.44 ($3.5)) million VC for the effort.

The question now - will the third parties (assuming they’re not totally pissed off with Twitter) get to transfer their ad system to Promoted Tweets? That could be a win-win for
both sides.

We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money

Almost exactly one year ago, we first wrote about former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, and former Social Thing founder, Matt Galligan, teaming up to form Crash Corp., an “alternate reality mobile gaming” startup. A lot can change in a year.

Today, Stump and Galligan are well into building out SimpleGeo, the location platform company that Crash Corp. turned into. That transformation started only a little over 6 months ago — and it may turn out to be one of the smartest pivots for a startup in years. SimpleGeo has just closed a new $8.14 million round of funding. And they’re announcing five new hires to go along with it.

The company’s Series A round pushes their total funding to just about $10 million (their $1.5 million seed round happened at the end of last November). This round was led by former backer Redpoint Ventures, with previous investors First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital (Chris Sacca’s fund), and Ravi Narasimhan also participating. SimpleGeo also picked up new backer, Foundry Group, in the latest round.

The money will be used to build out datasets, improve the API, and continue work on a new product they’re working on (for the API), Galligan tells us. The funds will also give the fast-growing company two years of burn — and that’s factoring in significant headcount increases, Galligan says. That’s good planning, considering how quickly the startup is adding new team members.

The immediate thing that sticks out about the five new hires announced today is that four of them come from the same place: Digg. As we mentioned, Stump used to work at Digg, but there was no funny business going on here, as these four were a part of Digg’s layoffs earlier this month. Included in this group is well-known designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who will now be heading up product development and design for SimpleGeo.

The others coming over from Digg include engineer Ian Eure, who will be working on Python infrastructure. Paul Lathrop, who will be a part of the Systems team. And Nicole Williams who will serve as the “Ambassador” of SimpleGeo — basically, taking care of all the logistics, facilities, and office management of the company.

SimpleGeo’s other big hire is Rob Bailey, who will be joining as the Vice President of Business Development. No, Bailey didn’t work at Digg, he comes from a company he co-founded called Delicious Brands. Alongside BD, Bailey will be in charge of sales as well, we’re told.

Two months ago, SimpleGeo hired 5 people to bring their total headcount to 13. Now, as they’re pushing 20, it’s time for another office. The startup has just signed a lease for a second office that will open in mid-June in San Francisco to go along with their headquarters in Boulder, CO. The team will be evenly split between the two cities for now, but Galligan foresees the San Francisco office quickly becoming the larger one.

With seemingly everyone in the technology space interested in location-based services right now, SimpleGeo finds itself in a very good position. Ever since Twitter acquired Mixer Labs (makers of GeoAPI) back in December, SimpleGeo hasn’t had a lot of competition in its space. They now have over a terabyte of geodata at their disposal to serve up to other startups who wish to use their plug-and-play packages.

“The new version of the API will scale better, work faster, and include more redundancy and servers around the world,” Galligan says. There will also be a new pricing model with this new API to fit different business models. This should make the service cheaper as well, Galligan says.

Not bad for what should have been an alternate reality gaming startup celebrating its first birthday.

Daily deal service Groupon, hot off a new funding that valued the company at $1.35 billion, may not love all those clones of its service out there. But they’re certainly being realistic about things – tomorrow they’ll announce the acquisition of German startup Citydeal, CEO Andrew Mason just called to tell me.

Citydeal first launched in January, raised €4 million in funding, and now has offers in 80 European cities. They have over a million subscribers to their daily deals, says Mason, compared to about 5 million for Groupon.

The Citydeal services will be rebranded Groupon. Currently each city is under a different domain name and there are some variations on the name – see citydeal.de and mycitydeal.co.uk, for example.

This is Groupon’s second acquisition. Earlier this month they acquired Mob.ly and opened a Silicon Valley office.

NileGuide Buys Travel Q&A Site Localyte —

Even more deal activity in the question and answer website market. Travel review aggregator NileGuide has bought up Localyte, a site that lets travelers ask locals questions (Sample: “Where is the best place to kite in Casablanca?” Consensus answer: Near the beach). Localyte claims a community of “tens of thousands” of contributors around the world. NileGuide, which is trying to distinguish itself from other travel sites in part by playing up recommendations from “local experts,” says it will now integrate Localyte into its own website, although it will also maintain the Localyte site independently.

No financial terms were released, although NileGuide has raised at least $9.5 million in funding, including $8 million in a second round two years ago. The deal comes as a number of Q&A sites have raised funding in recent months, including Quora, Fluther, Hunch and PeerPong. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) also recently purchased Aardvark. Unlike Localyte, however, those sites seem to be positioning themselves as general resources a la Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Answers.

