Personal Finance on the Cloud
It wasn’t long ago that whenever you bought a computer, it always came Pre-installed with a trial version of Microsoft Money, the company’s software for personal finance and home budgeting; and Intuit’s Quicken was the underdog. Today, Microsoft money nor longer exists;and Quicken has basically shut down. How did this happen? Blame it on their free online competitor iMint, a superstar of Web 2.0.iMint effortlessly gets into all of your online credit card, debit card and bank accounts, retrieves everything you ever charged to your cards, to bring them to one place, one list, and just makes home accounting a pleasure.And since it is all online, in the Cloud, you can access your finances anywhere – there is no need to remain tethered to one computer anymore. Microsoft Money and Quicken saw no reason to stay in business anymore, when iMint could run rings around them for free; the parent company of Quicken has discontinued their product, bought iMint, and are in the business today managing it. Microsoft Money, in association with Citibank, is bringing out a new product, for free, pretty soon.
The Web 2.0 Revolution certainly has not past the personal finance world over. The desktop is no longer where you do your accounts: your cell phone, or other Internet device is. There are a host of other services around the finance concept too. Bill Minder,for example, helps you remember when your bills come due.Small business accounting software, is the next category of previously-immobile application to make the leap to the web. Xero, a New Zealand online accounting site, strikes most users as particularly smooth, eye-catching, and easy to use. It is early days yet for Cloud ERP. For instance, you can’t account for stock trades on these. But there is something about these services that makes accounting no longer dry, no longer just for the suits. It almost feels like a game to try your hand at.
So how do these services turn a profit?So far, it seems to be hard; you could always buy into their premium service. And then there are other creative ways, like iMint’s plan to sell its user-data, to third parties, with all identifying personal details removed. There are lots of companies that would really appreciate having detailed information on the shopping habits of people in general. So far, iMint’s track record of protecting its members financial information, is spotless. Perhaps, it can be trusted even when it tries to sell, information about all those members who made it this successful.
And as an aside, would you ever be interested when you were running through your figures, in knowing how closely you followed the spending patterns of your general income group, your friends in the neighborhood? Try the new online service, Bundle. Bundle gets its information from Citibank and other sources, and sifts through the data, to find out how Americans manage their budgets. Of course, financial institutions have always done this kind of number interpretation for years. But this should be the first time the details are available to lay people. You never get any personal information, but you certainly do get to know what everyone on your street spends, without identifying information, of course.
Did GeoCities Give Birth to Web 2.0?
Twelve years ago, what everyone felt they needed was their own home page on the Internet. That was the thing to do, even if what to do with one once they had it no one really knew. They just laid out grammatically poor content in red fonts against a green background and decorated it with spinning Christmas trees. But GeoCities gave people what they wanted – a home page in minutes with no knowledge of web design or HTML. And those people made it the third most successful website on the Internet. Of course it was primitive; this was what taught the social networking and Web 2.0 giants of today their very first lessons in social networking. Yahoo was so impressed with the impression Geocities made on people, it rushed in and bought it out for more than three billion dollars. Yahoo was on to something: Geocities was a website that ran entirely on user-generated content, and it sold advertising to display on all sides of the content. It was the first stab the world had at user-generated Internet, popularly known today as Web 2.0.
But GeoCities offered people no social networking; you could put out your own content, but if it was poorly thought-out, people stopped visiting. The thrill of GeoCities wore off over the last decade; the costs of keeping it running proved to be too irritating to Yahoo, which recently decided enough was enough. The quiet impact Geocities always had on people around the world, and the 10 million visitors it gots every month was obvious when news of its closure broke. Twitter users put out tearful obituaries for the dear, if unattractive friend they always had in GeoCities. People can’t believe that the little things that put down as truly worthwhile ten years ago – their crazy personal bios, the songs they uploaded, the links to long-lost resources, are all gone today
Should Yahoo have preserved the clutter of GeoCities just to save people’s feelings? GeoCities 23 million pages occupied only about 10 TB – nothing burdonesome for a corporation like Yahoo to maintain. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Ten years from now, how will you feel if you check one day, and your videos on YouTube have disappeared?
