I am not sure if anyone is going to participate in this competition or not but Hedgeable, an online portfolio management startup is conducting one for America’s Worst Investor. The contest has been conducted to reward those Americans who lost the most during the financial crisis. Anyone who holds a portfolio of 2 or more stocks, ETFs or mutual funds from October 2007 till March 2009 can participate in it for free. Three lucky winners will have the chance to win vacations to Rome, Italy, Iceland and Las Vegas. Sounds impressive but the idea is obviously to promote Hedgeable and ensure that firms realize how Hedgeable can help them with its technology to build up a healthier portfolio irrespective of the ups and downs of the market. Is that possible?
Topics: Reports
GigaTribe that offers community software for people to share files privately on the Internet. It lets users share files directly from their hard drives, making sure that sharing remains private by eliminating the need to utilize the facilities of third party servers. It currently announced version 3 of its social community software that lets users share unlimited number of files with friends. This would let social communities to share files securely using its platform. This would of great help given that most of these communities don’t have the features to allow users share large files and on the other hand many of the users aren’t comfortable with the idea of sharing files over these forums, networks for the sake of privacy. I guess with this latest version that is going to change and users across the countless platforms will gladly use GigaTribe to share larger files.
The problem with having Kindle or the Amazon’s book store is that you feel restricted to just one ebook reader. However Shortcovers goes a bit beyond ad surfaces as an eBook store on a global scale with a wide variety of books to offer. Be it classics, best sellers or books that you fail to find elsewhere. Today Shortcovers launched support for ePUB downloads for any device you own, be it and Android based phone, the iPhone or you computer system, simply download your favorite book to your device at the cheapest possible rates and enjoy reading it. Plus the eBook store is also offering the latest Dan Brown book; Lost Symbols for its fans to read on their devices. If it sounds great, do visit the eBook store.
Online advertising and content monetization platform, Peer39 is making things easier for publishers with the release of a dashboard for its clients. This would cater to the information needs for sales teams and execs by providing them breakdown of stats, suggestions and predictions about various categories of content to match relevant ads. For example the Executive tab summarizes the performance of numerous categories in the form of pie charts that helps the team see how each category is doing. There are numerous other features that provide in depth analyses about each campaign, breaking them down into conversions, volumes and clicks, which in turn helps in predicting how a particular campaign would do. All this would give a better understanding of the platform and to take maximum advantage of what it is capable of.
IMShopping, the human assisted shopping recommendation platform that makes it easier for people made an important announcement today as it made its platform available to all retailers. The service called Merchant Answers has already been implemented by 20 retailers. This would enable sites to maximize sales conversions with a better shopping experience. Sounds nice given that it’s always the better services which improve loyalty of customers as well as boost sales. And with the implementation of Merchant Answers retailers would have a better possibility to turn the customers into buyers.
There is another one making it out of Google and as always he holds a great value. Michael Rubenstein, was VP and director of DoubleClick, Google’s Ad Exchange platform that provides display ads. He had become a part of Google with Google’s $3.1 Billion acquisition of DoubleClick. The departure isn’t surprising given that Google had been loosing key execs in the recent months but I guess the primary reason why Rubenstein took a bow is that Google hasn’t really lived up to do for display ads what it has done for contextual ads. That’s just a thought and there could be a totally different reason for his departure, one that I fail to get.
News Corp is releasing Newscore, its new global service that would enable instant availability of news to every news outlet. This is going to bring the bulk of information and news from within the News Corp circles to every other news service out there. The service has been approved by Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp and NewsCore will then branch out everything from text to video and citizen journalism across the globe. It is based in New York and is hiring journalists for New York, Asia and London. It’s an interesting move and will open dimensions for global journalism to easily collaborate and share news and to leverage the large network of News Corp which has more than 30 networks including the likes of Start TV, Fox News, etc and connect them each on a global scale.
Twitter continues to grow at a very fast rate and it was only a matter of time before it crawled past one of the leading social networks in some part of the world. Well it has done exactly that as it grew past MySpace in the UK. Presently Twitter sits as the 27th most visited site in the UK followed by MySpace at 28. In terms of popularity it is the 4th most popular site behind Bebo at third and ahead of MySpace at fifth. What’s even more interesting is that third party apps like Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck which are used widely by many users haven’t been taken into account, which might just make it even more popular.
RollingStone.com is finally going back to Wenner Media after being under RealNetworks. Wenner Media will be relaunching the site sometime next year after being running under RealNetworks’ banner for around five years. RealNetworks had been running its own ads on the site along with links to Rhapsody Music and it remains to be seen if Wenner Media will actually go ahead with this partnership. To be honest, it’s a big task ahead for Wenner Media and I am not sure if it will actually go beyond despite the name it has to push out to the general music audience.
While technology is expanding hard and fast with the web playing the most vital part in conveying information on anything, be it Twitter being used to break news of an earthquake, etc. There is however a shame that in certain regions of the world big shots will game on people’s lives. The reality TV shows have become quite a norm, challenging people to do the impossible but almost all of them have a very high standard of safety precautions to avoid any mishap. But they were sadly not available for Saad Khan from Pakistan who lost his life in all this. The 32 year old guy with four kids was given an under water challenge, where he lost control and could not be recovered. The game was sponsored by the big names in the corporate world, Unilever and produced by MindShare and despite their reputation they had no methods to save this young man and reports state he was under water for 6 minutes.
Of course this news is completely off the grid of what we cover at Startup Meme, but as a responsible person I feel it to be my duty to report this to the International Community and my fellow bloggers so that the authorities take due notice. What needs to be done is that there should be strict accountability on what exactly were the safety procedures and did they actually meet the standards followed by other reality shows? I fail to understand the lack of availability of the basic necessities and why it took them so long to provide medical aid to the young man.
