Vertical Response just made available to its customers the new social media tools that it acquired with its purchase of Roost, a company founded in 2007 to supply real estate professionals with Facebook tools, specific to their marketing. The Vertical Response ad formula is Email + Social = Success.

Interestingly, Salesforce also just announced that it acquired Rypple, a web-based social performance management platform that has a Facebook-like interace and a social environment to improve employee performance and recognition.

More Info:

Rypple on Crunchbase
Vertical Response Landing Page on Roost:  Email + Social = Success

Forrester Research projects tablets of the future will evolve from five “form factors:” wearables, embedded devices, surfaces, flexible displays, and mini-projectors.

Electronic surfaces as thin as paper are already being produced by E Ink Holdings, a spin-off from MIT Media Labs. They’ve developed a thin-as-paper surface that functions like a monitor, is nearly as light as paper and is touch sensitive. Plus, you can roll it up like a scroll, for easier carrying.

Send your company newsletter to the “Electronic Surface Making Shop” rather than the printing press and save 95 million trees plus 98 million tons of greenhouse gas each year, says the E Ink website.

These new surfaces are now being manufactured into eBooks, eNewspapers, eTextbooks, watches, smartcards, electronic shelf labels, battery/memory indicators and signage. The next wave of  tablet is upon us and it brings a revolution. Check E Ink out on their website, follow them on Facebook.

I love my clunky, withered, monitor-scratched Powerbook G4, it suits me like pumpkin pie and whipping cream. But let’s be realistic. Four years+ TTL is a rich, fertile stretch for one of these ole macBeasts, and software updates just don’t bother with that kind of antiquity.

Which brings me to the replacement question: laptop or tablet? Mini-van or Prius, that’s the sort of question this is. On the one hand, a tablet is hot, trendy, and primed to burst forth with even more glorious options in the next 6 months to a year. The laptop, on the other hand, has settled into its middle-age spread, relaxed fit, easy-to-please.

My Dad always says if you have trouble deciding something, probably you don’t want to. Put-it-off is what I’ll do, at least when it comes to the tablet. Spunky hotshots may already have a slick and spiffy tablet, but just wait ’til you see what I get in June or so, you’ll be sooooo green!

Endurance International Group has been aggressively acquiring independent hosting companies since it changed its business model in 2001, post-2000 tech-bomb. Recently it scooped up the spunky Los Angeles based Dreamhost, formerly an employee-owned company, increasing EIG’s portfolio to over a hundred thousand customers.

Spry and VPSLink were acquired by EIG in May 2010, after which EIG merged the former Spry/VPSLink Seattle and New York data centers into EIG’s Boston facility. The transition was rocky for many Spry customers, particularly because the VPS (Virtual Private Server) product that Spry offered was attractive to many small and medium sized web-dev businesses who focus on managing many sites and clients under VPS hosting products.

In 2008, EIG was acquired by private equity group, Accel-KKR whose sole focus, according to Crunchbase, is investing in technology businesses with revenues in the $15 to $150 million arena. EIG’s preference is to work with the existing management teams of the businesses they acquire, though they did not keep on the Dreamhost team. Compare the photos from either corporate website to get the gist of the cultural differences between the Dreamhost and EIG.

Dreamhost, on the one hand, is made-up of casually-dressed, hairy males in their late 20s to mid-30s. Accell-KKR and EIG teams are also all-male, but in their mid-thirties to early forties, and definitely SUITed.

Sadly, no women on any of the tech teams, executive management, special advisors or board of directors, pre- or post-merger.

The EIG acquisitions list, according to Dreamhost, includes all of the following and more:
AccountSupport
ApolloHosting
BizLand
BlueDomino
BlueHost
DomainHost
Dot5Hosting
Easy CGI
eHost
EntryHost
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Globat
HostCentric
HostMonster
HostYourSite
HyperMart
IMOutdoorsHosting
iPage
Ipower
IPowerWeb
Justhost
Netfirms
Networkshosting
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting
Spry
StartLogic
USANetHosting
VirtualAvenue
VPSLink
WebHost4Life
Webstrikesolutions
Xeran
YourWebHosting

Dreamhost blog entry: http://bit.ly/giFlN3

comments by Ann J Warman

Most of my work over the past several years since last posting here, has been going on over at http://BainbridgeArts.net and on Facebook at BainbridgeArts and BainbridgeArts.Announcements, as well as behind the scenes in search optimization research.

