Detroit-Digital.com

photo credit: mandiberg

Quoted from http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/webtrends-facebook-analytics/ If you use Facebook for Adverts….I can see where this would be BA!

“Webtrends, a company that offers marketers detailed web analytics, has rolled out new measurement capabilities for Facebook, including the ability to view Facebook data alongside data for other channels.

Tools like this are useful because Facebook’s own platform for this, Facebook Insights, runs three days behind, doesn’t measure custom tabs or apps, and doesn’t integrate with analytics for other digital marketing channels.

The tools work inside Facebook () to provide detailed analytics data about applications, custom tabs, brand pages, contests and advertisements, among other things. This wasn’t easy to achieve because most of Facebook (Fan Pages included) doesn’t allow JavaScript, but Webtrends developed a custom API to get around that. Third-party applications built on the Facebook platform are easier because JavaScript is permitted.

The special features here are the ones related to comparing data between Facebook and other digital channels. For example, you can see how much traffic is being driven to your Facebook Fan Pages by Twitter () updates, or you can overlay Facebook Fan Page activity with that on corporate blog posts.”

Mikey.

photo credit: Max Braun

Want to know how to get USB host mode on your droid? Check this out. http://www.tombom.co.uk/blog/?p=124

Hopefully they get this working on the Nexus One since I’m buying one next month!

Mikey.

photo credit: Dekuwa

If your a crazy Bit Torrent user like myself then this comes as great news especially since this release includes uTP.

“uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network friendly than its predecessor. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications. This is one of the main reasons why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.”

Read about it here: http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-reaches-milestone-with-2-0-release-100203/

Download it here: http://www.utorrent.com/

Mikey.

I can only see more and more of this coming….

Mikey.

Apples new IPAD was shown today. Honestly it looks like an IPOD Touch for the blind….. All I can say is I’m not impressed. It has all the same technology as other “ebook” readers and netbooks/tablets. The only thing I see that is a tad bit different is the inclusion of the simm card for 3G….but we all know how bad AT&T’s 3G network is because of IPhones so you can only imagine how much worse it would get with these on it. Also, I REALLY DOUBT the 10 hour battery life, maybe on standby…. Read about it here if you want too….

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-first-hands-on/

Mikey.

“The increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network, especially rules about content.” You suddenly become liable for anything that gets downloaded, whether it’s legal or not,” she said. “If you said to a municipality, if you build a road, you have to guarantee nothing illegal happens on it — that’s what’s happening on the Internet now. So that’s the kind of regulatory disruption that’s going to have some long-term consequences.”

This was said by Mitchell Baker who is the leader of the Mozilla Project at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany. Now only if the Government and some Corporations (who will remain nameless but you know who you are dicks….) would see it the same way. You can read about it here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/ap_on_hi_te/eu_eu_digital_future

Mikey.

So I came across this post from TheBigMoney and it talks about how Google is changing its strategies and will now be banning the Advertisers that advertise “scammy” products/rebills instead of just pulling the ads themselves. This is actually old news but what was funny is how this person is talking about how bad those types of advertisements are and actually calls out Pulse360 and Adblade, yet at the bottom of their webpage I found this on EVERY SINGLE PAGE THEY HAVE……

I don’t know about you but I find that HILARIOUS and very ironic/hypocritical so I had to point it out. I guess he doesn’t view his post after it gets posted…. Nice.

“You stay classy San Diego!”

Mikey.

I got an email earlier from Steve and Wes from Tracking202. Basically they were acquired by Bloosky but they now have a stake in the company and will stay on to help develop their products. Here is the email:

We have some BIG news to announce today. As of a little over a week ago, Tracking202 has been acquired by Bloosky, another company within our space. We wanted to give you details about everything that has been going on that has lead up to this point as we’ve always been 100% transparent with our users and would want to remain so. We felt this acquisition was beneficial for everyone and there are a lot of things we wanted to disclose in this blog post to clarify why this deal makes a lot of sense for all of our users.

Tracking202 was founded a little over 2 years ago and have grown tremendously in the short time span we’ve been around. Many may not realize this but we’re still very much a bootstrapped startup operating out of our house! Literally we have desks in the living room, bedrooms, kitchen, etc… Its not what you would have probably have imagined for the growth we’ve seen and support shown from all of our users around the world. We appreciate everything and all the love you’ve given us. But as you may have realized, we were perhaps growing too fast.

As some of you may have noticed in recent months, its been getting harder and harder to answer support around the clock the way we use to in the early days. The number of users grow larger every day and unfortunately we didn’t have enough resources, staff, or funding to keep on doing support and everything else without infringing on time spent innovating on the technology everyone has grown to love. Above all else, we only have two full time programmers on board, one of them being Wes himself who’s pretty much coded 98% of everything we have today!

