Mike Butcher » tbites

Mashup Demo in October

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

mashup, which runs ‘digital’ events, is launching Mashup Demo on Oct 2nd. It’s been put together to provide startups and growing companies in the digital sector with a platform from which to demo their services to an audience of investors, corporates, bloggers, journalists and industry influencers. This allows them to overtly sell and flaunt their products and services, gain feedback on concepts, develop or find partners, seek investment, practice the pitch, test the proposition, refine the model or simply find customers. If you’d like to be considered for the event email a brief overview and maybe a YouTube video pitch to demo@mashupdemo.com.

Edinburgh TV Un-Festival 2007

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Coverage of this year’s Edinburgh TV Un-Festival 2007 and the Media Guardian International TV Festival will appear across both tbites.com and – where the topic is on digital media – mediabites.com. Stay tuned…

Brunch Bites 1.5 networking event

Mike Butcher — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:24:44 +0000

Event by:

MashupCamp Dublin

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Are you a developer with a strong interest in taking something like Yahoo Maps and mashing it together with your Salesforce.com data to come up with some cool new innovative Web-based application? Or, are you thinking of building something unique and interesting on top of the application programming interfaces (APIs) from Amazon.com and Eventful.com? Check out MashupCamp in Dublin Sept 12-13.

Facebook still running ads on racist groups

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups.

First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week.

But research by tbites has found that adverts continue to appear alongside groups associated with the BNP, including the groups BNP – People Just like you making a difference, Old-Fashioned Fascists and Vote BNP and Save The World.

In each case the advert in question is for Searchanything.co.uk, an affiliate advertising search engine run by Advertising.com International Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US-based Advertising.com Inc, one of the world’s largest interactive advertising network. There is no suggestion that Advertising.com is aware that their adverts are appearing beside these groups. In all likelihood there is an automated script making these ads appear which Facebook appears not to have taken down.

Video of Bebo London office

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The WSJ's Kara Swisher visits Bebo London. Why is it so small an office for such a high-profile startup? Its development team is in San Francisco, while much of the commercial deals take place in London, since Bebo is growing fastest in the UK and Europe. Featuring an interview with Joanna Shields, “President of International”, a former Silicon Valley executive with extensive European experience at companies like RealNetworks and Google.

Plaxo plans social network

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plaxo plans to release a social network “aggregator” on Monday. Its key features look likely to be an independence from platforms like Facebook, the ability to add information about the social networks your contacts use, feed aggregation and control over your owen data.

Plaxo hopes its independence from closed networks like Facebook will give it a competitive edge, although all the evidence is to the contrary right now. While many commentarors have been saying that users owning their own data would be an idea which triumphed in the end, so far the fastest growing network – Facebook – has disproved that theory by making the process of social networking very user-friendly by locking users into a closed environment. Not unlike the way Apple locks people into hardware by focusing on the user experience.

In the past Plaxo had a reputation for eating into a PC and spamming all your contacts with Plaxo invites. As a result it was usually used by small businessmen with zero idea about tech. It’s unlikely to get much traction amongst the hip-young things on Facebook.

Facebook doubles ad rates inside four months

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook’s PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it’s the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

Dvorak just doesn’t get it

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

John Dvorak is an old-fashioned tech jounralist in the US who thinks we’re going to have another dotcom bust:

“Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same resultsâ€”a bust…Today everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle. And this doesn’t even consider the actual social-networking sites, from MySpace to LinkedIn to Facebook to even Second Life. This scene is totally out of control and will contribute to the collapse for sure.”

Marshal Kirkpatrick is a startup guy and a former TechCrunch writer who nails this rubbish to the wall:

“I say: Social networking is an emerging utility that combines the functionality of blogging’s self publishing with the usefulness of email list serves. Social networking services make these activities more accessible than ever before… Why on earth is this man considered a leading voice on tech? I’m guessing that it’s because he speaks to the potent paranoia of much of the aging population – afraid in the face of a changing, confusing world that they will face humiliation if they bet on new tech, that they will be unemployed if things take a downturn or that they will lose their self-righteous know-it-all credentials if this new economy does succeed.”

King of Shave preps Facebook app

Mike Butcher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

King of Shaves, the shaving brand and e-commerce site, is planning to release a Facebook application in what could be the first ever brand marketing use of the social networking site in this manner. Word leaked out via Twitter and a screen shot has been posted to Flickr.

So far brands in the UK (outside of media companies like Virgin and the BBC, see comment) have hung back form developing full-blown applications, preferring instead to use traditional advertising banners on the site.