Technically Speaking

I’m thinking it is pretty clear that Lookery sold the ad network about 2 weeks ago. Now many people are wondering where the money is, or rather how they can make money by using Lookery. First of all, you might want to go straight away to this post that David did the other day. I thought that was a great explanation of what we are doing currently.

Even with that being said, if that isn’t clear enough for you, Jay posted this the other day also. Yes, to answer the question that is roaming in your head after reading that post by Jay - I did jokingly say “Dude, that has to be the longest sentence I ever saw!” - Yet, it does make sense if you take a second to digest what he was saying.

One thing we are going to be doing on the Lookery blog is start doing a write up of the featured site of the week. This past Friday I posted our first in what we hope will be an enlightening series of sites that are on the front page of Lookery dot com.

By now you are saying, “Ok, Rex, where the f**k is the “Money” going to be coming from now that there is no ad network?!?” Well if you know me, and some of you do, I like to build a story before just saying, “Here ya go, here are some links, enjoy.” Story building is key to selling anything. It’s called psychology, and the more we draw you in with the story and use good psychology, the better you are going to understand the money side. Without a good storyline, you tend to lose the interest of your audience.

Some of you are only interested in knowing your audience, and that is completely fine. It’s free to use and easy to sign up. I think one of the biggest uses of this free service is the regular every day blogger. I see bloggers who use twitter daily to promote things about their blog, but yet, it appears they are shouting to an audience - but really - do they know their audience? That is where knowing your audience comes in.

Finally we arrive at the money part of this equation. It’s based on something we all learned in kindergarten actually, and that is called sharing. Specifically all we are asking is for you to share your data and you make money from that. It’s passive income. And the cool thing for the geeks reading this, is that we are sharing our API for you to do this. It’s very simple to deploy on your site.

Coming full circle now, it’s about what you know (your audience) and now you know where is the money (sharing your data). It’s a simple concept to grasp, and hopefully in the coming months we will tell the story well enough so that everyone out there understands this data stuff is not only interesting, but yes, it can make you money.

Technically Speaking, I hope I told a more concise story about where Lookery is at today. Sign up and start learning more about your audience. If you have the data, and are inclined to grow that data into something worthwhile, you should share it with our growing community or network of sites that power our team to move forward and create more for products for you!

The news now is very old since the first major blog to break the news. This of course was first put out to the world right here as well as here. This let out the fact early about the Adknowledge buy of the Lookery ad network, but it’s time to move forward with what we are doing best.

That specifically is helping site owners to amplify their audience data. It’s what we have been doing actually for months now, and with the sale of the ad network, we can now focus all our resources on that fully. Adknowledge was the right choice when the opportunity presented itself to us to give our publishers a well known ad network home.

Coverage was pretty good today after the actual press release went live. One thing I’d like to clear up is that in no way are we based out of “Palo Alto” as stated in this post. It should have said “the San Francisco - Boston with side shows in Seattle and St. Louis based Lookery” - well at least it would have been more truthful!

While many posts simply regurgitated the press release, no big deal as I have done that myself, other outlets dug a little deeper and wanted to know more. Since we started last July on the Facebook application network, there was the coverage on the sites dedicated to that space. Coverage went pretty much everywhere, even overseas.

To be quite clear, the last two post comments that I left - one word - babelfish! I am not fluent in any language outside of English which I happen to get by in. I did however want to acknowledge them for the coverage of the sale of the ad network, but also so that I didn’t appear as the ignorant American - as they say, “When in Rome… ” - I gave it my best effort to use their language in responding.

Technically Speaking, it’s time to come over to Lookery now that the ad network part of Lookery is gone and check out how you can amplify your site(s) audience data today by signing up and becoming part of the growing Lookery network - we gang up on the ASL (Age, Sex, Location) and KW (Keyword) / cross-site audience KW data for you!

Update: Appears that maybe we will find out more this afternoon, but for now it does appear to be a rumor.

Quite surprised that this was posted in one of the more respected and journalistic quality blogs, but VentureBeat is reporting that there is a big announcement on today for Yahoo. The rumor is that Yahoo CEO is going to step down effective immediately and that the sale to Microsoft is still on. This all comes from an internal memo that Matt received as a tip about some big announcement for this afternoon.

This all follows the top story on Techmeme this morning from the official Google blog. While Google has apparantly pulled out of the advertising merger deal, it is quite apparent that maybe this could be Yahoo’s last stand.

Should be an interesting day waiting on the confirmation of the above rumor, and if it’s true, Micro-Hoo game on. Of course the offer will be substantially lower than the first one of $45 Billion or $31 per share original offer, but at this point with Yahoo stocks sliding well below that $31 today (although on an upswing currently), is there another option out there that could save the one time shining star from the Valley?

Technically Speaking, this would be the best possible way for Yahoo to recover and start anew with all this Obama change is in the air mentality. All Yang has to do now is say “Yes we can!”

You can track it later with this Google embeddable widget:

123People officially launched this morning. Now many of you are saying, “Great, another competitor to Google, Yahoo, etc… another fail whale in the making.” That was my original thought, but I had to give it a try. I figured I’d put it through it’s paces, see how good this site was. What they are doing is not competing with any search engine, but rather enhancing the search experience when you are looking for people you know or knew. Cool concept so far, but I had to test this out for myself.

