Former TC’er Paul Carr’s latest venture, called NSFWCorp, has launched into private beta. It’s a weekly news magazine dubbed as the “the Economist as written by ‘The Daily Show’” and will be available for $26 a year or “two bucks a month.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is how the company is offering initial subscriptions using a clever sponsor model.

If you join the waiting list now right now, you will be placed onto a waiting list. Sponsors will pay $5 for each subscriber in tranches of 400 for a minimum $2,000 sponsorship deal. These readers will then be encouraged, in six months, to subscribe officially.

“Not disclosing the exact number of people on the waiting list right now — but the response has been even better than we’d hoped. I guess scarcity is a good motivator. The bigger immediate challenge for us is making sure we have enough sponsors to let all those people in. Right now we have way more people on the list than we have available sponsored subs,” said Carr.

Sponsors include Tony Hsieh’s DowntownProject and Cloudflare. The magazine will exist entirely as a HTML5 app on the web, making it eminently portable.

Quoth Carr:

The idea of a once-monthly (or weekly) collection of topical pictures and words, delivered as a 500mb file, without links or other interactive elements is anathema to the connected consumer. If they want those things, they’ll buy a paper magazine (which increasingly, of course, they won’t). For most people, periodicals are accessed in the browser, usually for free.

You can sign up here and may the beta odds be ever in your favor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There are plenty of travel sites out there, but have you ever noticed that almost all of them help you get where you’re going and then leave you all alone in the dark once you actually arrive there? What spots are must-see, what food is must-eat, and which shops do you absolutely have to pop into?

There really isn’t a great way to efficiently and reliably plan out a trip itinerary on the web, except of course for the new travel site and service, Fathom. And thanks to a new partnership with Kate Spade, Fathom is about to get a whole lot more fashionable in destinations like New York, L.A., London, Tokyo and Tahiti.

The site is a streamlined guide to the cities you want to visit, curated by former DailyCandy editors who can shed more light on food and good travel than most of the user-generated content out there. The core idea is tightly edited lists of places to go, food to eat, and things to do.

“24 is the magic number,” said founder Pavia Rosati.

The service compiles lists of 24 travel ideas, including old favorites, new finds, and multiple price points to make sure you can find what you’re looking for without sorting through a mess of madness. Rosati describes Fathom as the type of information your best friend would give you if they lived in the city you were traveling to, but couldn’t be there with you.

There are various features on the site, like Post Cards, which is set up around the structure of “I travel for the…” They are basically inspiration for the traveler. The idea is that even if you don’t know where to go for your upcoming vacation, you can figure out something great once you know your favorite part of travel, whether it be food, fun for the kids, shopping, or relaxing.

Fathom also features a store that lets you bring your favorite destinations back to you, with highly curated products. You can shop by destination, traveler, category or activity, meaning you can shop for a Safari or get your favorite mustard that’s only available in New Orleans.

Fathom has also just partnered with Kate Spade to bring Spade-themed travel guides to five locations, including New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London and Tahiti. If Tahiti sounds like the word that doesn’t belong, that’s simply because Kate Spade is working with a Tahitian-inspired print this year.

Each guide will have five sections, with five to eight suggestions for each category (sleep, eat, drink, shop, and explore). The guides will also feature itineraries, cheat sheets, and clever packing lists.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Daily deal community for website owners Startups.com is shutting down. In an email sent out to its mailing list subscribers, founder Gonzo Arzuaga admits that the company just “couldn’t make a go of it.”

“We didn’t achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago. So, with regret, this news of our departure from the realm of Daily Deals,” writes Arzuaga. “This may be a shocker to some of you and we want you to know that we’re really sorry we failed to achieve your expectations.”

In October 2008, KillerStartups purchased the domain name Startups.com for some $500,000 in cash. A year later, the domain was relaunched as a Q&A site for business questions. Then, in April 2011, Startups.com shifted its focus to the business model it operates today: daily deals.

The Q&A section was moved to answers.startups.com (now disabled), but the homepage began featuring discounts on things website owners, online businesses, and startup entrepreneurs would appreciate, like discounted software, gadgets, e-books, services, and other types of resources they may need to grow their company. Those same type of deals are still live on the site now, as the company hasn’t quite pulled the plug just yet.

According to Arzuaga’s email, Startups.com is not the only property that’s being terminated. BlinkList, a service that lets you save local copies of websites (which no longer seems that relevant, we admit), is also shutting down.

We reached out to Arzuaga for more info on the situation, and, as expected, he’s not too happy about how things worked out.

“Actually, I never expected to be in the spot of going on the record about shutting down a venture. I guess this is the other side of the coin in any entrepreneurial venture,” he says. “I’m really happily surprised by the 100 emails I’ve received with words of support and encouragement from our subscribers (we sent them yesterday an email notifying them of our termination). I am truly amazed, and thankful,” he adds.

But those feelings are tempered with a touch of grief, too. “I begin to feel very frustrated, when it comes to looking back and thinking about Startups.com,” Arzuaga says. “Today is a really blue day.”

He also tells us that he put $250,000 into the service and believes the domain name Startups.com is “an awesome asset” to have.  But bad news, folks: the domain name, for now, is not up for grabs…well, not exactly. Arzuage says he doesn’t want to sell the domain, even though he has already had offers in the high six figures should he change his mind.

“We’re looking for an amazing partner to take it to the next level and make it shine,” says Arzuaga of how he wants to now move forward. But given how recent a change this is, he admits he hasn’t had time to really think about things in depth.

As to why he couldn’t make a go of the business, it could have something to do with the “daily deal” model simply not appealing enough to those who would feature their software or services on the site. One company tells us that after the huge discount offered and Startups.com’s 50% commission, their listing, while generating a decent number of orders, was essentially a loss leader for them.