On the watch list as the next several quarters unfold, is just how social media will continue redefining search priorities, and how search engine optimization tools and open source content management, in particular, will evolve to address social media interconnectivity. The new seamless options offered by Facebook, along with the healthy batch of stable new plugins now available for WordPress blogs, makes adding blogging tools to the company’s main website the next best step for improving site traffic.

Link farms are out and quality content with relevant in-bound links are the new black.

eHeeeemmmm. Hello! I’ve been neglecting “THE BLOG” because of being in love.

That’s right, in love. Actually in love times two: Twitter and Facebook. Long hours with abandon, way into the night, posting furiously, conversing @-style, finding other SoMe nuts, just like ourselves.

The worst is, many of us nuts are starting to talk hiku, habitually. Twitter’s the hiku of all hikus. 140 words or less, you have to get to the point fast.

Which brings up a new term, “SoMe.” Some of the indoctrinated amongst us have been using this term but many of the aficionados have not. It’s a great text word, far fabber than SOCIAL MEDIA. Less thumb work. Metaphoric, yes?

In conclusion, I intend to come back here more frequently. Oh, but before we conclude, did I mention how I hate RSS feeds that pump blog text into Twitter? Yes, you can do it. Problem is, your Twitter and Facebook buddies want you, not some auto-blogger feed that cares not what friends are saying.

Automatic does look darn good on washing machines and automobiles. For SoMe, think William Morris, Arts and Crafts Movement, DEATH to the MACHINE.

Here’s where you’ll find us:

http://Twitter.com/brandUNITY

http://www.Facebook.com/brandUNITY

http://YouTube.com/brandUNITY

http://www.Linkedin.com/in/brandUNITY

http://Twitter.com/BainbridgeArts

http://BainbridgeArts.net (blog)

http://www.Facebook.com/BainbridgeArts

http://YouTube.com/BainbridgeArts

http://Twitter.com/BainbridgeAlert

http://www.Facebook.com/BainbridgeAlert

http://BainbridgeAlert.org (blog)

Have to admit, the new Wave concept is taking hold and it will seriously change the way we communicate on the internet. A desktop notification system, Wave bypasses browsers and brings messages directly to your desktop. When you think of it, email is riddled with problems. The chance of some intervening mechanism preventing message distribution is great, always leaving you wondering, did my email get there or didn’t it, and if not, why not.

What bliss life would be without email, phishing, and spam. Twitter is infinitely more fun than struggling for hours with a full inbox of email messages, subsequently sorting and filing it into folders. Tweets are realtime, short, to the point, giving you the option of linking (or not) to greater detail via simple link. Twitterfall is a blessing, so is Seesmic Desktop and the numerous other Twitter applications that have been emerging rapidly.

Wave capabilities are said to include drag and drop addition of attachments to messages and Wave can be embedded into your blog and social networks. Your editing shows up immediately across all live embedded Waves unlike Twitter. It’s possible to share and merge documents, useful in collaborative documents. Games can be constructed as Wave gadgets.

labs.adobe.com/WAVE>> Adobe WAVE

digital.venturebeat.com/WAVE>> Adobe WAVE

Just downloaded and installed Flock. This post is to brandUNITY blog using Flock blog editor while facebook is open. brandUNITY blog on http://brandUNITY.com/blogs

eMarketer reports that 25-26% of internet users have a blog they update at least once a month and the number will continue to rise. That’s close to 30 million blogs on the internet updated monthly. An estimated at 96.6 million Internet users read a blog at least once a month.

