FeaturedUsers.Com: Adsense For Twitter

Google Adsense is way to monetize for many websites and blogs. But the revenues out of google adsense many times are too low as they are mostly CPC (cost per click) based. Dusty Reagan, a twitter application developer who built friendorfollow, soon realised that google adsense is not bringing enough revenues to even pay for the server, so he came up with featuredusers.com, which he first used for just his application, but as the advertizing inventory grew he opened it up for other twitter applcations as well.

Featured Users works on CPM (cost for 1k impressions) model. Users will have to pay 10$ for 1k impressions. Basically impression will have a link to user's twitter profile. Users who want to increase their followers see featuredusers as better alternative to Adsense as they will be advertizing on Twitter Apps which is very contextual as people using twitter application are already twitter users and follow for them is just a click away.

Publishers can show featuredusers ads by just add a javascript code snippet on their twitter applications. Publishers get $5.64 for 1k impressions provided they have atleast 0.6% CTR(click through rate) that is atleast 6 clicks per 1K impressions. With increasing application using featuredusers ads it has run out of inventory so its not necessary that you see ad impression on every page view of application. Earlier featureduser was showing house-ads when they ran out of user-ads and paying $2 but they soon discontinued payment for house-ads as it wasnt feasible for its founder.

Try out FeaturedUsers and let us know the feedback. We will try to bring the Founder on TechI soon.

Mobikwik: Easy Mobile Recharge Online

Prepaid mobile recharge is still an unorganized market in India. Most of Indian mobile users use prepaid service. Mobikwik is Delhi based startup founded by IIT/NID alumini and is in alpha-stage testing. mobikwik helps you manage the mobile budget in better way. Most of the people use prepaid service to control their mobile billls. But its painful when you run out of balance in middle of some important discussion, and you need a quick way to recharge you mobile and ideal one would expect is via SMS.

In mobikwik, you can pay a bulk amout at one go which get translated into mobikwik balance. You can recharge your mobile via SMS or call using the mobikwik balance. You can also subscribe to mobikwik Kwikplan which automatically recharges your mobile monthly from mobikwik balance. Payment to mobikwik can be made via various credit cards, debit cards or internet banking.

Will you be using mobikwik service?

Website: mobikwik.com

Location: New Delhi, India

Funding: Private Funding

Founders: Bipin Singh, Sunali Aggarwal

Malliks Review: TweetMeNews Tweets Personalized News

TweetMeNews is a product created by privately funded nobosh labs which is into building news personalization engine. Nobosh is founded by Brett in 2007.

TweetMeNews is a Twitter application build using Twitter API's. The app asks you questions about what genre of news you are interested in (business, technology, advertising, venture capital and health) and what types of publications you’d like news from (blogs, newspapers, video, magazines) based on your selection they find the appropriate news from twitter. Further they also analyze your own twitter feed so as to ensure that the news they send is not already present in user feed. User can also limit number of tweets he like to receive daily from the service. These tweets are posted to user as Direct messages to the user. User can also read these tweets from the TweetMeNews page by signing in.

TweetMeNews is implemented well but its questionable whether the product has any real value add to the user. Some of the drawbacks of this approach are delay in the delivery of news as we all know delayed news is no more news. Users who generally are fond of Technology news may be following all the technology bloggers on twitter or via RSS feeds and they happen to get real time updates anyways. TweetMeNews also lacks any monetization model only option is to append a small advertizement along with every news alert.

TweeMeNews have just 200+ users that too after being covered by TechCrunch. This number is deduced from number of followers of @TweetMeNews.

Malliks Rating: 1/5

Website: tweetmenews.com

Location: Mountain View, CA

Funding: Privately funded

Malliks Review: diMdiM, poor man's WebEx

DIMDIM is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and conduct a session via webcam. DimDim is open source web meeting company. Dimdim is backed by the original investors in Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL. Dimdim is based in Boston,Massachusetts with offices in New Hampshire, Canada and India. Most of the engineering work is done in Hyderabad India. DimDim offers the service for free for upto 20 users & 1 webcam in meeting. For more features you can use the Pro version which is still much cheaper than Web ex.

Malliks Testing:
DimDim has been tested thoroughly by me and application is cool but you need good internet bandwidth for things to work as expected. Below are the some of the bugs found as part of Malliks Testing.

• HTML/JS injection(XSS) is possible at many places on DimDim because of improper handling of html & js code.
• Some of the cookies are storing the passwords in plain text format which is not appreciated from security perspective.
• Member knowing pptId and meetingId can open the presentation even without being member of meeting which is not appreciated.

Malliks Rating: 4/5



Website: dimdim.com
Location: Hyderabad, India and Massachusetts, US
Funding: $8.4M (Last funding of $6M on July 9th 2008 From Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards.)