Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has launched its latest product that aims to make it even easier for publishers to place revenue generating affiliate links in their content.
Dubbed SkimWords, the feature, which is currently in beta, differs slightly from the company’s main offering. Rather than simply converting existing retailer links to affiliate links on-the-fly, it looks at the page’s content and converts any references to known products into fairly non-obtrusive geo-targeted links to retailer sites where the item can be purchased.
The fact that these links are location-aware – at the country level – is perhaps noteworthy since it accommodates a site’s international traffic and therefore hopefully doesn’t leave much money on the table. → Read More
Apprupt, an affiliate network for mobile apps, has today launched its self-service platform for “appvertisers” (a slightly silly name).
It enables app developers to sign up to apprupt on a cost-per-install basis, enabling them to track their marketing campaigns for both paid and free apps. Features include account management (including campaign spend), and reports and analytics providing “the ability to determine the ROI at any given time” by measuring the number of app downloads generated. → Read More
Facebook recently announced it would be opening an office in Hyderabad, India, to be able to provide better round-the-clock and multilingual support to its ever-increasing number of users, advertisers and third-party developers.
According to Business Standard and India Times, the company is set to launch its India operations from the ‘City of Pearls’ – its first office in Asia – within the next two months. → Read More
Yep, you read that right. Today W3i is announcing Apperang, a new service that will pay users to download mobile applications. Apperang builds on the pay-per-acquisition model that we’ve seen succeed with companies like TapJoy. As opposed to pay-per-click, pay-per-acquisition (or pay-per-action) means that the developer only pays if the desired action occurs. In this case, developers pay only when the user downloads the app. Hit the jump to find out how Apperang works. → Read More
Another day, another iSuppli teardown. The folks at iSuppli have found that the iPhone 4, according to their estimates, costs $188 to make. While this is almost comically low, it says something about Apple’s ability to mass produce phones and the high margins they’re able to make on relatively low-cost products. The gyroscope chip, for example, apparently costs Apple $2.60 while it costs $2.90 in quantities of 200,000. These disparities pop up in a number of places, which, sadly, lends an air of WTF to the proceedings. → Read More
Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is debuting its free music cloud service today that allows you to sync your entire music collection across Android phones and PCs/Macs to the public today. The service, which was launched into private beta in May, streams music to your browser and Android phone.
Here’s how it works. The service’s application that operates in the background of your computer managing the upload and day-to-day syncing of your music library. In addition, it can upload playlists, coverart, ratings and song information you may have entered using iTunes. The application will manage your music for you, making automatic updates whenever changes occur in your library, and on across different connected devices. → Read More
Apple this morning announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of the iPhone 4 through Saturday, June 26, three days after its launch on June 24.
The company went as far as to call it the “most successful product launch in Apple’s history”, citing its iconic chief executive Steve Jobs.
Jobs also says he’s sorry about all those customers who were turned away because the company did not have enough supply. No word (yet?) on the antenna issues that continue to plague a subset of iPhone 4 owners. → Read More
Yahoo wants to help people write effectively for the Web by publishing a custom style guide, as was announced last April.
The stylebook, entitled “The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World”, will be released on July 6 by St. Martin’s Griffin, and will be available in dead tree form in a variety of stores, but also – naturally – in digital form for Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. → Read More
According to website analytics company StatCounter, Google Chrome has now overtaken Apple’s Safari in the US browser market for the first time on a weekly basis, claiming third place overall.
StatCounter, which says it analyzed some 874 million pages viewed on its network of over 3 million websites in the US alone for the week 21 to 27 June 2010, pegs Chrome’s market share at 8.97%, ahead of Safari with 8.88%. → Read More
Twitter recently launched a tool called Blackbird Pie that enables anyone to easily embed single tweets on their blogs and websites. But it doesn’t offer a solution for tracking or sharing conversations between Twitter users.
Enter Bettween, which does just that, stylishly.
We’ve covered the first version of the web app, which made it easy to visualize what is being said between two specific Twitter users (e.g. @aplusk and @mrskutcher), but a recent update brings more goodies. → Read More
Bionic cat! Videos: New “Hayabusa” bullet train boasts 320km/h top speed Clean your monitor with a hamburger? Don’t forget the bacon! Your disposable wine glass, monsieur Chocri brings you CreateMyChocolate.com → Read More
Remember Steve Jobs’ advice regarding the iPhone 4′s reported reception issues – it’s all your fault – relayed via an email from the Apple CEO himself (yes, one of those emails). Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down well with UK early adopters of the company’s latest smartphone.
