Internet Tech Boston

Last night I went to a little soiree hosted by PermissionTV‘s PR firm – BluePoint Venture Marketing. It was a fun night at BluePoint’s great office-loft location in the heart of Lexington. I got a chance to meet folks from a couple of the local Boston venture-backed internet software companies that BluePoint works with.

Carlos Larracilla and Tom Chevalier are co-founders of People Ahead, a job board that utilizes intelligent technology to match employers and potential employees. I first became aware of People Ahead at last month’s Web Innovators 19. It sounds like a great idea. As a person who is responsible for hiring tech, creative, and client-managing talent, it’s very time consuming to sift through resumes finding the right skill set and the right past experience. It would be great for the “computer” to hand over targeted resumes for my review.

The big draw of the evening was learning how to count cards in a hands-on demonstration from Dave Irvine,

one of the original MIT blackjack club members featured in the best-selling book “Bringing Down the House” and the hit movie “21.” Dave was an (obviously) smart guy who told the tale of his time in the MIT Blackjack team with a mix of humor and suspense. Good times were had by all.

I recently had a chance to talk with Abby Kirigin, co-founder and CEO of TipJoy, a Y-Combinator startup that recently landed it’s Series A funding. I was first introduced to TipJoy when I met Ivan Kirigin, co-founder and CTO, at O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 4. Since that meeting, I became intrigued in the idea of online micro-tipping and have since included TipJoy on my own blog. Thanks to both Abby and Ivan for taking the time to answer my questions.

Mamet: What need does TipJoy fill in the marketplace?
Kirigin: Web2.0 can be defined by two major trajectories:

1. The web is becoming more social. More often, you get to know the real person behind the content you consume. Now just like in the real world, consuming content online has become a social experience. People feel connected to those who provide the services they enjoy, and are looking for ways to connect with them and say ‘thanks.’
2. People are taking advantage of the fact that the web is essentially the greatest publishing platform in history. For most creators, the biggest problem they face is with obscurity. The solution to that is to post almost everything online for free. This is great for the consumer, because there is a flood of delightful things online. Content is increasingly published under a flexible and open license like Creative Commons, with direct fan contributions to support the continued creation of content. But up until now, there really hasn’t been a good way thank people or earn money for free content.

Tipjoy is a service which enables people to give money to the people who make the stuff they love online, and also earn money for making the great content that people want to tip. Tipjoy enables content creators to make money while providing their content for free. Up until now, the primary way to monetize free content has been through advertising. But ads can be distracting and annoy readers. There are also other donation buttons out there, but they require a multi-step checkout process, which most people don’t bother doing.

Now fans can connect on a personal level to the people who make the stuff they love. And the great stuff they support can be automatically shared with their friends.

Mamet: How does TipJoy make money, or plan to make money?
Kirigin: Tipjoy takes a 3% cut when users withdraw cash from our system.

Mamet: As a Web 2.0 software company, how have you been helped or hindered by being located in Massachusetts, as opposed to California?
Kirgin: We were in Silicon Valley from January – July 2008. It was a great experience and I would recommend that any startup spend at least some time out there. The startup environment is extremely vibrant, with nearly constant quality networking events to attend, and an seemingly unending list of angel and VC investors with whom to speak. SV is really the center of the startup world, and I think that it helps to at least experience that for a bit. That being said, we are very happy to have returned to the Cambridge area. Our lead investors are headquartered in NYC, so being here means we’re much closer to them. Boston and NYC are hubs of the banking & finance, and media & advertising industries, both of which are very relevant to Tipjoy. The colleagues you meet in Cambridge have interests much more varied than you’ll find in SV, which makes for a more complex and dynamic scene. Also since the startup scene is smaller, it can be much closer-knit and stronger. We’re excited to be back and to connect with other startups in the area.

Mamet: On August 28th, Seth Godin caused quite a stir when he stated that the best way to thank a blogger for good content was to click an ad. Many stated that this was tantamount to click fraud. What are your thoughts on that?
Kirigin: We wrote a blog post response. Below is the text from our post:

Seth Godin recently told us all to click ads on sites we like.

