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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: LeadVine

20-word Description: LeadVine is where you post sales leads or information you are searching for and have the community act as your sales force.

CEO’s Pitch: LeadVine is a new kind of social network where the community is the sales force.

LeadVine has two goals:

A. Simplify how companies find new customers by posting sales leads and referral bonuses on LeadVine. Obtaining new customers is a difficult and expensive process. LeadVine helps companies find new sales leads in an efficient way.

B. Have the community earn easy money for finding and sharing sales leads. Everyday people come across information that is useless to them but valuable to someone else. Use LeadVine to find companies willing to pay you $1,000s for valuable information you come across.

Mashable’s Take: Social networks have shown what Web-based interconnectivity unhindered by geography can do for personal association as well as professional. LinkedIn, for instance, has shown itself to hold ample value for its users - and vice versa. LeadVine, a new service launching this Thursday, August 14, walks a business-centric line as well. But rather than try to compete with a stalwart like LinkedIn directly, it tries to build on the market already established by facilitating connections for sales purposes or other business. Advisory and consultancy outfits, for instance.

Looking at the list of requests published to LeadVine in advance of its public debut this week, one might see some highlights that sport “finder’s fees” and think it peculiarly easy to interact with users. LeadVine’s promotion of users’ ability to “earn easy money” only makes the visitor’s double-take more pronounced. There’s considerable value being spoken of in some cases, a number of which are too grand and too playful it seems, especially given the site’s preview status.

Even so, LeadVine is at its core quite promising. Its design is meant to enable a three-step process: post sales leads; seek community assistance in finding those leads; conduct said business and add to sales. No mystery. Just the corporate world at work. Only with LeadVine, it is a bit more cloud-based than before.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Disqus is getting a whole lot more attractive to publishers today with the rollout of several new features designed to make the third-party commenting system function much more like one native to popular blogging platforms.

While Disqus has attracted more than 30,000 websites to its system, its biggest drawback to-date has been the fact that its commenting system functioned essentially like a widget, meaning comments were not stored locally. This meant that publishers who installed the service could not migrate their old comments, needed to login to Disqus for moderation, and lost the SEO benefits of having comment content on their site.

To begin to address these issues, Disqus is launching a new WordPress plugin and enhanced developer API. With the plugin, comments can now be synced with a local database, and publishers can import their old comments into Disqus. Additionally, comments can now be moderated from within the WordPress Admin, as they are with the standard WordPress commenting system.

With comments now being stored server side, it means they are indexable by search engines, in turn negating the SEO problem created in previous iterations of Disqus. As for the API, the idea is to allow developers to create their own custom integrations, allowing the comment system to serve audiences beyond those on blogs.

So do all these enhancements make Disqus worth switching to if you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon? Before today, the big selling point was that the service increases engagement, because people are more likely to leave comments when they have ownership of them (i.e. - with a Disqus account, all your comments from across the Web are stored at disqus.com/yourname). Looking to take this idea a step further, another big enhancement being released today by Disqus involves making profile pages much more blog-like, as you can see in the screenshot below:

Up next for Disqus: a much requested integration with Friendfeed, so comments left on the social aggregator will be streamed back to the originating blog, similar to the feature the service already offers through Plaxo.

Disqus clearly realizes that comments are owned by the bloggers producing the content and the people engaging with it. They’re also showing the beauty of hosted applications - solving big problems for bloggers that get implemented in real-time without any effort on our part. Today’s enhancements solidify these ideas, and should lead more big publishers to seriously consider the platform.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Movable Type Plugin Connects FriendFeed Comments With Your BlogDisqus Video Comments Go Live, Powered by SeesmicRevver Plug-in for WordpressDouchebag Wordpress Plugin Helps You Curb Bad CommentsDisqus Challenges CoCommentDisqus And IntenseDebate - Two New Unified Comment PlatformsDisqus Now Includes Trackbacks with Commenting System

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under News, web 2.0, wordpress, web, disqus, FriendFeed, blog comments. 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.