A Developer Contest with Real Money Prizes by GENBAND

I spend a lot of time reading up on, and sometimes using various API's available "in the cloud" to develop applications or integrate data into websites. In many cases it is much easier to find access to complex data or functions using an open API from another company than it is to create it from scratch.

One area that I have always had a keen interest in is telecommunications, from my history in the industry I understand well how hard it can be to get access to the large telecommunications companies that hold the large majority of connections (whether wireless or wireline) to customers. It becomes almost impossible to find a way to get a new app in front of these carriers or their customer base if you do not have a long history showing 99.999 percent reliability in your application.

Well, GENBAND has opened up their API's to their A2 communications application server which is used for millions of ports communications services by some of the largest companies in the world.

Knowing that the developer community is different from the more corporate focused large companies they have provided access to their developer program through a development community that has been established, BUT, more importantly has launched (and then extended due to interest) a contest for developers with some really nice size cash prizes.

If you are a developer reading this and want access to a large base of customers take a look at the GENBAND GENFuzion Contest page and program info.

Also, you can see a little intro video here:

That Mobile Internet Thingy Is Going To Be Big Someday

I was just doing my daily perusal of various tech news and ran into a couple articles on Mashable and ReadWriteWeb that really show the changing usage of internet users, both non-techies and the early adopters.

With mobile broadband becoming more ubiquitous everyday and it seems like every device in the world has wi-fi built in this trend of app based access rather than browser based access is going to continue.

One thing that will continue as well is a deeper integration of communications (group messaging, VoIP, etc) directly into the apps. Social=Communications and having SMS and voice directly in the apps on our mobile phones will only increase stickiness as we will not have to exit an app to go communicate what we are experiencing in the app.

The two articles that are linked to above show that consumers are spending more time on mobile apps than they are browsing the web now. That is a first.

What is driving this? Well recently the combined shipment of smartphone and tablet sales surpassed those of desktops and notebooks. This drives app usage as many people just click on a branded app rather than going to a browser. This growth will continue as wireless penetration continues.

With rural broadband growing by the day, and wireless being one of the most common ways to access these areas this affects not only metro areas but smaller regions as well.

One very interesting statistic is that the growth year over year is 91 percent for mobile app usage, and the general consumer is just now starting to understand the value of smart phones and tablets. In todays world it will not be enough to just target consumers with a great website, now it is going to take a mix of web, social media, and apps if you want to catch your customer each step of the way. I would venture to say many younger consumers will default to mobile apps before they even head to a browser.

Check out the articles linked to in the top paragraph. Interesting reads on both accounts.

Thanks To The Castello Brothers For A Great Weekend in LA

I wanted to type a quick public thank you to David and Michael Castello who showed me a great weekend in LA this past weekend. Between great sushi at SushiRoku, cigars at the Buena Vista Cigar Club in Beverly Hills, or great wine and food at Si Laa Thai, they made sure that my time there was great.

For my readers that are from outside the domain industry you can see the successful online real estate properties that the brothers own at CCIN.com. Although the details will come in another post many of you have heard of the Grape.com project that has started with them.

But one thing great about visiting LA is I also got some great time with my good buds Jason Thompson and Morgan Linton, I have not been out that way in awhile so was very excited to get some time with them as well and also want to thank them for their hospitality, seems Morgan always ends up being my chauffeur when I am in town, sorry bud:)

Every time I get to spend time with the Castello Brothers I come away feeling energized, one thing about them is they see the big picture. They see more than a great domain name, that is a very important thing to get. Too many times I see domain investors talk development and think that ends with the website. The Castello Brothers have the same mindset that I like to think I have, seeing that the domain name is the foundation for a real business that just starts at the website but really takes off when you take advantage of the BRAND that is the great domain name. And that means more than just getting traffic from the memorable name, it means revenue from developing a real business by either getting out there and working the streets for ad sales or selling a product on a category killing product domain name.

Sometimes we get to busy and wrapped up in day to day work or business and can lose track of the bigger picture, this weekend with them helped re-energize and focus my efforts. Stepping back from day to day but still keeping focused on business can be one of the best refreshers you can get, sharing ideas, brainstorming, in a different and energetic environment helps the creativity flow.

Also, the domain industry should give a big thanks to David, watching him come into dinner Saturday night after doing several interviews live and recorded after being sick all week was interesting, he was a trooper and made it though, if you do not know what I am talking about take look at the Good Morning America video of David discussing the "Playboy Plague". If you could of heard the conversations he pushed at the stations in between interviews you would know why I say we owe him a big thank you, he could not help but to sell the value of domain names and why they are so important. And before you think that having a few conversations about domain names and what domaining is to producers, etc does not mean much, think about how most big ideas start and know that he did have emails coming in from one I know of for sure wanting a follow up on the industry. It is a start.

