Internet Business

Dot Com Pho Giveaway

ian — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:15:01 +0000

Stephen Fung is giving away an ipod nano to one of his lucky readers. You can enter the contest here. Seriously for such a great prize, given the number of likely entrants, these types of contests/giveaways really do have good odds. If you are a tech publisher, I would also recommend subscribing to his blog. The Dot Com Pho videos also contain some interesting and often humourous reviews of tech gadgets.

CDF Networks - MarketLeverage Contest

ian — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:58:07 +0000

CDF Networks are holding a contest sponsored by MarketLeverage. The contest details are located here. I am a bit of a sucker for contests, although I never win anything. I would also recommend subscribing to the cdfnetwork.com blog as they are widely recognised as being one of the best PPC blogs on the internet.

Number of new blogs per day

ian — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:22:17 +0000

Some very interesting information sourced from the technorati website.

The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

Not sure how many of those blogs may be spam blogs, but those sure are amazing statistics. Would also be interesting to see the breakdown of properly hosted blogs with their own domain vs those hosted using free blog services.

Msn China Office

ian — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:09:29 +0000

John Chow posted an interesting video on his visit to the MSN china office. Whilst the offices looked quite plain and rather boring, I was surprised to see the informal dress code, which I think is quite cool, especially when you associate Microsoft with being a stuffy suits and ties type organisation.

Over $500 a day from CXdigital

ian — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:40:47 +0000

Tim Schroeder from emonetized.com made an interesting post on how he exceeded his goal to make US$7,500 in a month from the affiliate network cxdigital. He made US$15,392.50 which equates to over $550 per day. Hard to say how much of that is actual profit, but not a bad result, and proof positive of the importance of setting goals and working towards them.

Loren interviews Zivity.com founder Cyan Bannister

ian — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:26:22 +0000

One of the sites that I check each morning, after of course, I have checked my stats is 1938media.com Today the Shel Puppet interviews zivity.com founder Cyan Bannister. When they initially raised $1 million in VC funding, I was in awe, it seems they have since raised a further US$7 million in funding. Personally, I don’t like the site concept, but you cant deny the irrestible charm of the founder Cyan Bannister. In this video, Loren Feldman is at his comic genius best.

Rupert Murdoch Interview

ian — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:16:39 +0000

This is a very interesting interview of Rupert Murdoch. It offers an interesting insight on how Newscorp beat Viacom in buying Myspace. Despite all of the media hype now being about facebook these days, he says that Myspace is 2-3 times bigger than facebook. Also when Newscorp bought facebook, they had 22 million uniques, now there are 120 million.
He paints a very accurate picture when he says Australia is still booming, because “it is like one big quarry for China and India”

Jason Calacanis speech at Cebit 2008 Australia

ian — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:23:04 +0000

I did not make it to Cebit 2008 in Sydney this year, despite being able to walk down there. The only part of the conference that I would like to have seen was the Jason Calanis speech, and today I got to watch it on youtube.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

He is a fantastic public speaker, and I enjoyed watching his speech. I don’t think I am on the same wavelength in regards to “reward obsessive behaviour”. I see too many people who work very hard and are enthusiastic and have an “obsessive” work ethic but they are not the sharpest tool in the shed. That may be an ok quality for low level menial jobs, but for important jobs, I would take the essentially lazy person who has brilliant ideas, who can read the market and can provide a roadmap for the execution of those plans. I value intellect over a hard working person who works around the clock.
It will also be very interesting to see how mahalo.com works out. To be honest, I dont like the product, I dont like the look of the site, I dont like the layout, I do not like how it is starting to get complicated and deviating from its core focus. What I do admire, is how the site is adapting and constantly changing. And that they do conduct focus groups, so at least they are trying to deliver a product that the customer wants. I would like to see the site become a big success and prove the critics wrong.

jobs.ca sold for US$600,000

ian — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:46:26 +0000

Dnjournal reported that jobs.ca sold for US$600,000. Whilst that may sound a lot, it is certainly a domain with a lot of potential. The domain was purchased by ogopogomedia.com I would have thought that a company that could afford US$600,000 for a domain could afford a better branding for their main site. They are apparently quite prominent in the domaining industry and own such gems as jobsearch.ca and resumes.ca
Jobs.ca as a fully developed website could easily sell for many millions of dollars to a traditional media outlet like a newspaper or television station.

Video comments and seesmic.com

ian — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:52:26 +0000

I read this post over at 1938media today. Now, I am not familiar with the service, in that I have never used it. But here are my thoughts.
1. They really need to find a way to monetize the site. I dont like their prospects as google from what I have read are having a hard time making any money from youtube. Looks to me, that they are using VC money and hoping for an acquisition.
2. They need to give members or users of the site member pages with their own URLS eg www.seesmic.com/internetbusiness And track comment views and perhaps even some fancy stats on which sites the comment views came from. Also give them the ability to link back to their own website via URL and graphics, that is ability to link back to internet-business.com in this case.
3. Youtube.com could easily adopt something like this and blow seesmic out of the water.
I think on the main seesmic page, they should give an incentive to publishers, a leaderboard for websites which has the most video comment views, perhaps even a directory which ranks publishers by categories. This at least may give publishers an incentive to use the service.
4. They should listen to Loren Feldman’s comments about the horrible color scheme on their mainpage and that they should not use flash. Also a link on the homepage to a page saying “About how we’re building the business” which links to a youtube.com page looks like a bad move for a site that is meant to be about delivering video themselves.
5. Their site development looks to be taking way too long. This seesmic review was posted on December 2007 and they are still in beta mode nearly 6 months later.