Related

• Travel Recommender NileGuide Raises $8 Million Second Round

Twitter advertising network Ad.ly, which launched last year, has raised $5 million in additional funding led by GRP Partners with Greycroft Partners and Matt Coffin (the founder of LowerMyBills) participating in the round. Ad.ly is also bringing on new CEO, Arnie Gullov-Singh. Gullov-Singh was previously EVP of product, technology and operations at News Corp’s Fox Audience Network, a group he co-founded 4 years ago. Founder Sean Rad will become President of Ad.ly.

Ad.ly’s Twitter-focused platform places ads within the Twitter stream. Ad.ly links up advertisers with Twitter users and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the user’s tweet streams with full disclosure.

Ad.ly’s recently launched self service platform platform enables Advertisers to connect with any Twitter users who signs up for Ad.ly’s service. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The publisher then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. You can find examples of Ad.ly Tweets here, and here.

Each campaign requires the publisher to send out four Tweets over the course of a week and each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an ad campaign for a brand. Of course, publishers are paid and advertisers get their reach.

Ad.ly also offers analytics that provides valuable data to advertisers including user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr, a startup that data mines Twitter, to provide the data to users. Ad.ly will profile each publisher with user data, and will allow advertisers to target their campaigns according to this data.

As of today, Ad.ly network has over 70,000 publishers (Twitterers), a number of which have more than a million followers. Publishers range from celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Bethenny Frankel, and Soulja Boy, to publications like Newsweek, to influencers like Deepak Chopra and Mark Cuban. Anyone, regardless of their follower count, can join Ad.ly as well.

Advertisers have included Microsoft, NBC, Universal, Bookrenter, Hautelook, Clicker, and Chartbeat. We’ve actually tested out Ad.ly here at TechCrunch; and donated the proceeds to the Golden Gate Lab Rescue organization.

We reported in February that Ad.ly is seeing average campaign CTR ranges from 1%-3.5% (However, Rad says that Ad.ly has seen CTRs that are far greater than 3.5%). Rad says that this performance is key when comparing to clickthrough rates for conventional display advertising, which he says is be around .19%.

Of course, Twitter recently unveiled their own advertising platform, Promoted Tweets. While this differs slightly from what Ad.ly is doing, it wouldn’t be surprising if Twitter moved into in-stream advertising in the near future.

Regardless of Twitter’s foray into the advertising world, Rad seems confident that there’s a place for Ad.ly in the stream. Rad says that the Twitter ecosystem is so large that there is room for many players in the space. He also alluded to a new product that the network will be launching soon but declined to give us details at this time.

Data is the lifeblood of the Web, but when it comes to advertising some of the most valuable data ends up all over the place. New York City startup Demdex captures behavioral data on behalf of Websites and advertisers and stores it in a “behavioral data bank.” The 14-employee company just raised $6 million in a series A financing, led by Shasta Ventures. Seed round investors First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures also participated, bringing the total capital raised by the startup so far to $7.5 million.

Here’s how I described what the company does when it came out of stealth last December:

They put all of this user profile data into a “behavioral data bank” and then score each user across more than 40 behavioral and demographic variables to come up with a “traitweight.” This number is supposed to be able to help websites segment their audiences better and advertisers target their messages more exactly.

. . . All of this behavioral data is currently locked away in black boxes inaccessible to the advertisers themselves or the Websites. If a big advertiser decides to switch technologies or ad networks, all that historical behavioral targeting data typically gets left behind. DemDex makes the data portable and puts it in the control of the Websites and advertisers themselves. They can plug it into whichever ad server or service they are currently using.

Demdex wants to cash in on giving control of that behavioral data back to the advertisers and publishers on whose behalf it was originally collected.

Why Facebook’s Community Pages Could Give Brands Headaches —

A couple of weeks ago I received a worried call from a friend working in PR for a large company. Her opening question went something like:

“What the heck are Community Pages on Facebook, and why is there one for my company?”

Community Pages 101

Facebook’s Community Pages are an initiative from Facebook to create “the best collection of shared knowledge” on a wide variety topics. Right now the content from the pages is pulled from Wikipedia (if available) and from your friends’ updates, so they’re often pretty bare but apparently Facebook plans to enable users to add content in the future. The social network launched roughly 6.5 million of these when they first launched.

In theory these pages should be a good thing for companies. The intent, according to All Facebook, was to take generic topics that aren’t necessarily brand-focused and to create Community Pages for them. Facebook states:

“Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it become very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”

So, if your Facebook Page falls into “owned media” in our social media ecosystem, Community Pages would fit more into “earned media.”