Google & Yahoo To Swap Ads
In what seems to be a shot across the bows of the dreadnought that is USS Microsoft, Google and Yahoo today announced a two week long ‘experiment’ of swapping ads with one another.
Effectively this means that Google can serve ads on Yahoo’s results page. The percentage is around 3% of all Yahoo searches will show Google ads.
Is this a calculated shot from the two internet monsters that they will not accept Microsoft’s pestering of Yahoo lying down?
Read the full story on BBC News
Move Aside Facebook, Kootali is Here
I have started to notice a small, but significant change in the way I am surfing the internet. It’s been growing since summer 2007, but it’s only recently I realized that my surfing habits have changed. Talking with other people my age (I’m 25 by the way) reveal that I’m certainly not alone.
So what is it? How have my surfing habits changed?
The answer may come as quite a surprise, but I’ve found that I’m visiting Facebook.com less and less. What used to be a daily ritual (I was sad enough to check multiple times a day) was reduced to every other day, which in turn has reduced over time to maybe once a week.
But this is not a phenomenon restricted to just me, lots of people are using Facebook less and less, just check out this graph:
It shows, as a percentage of all sites on the internet, how many page views it gets per day. As you can clearly see, MySpace has been on the wane since July 2007. Facebook continued to grow, probably as it took users away from MySpace, but since December 2007 we can see page views have declined.
So what’s the reason for this? Are social networks losing their value?
I think not. The biggest turnoff for me when it came to Facebook is the multitude of useless applications that flooded people’s profiles, turning it from a clean elegant way to keep in touch to a constant battle to reject or ignore dozens of application requests each day.
In effect, with the addition of outside applications, Facebook turned in to everything I hated about MySpace. What’s next for Facebook? Glitter text? How cheesy and tacky can Facebook go without losing it’s original users who joined because they didn’t like the gaudiness of MySpace.
I know I’m not alone in this, infact, ReadWriteWeb interviewed someone who was one of the original users of Facebook and asked her opinions on where she thinks it’s going, this is what she had to say…
When they started to add new features like the wall, photo albums, video capabilities, and groups, people became more interested. But then Facebook took it too far. Now I find Facebook to be a suffocating bombardment of useless applications and features. I prefer an older version of just the basics – messaging, walls, photos and groups.
15 Questions For an Early Facebook User – 7th January 2008, ReadWriteWeb.com
So, does this make me homeless in terms of social networking? Certainly not, I will keep using Facebook, although my usage grows less and less each day.
What I am on the look out for is a social network site that can offer the sophistication and decorum that Facebook offered in 2006, before they tried to go mainstream and convert the MySpace weenies.
Can you make a better Facebook using similar software? Check out our range of social networking scripts starting at $399 and make a better job than Facebook and MySpace!
Here’s Your Cheque For $850m…
Imagine being given a cheque for $850m. Seriously, think about it for a second. The interest alone would net you a cool $29,750,000 every year in the US. Not sure about you, but I think that’s a serious chunk of change.
Let’s take another figure, say $225m. OK, given the choice between $850m and $225m it’s obvious which one you’d take, but forgive me if I bite the hand off the person who offers me $225m for my website.
So, what on Earth am I talking about here? Believe it or not, these are the latest figures for corporate take overs of Bebo and Digg respectively.
Bebo is a large social networking site that claims to have over 40m users worldwide. It is the 3rd largest social network after MySpace and Facebook (both of which were bought for $580m and $280m).
But large buyouts of this kind are not confined to the big players, in 2007 a facebook clone (literally down to the last detail!) called Studivz was bought out by a single investor for $132m. The unique thing about Studivz was that it was aimed at a niche (albeit a fairly broad niche). The niche was a social network for German speaking people.
So, like Studivz, how can you jump on this bandwagon of massive buyouts (and lets face it, I think we’d all be quite happy with a paltry $10m)? First off, target a niche – whether it be by country, region, language, interest, cause or whatever. The days of being able to start large generic social networks are over. It is the time of the niche social network.
Define your niche properly before you start, and you too could get a knock at your door with someone trying to offer you millions for your little piece of the web.
