I Am Adam Smith

TechCrunch article on Social Travel sites

Techcrunch has an article up from last week about social travel sites.  Definitely some interesting things going on in this space right now.

Fresh CPM Ad data

I love when blogs publish hard numbers... on anything really. New data from PubMatic on cost per thousand (CPM) rates. Here's the data via TechCrunch

Online ad-optimizing service PubMatic is now publishing an AdPrice Index with the average rates collected for remnant ads by 3,000 Web publishers. These are the ads that sites place from the big ad networks when they cannot sell the inventory themselves at normally higher rates. Small sites (those with less than one million page views per month) command nearly three times as much per ad as large sites (those with more than 100 million page views per month): an effective CPM (cost per thousand) of $1.18 versus $0.38. The effective CPM across sites of all sizes is $0.49. All of these figures are for March, 2008. Ad rates are also growing faster for small sites, up 18 percent since January versus 12 percent growth overall.

The low average rates for large sites reflects the poor returns on social networks, entertainment, and gaming sites. Effective CPMs for social networks are amongthe lowest at $0.37 in March. But there is hope, that was up 69 percent from $0.22 in January.

LinkedIn Answers Rocks!

I've been researching hosting companies for TripInvite the past week. Its very confusing with the wide variety of options, and also hard to compare apples to apples because they all present their offerings differently.

How much RAM do I need, which brand/model of server should I use? Who's got the most up-time, who's customer service is better, do I need a dedicated or a virtual server? How mature are the new grid-based offerings such as Mosso....

Luckily, I've got a profile on LinkedIn, and took advantage of their Q & A feature. I wrote a question that went out to my network, and to people interested in the category of this post, in this case Tech/IT/Computers.

I got 13 thoughtful answers in the first day. People offered their experiences, advice, and even some connections. Only 1 person made a direct sales pitch. I was overwhelmed, and very appreciative.

While I still haven't decided, I now have a much better idea of my options and what issues to consider. Anyone else who can help, please let me know (adam atsymbol tripinvite.com)

A+ rating to LinkedIn Answers! Thanks

SaaS Summit 2008

I'll be attending SaaS Summit 2008 this week in San Fran. Lots of interesting speakers talking about trends in Software as a Service and Web 2.0. Let me know (contact info) if you'll be attending the conference or are in the area and would like to get together.

RackSpace launches Cloud Computing: Mosso

As far as I can tell, cloud computing is a cheaper more efficient way of serving web pages.

From TechCrunch:

Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:

—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.

From there additional capacity per month costs:

—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests

This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.

PageOnce

Pageonce is a personal content aggregation service. Keeps all your RSS feeds, bank accounts, travel info, email all together in one spot. I like the concept, and the web design looks slick.

Might be a partnership opportunity for TripInvite in the future.

Facebook App Networks

According to Techcrunch, there are now 16,000 apps on Facebook, and its hard to get noticed unless your a high profile app developer, or associated with them. Some of these such as Slide  are charging develoeprs $.50 an install.

But now we are beginning to see networks starting to form across specific application genres.

In the social gaming category alone, a battle is brewing between the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga. Tomorrow, both will launch separate developer platforms for other gaming applications. The appeal to smaller social game developers is similar: join one of the gaming networks and see your game promoted on the toolbar or gaming page when people are playing other games in the network. Fred Wilson, the partner at Union Square Ventures, who invested in Zynga, explains to me:

It is the exact same value proposition why you would want to build your app on Facebook as opposed to the Web. You can rapidly develop an audience. It is access to audience and monetization.

Nuconomy: Web Analytics Measuring Interactions

New startup which will do web analytics thats more relevent to today's 2.0 sites. Nuconomy is still in beta. I've signed up for the beta, and will see how well this all works.

From their blog:

Let’s take an example:
User A, goes into YouTube. He goes through a few channels and user pages. He browse about 30 pages which brings him deep into the site, but he doesn’t watch even a single video.
User B goes into YouTube. He watch the top 5 videos in the home page. He rate 3 of them and make comments on the other two. He than continue to upload two videos of its own. During all this time, he doesn’t browse more than 5 pages in the site.
Now - Which of the users do you think is more engaged with the YouTube brand?

This kind of measurement is exactly what’s in the heart of our product NuConomy Studio. We let you measure all kind of user interactions, and even combine them to get a definite "engagement" rank to each of your users or content pieces.

Fun, Inspriational Speach by Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch is an amazing guy. Virtual reality prof at CMU who recently was diagnosed with terminal cancer. This is his last public speech. This talk changed my whole day. He's more fired up about life then most healthy people I know.

UI Design by Next Web

Tips from NextWeb on how to make your Web 2.0 site look great, without the now typical shadow effects, 3d and bling.

Main points: use lots of whitespace, carefull selection of typography, and grey scaling.

So what is it that all these site have in common?

1. Grids and white space
Order your site with mathematical precision, create a grid where each column has a certain width, and stick to that format. Another thing is making things stand out not by making them really big, but by adding a lot of white space around it, some things on Hulu just needs to be clicked because there is noting else that catches the eye. Mark Boulton wrote a good tutorial about it, Khoi Vinh wrote a blog post accompanied with a pdf for it.

2. Typography.
There is a lot more into typography than only choosing which font you are going to use. Without even changing the font you can already differ two text blocks from each other in different line-height, different grey scales, and different sizes. Once again Mark Boulton wrote a wonderful series. Another good point to start with is Oliver Reichensteins article about typography.

3. Colors, and shades of grey
I already mentioned the use of different shades of grey to differ texts in importance, and especially sticking to one or two colors and grey can be easy tools to create an attractive yet clean site. Flickr especially manages the grey tones pallet very well. Veerle wrote a good article and ColorLovers and Adobe’s Kuler are worth visiting too