Over time, Community Pages would reduce the number of errant brand-related pages set up by individuals – a good move from a brand’s perspective. As Christopher Heine at ClickZ wrote, “Big brands that have seen their official Facebook fan numbers hindered by third-party fan pages will likely welcome the move.” The piece also noted that “community pages will indeed help make official brand pages more distinct from third-party pages and groups on the site.”

Causing Headaches for Brands

Here’s the problem, though – alongside generic causes and topics, Facebook has also created Community Pages for many well-known brands. As my friend put it:

“But we already have a Facebook page! What do we do with this?”

Right now, she can’t do anything.

As Facebook states in its FAQs:

“At this time, there is no way for people who choose to connect with a Community Page to add their own pictures or edit the information.”

Many companies have spent time and money building sizeable communities on Facebook through their curated fan pages. Now they’re seeing Facebook roll out yet another form of pages which undermine their efforts. As it it weren’t confusing enough already, we now have:

• Pages – representing an organization or person
• Groups – for communities of interest
• Community pages – theoretically about topics, causes or experiences but seemingly also about brands

These Community Pages also create an additional challenge for companies – they’re a monitoring nightmare. Community Pages are pretty much impossible to monitor effectively, as right now each user only seems to see content posted from their own network. That means everyone sees a unique page driven by their friends.

As if there isn’t enough noise on Facebook already, companies now have to deal with a third wave of pages about their brands – and this time they have absolutely no control over them.

Let’s take Roots, for example (not where my friend works). They’ve created a reasonable-sized community of roughly 14,000 people through their Roots Canada page, and they maintain it regularly. They run contests and promotions, and have a solid level of engagement from “fans” (or whatever we’re calling them now – “likers”?).

However, that page now has to compete with other Community Pages including Roots Canada and Roots. These pages are effectively off-limits for the company, and compete directly with the community the company has already invested in developing.

This isn’t unique to Roots – do the same for Microsoft, for example. When I searched for Microsoft, for example, four of the eight results shown in the drop-down were Community Pages, at the expense of Microsoft’s own pages for students and for Windows 7.

On Control…

Now, I’m of the view that companies don’t “own” their brand – that brands are really the sum total of peoples’ perceptions about the entity in question. This isn’t about that.

I also get that companies don’t “control” their online presence – I work in social media; I actually appreciate the fact that people talk about things that interest or are important to them .  This isn’t about that either.

This is about the world’s largest social network encouraging companies to set up shop on their network and to invest in their presence there, then pulling the rug out from under their feet and launching a new aspect to the network that dilutes the investment for those companies.

It’s funny if you think about it – in the past Facebook would hand over control of fan pages to companies; now they’ve launched a new type of page that’s designed specifically so that brands can’t control them. It’s quite ironic given Facebook’s repeated moves toward enabling businesses to interact more and more with its users.

Managing Risk For Your Community Page

As for my friend and her concern about her company’s new, unsolicited Community Page, I had limited advice to offer. Most of the content, at least initially, is pulled from sources out of the company’s control, so I really only had two recommendations:

1. Keep a close eye on your Wikipedia page – your company’s information is pulled from there, so brand-jacking efforts may shift there even more if Community Pages take off.
2. Enter your company’s official website if it isn’t already included on the page – Facebook lets you enter that, at least.
3. Pay even closer attention to monitoring other social sites. Facebook still offers no effective way to monitor your brand; however as more and more Facebook content is made available on the wider web, you may see more spill-over if an issue does bubble up, and these pages make it more important than ever to catch those issues when they do.
4. Prepare in advance for how you’ll react if a crisis does emerge. How will you decide whether to respond? Where will you respond? How? Who will do it? Picture Nestle’s recent Facebook issues but in a forum where, even if you wanted to respond, you couldn’t.

What do you think? Is this move good or bad for marketers, and what other tips would you offer to help organizations manage their Community Pages?

Groupalia, a Spanish Groupon clone group buying service provider, has raised €2.5 million in its first institutional round. The financing comes from Nauta Capital, who led the round with an investment of €805,000, and Spanish bank who la Caixa contributed €250,000. The rest comes from individual investors, namely Lucas Carné and Jose Manuel Villanueva (the founders of Privalia, another Nauta portfolio company) with an investment of €660,000 and Groupalia CEO Joaquin Engel (€125,000).

Gizmodo, the popular gadget blog that everyone is now talking about for their iPhone 4G scoop, may have paid a hefty price to buy a non-working prototype of a phone but the site owners may still be having their biggest paydays ever.

Here’s why. Gizmodo gets around 5 million pageviews per day but the day they published pictures of the iPhone 4G, their web traffic nearly quadrupled to 20 million. The excitement continued unabated and traffic soared to 23 million the next day.