Interested in finding out how you can set up your own turnkey social networking software? Want to run a face like YouTube? Think you can make a better job of Facebook (let’s be honest, with the countless thousands of ‘apps’ now available, it’s becoming more like MySpace everyday)?
Come and check out Agriya’s Social Networking software, with turnkey prices starting at just $399.
Now You Can Get One Over The Big Boys
Agriya has recently launched some brand new software that lets you run your own site like Yahoo Answers – but far from just being a Yahoo Answers clone, it gives you a significant advantage over the established sites…
Drawing on our experience with Rayzz and video sharing, we saw a huge gap in the market for an Answers type website but with a significant twist…
As well as being able to post plain text questions and answers, we have given users the ability to ask and reply to questions with video and audio!
What’s more, your users don’t even need to have any special software on their computer to record and upload the audio/video as it’s all done directly from the site – cool or what?
Find out more Anova – Making Knowledge Fun!
The Future of Social Networking Sites
Statistics released by Nielson Online – the online research and monitoring company just announced that Facebook, along with most major social networking sites experienced a decline in users during January 2008.
Facebook saw the largest decline with a 5% fall of UK users alone. MySpace and Bebo users fell 5% and 2.5% respectively.
But this is great news for you, because these users are not giving up on social networks, they are joining more specific, niche targeted social networks.
Agriya’s range of Web 2.0 software, including several different types of social networking software means that their loss can be your gain as you look to set up profitable targeted social network sites.
Go and check out our range of ready made social networking software products today.
Monetizing Your Rayzz Site
Money, we love it. We also hate it. Some even say that it’s the root of all evil (actually, it’s been proven that, infact, girls, not money is the root of all evil). So how can you, as a cool Rayzz customer cash in on your new site?
Well, here at Agriya, we put on some thinking caps and come up with this list on how you can make money from your Rayzz sites…
1. AdSense
Webmasters have been making money from AdSense since 2004. It was the original and by far the best contextual advertising solution available. It serves up text, image and more recently video adverts that are (hopefully) directly related to the content the page is on.
To get the most out of AdSense, we went to our resident internet nerd who had this advice…
Make sure your ads are formatted to blend in with the style of your site. The background and border of your ads should match that of your site. Keep your links blue and your text black. Try an use the untraditional ad sizes like the squares and rectangles. The whole point is to make your ads not look like ads.
This cool little program lets you place a line of Javascript code on your site and will then launch a video in your player, before, after or during the clip. This is a great way of monetizing your site, and they don’t half pay out bad either! Check out the demos to see for yourself.
3. Kontera
This program is a lot like AdSense (why invent the wheel, if the idea works, go with it), but instead of placing ads on your site, it contextualizes (try saying that when you are drunk) certain keywords on your site to make them clickable. Not sure what we mean? It’s quite easy…
Say there was a word on your site such as Money. Kontera will make that in to a clickable link so that when any of your visitors click that link, you earn money. Pretty simple, huh?
4. Join Pay-Per-Impression Programs
Although pay-per-impression programs usually pay out low amounts (boo!), the shear number of page views that video sharing sites get should be enough to make this very worth while – hey at the very least it might pay those server fees.
One of the best ones we found was on Advertising.com – where you can earn up to $2 per 1000 impressions. They also have an opportunity to profit from your videos, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
For more sites that will pay you per impression, check out this site
5. Affiliate Programs
In the day and age of AdSense, people seemed to have forgotten how much money affiliate programs can make. For example if you run a site that shows movie trailers, having a banner next to your video player advertising some DVD renting service can make you hundreds of bucks as it’s targeted advertising. Whatever your niche, just type in “your keyword”+affiliate in google, and off you go.
If your site is an adult site…well, there’s no limit to the stuff you can try and sell!
6. Strike a deal with a movie studio for premium content
Err, yeah. Our boss suggested this one, so rather than get fired and reject his suggestion, we’ll add it here. It’s up to you how you go about this one.
So now you have it, 5 easy and great ways to make money from your Rayzz site, and one idea that would be nice if it worked. If you have any other suggestions, comment below!
Don’t have your copy of Rayzz yet? Start your very own video sharing site, just like YouTube today! More details…
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