That’s according to a rather opportunistic “flash” survey from rightmobilephone, which found that 63% of respondents were “particularly angered” by Jobs’ email in which he told one early iPhone 4 adopter to “avoid holding [the phone] in that way”.
The mobile phone comparison website polled 836 iPhone 4 users, 93% of whom claimed to have already been affected by a loss of signal whilst gripping the handset to make calls, whilst 78% of owners dubbed the fault “an insult”. → Read More
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, PR consultant Vijay Chattha of VSC/AppLaunchPR gives some unsolicited marketing advice to Research in Motion.
Another profitable quarter and another hit to RIM’s stock price. People are buying Blackberries, but investors are not buying RIM. Why? Short answer. No buzz. Despite continuing to reign supreme as America’s smartphone of choice, RIM’s Blackberry devices are not creating enough excitement in the market. Sure, RIM saw 20 percent profit growth in the first quarter of 2010, but they’ve also watched their market share dwindle as rivals Apple and Android grow. If there was ever a time for a change, it’s now.
BlackBerry, which is still ranked ahead of the iPhone and Android in worldwide popularity, can’t keep telling the market its working on an iPhone-killer that remains in the distant horizon. It needs a business makeover. → Read More
Opera has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, and once again it has registered reasonable growth, with Opera Mini users increasing by 4.2% compared to April 2010. Since that month, page views have also gone up 7.7%, Opera says.
For this report, Opera analyzed one 24-hour period to see how Opera Mini is used throughout the day in the top 10 countries (Indonesia, Russia, India, China, Nigeria, Ukraine, South Africa, the United States, Vietnam and the United Kingdom). Turns out that for all of those, regardless of differences in economy, culture or location, the four hours between 8 PM and midnight apparently account for a disproportionate amount of mobile data consumption. → Read More
Elevation Partners has quietly amassed another huge chunk of Facebook shares on the secondary market, according to a recent letter to its limited partners. Elevation spent $120 million for five million more Facebook shares. This is on top of Elevation’s $90 million, 2.5 million share purchase back in November.
That November deal has already gone up 2.5 times in value in a short eight months, making Facebook one of the better performing deals in Elevation’s portfolio and an enviable holding for any firm. Even though the bulk of Elevation’s Facebook shares were purchased at the more recent price, if you blend the two deals, there’s still an on-paper gain. Blended together, Elevation’s 7.5 million shares were purchased at a $14 billion valuation, and Facebook is trading at upwards of $24 billion on the secondary market today. → Read More
Amazon just introduced a audio and video to the Kindle, but the only way to experience the new Kindle multimedia books is on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. A baker’s dozen of titles already come in multimedia editions, including Rick Steves’ travel guides, Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar, and Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds In Song.
Adding music or narration to digital editions of books is fairly straightforward, and given the popularity of audio books, being able to both read and hear a book should be popular for some genres. Video can work also, but I suspect that more often than not it will be treated as something to be tacked on at the end rather than as an integral part of the original work. I guess it depends on who picks the videos: the author, or the publishing company’s marketing department. Trial and error will determine whether people really want video with their books. → Read More
Oh, you thought Verizon would let AT&T , Sprint, and T-Mobile all nab their own variants of the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S without them getting one too?
Not a chance. → Read More
We already knew a good amount about T-mobile’s variant of the Android-powered Galaxy S superphone. We knew about its 4″ AMOLED screen; we knew about its 1 Ghz processor. We knew about the 5 megapixel camera (with HD video recording!), and its 16GB of internal memory. We even knew about the $199 price tag and July 21st launch date. What we didn’t know: when it’d be announced. Turns out, that’s tonight. T-Mobile just made this thing official, announcing that it’ll come preloaded with Sims 3 and a full copy of Avatar preloaded onto the 2GB microSD card. If you’re itchin’ for more info as soon as T-mo’s got it, you can sign up for notifications on their preview page right here. → Read More
Remember the Galaxy Pro? It popped up around the rumor mill almost immediately after the Galaxy S was announced, and was supposedly a nearly identical phone, with one major difference: a big ol’ full QWERTY physical keyboard. It disappeared for some time after its first leak, only to make another appearance last week. And now.. it’s real. It’s oh, oh-so-real. → Read More