This roughly means that Gizmodo got nearly 30-32 million extra pageviews in just two days due to their iPhone story. If Google Ads and other non-premium ad networks are paying Gizmodo $5 CPM (a conservative estimate), the scoop alone may have made the gadget site richer by at least $150,000 (or even more).

Such is the excitement around the leaked iPhone that Gray Powell, the Apple employee who left his phone in the bar, became the 5th most searched term on Google yesterday. This is however one achievement that Gray would never like to brag about.

The iPhone May Have Made Gizmodo Richer by $150,000

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

     

How real is money?

From one perspective, it’s the most real thing in the world. Without it, you don’t eat, you don’t have a place to live, no clothes to wear, etc. unless you’re living out in the wilderness, foraging off the land. Money can be a tremendous amplifier of personal power. With an inexhaustible supply of money, you could solve world hunger, cure disease, and end conflict.

On the other hand, money is entirely fictional. It’s a construct, an artificial intermediary between things we value, because we may not value them equally or at the same time. I may sell email marketing and you may sell search engine optimization. If I don’t need SEO, no matter how valuable your skills are, I won’t trade with you no matter how much you need email marketing. With money, if someone else needs SEO, you can take their money and then give me that money for email marketing.

How fictional is money? The recent stock market mini-crash (due to a trading software error) caused several indexes to lurch as much as 10% below their value in mere seconds. At one point, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 998 points. This erased as much as $1.25 trillion dollars of theoretical wealth in mere minutes. Think about that for a second. Think about how much money that would be if you had it in your bank account.

• You could send 5 million students to college for 4 years.
• You could spend a million dollars a day and not run out of money for 3,424 years.
• You could own 1,667 super-giant luxury houses.
• You could pay cash for the entire Iraq/Afghanistan war and still have a couple hundred billion left over in change.

Think about the fact that $1.25 trillion was erased, vaporized, in just minutes. Imagine every student in college right now quitting all at once, or an entire city block vanishing in just minutes. That’s staggering, when you think about it. It’s hard to wrap your brain around.

Now think about the fact that the NASDAQ ordered a nullification of trades between 2:40 PM and 3:00 PM (when the mini-crash happened) for trades exceeding 60% of market value in either direction. Poof! Suddenly a big chunk of that imaginary money that was lost is back again.

You couldn’t build 1,600+ houses in minutes. You couldn’t enroll 5 million students in minutes. You couldn’t wage a 9 year war in minutes. But because of money’s fictional nature, you can make trillions of dollars appear with just a few clicks of a mouse.

What does this all mean for you? Think about your attitudes towards money, towards what you’re chasing. It’s a completely fictional construct that in our society is anchored to faith alone, making it the one true faith-based initiative our government has successfully created. Money is worth only what society believes it to be worth, because we can create or destroy vast quantities of it in minutes. It has no intrinsic value.

More important, if it’s entirely fictional, if it’s anchored only in belief of value, then instead of chasing money, think about how to create the perception of value. Think about how to inspire in someone else the desire to give you anything you want in exchange for that perceived value. What do people value about you, about your products or services? How can you provide more of that value perception? How can you boost the perception of the value that’s already there?

What do you value? I know that as a businessman, I tend to value three big things – things that will save me time, things that will save me money, and things that will make me money. If I perceive that your product or service can do any of those things well, I perceive that it has value and will buy from you.

Change your focus from trying to take other people’s money to creating the perception of value and see if other people start handing you a lot more money.

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Relax Apple fanboys of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, your iPad will be available in stores May 28. Apple, as previously announced, will take pre-orders starting May 10. The next countries on deck, for a July release, is Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore. Local pricing will be disclosed at a later date.

The international release of the iPad has been delayed due to heavy domestic demand, according to Apple. Latest stats: over one million sold, 12 million apps downloaded, and more than 1.5 million ebooks sold.

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) handily beat revenue and earnings estimates for the first quarter of 2010, with a profit increase of nearly 10 percent boosted by the ad recovery, higher affiliate fees and a strong film slate. It’s a far cry from the same quarter last year, when the company met expectations with revenue and profit declines. It’s also another reminder of how much lighter Time Warner seems to feel without the AOL (NYSE: AOL) albatross around its neck, especially with Time Inc. turning in something positive to talk about—and to add to the bottom line.

True, revenue dropped 1 percent at Time Inc. to $799 million for Q1 but the Time Warner publishing division reported increases—modest but up—in advertising of 5 percent and subscription revenue of 2 percent. That only translates to $18 million and $5 million respectively but it’s a dramatic change from last year when advertising revenue dropped by $167 million and subscriptions were down $58 million. More to come.