One of our co-founders, Dean Mao, won another coding competition, this time with WeekendApps on the OpenSocial platform. He doesn’t like publicity, but I thought I’d mention this feat anyway. He won a pass to the Google IO conference, 1 million banner ad impressions, and some conversations from two private equity guys who want to […]
Dean Mao wins Google coding competition on OpenSocial/MySpace Read More »
If you have a tripod, which of the legs is most important? Of course, they are all equally important– if you take any one of them away, the item being supported collapses. The same is true in hiring. Do you want smart folks, trustworthy folks, or hard-working folks? How about hiring an absolute genius who
The three-legged stool: a bad hire horror story Read More »
Pubmatic released a report covering the massive drop– Q408 average CPMs are at 26 cents. Before folks claim economic peril, let’s consider a few other factors. The mix of inventory for ad networks has shifted dramatically to social, which has historically terrible CPMs. From a weighted average perspective, it’s hard to say exactly the impact,
Display ad prices drop 50% in Q4 Read More »
Yodle and Ambassador, both out of NYC, were featured in a Kelsey Group press release. Yodle was founded by a friend of a friend of mine and just raised $10MM. And ReachLocal’s $300MM valuation is insane. Funny that these guys, Orange Soda, Webvisible, LocalLaunch, Marchex, and other folks are getting into the local advertising game,
The Upcoming Bubble in Local Search Read More »
Lee Scott in his annual address to the National Retail Federation, noted that in the latest focus group of young shoppers, “Every one of them had given something up, and they were talking about how good they felt about doing that.” Thus, he doesn’t see a rebound in sales any time soon. Look at your
Walmart CEO says people enjoy spending less Read More »
I first heard of Yodle about 4 years ago, back when it was called NatPal, by Nathaniel Stevens out of UPenn, a friend of Brad Twohig, who is our joint friend. Since then, I’ve seen the company grow from a few dozen clients to a reported 5,000, bring in a CEO (Court Cunningham), and a
Yodle gets $10MM in Series C Funding Read More »
CNN.com reported a story where Larry Flynt and some other porn executives are asking Congress for a bailout. I suppose the folks making free porn are losing their shirts, literally? If the adult industry, one of the largest and most lucrative segments of internet traffic, is asking for a handout, then things must really be
Porn industry requests a bailout Read More »
Here’s the response from an unhappy customer of ours on SocialMedia.com, when I ran the ad network there a year ago. Reminds me of the United Airlines customer who was so mad about United not responding to his issues – repeatedly – that he created untied.com. United’s management stance was that they should not respond
This is what happens when you don’t take care of your customers Read More »
At merely mentioning “Twitter skins” in an earlier blog post, this blog ranks #2 and #3 in Google for searches on “Twitter skins”. And that natural search result drove 8 visitors yesterday, of which several decided to take me up on my offer of a free skin. This is a great example of the positive
Twitter skins– Get one Free! Read More »
Have you seen YSlow? It is a Firefox plugin that extends Firebug’s functionality to show some interesting information, such as page load times, and the heaviest parts of the site. You can use the information gathered to increase performance on your sites. Yourcontentfactory.com, which admittedly a work-in-progress, scored only a 64. Humbling, as are the
Does your site suck? Read More »