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Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Smynx

20 word description: Find new ideas for having fun, and arrange to try them with friends and people near you.

CEO’s Pitch: Smynx is a website for people who need more variety in their lives. Get inspiration for active, worthwhile, or just unusual new ideas to try and things to do. You can also arrange to try them, either privately between friends, or publicly with new people, making friends in the process. And if you have a good idea, add your own!

In keeping with the idea of having more fun in your life, you can rate ideas by interestingness, comment and tag them, and even add your own little sketches!

Mashable’s Take: If you have friends in driving distance and the lot of you can’t think of anything to do, Smynx may be just the thing for you. This site lets you post and search for activity ideas you can do with your friends. Some of them you can even do by yourself, such as watch all the episodes of a season (or 3) of your favorite television series in one night, but the purpose of Smynx is to help you find activities on a local level.

Any ideas that are public and are in your neck of the woods will appear as recommendations for things you may want to do yourself. Any ideas that you’d like to try out through the site involve some basic event-planning tools that let you pick a time and date, and post the event on Smynx’s site.

This event-planning process could be greatly expanded to include import and export options so you can post the event on your Facebook events profile, import friends from email or various social networks, or sync up local events with your iCal. This would also be a prime area for any additional event-planning resources or further details surrounding a particular idea, which could be used for marketing or advertising purposes or for recommendations for products that are related to the idea being tried out. For instance, in planning my dog party, I could receive recommendations on pet treats and party favors for the willing pet owners.

In posting or viewing others’ ideas, you can rate them, or even add a sketch (think the graffiti app), which is fun and helpful for search and filtering purposes, but uploading your own image or even performing a Web search for importing a Flickr image may have a broader appeal to users as opposed to the sketch option. While ideas are currently broken down into categories like “social” and “active” I think Smynx has the potential to dig deeper into various niche groups, such as dating ideas, children’s parties ideas, or even housewarmings or weddings.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Companies from all over the globe are making their way to the Web to try their hand at online advertising.  And according to the latest comScore report, American Apparel leads the pack, delivering 483 million display ad views in April, reaching 49 million Internet users an average of 9.9 times during the month.

And while it easily outpaced the second place firm, UnderArmour, I can’t help but wonder if American Apparel should run for the hills and hope against hope that things can turn around.

For all the money it spent on advertising online, the company’s profit slumped to just over $1 million in the last quarter, $11 million less than the previous quarter.  Granted, those quarters didn’t include the advertising the company spent during April, but American Apparel has consistently had an online presence in advertising and seemingly, to no avail.

Some will say that the economy may be causing the downturn in American Apparel’s revenue, but I think it may go far beyond that.  Let’s face it – if you’re spending that much money online in an attempt to bring more people to your site and buy clothing, wouldn’t you hope that it actually bears some real progress?

But the story doesn’t quite end there.  According to comScore, most of these ads were displayed on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others.  Does this say something about advertising on social networks?

Social networking users are notoriously fickle and usually interact with the services for as long as their “cool” or until they’ve grown out of them.  And although there is little evidence to prove the point, I’m wondering if social networking users also couldn’t care less about advertising and vendors would do better to spend money on more traditional sites where viability of advertising is easier to measure.

At this point, this is all conjecture and American Apparel’s poor performance may be the result of other factors that have nothing to do with social networks.  But it begs an important question: Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults?

I’m starting to think they shouldn’t.

Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults? ( surveys)

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:American Airlines Sues Google for Selling AdWordsStagr - Killer Custom T-Shirt ServiceReminder: Design a T-Shirt and Win an iPhoneAmerican Greetings Nabs PhotoWorks for $26.5MCBS and Dogster.com Partner for Summer TV SeriesTakkle Launches America’s Best Branded GroupGlam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpace

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Mark Dykeman. Mark broadcasts from his brain about communications, social media, and technology several times per week at Broadcasting Brain. He enjoys participating in several social media sites, including Twitter, FriendFeed, and StumbleUpon.

Oil and broadband Internet access are the twin fuels of both brick and mortar businesses and Internet based businesses. When oil prices are low, economies can zoom at light speed. When prices are high, many businesses can barely put one foot in front of another. A look at the history of oil might serve to help us understand the importance of ubiquitous, low cost Internet access, which is currently growing at a snail’s pace in North America.

