TechAddress

Google Analytics for Flash: Welcome to the Engagement Era

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:31:58 +0000

The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it. The latter is being addressed today at Adobe Max, where Google is announcing Analytics Tracking for Flash, which will let publishers track metrics for their flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package.

Aside from the unique file format, one of the major differences between tracking Flash and tracking webpages is that Flash can be embedded anywhere – meaning that analytics software needs to be able to measure interactions from not just a single location, but from within an application, regardless of where it’s placed.

To demonstrate how Google Analytics now does this, the company has teamed up with web-based Flash creation tool Sprout. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.

Google and Sprout demonstrate how this works in the video below:

While Analytics for Flash is an interesting breakthrough in its own right, it also could be the dawn of a new era in marketing and how companies pay for advertising. As opposed to paying simply for clicks and for views, advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.

Sprout is currently charging clients based on a “pay per publish model,” meaning the client pays each time someone actually does something with an app – like customize it (with Sprout’s “remix” feature) or republish it to a social networking profile. Sprout is marketing this new approach through a product they are calling SproutMixer.

Although most of the widget platforms like Clearspring and Gigya offer their own tracking solutions, Google Analytics adding its own support for Flash tracking is a big deal – it’s a solution that any Flash developer can implement into their applications – without the need for a middleman. As such, it could have significant implications on how online advertising is paid for, and how the widget companies evolve their business models.

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MTV Partners With Clearspring for Widget Distribution

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:32:49 +0000

Source:CenterNetworks

Back in September Google launched Google Maps with NYC public transportation and subway directions. They have been heavily advertising the new option, even grabbing a special place on the MTA home page (something I am not sure if HopStop ever received).

Today I found the following images of a "wrapped" Times Square shuttle train via SubChat. I thought the little AIM guy was dead… guess not! The shuttle is running a variety of wrapped cars as a test to see if they will go systemwide to help generate more revenue for the MTA.

Car 1953 pushes the entire url complete with http://!

Car 1946 shows off the markers

Some Subchatters are wondering what’s going on in the red circle. Apparently parts of the AIM people are "behind" the windows…

More AIM people

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Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

Source:CenterNetworks

MTV and Clearspring have announced a new distribution partnership today that will allow MTV to have their widgets shared via the Clearspring network. Today’s snnouncement comes a week after Clearspring refreshed their launchpad widget service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

MTV will provide show- and media-related content in widget form and fans of the content can grab a widget and place it on their blog or social network page. MTV will also look to monetize the widgets as well.

By creating the set of widgets, MTV hopes to get tons of free advertising by getting users to distribute their ads for them.

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What’s Your Favorite Widget?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:32:49 +0000

Source:Mashable!

The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards has hit the ground running, with over 600 nominations made since our noon launch. How do you ensure your web company gets enough nominations to make it into the voting rounds, leading to multiple mentions on Mashable and our nearly 100 international partner sites?

That’s easy. Our widget is super smart, and it can be “locked” to a preset category and company name for posting to your company blog. Here’s how:

1. Visit the Widget creator page

2. Select “Preset Category” and enter the category

3. Select “Preset Company Name” and enter your company name

4. VOILA! Post the code to your company blog!

Good luck!

Source:Mashable!

Nobody likes having to think up new passwords, which often leads to people using the same ones over and over. Even if you do come up with some good passwords, how in the world do you keep track of them for all of the different sites you visit? Luckily, the Firefox development community has come up with numerous extensions to help you not only create new passwords, but also manage them across numerous sites and multiple computers.

Tell us more about the password managers you use in the comments. And, as with any list of Firefox tools, please do not install all of these at once unless you’d like to slow down your browser.

Exporting & Synchronizing

Foxmarks - The popular bookmark synchronizing tool added password sync to a recent version of the extension. You can now sync all of your passwords across all of your installations of Firefox with it.

Password Exporter - Password Exporter allows you to save your passwords as an XML or CSV file and then import it onto another system. While a little more work than automatic sync systems, you have no concerns over security of a server or service.

SyncPlaces - SyncPlaces allows you to use your own Web storage and FTP sites as a way to sync your passwords across multiple computers. Since it is your own storage space, you have complete control over the security.

Password Generators

Magic Password Generator - Create a master password and then this extension will make unique passwords for each site based off of it.

Masterpass - Generates passwords based on a masterpass you enter and the name of the website you are creating it for.