Of course, it’s our opinion at Tipjoy that instead of clicking ads, it would make much more sense to leave the content creator some money directly. Cut out the middle man, and do it without leaving the page, and certainly without being taken to an annoying ad page.

But now, let me talk a bit about why I think Seth wrote this, and what it means about the web today.

The sentiment of this article is spot-on: if you’re not paying for all the free stuff you love online, you’re “starving great content”.

This post is yet another great example of how the world is starting to change their mindset around digital content. At first, content creators tried to make people pay to get everything. That didn’t work; we all turned away. So content creators gave their content away for free, and we all came flocking. Now we are starting to feel a bit guilty about getting all of this great content without having to pay for it: great independent music, thoughtful articles, comics which make us laugh, videos which make us laugh until we cry.

And we’re not just feeling guilty because we’re ‘starving’ them. We’re feeling guilty because increasingly, we’re not just content consumers. We’re content producers ourselves. In this world of mashups, remixes and samples, the lines between producer and consumer are blurred.

As I read Seth’s article, I scanned the page for ads to click on, and what I found were links to his books. So perhaps Seth’s motives are not entirely altruistic. And that’s absolutely fine.

Let’s all continue to distribute the great stuff we make for free. And let’s make money from it.

Mamet: You’ve recently announced a TipJoy API Beta. Tell me about what you hope to accomplish with this feature.
Kirigin: Our Platform API enables content hosts to split tips with content creators. With a simple opt-in, an entire site’s contributors can start earning money with Tipjoy. The site earns a cut of the donations as an affiliate fee. This structure is great for everyone: Platforms can offer their contributors a way to earn money without resorting to ads, and contributors can quickly and easily start earning money without having to go through any sign up processes with a 3rd party.

Site owners can apply to be part of the beta by going here: http://tipjoy.com/platform

Mamet: If you had a 2 minute audience with all the millions of bloggers that don’t have a plan to monetize their content today, what would you say to them?
Kirigin: Ads bring in revenue for a site, but they don’t help make a connection between the author and the audience. More often, they take readers away from the content, or just annoy them. Tipjoy lets your audience engage directly with your site to help monetize. Since Tipjoy is social, your content will be shared among friends and broadcast on social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Recent data suggests that over half of Social Media practitioners describe themselves as introverts, but that’s definitely not me.  Those who know me, know that I’ve got one of the biggest ego’s of anyone they know. Getting involved in Social Media is probably one the worst things I could have done to my nearly-unquenchable thirst for attention and recognition.  But, then I would depriving all of you from the life-fulfilling experience that is me. I couldn’t do that.

Imagine the titillating thrill, when last Tuesday I realized I was involved in 2 mainstream blog posts – TechCrunch and Mashable. Oh, the joy. Paisono Carta of Mashable re-used my SummerMash Boston interview in his October 5th post describinghow PermissionTV Provides White Label Video Platform Services. I look mah-velous.

But wait – there’s more! The man, the myth, the immortal Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote about Jeremy Baines’ upcoming release of AlertThingy and included some screenshots of version 2′s interface. I guess Arrington described some stuff about AlertThingy, but if you look closely at the screenshot, 2nd headshot from the bottom you’ll see . . . yes, that’s right . . . I’m there.  I did it – Matthew Mamet got into TechCrunch.

I am kind of a big deal. I guess I’ll go back to work now.

Not sure if you’ve noticed it, but Twitter has reached critical mass. At the end of last year, Twitter was little more than the latest toy for techno geeks and PR teams. In short, it was little more than a diversion. But, things change as they often do, and Twitter started to gain some ground early 2008 as something more than a geeky tech toy. It actually became a viable method of communication for the “always-on” tech community. Now it’s starting to spread outward from there.

Their early success led to some pretty disastrous scaling problems and growing pains, which made their “Fail Whale” infamous. Twitter was down so much in the early to late Spring, there were more than a few people who decided to dump the service and move over to the fast growing, more stable, and ex-Google-exec-backed FriendFeed. But, in the back of my mind, I knew there was something special about a product that drew so much attention, that even its failures were an opportunity [for someone] to make money.