Cheap oil was one of the drivers of recent global economic booms. Cheap oil helps keep transportation, electricity generation, and manufacturing costs low - all three types of work normally require huge quantities of refined petroleum products. When the price of oil rises, ballooning as it has since the 9/11 tragedy in New York City, it tends to cause the global economy to slow down because of the compounding effects of widespread oil usage.

Cheap oil was a hallmark of recent economic boom periods, permitting stable, continued economic development. Today, more expensive oil (not withstanding any recent price fluctuations) is leading to price increases in many sectors of the global economy, slowing growth by making it more expensive to travel, manufacture goods, heat our homes, and so on. While businesses that specialize in extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum products are reaping record revenues and profits, increasing demand coupled with supply challenges has resulted in increased costs for virtually all other sectors of the global economy.

Cheap broadband Internet access has worked the same as cheap oil, powering the expansion of e-commerce, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. At one time people were limited to dial up access for either Internet or other private online services (e.g. the original America Online, CompuServe, the Well, etc.) As telecos and other technology companies gradually built a high speed communications infrastructure –- first in major centers across the world and then expanding to wider areas of coverage -– applications gradually began appearing that could take advantage of increasing communications bandwidth. Images, audio, and video applications grew tremendously as broadband Internet access became available.

These days, can you imagine using services like Amazon.com, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, or Flickr at speeds of 14,400 baud? Can you imagine podcasting or videoblogging ever happening without some form of high speed Internet connection? Would digital photography have ever become as popular as it did if you had to wait 5 - 10 minutes to upload or download a single photo?

Fortunately for many of us, broadband Internet access is affordable, giving us access to these kinds of services. Likewise, many newer e-business models would not be feasible without affordable broadband Internet access.

Unfortunately, that high speed Internet is still not universally available across the world, nor do we have 100% coverage in developed countries like Canada and the US. Even New York City, one of the largest developed cities in the world, has less than 50% broadband Internet access in its homes, according the city’s Broadband Advisory Committee report of July 30, 2008. According to a New York Times article on the report, “the use of broadband in New York lagged behind Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta, but was more common than in Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles. Broadband connections were also notably more expensive in New York than in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.”

A July 2008 Pew Research Center study on home broadband adoption in the United States provided some interesting insights. Although broadband Internet connections are continuing to increase across the US, broadband adoption is stalling amongst lower income Americans. Moreover, while 54% of Americans have broadband Internet access, that number isn’t growing much - cost (and availability) is definitely a factor.

Average broadband Internet costs are decreasing slightly across North America, but not enough to make some users switch from dial-up Internet connections. Worse still, the Pew study reveals that dial up Internet costs are increasing, making an inferior service even less desirable. Considering the growing advantages, if not needs, for E-Mail, search engines, online databases like Wikipedia.org, financial services, and government information/services that are available via the Web, lack of affordable Internet access widens the divide between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

Mashable’s Steven Hodson recently wrote about US Internet access being marginalized through caps on broadband usage and potential tiered usage pricing. If these initiatives go through, they will have the same effect as rising oil prices. Many Web 2.0 services and e-commerce services are like the vacations, air travel, gas guzzling cars, and other luxury items of the “bricks and mortar” economy. As oil prices have risen, the global economy has responded through slowing economic growth. Lack of affordable access to services will constrain revenue and profit growth for companies both online and offline.

We are currently seeing the economic impact of rising oil prices. While there are multiple factors in play with oil prices, including finite oil supplies and environmental concerns, many would agree that current prices provide hardships to many people. Unless broadband capability increases over time, it may become a scarce resource subject to the laws of supply and demand. If demand comes to outstrip supply like we see with oil, broadband Internet access could become more expensive. Furthermore, the compounding effects of broadband cost increases from producer to consumer might lead to sluggish growth.

Despite the costs involved, the advantages of inexpensive broadband Internet access are potentially much greater. Suppliers should work to ensure that this increasingly important service, the oil of the online economy, increases its penetration into the global economy at affordable prices. Broadband Internet access is becoming an important driver of economic welfare, just like cheap oil.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Comcast Not Net NeutralIndian ISP Airtel Taps Google To Provide Apps Via New Web PortalBSkyB Creating YouTube Rival Using YouTube’s TechnologyGoogle SketchUp Now Free, User-Generated Content Goes 3D!MySpace Emmy AwardsIs US Internet Access Being Marginalized?Motorola Splits in Two

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under internet, web, broadband, Opinion, internet access, fuel, gas, oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.