Thanks guys, appreciate all the hospitality!

Free Kindle Books A Hot Topic

With the Amazon Kindle selling like hotcakes this Christmas season it only makes sense that electronic books for the Kindle are flying off the proverbial shelf.

Free Kindle books have become a trending topic as people unwrapped their Kindle over the past couple days, people are looking for things to read, and one thing people are finding right away is that there are TONS of free books available for download online for the Kindle.


Although the latest best sellers are not available for free you will find GREAT classic literature, and don't worry, if you got the Apple iPad instead you can download the Kindle app and read the books there  as well.

Rather than re-hash the list of places you can find free books for the Kindle you can see the list at Mashable. My wife had already started downloading from this list after getting her new Kindle and was able to find a few more on some of the links in it.

ScienceFiction.com Launches and a Few Other Things

Merry Christmas to my readers and friends, sitting here on Christmas Eve while my kiddos play with all of their new toys (and my daughter takes over my new iPad) I thought I would post a few thoughts from events this past week.

First off congrats to my good friend and fellow blogger Patrick Ruddell for his launch of ScienceFiction.com, Patrick is a hard worker and great promoter and he deserves a big congratulations on the acquisition of this great domain name and the press on TechCrunch.com. I am looking forward to see what he has up his sleeve as far as marketing and plans for this site.

Also, thanks to Morgan Linton for the very kind words on this post today about reflecting and domainers that have changed his life. Morgan is a true friend, as bright and energetic as they come and just all around great guy.

Another random thought, last year Facebook was big over the holidays, but it is AMAZING to me how mainstream it is this holiday compared to last year. Check out your newsfeed on Facebook and it is filled with pictures, videos, and everything else surrounding Christmas, mostly posted by people that last year at this time probably did not know a whole lot about it and for sure did not know how to upload videos or pictures to the site. Times they are a changing.

On a side note, as much as Twitter is great, I see a whole lot less of this holiday chatter on Twitter, which makes sense if you look at how people actually use Twitter versus Facebook.

If you have not read the post at TheDomains.com about the percentage of Christmas sales done over the internet read it now. If you do business online or have a business that wants to stay in business for the long haul you do not want to ignore the shift that is happening more and more everyday. People are looking online and the percentage actually buying rather than just looking online increases everyday.

And one more interesting story to read, the 10 Hottest Private Companies in Tech, if you want to know where dollars are going take a look, hint hint, lots of social.

Enjoy your holiday and be safe! Do NOT DRINK AND DRIVE, remember there are other people on the roads that would like to make it home safe. Do not ruin your holiday by making a decision to drive when you think you are ok but your reaction time says otherwise.

About.me Acquired By AOL

A quick post, Techcrunch is reporting that About.me has been acquired by AOL in what is a big coup for .ME supporters and obviously a big win for the founders of the company. It is estimated the company received 425K in investment (partially from AOL Ventures) in their initial funding round. Acquisition price of the company has not been released but is said to be in the 10s of millions.

Last week I had written about the About.me site and as a .ME domain investor and developer I was happy to see such a perfect use for the extension in a way that showed the potential of using .ME  as a brand.

About.me just launched in this past week after 400,000 sign ups for their beta. They provide a great personal profile service, mine is simple and not yet completely customized, you can see it at About.me/bmarler.

I see it as a great way to consolidate my social media profiles and bio into one location, the example I gave in my previous post is that I can now give one address on my business card so people can find the rest of my social networking info.

Congrats to the team at About.me and the .ME registry (Natasa and Predrag).

Also, Elliot did a nice write up on this acquisition as well.

First Page Of Google Costs More Than $100

As a company that works with local businesses on bringing them online and helping them with online advertising and local SEO we spend quite a bit of our effort on educating the customers.

This is quite rewarding and our team enjoys showing customers how taking advantage of how the customer uses the web everyday actually helps them bring customers to their door that use the web in the same way they do.

We like to talk to our customers about more than their website and when building the website we like to start with some level of basic SEO. With most of our customers being local businesses and local search on the rise, most of our customers understand right away how important it is to show up when people search for local services.

Although many customers are still learning how to understand that just because they are found online does not mean people are buying from them online, they are understanding that they need to be there.

We have another set of customers that start to see the benefits of SEO and see that they can increase their market presence and expand their product reach nationally, if not globally. It is great once this realization sets in. But there is one issue.