Credit Twitter’s founders for making the right moves. If your product doesn’t scale well and your engineering team can’t figure out how to fix those problems – fire them, and find more capable people. There’s no reason to try and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titantic. In the end, do what is right for your business – no matter the human cost.

Well, the plan worked. The Twitter team hunkered down and “fixed the glitch” that was causing problems and the following few months culminated in an early September Nielsen Online report detailing a gigantic 422% growth of unique visitors to Twitter from the same period last year. Numbers don’t lie, which led even the perennially-negative Mike Arrington at TechCrunch to (tentatively) declare that “the worst of Twitter’s scalabilty issues are behind them.”

Nowadays, I’m a regular Twitter user again. I don’t use FriendFeed, or Plurk, or Pownce, or any of the other Twitter-clones out there. The release of popular clone Identi.ca, which seemed like a possible deathblow in early July, now seems insignificant at best. Twitter isn’t about technology, you see – it’s about community. The Brits have showed us that driving on the left-hand side of the road doesn’t offer any real technological driving advantage to the right-hand side. Instead, the power lies in the fact that no matter where you inside a given country, you can always count on everyone driving on the SAME side of the road.

Twitter has the critical mass of community, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it can’t be beat by FriendFeed (I don’t even use it anymore), or newcomers like Identi.ca, or anyone else, unless the founders do something royally stupid. But even if they do, it might not matter. Prevailing critical opinion is that Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams have a little more than luck on their side.

What do you think? Does Twitter have us right where they want us, or are they still ripe for the picking? Or, let me put it another way – which of you regularly uses a micro-blogging service that’s NOT Twitter?

Day 2 at the New Marketing Summit (NMS) picked right up where we left off yesterday with a great presentation by Paul Gillin titled ” Profiting from Engagement: Why content is the new currency of marketing”
Some compelling notes that I took include:

• Chris Brogan collects New Marketing Case Studies, and he’s shared them for all of us to review.
• Brian Halligan of HubSpot says “Create lots of remarkable content to attract links to your site and that will change your business.” See Brian Halligan’s HubSpot presentation slides for the full monty.
• Nick Saber, CrossTech Media requires the sales team to use social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter to research prospects, and is opening and closing business strictly on Facebook.
• Alan Scott, CMO of the Dow Jones doesn’t have a budget for “new marketing” and won’t ever. He focuses on where his audience is and then budget on ways to reach them.
• Authenticity sells. That’s what works – Seth Godin.
• Growing a community? Aaron Strout, Mzinga, reminds us “We’re all ego-centric”, so any kind of pat on the back you give your audience helps grow community.
• Glenn Gaudet, CMO of Treedia Labs, helped us understand where Podcasting is at with the Hype cycle vs. actual usage. Usage has doubled in past year, but there’s no press coverage of it. Don’t believe [the lack of] hype!
• Harry Gold, CEO of Overdrive Interactive gives us his definition of new New Marketing as:
  • Weaving your content into the social web
  • Joining the conversation that already exists
  • Making new friends
  • Communicating with your friends
  • Listening to what your friends have to say
  • Measuring the impact of your conversations
• Chris Penn – “It’s all within your reach if you’re willing to do just a little bit of homework on it.” How much of the NMS was dedicated to getting “traditional” (i.e. old and stubborn) marketers to actually try something new? A lot.
• CC Chapman – “Keep the PR people away from your blog and comments. They love to give spin. ” Another reinforcement of top theme of the event – “Authenticity.”
• Chip Terry, VP Zoominfo tells us “Email has the benefit of being highly trackable- which has led us to overuse it.”

Best speaker of the day for me was Paul Gillin on “Profiting from Engagement: Why content is the new currency of marketing.” Here is what I heard Paul say:

• “By creating compelling content, you can become a celebrity and reach an audience that you previously needed mainstream media to reach.”
• Content Marketing is all about giving people something useful that will make them want to come back.
• There should never be another New Coke or Arch Deluxe. Blogs now allow companies test ideas with larger audience.
• Asking people for their input doesn’t work if you don’t respond to what they say.
• Don’t look for a quick payoff. Typically going to take 6 months to 1 year to see results.
• Big media is a declining market, giving way to de-centralized media.

