Burger King Blow Job Ad!!!!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/bk-bj-ad

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

What’s A Browser??????

A Google employee interviews random passersby in Times Square with a seemingly simple question. Answer: “It’s where you put your search terms.” Yes, that is correct. As usual for a Google-made video, the music and production are incredibly cheesy, but the reactions from some of the interviews are good for some laffs, I suppose.

Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebuzzfeed%2Ecom%2Fscott%2Fwhats%2Da%2Dbrowser&feature=player_embedded

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

Quiz show on a roller coaster? Genius!!!!!!!!!

Watch this!!!!!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gustavoa/brain-rush-4bf

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

Really Love Firefox? Skin Your iPhone, Laptop or Even Your Car with Firefox Artwork

Mozilla has teamed with Infectious, a startup that lets users easily customize iPhones, laptops and even cars with high quality stickers of commissioned artwork.

From time to time Infectious works with corporate partners to create custom stickers. Here’s an example of an iPhone with a WordPress theme, for example. We’re also talking to them about designing custom stickers for the CrunchPad.

The Mozilla project brings art from five Infectious artists that you can buy now. iPhone skins cost $15, laptops skins are $30 and car decals are $35. 25% of the proceeds go to the artist and the Mozilla Foundation.

In a couple of weeks Infectious will also open up the project and let any artist submit work. One or more winners will be selected by user voting and input from Mozilla and Infectious, and users will then be able to buy those skins, too.

Source: www.techcrunch.com

Cool link: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/06/17/artful-collaboration-infectious-mozilla-firefox/

Twitterfeed Gets An Overhaul, Adds Analytics

If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed, you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams.

By one count, Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets.But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages.

So many people, in fact, were pushing their feeds through the service that Menti’s one-man shop was having trouble scaling the service. About a month ago, he sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group (TAG), and today it is relaunching with a completely rebuilt back-end, which should improve reliability.

Working with betaworks (which includes a stable of interconnected real-time startups including TweetDeck, bit.ly, and Chartbeat), the new Twitterfeed now also includes a basic analytics dashboard which brings in bit.ly data so publishers can see how much traffic is coming to their site from Twitter. They can also compare that side-by-side with traditional Feedburner stats to see where most of their redares are coming from and which source is growing faster.

Twitterfeed is also adding more sign-in options. In addition to OpenID, it now accepts usernames and passwords from Google, AOL or Yahoo accounts. But one big drawback the service still needs to address is the lag time between a post hitting a feed and the corresponding Tweet hitting Twitter. It can still take a half an hour between those two events. When you are talking real-time, that is 30 minutes too long.

Source: www.techcrunch.com

Cool link: http://twitterfeed.com

AdWhirl Scores $1 Million For Dynamic Ad Platform For The iPhone

AdWhirl, the startup that lets iPhone developers to tap into multiple ad networks, has raised a cool $1 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital, with several angel investors participating. Launched in April, AdWhirl solves a simple problem for iPhone developers. As the number of ad networks available for iPhone apps has increased since the launch of the app store, developers were having a tough time switching between different ad networks. And after switching, developers have to issue updates to their apps, which can take days or weeks to make it through Apple’s approval process.

AdWhirl allows developers to switch between different ad networks on the fly without having to submit a new application to Apple. The service has support for five different ad networks, including AdMob, Quattro Wireless, Videoegg, and Jumptap (with Millenial Media and Google’s Adsense coming soon). In the past two months, AdWhirl (which launched under the name AdRollo) has 1,000 publishers using its publishers and has helped deliver more than one billion ads each per month to iPhone and iPod Touch users through free applications.

AdWhirl, which is available to developers for free, offers developers a platform where they rotate between ad networks and specify how often they’d like their ads to appear in their application. Developers can also set up AdWhirl to automatically switch between all available ad networks, optimizing CPM rates to ensure that their apps are generating as much revenue as possible (it can also fill an ad unit when the current network runs out of inventory, which can be a problem on popular applications). Developers can also create customized advertisements and include these in their package.

iPhone developers stand to make a good amount of cash from delivering these ads. Yam says that applications actually tend to serve 3-5 impressions each time a customer interacts with them, with even higher figures for some especially engaging applications. AdWhirl recently released a report that said that applications that crack the top 100 in the free apps list make $400-$5000 a day – a wide range to be sure, but even at the low end that works out to around $12,000 a month. Among these top apps, AdWhirl is reporting a notable $1.90 eCPM and 2.6% CTR.

Sam Yam and Ra Roath, co-founders of AdWhirl say that they are seeing a lot of developers using the platform to cross promote ads for other apps to help boost their ranks on the apps list. Yam says that there is potential to connect developers together as a collaborative community to further this cross promotion to help each other out. AdWhirl will use the funds to expand out to other potentially lucrative platforms for mobile devices such as Android, Blackberry, and Palm Pre.

Source: www.techcrunch.com

Fred Wilson: The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links”

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who is an investor in Twitter, argues that the value of Twitter is “all about links.” Today at the 140 Characters Conference in New York City, Wilson gave a presentation ostensibly about how to make money from Twitter. The value of Twitter, he says, is in “the power of the passed link.”

He compared Twitter’s recent organic growth to the early growth of Google (minus any mention of Twitter’s recent slowdown) and shared some analysis of traffic to the Websites of his portfolio companies and his blog. Google is the dominant source of traffic, but over the past 12 months Twitter traffic has been growing 30 to 40 percent per month. It is becoming a significant source of traffic to those Websites, to the point where it is now bringing about 20 percent as much traffic as Google.

Wilson predicts that at current growth rates, Twitter “will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.” And that just as nearly every site on the Web has become addicted to Google juice, they will increasingly try to find ways to get more links from Twitter. Because Twitter equals traffic. (We’ve noticed a similar trend at TechCrunch, where Twitter is now our second largest outside source of traffic after Google).

Moreover, he asserts that these Twitter links “convert better” than search links because they are often pre-filtered and come in the form of a recommendation from someone you are following. And while spam is a growing issue, it is somewhat mitigated by the ability to unfollow anyone who abuses your trust.

Given these dynamics, Twitter needs to “inject a paid model” into its service, says Wilson. He is clear that he is not speaking on behalf of Twitter:

I am not telegraphing anything here. It is the obvious thing to do. If they don’t do it, someone will figure out how to do it as a third party application.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was sitting right next to me when Wilson said this onstage. He didn’t seem surprised by anything Wilson was saying. But how exactly is the best way to inject paid or sponsored links into Twitter?

Again, looking at Google might be instructive. Google delivers traffic to Websites through a combination of organic and paid links. The paid links amount to billions of dollars in revenues for Google, but they wouldn’t work without the links in natural results. Twitter needs to come up with unobtrusive ways to inject sponsored Tweets with paid links into people’s Twitter streams. It is still not clear, however, how it can do this without turning off users.

Source: www.techcrunch.com