The web has a lot of information on any topic imaginable. All this content could be hidden anywhere from the latest news, blogs, videos to even a 140 character tweet. So, the process to read an article on a given topic of interest become tedious and involves “Searching” and “Filtering” (or jointly discovering) for the right content.

Dan Olsen, the CEO of YourVersion, gave a live demo of the product at the Facebook App Meetup in Palo Alto that lets you “Discover” content based on topics of interest that matter to you. It’s called YourVersion, a real-time discovery engine. He mentioned that the company was bootstrapped since 2007 and they have hardly spent any dollars on coding. The service currently offers a free iPhone App, a Firefox toolbar to check out YourVersion of the web. They will soon be launching an application for Facebook and an IE toolbar.

The service has integration with Facebook using Facebook Connect for authentication. Once you have setup your topics of interest (the service auto-populates the tags for each interest as well), the service will automatically populate the main page with content filtered by categories like news, blogs, webpage’s, twitter, videos, and products.  Each story in the list has an easy to share option via email, twitter, facebook. You can also give a quick thumbs up/down to the story and even bookmark it for future. YourVersion also lets you share your Topics/tags to the world based on privacy settings that can be enabled from the Profile page. The service looks promising and it would be nice to see if they let you integrate RSS feeds as well. Check out the Product Tour on their website.

Screenshot

Plurchase is a brand new service from Ycombinator that will let you do exactly that. It’s currently in private and will be launching in a few days. Tom Saffell of Plurchase gave a sneek preview of the service at the New Tech Meetup at Palo Alto.

Plurchase let’s consumers shop on eCommerce sites like Amazon, Zappos and get feedback, advice from their friends using a sidebar widget.(They actually display the eCommerce site in an iFrame). You can bookmark products, search for products and share them on Facebook using Facebook Connect. They have also integrated a chat system to get real time advice from your friends. It currently supports only 3 eCommerce sites Amazon, Zappos, and Craigslist respectively.

Tom mentioned that they plan to make money via the affiliate program when a user/friend makes a purchase through their system. A typical payment in Amazon’s affiliate program ranges from 4 to 14%.

I am eagerly looking forward  to see the service go live and see it’s impact on online consumer spending. Leveraging the social graph of facebook(and maybe other newtworks) for online shopping seems like a smart move. You can follow them on twitter @plurchase for updates or read their blog here.

I have attached a few screenshots below

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Update: The site is live so go play with it.

PayyAttention is another service that offers readers the means to support the blogs, sites, etc that provide them with their online content.  Stephen Farrell gave a demo of their service at the SiliconValleyNewTech meet up in July minutes after Cynthia gave a demo of  Kachingle, a similar service.

They have two models for the content providers to use:-

1. Patronage Model – In this model the content owner places a widget on their site so that the patrons (or readers) can donate some money to the site. It’s voluntary for the patron to disburse any sum of money. PayyAttention pays the entire money to the content provider except the transaction fees unlike Kachingle, which takes a 20% cut.

2. Paid Access Model – In this model, the content owner can charge the reader for providing access to exclusive content, or for removing adds from the post. PayyAttention take’s a cut in the model, which also help’s subsidize the cost for the Patronage model.

As an example GigaOm’s main site can use the Patronage Model, whereas the GigaOm Pro Network could use the Paid Access Model.  I can definitely see a lot of content providers having the ability to use the services of PayyAttention for increasing revenue or even cover basic hosting fees.

They also seem to have an integration with Twitter and provide statistics for shared links etc. To get an insight of their service you can request for an invite by email and also follow them on Twitter.

Demo Video from SiliconValleyNewTech Meetup

Screen Cast from PayyAttention

Every good product irrespective of their base industry is a result of great feedback. There are tools to review word documents with comments and feedback from each reviewer.  Google Docs makes it even easier as you can share the documents on the web. Similar tools exist for reviewing software code with comments.  However, one was missing for web designing.

I have myself tried to give feedback on website design & layouts or even share my idea visually by using a Photo Editing tool and then emailing the picture to the respective team members.  It did work, but was clumsy and time consuming, and the exchange of feedback via email between multiple members will make it complex to digest the feedback as well. However, in the New Tech Meet up I was delighted to see a the demo of a tool called Notable App, that seems to address most of my issues.

Notable App is a product by Zurb that makes sharing web page design and assimilating feedback really simple.  Hunter from Zurb gave a really good demo of the product. It comes with a firefox plug-in with which you can take a screen shot of the page currently open in the browser and then send/update it to your account in NotableApp.

Some of the notable features:

Screenshot/Annotate: The ability to take a screenshot of the page and then annotate any part of the page with comments.