Some rough notes here for sure, but I hope they’re helpful to someone as inspiration, at the very least. I hope to take the next few days to de-compress and provide some more detailed conclusions around what I heard at this year’s New Marketing Summit.

I attended the New Marketing Summit (NMS) to learn how the thought leaders are combining Social Media, blogging, “traditional” internet-based marketing, and offline marketing in innovative ways to product results for their clients or commpanies. I was not dissapointed. It was a face paced event, treating us to 18 speakers in one day. Nobody had the time to drag on. Topics were brisk and lively. Great idea for format.

Day one started early with an 8am kick off by Chris Brogan, the emcee of most of the day. He let us know the most important things – the wifi key, the twitter hashtag to use (#NMS) the Flickr tag to use (NMS08) and that the NMS is a green conference – no water bottles or extraneous pads of paper, etc. Kudos to NMS for that. Chris started the conference off with 3 broad topics that were reinforced throughout the day – New Marketing is about listening, learning to speak to your community, and content.

Mike Lewis, President of BMA Boston, spoke next with the purpose of defining “new marketing.” He came away with a solid definition of the term that include 5 main points:

1. New Marketing is about listening and engaging in dialogue – not broadcasting your message.
2. New Marketing is more than technology 
3. New Marketing is measuring the right things better, rather than measuring everything 
4. New Marketing extends beyond the marketing department in your company. Everyone joins the party. 
5. New Marketing is not “one size fits all.” Because each audience need is different, there is no standard, no template, than can be extended to all companies.

David Meerman Scott spoke next, and I found his 1/2 hour to be the most effective of the day, summing up what New Marketing is all about in a real way. Much of what he said reminding me of High Probability Selling applied to the current Web 2.0 world. He calls them the “Rules of the Rave” and are described in his new book:

1. Nobody cares about your products (except you). 
2. No coercion required. 
3. Lose control. 
4. Put down roots. 
5. Create triggers that encourage people to share. 
6. Point the world to your (virtual) doorstep. 

Sounds goofy or a little too hippy? Consider this, TripAdvisor spent 2 days building a small Facebook app caled “Cities I’ve Visited” and turned it loose without a big marketing push. It currently has over 5 million installs. David ended with a quote from the [Matt dance] “Sincerity is something hard to fake, impossible not to recognize, and hard not to respond to.” In other words, share what you’re passionate about, leave out the PR taglines, and let people share your enthusiam with no strings attached.

I also enjoyed listenign to Adam Broitman, Director of Stragegy at Crayon during his panel discussion of Brand and Reputation. A few gems that I pulled away from his disscussion include:

• Don’t be afraid of negative comments on your blog. Use them to amplify your responses.
• Don’t use “artificial adjectives” to describe your product (“Durable Toilet Paper” yes – that tagline exists). Use your own voice. 
• Social Media is a commitment, not a campaign. 
• When your press release can’t get mainstream coverage – it’s a lot easier and more effective to write a blog post. 
• “No longer can you sit in your walled garden and work to get people to come to your site [using SEO and PPC tactics]. You need to be where your they [customers and prospects] are.”

I’d love to continue with a detailed recap of each speaker, but with 18 on the agenda, it would make this post unreadable. Here are highlights from the best of the rest:

