Bad news for Facebook… The famous social network platform seems to face a gaping hole which could allow hakers to break into your FaceBook account. In other words, that gap could enable attackers to change your privacy settings, add or delete some of your Facebook friends or even read and send messages from your account. The problem has been reported to Facebook by a German developer, Artur Wachelka, and Facebook’s Managers are still working on it.
After having been watching closely the development of Zilok, the US.American and European market-leader for renting anything C2C, we have just come across a similar concept, which started in Japan, called Sharemo. Zilok is the first address for those people who don’t want to throw something away but would rather rent it to somebody instead.
Sharemo, a company of Enigmo, however has taken a different approach and created a mobile-site where people can just give away, rent, share for free and swap (Swap N’Go) anything that they don’t want to simply throw away until somebody wants to keep that product. The difference to Zilok is that on Sharemo everything is for free and this idealistic idea is what they call “Sharing Economy”. Don’t hesitate to enlighten us on the business model, which we haven’t been able to figure out yet.
According to the comments on Techcrunch this would not work everywhere because it demands a lot of trust but nobody could imagine either that in Scandinavia you find unmanned-stands of strawberries and you throw in money on good faith, similar to the newspaper boxes in Germany, where you put the money in a box and take the newspaper yourself. How about the fact that in Scandinavia and Germany you don’t have to pass machines to check your metro and subway tickets, which is also unimaginable in most other countries!!?? Very interesting and we definitely keep an eye out for those sites!
In addition to the social community HalloHund, which we had talked about in a previous article, we have discovered a new and English network for dog-lovers called Doggyspace. According to several sources (netzzeitung, msnbc, time) there are about 700 dogs registered with a goal of 2 millions registered dogs (or owners that behave like their dogs) by the end of the year (we can only find 551 doggies while looking at openly accessable “doggy friends“). Best of luck to Levi Thornton, the founder, for that venture and for those that want to share the problems, experiences and joy of their dogs with others definitely should keep an eye out for doggyspace.com
After many rumors and a long time of waiting (since July 22nd, 2007) it has been made public by Ryan Hayward on AdSense Blogspot now that Google launched its AdSense for Feeds in beta. With your Google AdSense account, it is now possible to push for Google advertising in your feeds in order to earn money with your blogs and feeds now. It is similary customizable as the other AdSense applications however this is only the beginning. The efficiency is questionnable as we are using feeds in order to minimizing the time spent for reading news and blogs hence we doubt that that Click-Through-Rate will be very high.
To find out more on how to integrated AdSense in your Feeds (interesting for publishers) click here for more info.
We found plenty of articles on the Google Blog but has this been existing in the other countries since 2005 as stated here on the Google Blog dated May 7, 2005 or is the date of the blog post just wrong?
It comes as no surprise that Google is trying to monetize its Readers now as well because Google is struggling to monetize their other projects such as YouTube, which just recently had to stop its project of live-streaming (article here) because investors are having a hard-time accepting those massive investments with no nice returns.
Last Thursday we participated in the OpenCoffee Roundtable in Hamburg, which treated the topic “PR for start-ups”. It was an interesting get-together because entrepreneurs from Hamburg met to discuss how the PR should be handled for start-ups. Those exchanges of experience in a small group are very inspiring because it gives you the chance to also see what others are thinking, who they know and what mistakes have already been made. These were the participants of last week along with their companies:
Without getting too much in details our conclusions are somewhat the following:
1) When you want to do PR then you better be well prepared for it and have a significant impact on the agency, in case you use one, because only the founders can really communicate and reflect the “spirit” of the company.
2) Only when you are really creative will the PR be successful because nowadays every is overloaded with great ideas, events and stories so it is difficult to stick out.
3) When you want that a journalist writes a story about you then you must deliver them a story, that can mention you as an example, because they will definitely not write an ad about you for you.
4) In case you want to use an agency you better a get a good one that actually knows all the individual journalists and bloggers, one that does those tedious follow-up calls and knows WHEN to contact the press (Mondays and early mornings are just the worst time, according to this great Techcrunch article).
There are uncountable videos on YouTube and its impact cannot be measured, which makes it definitely one of the most mysterious and influential mediums on the web. After having watching countless hours of videos on YouTube we found this very interesting video, which gives a little background information about the Anthropology of YouTube. It is a must-see!!!
Most probably you have been noticing the increasing number of video ads because more companies see this is as way to draw attention. In addition to the nice little Visa Ad that we recently shared with you, we found this strange little ad/teaser/viral of Old Spice Aftershave. Check it out because we are convinced that you would like it (we had some issues with the site but maybe it works for you: OldSpice
In case you like Mangas then you might like those websites where you can read Mangas online: Jumpland and for the Germans among us TokyoPop.de. Can you recommend any other sites where we read Mangas online?
Can any of you draw Billy in Manga-style based on the picture below (billy with the terminator-eye). Just email us at contact @ letsbuyit.com.
We are reading a lot of stories about the new search engines lately and after Cuil claimed that it wants to be the new competitor of Google we found it was time to test it. We searched Letsbuyit.com on three different often mentioned search engines namely SearchCloud, Cuil, Searchme and Google to see how relevant/useful/advantageous the results are for us in 2008:
The fact you need to click twice to execute a search is a negative point. Secondly we find that the search result only returned articles about us from 2001, which didn’t really impress us. Unfortunately we are not convinced that this is the future despite offering that grid function (whatever that is for?!)
If Cuil wants to be the new competitor of Google.com then we hope for Cuil that they have endless updates up their sleeve because to get Google down on their knees because of Cuil is rather unrealistic as of now! The page set-up is definitely interesting because you receive so much preview text however the order and relevancy to Letsbuyit 2008 is not obvious and the summary text for letsbuyit.com is very out-of-date! Maybe they have indexed trillions of pages but for Letsbuyit definitely not the most current nor relevant!
The visual search engine SearchMe definitely gave us the most up-to-date results with the screen-shots of our latest website and blog design, which means that their indexing is up to scratch! We still like it the best because it is most relevant to our 2007/08 relaunch. To compare visual search engines with text-based search engines is questionable, we agree, but still our most favorable search engine result!
Google did quite well with the pages shown on the first page but still too many articles about the former Letsbuyit.com of 2001. Also not very favorable for us yet and definitely improvable!
Our Conclusion is that in order to have the most favorable Search Engine Ranking without having a website is to create your own search engine and beat Google at its game ;).
Have you noticed that Letsbuyit.com is also on Twitter? In case you have never noticed it we have put a special candy on the Twitter on the 24.07.2008 at 15:58h EST we are sure that you will like it for those who are interesting in knowing some inside information of Letsbuyit. Tip: Beta Launch!!!
check it out here on twitter.com/letsbuyit
we are sure that you will like it for those who are interesting in knowing some inside information of Letsbuyit. Tip: Beta Launch!!!