Workspaces: Create separate workspaces for multiple projects.

Collaborate/Share: The ability to share your workspace with ‘certain’ team members. You can also create a PDF document as well.

Track: You can also track which member has seen the document but is yet to comment on it.

I am sure there are some other features in the tool, but these do the basic job for me. They are currently offering a 2 weeks free preview after which you will have to pay a monthly charge to use their services.

ScreenShots

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Kachingle is an upcoming company that is making it easy for readers to contribute and appreciate their gratitude towards the numerous blogs, news sites, etc for the content they provide to them.  Cynthia, the Chief Kachingler calls this crowd funding, which I think is a great idea and huge potential of growth.

I personally read a lot of blogs, ands news site consuming a lot of content everyday.  I am a frequent visitor to a few blogs that are making descent revenue via adds, events. On the contraray there are also single person blogs that provide good content and their perspective on topics. These are some of the blogs that I would want to stay afloat, and Kachingle provides me with an option to  Kachingle (aka donate) them a few dollars.

Kachingle let’s users create an account and deposit some money into it for kachingling it across the web.  So, every time a user goes to a blog or content provider of his choice, he can Kachingle on it using a Widget that the content provider has placed on their site. At the end of the month, Kachingle will distribute your funds (say $5) to the respective content providers based on the number of visits to each of them.  Currently each visit is weighted equally, but they intent to make it more smarter based on certain other parameters as well.

Kachingle will take a 20% cut on the donations in lieu of their service. So, from a $5 monthly budget they will earn $1 and your Kachingled sites will get $4 distributed among themselves.

I definitely see this as a good model for both the content provider and the reader, as the contributions are purely voluntary.  In a way, getting Kachingled is almost equivalent of being Digged but with real money.

Video Demo

Jobs:  Kachingle needs a Ruby on Rails Developer.

Plug And Play Tech Center is sponsoring an iPhone Intensive meetup for Developers on May 20th, 2009. 

WHEN

Monday May 20th 
6:00-9:30pm

WHERE

Peanut Lab’s is sponsoring a Monetization meetup at Google Hqrs on May 18th, 2009. 

WHEN

Monday May 18th 
6:30-9pm
Network for the first 30-45 minutes then have a few speakers speaking for 10-15 minutes each with Q&A time after each speaker.

WHERE

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Tunis Conference Room
Mountain View, CA 94043

SPEAKERS

The speakers for the evening listed below will discuss best practices around monetization in their respective companies :

• Jonathan from EA
• Michael from Justin.tv
• Ali from Peanut Labs
• Sergio from Norwest Venture Partners
• Shanti from Three Rings
• Lars from Frogster
• Paul from (he’s too cool to be associated with any company… just yet) 

Hope to see you all there.

Tony Hsieh, CEE of Zappos, gave an opening Keynote at Tiecon 2009. It was a refreshing start for a long day at the conference. He attributed that the magic sauce behind the great success of his company are:

1. Company Culture 
2. Customer Service 

He talked about how he tries to have a company culture where every employee is treated as a friend. In fact, the hiring process has a mandatory Cultural Fit interview conducted by the HR which needs to be passed apart from the technical interview conducted by the relevant department. All new hires go though a 5 week training where they are taught about the company’s history and customer service. The customer service representatives are encouraged to have a bonding with their customers and often create a ‘WOW’ factor by helping them and often surprising them with a Free overnight delivery. It’s all about making your employees happy who in turn make your customers happy. I definitely recommend going over his PowerPoint embedded below :

Santosh Jayaram, VP of Business Opertaions at Twitter was a panelist at a Social Media Monetization Session at TieCon 2009. He talked about Twitter’s huge growth and how it has become a part of a a 24-7 bi-directional(or multi) communication. He says ‘Engagement’ is the central mantra and that they owe a lot to the developer community that has build hundreds of applications on top of their platform.

In terms of a revenue model he mentioned that they just started to collect data and are experimenting with about 4 or 5 different ideas. He confidently said that they will be making ‘Money’ by the end of the year. One of their monetization strategy is to have ‘Promotional’ Accounts.’  These accounts will be able to establish communication with their customer and fan base.

Santosh cited a lot of examples where consumers who vented out frustration about about a service/brand by tweeting were often directly contacted by the concerned brand to make up to them. He thus a sees a lot of bi-directional communication between the consumers and the services that could be tapped by Twitter. I hope they do make money. Good luck to them. What do you guys think ?