• Rachael Happe of Mzinga believes that Social Networks are the new Marketplace – places people go to research, socialize, and buy. 
• Chris Brogan doesn’t mind interrupting himself on stage to say hi to people in the crowd he recognizes. 
• Alecia O’Brien of DNA13 used a clever tactic to get people to listen her – After my talk come by our booth, if you answer 3 questions correctly, you win a prize [that people wanted]. I noticed people started writing down notes . . . 
• Tim Young of SocialCast tells us that Generation Y employees are known for pinpointing the location of information within your company, and will often disregard the org chart, or the hierarchy to get what they need. 
• Speaking of autenticity, John Munsell, CEO Bizzuka, took a moment to complement a fellow panelist and loose competitor, Peter Nieforth of docmetrics, on having a “brilliant product.” Trust points +5. 
• Worried about turning Twitter loose inside your company? Laura Fitton logically reminds us – If you’re not worried that your employees will divulge company secrets using email, why worry about them doing the same on Twitter? Regulate policy, not tools. 
• “Millenials” is the term used to define the generation that grew up after the internet was born. Ben Grossman, a millenial, stated with pride that Millenials “have $200 billion in shopping power and we haven’t even entered the workforce yet.” So, I guess that means we should be marketing to your parents still, and not to you? Call me back when you have your own money. 
• When asked if you should treat “influencial bloggers” that same as press, Christine Perkett answered an unequivocal “Yes . . . and I believe that ALL bloggers are influencial.” Thanks Chris! 

The day ended with a keynote from Don Peppers, who ended the day with a bang. He described 2 large motivating forces of marketing: Product-centric marketing, where you try to reach as many customers as possible with your product; vs. Customer-centric marketing, trying to satisfy as many needs of your existing customers as possible over their lifespan as a customer. These 2 forces tug and pull a product company and if not managed correctly – can pull a company apart. Don left us with a mantra – “The only way to succeed is to build & maintain a reputation for trustworthiness.” If you over-promise features in a pure customer-centric organization, you WILL take a hit in the trust department.

Overall, it was a great day, I learned a lot, and met some interesting people. Stay tuned for the final, Day 2 recap tomorrow. Or, if you can’t wait, follow me and the #nsm tag on Twitter for live updates throughout the day.

Twitterific for iPhone Updated

Late last week, IconFactory released Twitterrific v1.1 for the iPhone.  For an ad-supported free service, the complete list of bug fixes and new features included in this release is impressive. The release notes indicate that the eagerly anticipated fix for the TwitPic rotation bug has made it into this release.

In the very small world of iPhone applications used to update Twitter status, Twitterrific continues to be the best combination of features, usability, and price.

Other options include Twinkle (from Tapulous the creators of the wildly popular game Tap Tap Revenge), Twittelator, and Twitterfon.

With the rise of Social Media, people now have several websites where they track their status and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Earlier this year saw the rise of the Lifestreams – web sites that serve to aggregate the inputs and outputs of a single person’s myriad social media sites. When I saw these sites begin to take hold, I’ll admit I wasn’t a believer. I watched the Instant Messenger Wars play out years ago, and I was skeptical that companies with established user bases would ever allow a 3rd party to have access to that userbase or the rich data that it held. This walled garden approach is what sunk ICQ. In short, I didn’t believe that social media or microblogging sites would ever have a truly open API.

Glad to say I was wrong on that one. The post children of the Web 2.0 craze are social media sites and their open APIs. For every micro-blogging site like Twitter, there is a 3rd party AIR app like Twhirl that is built on its API. There are applications like Digsby that are mashups of “old” IM and “new” social media. And now there are Lifestreams – services that are successfully built around the goal of aggregating the streams of information from all these social media sites into one simplified view.

The king of the hill in the Lifestream community is FriendFeed, which launched privately in 2007 and opened a public beta in Feb 08 with a $5 million Series A funding. FriendFeed was covered mightily by the l33t bloggers at TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb. At first, I thought it was mostly because it was more because of the founding team of 4 ex-Google execs. I suppose that’s with good cause. There’s a fraternity of ex-Google employees that have gone on to fortune and glory. Sergey & Larry and Google are the 2000′s version of Jack Welch and General Electric.

