I Am Adam Smith

New Energy Drink Launched

My newest project is PornStarr Energy Drink - with Afro-disiacs. My partner and I have created the formula, design, and marketing plan.

We had our first 3 parties in October, which went over really well. Have the next 160 cases coming in tomorrow. There'll be plenty more parties in Honolulu over the next two months, and some in Vegas and LA early next year.

Let me know if you'd like to try it out.

Funny Video, this just might go viral

Just got sent this one... don't really know the scoop, but it definitely provided two solid minutes of me laughing my butt off. Enjoy (p.s. phase2.com is where I work).

TravelMob.com Launches!!

I'm very happy to announce that we launched TravelMob.com today!

While we've had our bumps in the road, I think we launched an outstanding service.  I know that I'm using it to plan a ski trip to Utah this winter ;)

Gotten some great press already, and a killer review by web guru Allen Stern.

Please checkout the site, and let me know what you think: adam@travelmob.com .

I'll be writing about what's happening with the company from a personal point of view on this blog and official company news and ideas for really fun group trips on the official blog.

TravelMob.com Screenshots

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: travel group)

Press release is at http://blog.travelmob.com

TravelMob is travel site meets Evite; while a few others have similar models, TravelMob has some outstanding differences.

Travelmob lets you create a trip homepage, invite people, manage RSVPs, upload important files, create a photo gallery, see top tours for your destination, and plan via message board. There's a Facebook-style newsfeed that shows what everyone on your trip's doing.

Also, there's an integrated air, hotel, car, tour booking into the site via web services. So you can search/book directly from the site or your trip homepage. When you book anything, it goes into your trip's itinerary. There's a "Jump on this Flight", button which will search for a seat on the same flight.

Starting in October 2008 half of the team will be taking an around the world trip, using the site to plan, blogging the whole experience, and digging up the best events to travel to with friends.

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.