Password Hasher - Generate multiple passwords based off of one master password and unmask hidden passwords. Supports multiple lengths, and more.

PasswordMaker - Just as the name implies, PasswordMaker can generate new passwords for you, store your current ones and autofill forms for you. Nothing is stored in your system since the passwords are recalculated time and time again.

PwdHash - With just a keystroke, PwdHash can generate a unique password for each site and will be usable across all of their subdomains.

SecurePassword Generator - A tool to help you create secure passwords that can be accessed via your Tools menu.

Password Managers

LastPass Password Manager - LastPass can manage all of your passwords, generate new ones, fill in forms and more. Also works with Internet Explorer.

RoboForm - Memorizes your passwords to log you in automatically, can generate new passwords, encrypts what is stored and more.

Secure Login - Gives you easy access to your passwords, the ability to make secure bookmarks that will log you in, keyboard shortcuts and a lot more.

Sxipper - Sxipper allows you to create personas that will fill in all of your information by just clicking on them. Can be used to sign up or log in to sites.

Password Unmaskers

Show my Password - After you enter a password, pass your mouse over it and you can see what you entered in regular letters.

Show Password On Input - Check a little box added to password entry areas that will let you see your password upon input.

Unhide Passwords - Tired of not being sure if you typed your password correctly? Unhide Passwords makes them readable so that you can see them just like anything else you type.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, Fredex8

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Widgets are officially everywhere. From blogs to social networks to Presidential candidates, it’s hard to find a webpage that doesn’t include some form of embeddable media. In this space, you have major widget platforms like Clearspring, Gigya, and Widgetbox, builders of specific widget applications like Slide and RockYou, and companies offering tools to build custom widgets, like Sprout and iWidgets.

While those might be some of the big names, there are also hundreds of other great widgets produced by web companies offering their users new ways to share their content on third-party sites. Which ones were the best? Nominate your favorite innovator in the widget space using (appropriately enough) the widget below.

Make Your Nomination

Mashable Open Web Awards

Spread the Word

Feel free to elaborate on your nomination in the comments, or try to gain more support for your favorite service by copying the widget to your blog (click the “Grab This” link in the widget above)!

Support Our Sponsors

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura’s advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

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Widgadget Lets You Build Viral Marketing Widgets | The Startup Review

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:31:25 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Company

Widgadget

20-Word Description

Widgadget is the community portal for widget creation and distribution. It wishes to popularize widgets for users, bloggers and brands.

CEO’s Pitch

Widgadget is designed to help users, bloggers, brands and agencies spread their content exponentially, to get more websites/blogs traffic and to improve brand loyalty. It enables all users to see the best widgets and to create their own in three steps:

The registered user enters their feeds, then, he or she designs the widgets with sizes, colors, images, logo, titles, etc., and finally, adds information that enables the widget to get well-indexed in the gallery (titles, description, tags, etc.). Once created, the widget can be spread throughout social networks, blogs or desktops. The statistics allow every user to track word of mouth effect.

Mashable’s Take

Widgadget lets you create and distribute customizable widgets for whatever you want to promote, such as your website, blog, company, product, service, etc. Widgets can be created in Flash or Java, depending on where you want to use them. You can also embed your widgets on many different platforms, such as social networking profiles, blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.), websites and start pages such as Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes, etc.

There are several competitors in this viral marketing widget space such as Gydget, Gigya, and Clearspring, which have all carved their own niches. For example, Gydget focuses mostly on the music industry, so most of their widgets promote musicians. All of these platforms provide easy to design widget tools and also a distribution channel with ways to monetize and analyze your viral marketing campaigns.

Widgadget offers all of the same core features without any major new features or niches, so it’s difficult to separate them from the pack. One of the things they do well is their customization for each member depending on what type content is being created and distributed. For example, their service is different for members creating widgets for personal use, business, blogs, or advertising for clients. Also, while creating widgets, the service’s performance seemed to be slightly better than the experiences I’ve had on some services such as Gydget for example.

Being able to track each widget and analyze the traffic and popularity of each creation could prove useful for future campaigns. In addition, being able to view all of the different widgets that you’ve created on one screen is very helpful as well. However, I was not thrilled with the inability to add any audio or video content to widgets, which is a feature many of their competitors have. This is significant because some studies have proven that some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns usually (NOT always) include some form of audio or video content. Being able to embed audio content like a song snippet, narration clip or video from YouTube has become a standard option these days.