The speed with which FriendFeed integrated profiles, statuses, and all other rss feeds it could lay its hands on changed my opinion of the service. Their product development methodology firmly guided by their Google background, FriendFeed put together a very simple design and then focused entirely on the product functionality itself. FriendFeed quickly added the most popular services in the all the major categories – microblogging, video blogging, photos, status, news, and music. They cleverly added RSS feeds from sites that you wouldn’t think of as 2.0 – Amazon’s Wishlist and Netflix’s favorites. That’s a mashup of sorts. In early 2008, FriendFeed had clearly focused on the aggregation of services, ballooning to 43 services at the time of this writing. Functionality exists to post to the aggregated Lifestream through a simple “Comment” feature, but in my opinion that’s not a useful service. Here’s why – if your friend uses Pownce for micro-blogging and you comment on that post in FriendFeed, your comment doesn’t become a Pownce update. After some pressure, FriendFeed did add an option to make FriendFeed comments become tweets, but that’s the limit of integration with other services from an update perspective. Recent feature additions include the concept of “rooms” and the integration of FriendFeed comments as part of blog comments. Like their chatroom namesakes before them, FriendFeed Rooms are essentially a group of people discussing a specific topic – using FriendFeed comments of course. The blog comment mechanism came to be as plug-ins for WordPress and Movable Type, where you can see FriendFeed discussions as part of your blog commentary.

Upstart SocialThing! launched in beta after securing $300k in “early stage” funding in the Fall of 2007. From the start, SocialThing! has attempted to avoid direct competition with the larger and more popular FriendFeed by claiming that they’re a different breed of Lifestream that’s not competitive at all. There’s a lot of truth to that. Where FriendFeed focused on pulling together all the RSS it could lay its hands on, SocialThing has focused on 2 way integration with the services it supports. SocialThing’s design more closely mimics others in the Web 2.0 space, which stands in contrast to FriendFeed’s mimimalistic user interface. FriendFeed comments require a FriendFeed reader (website or AIR app) to view. SocialThing caught on earlier about that major drawback. When you post a response to someone using SocialThing, it posts directly to the service, not to itself. Additionally, when you make changes to your profile or add/remove friends on other services, these changes automatically occur in your SocialThing account. This makes SocialThing more heavily reliant on 3rd party API, which is risky. But, the risk outweighs the benefits to AOL, who recently decided to acquire SocialThing earlier this August. AOL probably has desire to pair SocialThing  with Meebo, a web-based IM client that it has a significant investment stake in.

In summary, the top 2 Lifestream services both offer RSS and social media stream aggregation. FriendFeed focuses on aggregating as many streams as it can, where SocialThing focuses on a more complete 2-way integration with each of the services it supports. With the acquisition by AOL, SocialThing’s product roadmap is in doubt. The future for FriendFeed seems focused on slowly turning the discussion from Tweets and Pownces to FriendFeed comments.

You can find me on FriendFeed and SocialThing. Add a comment below if you’d like an invite to the SocialThing beta. More importantly – I’d be interested to hear how you’re using either or both of this services.

I and a contingent of PermissionTV rabble-rousers attended Mashable.com’s SummerMash Boston event. We wanted to meet some folks and maybe spread the world on what our company has been up to. Here’s what the $21 ticket got us:

1. A live, streaming interview of us discussing PTV, that was shown on the Mashable.com homepage during the event.
2. Some crazy photos of the PermissionTV Team with Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, and another one here.
3. An intro to Chris Brogan, local Social Media hero who’s now following PermissionTV.
4. An intro to Adam Ostrow, Mashable Editor in Chief, who told us the secret to getting covered in Mashable – “Have an interesting story to tell, that’s not being covered anywhere else.” Eureka!
5. 5 new followers of PermissionTV.
6. Coverage from Marcel Moreau (aka Combusting Boy) at Summermash Boston 2008 Roundup.
7. Free food and two free drink tickets. w00t!
8. A dancing Owl
9. The most ridiculous picture of the PermissionTV Crew known to man.
10. Best Job Title of the Evening – Saul Colt, Head of Magic at FreshBooks.

All in all – it was a good event, I’d say! I met a lot of interesting people and had good fun along the way. For anyone else who was at the event, I’d love for you to share stories and links to pics in the comments below!

Update: Looks like the owner of the Flickr stream turned their pictures private, so some links above might not work properly. You can see all the fun pics here.

I’ve added yet another social media app to my arsenal – welcome Ping.fm