I went to the site and was greeted by the below usual stripped down search look that we are all use to seeing these days on a search site. Nothing new here.

Well I said I was going to put it through it’s paces, right? I went and searched for someone that I haven’t been able to find for over 14 years now. Yes, I’ve tried countless searches on different sites in the past few months, but since the person’s name (real last name) also is a Hip Hop term, it was becoming pointless in trying to find him. A lot of hip hop artists were actually using his real last name which is “Samples” and calling them self DJ Mike Samples, DJ Fred Samples, etc… You get the picture.

Well with 123People, not only do you get a string of endless links, but you get social network connections, YouTube connections, as well as e-mail addresses, article links, etc… The complete person search results you want. The most important thing here, is that you also get pictures. You are not just receiving back a spit result list of articles and links where it “might be” where the person you are searching for is located at online.

Well I found test case #1. I was quite shocked to find that he also found the old band page like 4 days ago. So since he found the old band page first, I said, “One more missing member to find.” I figured the test wasn’t really fair since he had actually found the band page first about 4 days ago on a Saturday night around 1:30am.

This next person was going to be harder to find, since up to now I couldn’t find him on the normal social network searches, Google searches, etc.. 123People found him in one simple search! The picture find really helps as he has one of those people with non-gender specific first names - “Shannon“. I found him by his picture which linked to his MySpace page. Now I’m putting it out there for anyone that knows him, since he hasn’t been online since 6/1/08 according to his MySpace page - if you know him, or know of him - ping him for me please.

Technically Speaking, isn’t it about time you actually found those people from your past lives vs searching endlessly on Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.. and finding endless links to what you are not searching for? It’s quite refreshing to write about a new company that actually does what it says it is doing. btw, didn’t you like that I didn’t use one word from the usual press release?

Unspoken Promise - If you have a MySpace account, add them. Yes, it’s my son’s band who you saw here on this blog earlier this past summer playing on my drum kit.

The recording they have up is only a “laptop in the middle of the room” recording on a song they call “Shattered Glass“. They are planning on going in the studio to get a real demo with vocals done soon.

Technically Speaking, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

So you have some voter apathy and think your vote doesn’t count. Here is a view into the future, November 7th, 2008 to be exact. I know the instant classic Marshall Kirkpatrick is loving this.

Technically Speaking, if you don’t vote, YOU might make it to a real video - maybe!

Just wanted to say congrats to Slicehost! Glad to see success come to you Matt, and of course your business Slicehost. Oh and I’m glad to see you have kept the old business/domain still alive.

ExpertCEO a private, on-line community for senior executives, today announced the general availability of its innovative platform connecting corporate leaders to one another and the resources they require.

ExpertCEO members can quickly solve real-world business problems by confidentially exchanging ideas with peers, asking questions of experts across a range of disciplines and locating trusted resources. By applying social networking technology to enable CEOs to solve real-world business issues, they intend to make the social aspects of social networking more like business networking.

This new community provides CEOs with instant access to valuable information, a variety of perspectives and thought-provoking content–all within a secure environment. Lively, high-level site discussions span a wide variety of topics including financing, board governance, compensation, offshore product development and options’ vesting acceleration on acquisition.

Members benefit from a panel of expert advisors who are “on call” to answer their questions. Those responding to queries include James D. Robinson III, general partner of RRE Ventures and former CEO & chairman of American Express; David Hornik, General Partner of August Capital Partners.

To assist with its own strategy and growth, ExpertCEO has established an Advisory Board comprised of accomplished professionals with unique understanding of senior executives’ concerns and behavior, as well as domain knowledge around use of the Web to share information and ideas. Advisory board members include Gordon Crovitz, columnist and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; Thomas J. Friel, former CEO & chairman of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles; and Kathy Yates, CEO of AllBusiness.com.

Take a virtual tour of their services right here. See a preview of their services here.

Technically Speaking, in this down turned economy their first core members could be some ex-CEO’s, or CEO’s that are teetering on extinction.

SpeedDate.com is one year old and in that year’s time, they have successfully hosted over 18 million dates as well as receiving funding from Menlo Ventures to the tune of $8 million. Since launching in October 2007, SpeedDate hosts an average of 120,000 online dates per day, a new date begins on the site every second of the day.

One of the highlights of the first year came on Valentine’s Day, when SpeedDate.com user Francesca Salcido dated over 300 people in a single 24-hour marathon session. The event attracted worldwide press coverage including ABC’s Good Morning America. The site’s themed dating nights around events such as Super Tuesday and the summer Olympics also drew large dating numbers.

SpeedDate.com’s patented system allows singles to meet each other through 3-minute online speed dates using webcams, audio, and instant messaging. SpeedDate is available by visiting www.speeddate.com and as a popular application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and meebo.

SpeedDate.com was founded by Stanford Business School Graduates Simon Tisminezky and Dan Abelon.

Technically Speaking, while I have never seen the point of speed dating or speed anything (tons of copy cats that employ the same technique), it’s obvious that this speed date had a successful first year. Congrats.