Here’s a sample widget created on Widgadget in minutes for 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.

RockYou Spits in Recession’s Face, Secures $17 Million In Funding

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:32:53 +0000

Source:Mashable!

VoxOx is a new service launched by San Diego based startup TelCentris. It’s a Skype competitor that does more than just VoIP, unifying voice, video, instant messaging, texting, e-mail, fax and social media communication inside one desktop application.

The easiest way to check out all the services that VoxOx supports would be to look at the image below, which offers a great overview of what VoxOx is about.

Other key features of VoxOx include a unified meta address book which contains contacts from all the various services and networks; VoIP telephony with two initial hours of free talk time (Mashable readers get 1200 minutes, more on that below), inbound/outbound calls, voicemail, call forwarding, inbound faxing, two-way texting, and even a landline replacement (if you’re so inclined). It supports Windows and Mac based machines, and support for Ubuntu, Debian and mobile is coming soon.

It’s hard to find what’s missing here; it’s like Trillian and Skype in one with some sugar on top. Of course, the application itself needs to prove that it’s reliable, stable and at least as simple to use as Skype, or it’ll be hard to create converts from that immensely popular desktop VoIP solution.

Note to Mashable readers: the first 500 folks who sign up for VoxOx using this link: signup.voxox.com/mashable will get 1200 minutes of free phone calls to U.S. and Canadian phone numbers with no expiration date.

Source:Mashable!

We know that the looming recession doesn’t mean that all funding will immediately stop, but amidst the waves of layoffs and cautionary e-mails sent by VCs it’s nice to see widget maker RockYou getting additional 17 million dollars, which brings their C Round Total to $52 Million.

This investment comes from Softbank, leading shareholder of Yahoo! Japan, and SK Telecom Ventures, the venture capital arm of SK Telecom; initial C Round investment of $35M was led by DCM. Put everything RockYou has amassed so far and you get an impressive number: 67 million dollars.

To put this into perspective, its competitor Slide raised $50M so far this year, Gigya raised $9.5 million in March, while Clearspring snagged $18M in May.

RockYou will use the funds on several fronts. First, they’ll open offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit. Furthermore, they plan to expand into Asia-Pacific market; SoftBank and RockYou will set up a new joint venture company to develop widgets for use on PCs and mobiles in the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets.

Finally, they plan to grow the internal ad sales team (and this at a time where many companies lay off people in that same department), as well as strengthen their Automotive, Retail and Entertainment specific application verticals. Recession? Meh, says RockYou.

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Clearspring Updates Launchpad Widget and Ranks First in Widget Network Traffic

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:30:43 +0000

Source:CenterNetworks

Widget sharing service Clearspring has announced the launch of their latest version of Launchpad today. The new Launchpad allows for more customization than before including colors nad layout. Clearspring is now also supporting a variety of additional languages within their sharing feature.

The sharing menus within the widgets also prioritize the destinations based on each user’s history with other Clearspring widget interactions. The company has also launched "liquid sizing" which allows the sharing menu to morph to the right size automatically based on the size of the widget. Clearspring serves ads in the widgets on their free version.

The company has also pointed to new tracking analysis from comScore which shows them at 254 million unique visitors worldwide in September while I assume they are pointing to Gigya at 93 million visitors. comScore also notes that they had "reached" 101 million U.S. consumers for September. "Reached" is a tough word to use — I’d very much prefer to see actual interactions. Widget views are easy, interactions are a whole other ballgame. Part of the bump in numbers comes from Clearspring’s acquisition of AddThis.

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Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

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YourMinis Rides Off Into the Sunset

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:31:37 +0000

Source:CenterNetworks

Start page provider YourMinis has announced that this will be the last week for the start page. They have suggested that YourMinis users transition to another start page including myAOL, iGoogle or MyYahoo. They will apparently focus on creating widgets going forward.

The gallery will remain with detail pages on each widget but they have decided to remove "browsing, favoriting, and statistics functionality" from the public gallery. This means that you can pickup a widget but that’s about it.

YourMinis is a service of Goowy which was acquired by AOL back in February. I can only assume that eventually the widgets will be served via the AOL framework. The Goowy webtop has also been shutdown and users transferred to AOL Mail.

CN Sponsor: CloudContacts - make your business cards work for you!
Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

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