Many customers have a look of disbelief once it is explained that it takes more than $100 in extra services to make the first page of Google for a one word term. One way that it is easy to explain this is by showing the number of results shown for a search term and the companies that are on the first page and showing some simple results of why they are there.

Another way of showing the value is equating it to something that customers are familiar with, things like paying more for higher eyeball having TV shows, larger reach radio stations, etc. If a term has 500 searches a month it is likely to be much less competitive than a term that has hundreds of thousands of searches a month.

If organic SEO cost is a concern it is typically a good plan to offer PPC help up front but as we all know it makes much more sense over the long term to have a solid organic SEO plan in place.

Large companies understand this and as time progresses smaller businesses will start to understand this as well. It is great when a prospective customer starts to see the potential, they start to think about how they use the internet. For those customers that realize that but do not have the budget in place for a larger marketing plan it is important to start them from a base they can build from in the future for a larger reach SEO plan. Sooner or later they will want, or NEED it.

A Couple New Domain Development Projects

As mentioned in a previous post about high dollar affiliate programs and possible lost revenue, I have been working on researching affiliate programs that generate higher dollar revenue than typical PPC or product affiliates on Amazon, etc.

As part of this I have also been making it a point to develop a smaller number of sites into larger sites. Although I am still not close to done on either of these development projects I thought I would talk about which sites I have started down full development process on.

Both of these sites are being developed using content mainly from TextBroker.com and using Wordpress themes from iThemes.com. (Neither of those are affiliate links, but are products that I use daily at this point.)

The first site, PrivateJetCost.com, is a project focused on private jets and either booking or fractional jet ownership, I mentioned this site in my TextBroker.com post comments. Although I currently have Adsense on the pages as the site progresses it will be focused almost exclusively on affiliate revenue.

Currently I have affiliate approval from the two programs I submitted to and am working on implementing the second one. The goal is to provide a content rich site and continue to add new content weekly. This is not a site that will sit dead, for a competitive industry such as this the "set it and forget it" mini-site model will not work. On a side note, thanks to Melly Walker for the work on the logo and header. She also did a few articles for the site and she provided great work on the logo for the next site as well.

The second site, which is a little behind PrivateJetCost.com, is RetirementSeminars.com. The content is just coming in for this site, the site will also have content added weekly and is starting with Adsense as I determine the revenue path for this domain name.

There are many options so it is not a matter of not having a good path, its a matter of finding the best path. Retirement seminars are big business, especially as the baby boomer generation marches towards retirement in this tough economy. Once again, this is a site that will not benefit from sitting still. There will be an event calendar and directory added after the initial site content is complete but for now its all about article content.

Although these sites will have hundreds of pages of content as they move forward these are really smaller projects compared to another project that will be announced in the very near future. There is some fun stuff going on that I cannot wait to talk about.

About.me Launches Personal Profile Page Service

If you have not checked it out already you may want to go to About.me and claim your profile. About.me is a service that provides a custom personal profile (example About.me/bmarler ) as well as analytics on interactions with your profile.

This is a great use of a Dot ME domain as well, since the profiles contain a custom background, a bio, plus easy integration with your social networking profiles it is easy to create a simple page about yourself that integrates all your various online profiles in one easy to access location.

As an example of why this could be useful, on my business cards the back of the card is dedicated to my social media profile links, i.e. Facebook.com/brucemarler , Twitter.com/brucemarler ,etc.

With the use of About.me/bmarler I could simply put the link to my profile on the card and all the information on my profiles would be there for someone to access instead of having several different profiles.

Even if you do not plan on using all the social media functions it is probably a good idea to claim your profile name now.

TextBroker.com Works – Thanks Elliot

I have bought hundreds, actually over one thousand, keyword targeted articles for websites over the past years and have used various sources but one of the issues typically has been turn around time and at times cost per article.

Although I am a fan of sites like elance.com and guru.com, I always found for article writing they were more than a bit cumbersome. Although I had some great work I received from those sites it always seemed like it was as much work to prep the project as it would of been to actually write the articles myself.


Well, after seeing Elliots post about TextBroker.com I figured I would give it a try this weekend as I am wanting to add quite a bit of content to a project I am currently working on and was in the mood to work on the site and needed some additional content to work with.

Well, all I can say is that TextBroker.com will become my first stop for content moving forward. It was very simple to set up the "assignments", pick pricing, number of words, SEO options, etc. And I now have 4 quality articles in hand for the topic I needed content for. Based on that there will be many more sent that direction. I must say, having a marketplace just for content and quick turnaround time like this will make projects much easier moving forward.

Thanks Elliot for the tip.

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