Startup Weekend hosted a event from Apr3 – Apr5 for all the tech minded and entrepreneurial people to come to one place and start working on a product to deliver a prototype by Sunday Night. There were about 200 people that had showed up for the event. I was among that fortunate list to have participated in the event.

The venue had started to gather people from 6 pm onwards.  I was amazed to see the number of people that had turned up for the event. Andrew Hyde (founder of Startup Weekend) kicked off the event around 7pm and introduced some of the well known VC’s from the Bay Area. They all had some good suggestions for the audience of about 200 people. 

It was a great learning experience for me. I had primarily gone with the intention of developing an application based on either facebook platform or the Twitter Api. There was more interest with respect to Twitter, and so I mingled around and talked to people with ideas related to Twitter.

Team Structure

    1 Idea/Business Guy ( php/mysql experience) 
    1 Sales/Market Guy.
    2 Back End Developer (1 Full Time 1 Part Time )
    1 Front End Developer with Flash.
    1 Front End with Java Script. 

Day 1

There were a couple of ideas that we pitched to each other. Among the group it was apparent that not all members were very familiar with the features/power of Twitter. Also the level of engagement and used cases were different for the people that already had accounts on Twitter prior to the StartUp Weekend. The positive outcome of this arrangement was that we were getting different outlook for the same service. However, the drawback was that as some people were not very familiar with Twitter, it seemed that there was no scope for the project to be developed beyond Sunday. I and another member needed to catch the train to South Bay, so we and the group dispersed without finalizing a project but sticking between two ideas.

Day 2

The day started late for the team. There was a little confusion regarding the timings of our team to show up the next day. There were only 3 members of the team around 12 Noon, so we decided to just stick with one of the Idea (Analytics) and start working on it. At this moment the team comprised of an Idea Guy(with some php/mysql experience), Back-End(me) Developer, and a Front End Developer. I had been playing with the Twitter Api using Python(for App Engine) for my own Twitter based projects over the last few weeks. As, currently it seemed like a 3 member team, I decided to use PHP and use some of the Php Client Libraries listed on Twitter (Bad Move).

Soon, the other Developer also came in and then I discussed with him the project we were working on and my decision to use the Php Library available from the Twitter Docs. He was familiar with the Perl library and mentioned about it. So there was a slight confusion if we should now move guns to Perl. Finally he suggested that as he will be working on his another project for the Startup Weekend, that I should continue with Php and he will help us as and when needed.

Finally I downloaded the Php library to my Macbook and started to look into it. But, unfortunately by now we were having connectivity issues as all the DHCP licenses created by the wireless router at the venue were full. Thinking it will get fixed soon also cost us a lot of time. We then decided to go to some Coffee Shop but could not find a single Free Wireless place to go. One of the team members then offered to take us to his work place. More time lost.

Finally, at his office, I started to test the calls to the Client Libraries. Soon, it was apparent that the libraries need Pear to be installed. So, I downloaded Pear to my machine and was trying to get it working. It was having some issues; the other developer also was not much familiar with Pear. Search after Search for solutions in Google, we finally decided to move to Python (context switch) and I started writing code in Python. In the mean while, the Idea guy who was at the Venue pinged us and said that Internet is finally working.  We communicated to him that we will be using Python, but he interjected saying why can’t we just call the Twitter Api’s in XML format and just parse it (Good Point). However, the main reason we were trying to use the libraries were to leverage code reuse and authentications.

Finally, we had the leave the Office, as this team member had to leave by 7pm or so. We then walked back to the venue and then we were back to using PHP but no external libraries. I started writing the code and was done with functions that would parse, compute and the then return the output to the Front End Developer (using Flash). He would then use the output from my functions to display it on the page. In the meanwhile, when I was writing more code, the other members decided that since the Twitter Api returns the output in XML format, maybe let the Front End Developer handle and display it directly while the rest brainstorm for other possible metrics for the demo. At this junction, we called it a night and decided to meet up early in the morning.

Day 3

As planned, 4 of the members met up early and after grabbing breakfast, we headed back to work. I was now partially working with Front End guy regarding the logic that needs to implement in his Action Script code. In parallel, one of the other team members also developed a version in PHP. So, by the end of the day we had TWO versions of the same application.

Lesson Learned

-          Finalize Idea on Day 1
- Day 2 Start Early, Design and Divide Work Responsibility
- Day 3 Final Touches, if time adds more functionality.

Conclusion

Overall, I would call it a great success as I networked with a lot of people with similar interests and passion to work on technology. A real life experience building a team with strangers and the challenges involved in finishing the product. The best part is that I will now be working with one of the team member from the weekend in one of my applications for the Facebook Platform as a co-founder.