Having said that, we were limited on growth in several areas and with the launch of our new network, had a hard time keeping up with the sheer volume of affiliates that were getting on board with our software and network. Lately, its felt like we were in a catch-22 situation, working hard just to maintain things, even when we gave our best efforts its been difficult to continue to grow the company and help the community the way we have wanted to.

Several months back, we had the privledge of meeting with the founders of Bloosky. At the time, we were thinking of strategic ways the two companies could work together to help each other out. Wes and I were also debating about bringing outside funding to continue growing the company. Although we were affiliates early on and for the most part, have self funded Tracking202 with all the campaigns we’ve built in our early days, it got to a point very early on where we no longer had time to run any campaigns and went full steam into Tracking202. With that, the company grew based on what it was able to bring in itself for revenue in terms of software subscriptions, advertising, and of course now network revenues. However its difficult to scale when you have limited resources, time, staff, and funding to continue to grow.

After debating long and hard about bringing on venture capital (VC) to grow the company who probably wouldn’t understand our business, we decided we didn’t like that option. We felt it was in Tracking202’s best interest as well as the interest of our users and the community we created to keep VCs out of this. What started as just a discussion on a simple business partnership ended up becoming talks of a potential buyout. This made a lot of sense to us because Bloosky was already involved in the space and more than just funding, they had extensive knowledge and ideals that complemented Tracking202 VERY WELL. After long talks, the deal made a lot of sense.

Before I dive into why I think this partnership is great, I wanted to give you guys a background on what Bloosky does for those unfamiliar with the name. Many companies in the space know who they are but they don’t have such a strong presence among the affiliate community. The reason for this is because most affiliates don’t deal with Bloosky directly or run Bloosky’s offers. Over the last couple years they have focused on working with other types of publishers, emailers. The other thing they are known for is their advertising relationships and focus on providing advertiser services. They have call centers, creative services and a strong ad sales team. They pull in an average of 60-100 new offers per week!

Tracking202 on the other hand as many of you know, is a publisher focused company with a strong affiliate base and technology that control several traffic sources such as search, social, contextual, media buys, etc… basically other than email. Like two halves of the same coin, the combination of the two companies made perfect sense. So what does this mean to our users?

Wes and I are staying on board to continue our vision of what we believe Tracking202 should have been since day 1. This deal gives us an equity stake in Bloosky and allows us to gain valuable resources necessary to continue doing what we do best. Above all else, Bloosky shares the same passion, values, and vision we have, which is one of the key reasons we were excited to do this. We would never compromise our values or visions for anyone, hence why we didn’t want to go the VC route when we could of. With this deal moving forward, this allows us to put more emphasis on support where it is needed. We now have more resources and funding to accelerate on the growth of the technology side building faster and bringing more tools, and to help the community as a whole to help our affiliates better. We saw several positives in this and Bloosky have been very supportive of everything we’ve done and wants to see our goals achieved. We hope with this, you’re able to get a glimpse of things to come and see why this is so beneficial on so many levels. We hope to make Tracking202 an even greater company in the near future. Thanks for everything to every one of you guys out there! We couldn’t have done it without the support and love you guys have shown us. The ride had been wild and it’ll only get wilder from here on out =]

Kindly,

Steven and Wes

Wow this is awesome. I use Prosper202 for all my tracking so I wish these guys nothing but Good Luck. This looks like a good move to me just by seeing how strapped they were for staff and money. Hopefully this helps move along development of new features and tools! I’m always looking forward to what they offer.

Mikey.

photo credit: Hanne LK

Well they finally did it. They killed my focking car….I mean tracker (Sorry Big Lebowski quotes always creep up on me). The Pirate Bay admins pulled the plug on the infamous tracker.

““Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.”

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tracker-shuts-down-for-good-091117/

BT lives on no matter what, so go Fock yourselves MPAA/RIAA

Mikey.

So I’m a regular reader of Shoemoney. A fan as well. Over the past few weeks there has been tons of buzz about Dennis Yu ever since his post up on TechCrunch (read here). Well I guess Shoe must have had enough and decided to write a no-holds-bar post about his experience with the dude. Pretty good stuff and pretty funny. Here’s a snip.

“So whats the story in the end. Well I feel embarrassed. I fell for it. AND I was leveraged to get other people to fall into Dennis’s crap. I have heard people tell me Dennis used my name and told people he did everything from run our ppc campaign, to geeze just about name it. Each time I hear that I’m like damn… I’m sorry…”

http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-in-the-affiliate-industry/

All I can say is he is just flat out retarded. Make your own judgment but that’s mine and I’m sticking to it.

Mikey.