In other numbers, more women than men are internet users by about 7 million and online usage patterns vary significantly by gender. Men are more prone to using mobile devises, spend more time on busy sites, and make more use of search engines.

Take away –  if the audience is women, make the internet experience less busy and cluttered than that targeted to males. For males, added more reading content, more diversions with advertising, and make provisions for mobile.

http://bit.ly/Y18iT

http://bit.ly/bTWBJ

Among the fastest growing companies durng this economy are social media app developers. The question is, will people playing Mob Wars on Facebook pay real money to get a virtual pistol or bag of cash, winning favors with the Godfather?

Facebook has grown to 200 and 250 million monthly users and earned $300 million during 2008. It has raised more the $400 million in funding and its largest investor is Microsoft at $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in the company.

Revenue streams come from advertisers. Developer revenues come from advertisers who pay them to create apps that will engage social media users with free games and utilities expressly to increase brand awareness.

One example cited by Money.CNN.com is Vancouver, WA based Papa Murphy’s. A Papa Murphy widget on Facebook gave free pizzas to anyone becoming a “fan”  on the Papa Murphy Facebook page. Users clicked-thru using the widget to the Papa Murphy’s website to get their free pizza coupon.

VentureBeat: MORE>>

Money.CNN.com: MORE>>

Twitter’s ability to distribute information in real-time is what fuels its potential to change the way we communicate. It is particularly effective at communicating immediate occurrences from a vast number of sources. Posted information could include situations that have local, regional, or worldwide impact.

Twitscoop is a third-party app, built by lollicode that collects twits in realtime, ranks them in frequency and by topic to reveal top discussion trends in the moment, and displays them in a word cloud. Software like this, collecting and organizing the realtime information that twitter yields, is a technology trend that is changing the internet and how we use it.

TechCrunch: MORE>>Technorati

We have to agree with the TechCrunch post about the importance of Twitter to the web – posted today by MG Seiger:

“Simply put, we (TechCrunch) write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.”

Full post MG Sieger, TechCrunch: MORE

BreakingNews, on Twitter, posted the Bank of America Ken Lewis ouster just now with reference to Associated Press.

Checking Google Search via “Ken Lewis”,  the story is first found on the Reuters site as an article written by Jonathan Stempel.The 4-hour annual B of A meeting was this afternoon, the post hit Twitter minutes ago at 2:57 pm Pacific or nearly 5:57 pm Eastern.

Searching Google for “Ken Lewis Associated Press” returns a top link to the Wall Street Journal, posted at 12:30 pm Eastern, five hours ago, but the article does not mention the Lewis ouster. The annual meeting would have been starting at that point. Next link on the Google search results are to AP articles posted on Google Hosted News, 34 minutes ago by AP journalists by Augstums and Weiss, with ousted information.

Depends on where you’re looking, but @BreakingNews on Twitter is pretty fast. Reuters dates it 5:55 EDT: http://www.reuters.com

http://www.google.com/hostednews

Technorati Tags:
Bank of America Ouster, Ken Lewis Ouster, Twitter Speed, Twitter Adoption rate, Getting News Fast

April 20, 2009 – The 2008 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report showed that digital video advertising more than doubled in just one year-totaling $734 million for the year.

In other statistics, researcher eMarketer had projected that 2008 would reach $1.4 billion spend on ads in online social networks. Actual results were $1.175 billion or a 33.8% increase over the previous year. Projections are more modest for 2009, at a 10% expected increase over 2008.

Businesses and marketers seem to be re-analyzing their advertising methods, changing the mix, trying a different set of channels in their campaign planning.

IAB: http://www.iab.net/dv09_recap

eMarketer: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/530422/1675

Newly posted whitepaper How To on blogging includes resource list and blogging demographics. If the goal is increased site traffic, improved response, and expanded web presence and following, then the benefits of adding an active blog with RSS feeds can’t be understated. By extending outward from your blog and website through your RSS feeds, your social network becomes the pathway to your target audience, reaching out and bringing back interest and relationships to your site and mission. Whitepaper>>