Below, the full text of the goodbye email:

Startups.com Is Closing Up Shop…

Yeah, unfortunately we couldn’t make a go of it. We didn’t achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago. So, with regret, this news of our departure from the realm of Daily Deals. This may be a shocker to some of you and we want you to know that we’re really sorry we failed to achieve your expectations.

It’s Spring and it feels like the right time for us to do some Spring cleaning. We’re evaluating all of the projects we’re working on, (and we’ve got tons, believe me), and unfortunately we had to make the painful decision of shutting down Startups.com as a Daily Deal service.

We’re selling Blinklist.com, and shutting down other sites as well. There’s no point in going on with something just because you’ve been doing it for a certain amount of time. In a startup, as you well know, everything takes up your precious resources. And people’s time and effort is something we can’t afford to waste. We believe this is the right time to pull the plug.

New and fresh ideas need room to grow and for us that means clearing out some of the old ideas which never took off. We wanna thank you, one of our 20,000 loyal subscribers for sticking with us for all this time.

We’re really sorry we couldn’t make it work for you. But hey, life goes on. Best of luck in your endeavors, we shut our doors knowing that we did all we could to help you grow your online business, which was our main goal for launching Startups.com as a Daily Deal site.

To Your Continued Success!

P.S. Reach out to me at gonzo@startups.com with comments, concerns, just to say “Sorry, it was good while it lasted,” or to share your stories about the awesome Deals you got on Startups.com.

Gonzo

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While we all need water to survive, colleges and universities across the U.S. are betting that their students can survive without water of the bottled variety. As Bloomberg recently reported, more than 90 universities, including Brown and Harvard, are banning or restricting the sale of plastic water bottles. Considering that bottled water represents a $22 billion industry in the U.S. and that more than 9 billion gallons were sold last year, the actions of these universities aren’t likely to scare “Big Water,” as they represent just a fraction of sales. But it makes an important statement about bottled water nonetheless.

And let’s be honest: Whether or not you’ve recently hugged a tree, buying branded tap water in a plastic bottle for $1.50+ a pop seems … well … completely #$%^&-ing ridiculous — unless of course your village has yet to secure a reliable source of potable water. In that case, we understand. But, with colleges (and apparently Concord, Massachusetts) moving to or actually banning bottled water, a Pennsylvania-based startup, called Evive Station, has developed an innovative, ergonomic solution for providing campuses (and beyond) with a better alternative.

Like cellphone recycling startup, ecoATM, Evive has decided to go with the kiosk approach to the bottled water problem. With design help from Daedalus, the startup developed its “stations” to provide campuses with the world’s first on-site bottle cleaning and filtered water-dispensing service.

That doesn’t sound that cool, says the 16-year-old cynic in you. And you’re right, plenty of universities and organizations provide what are known as “sinks” and “dishwashers” and “hydration stations” often called “water fountains.” Fair enough. But even if you buy a plastic water bottle and use it once, it can get filthy pretty quickly, and sticking it in the dishwasher isn’t a workable solution.

So, what’s cool about Evive is that they offer users double-walled stainless steel reusable bottles, which means no more plastic, and lower carbon footprints. In turn, their kiosks filter municipal water, offer unlimited re-filling and cleaning of those steel bottles by way of a patent-pending process that only takes a minute. And everything other than the bottles are free.

The stations are also designed to dispense bag-in-box concentrated, flavored water drinks, hot beverages, and multivitamin options, so that pale, sickly looking college students that haven’t seen the light of day as they cram for exams can get their daily dose of vitamins.

But, seeing as the service is free, that Evive is offering to install these stations on campuses for free, and is sweetening the deal with something called the “Precycling Grant” — which essentially means that the more students use the station, the more Evive gives back to the university — you might wonder whether this is purely mission-driven or whether Evive actually has a business model. And that’s where it gets interesting. Or crazy, depending on your point of view.

During the minute that students wait for Evive Stations to clean and fill their water bottles, the kiosks’ 32-inch high-def screens serve them interactive advertisements, internship opportunities, campus messaging, and offers. Evive Co-founder and CFO Jason Yablinsky tells us that the team wants to use advertising to offset the costs. Students go to Evive’s website, create a user profile, at which point the site asks them for some relevant demographic info. After checking appropriate boxes, they receive a redemption code which is linked to an RFID tag inside their new bottle.

Each time they go to a kiosk, they scan their bottle’s tag, and the cleaning and re-filling begins. The demographic data they collected from the student on their site is connected with the RFID tag, and they’re then served targeted ads that are relevant to their age, the classes they’re taking, what year they are, etc. While those ads and job opportunities play on the screen, students can request more information or post/tweet messages to their social media profiles linked to their user profiles.

Evive also plans to make space both on the kiosks and the water bottles distributed to students available for branding (which it’s offering for free now, but for purchase down the road), as well offering discounts and deals at local restaurants or coffee shops that will be relevant to hungry students looking for a bite, for example. Along with proximity ads that display digital billboards when someone walks by the station. Plus, they plan to offer realtime tracking of the amount of plastic bottles saved from the landfill, which campuses can then display to feel good about how green they’re becoming. Good PR for them as well as saving them from the cost of distributing bottled water.

There’s obviously a lot going on — a lot of moving parts in the Evive user experience — and that may make it a tough sell for some universities. And, really, Evive is attempting to blend a number of different industries and operations in one — beverage distribution, cleaning, campus/organizational services, steel bottle manufacturing and distributing, and so on. It’s an ambitious project, but one that the team is hoping has enough appeal in cost-savings and sustainability that it will outweigh the rest.

Evive has enlisted Flextronics — an electronics manufacturing services provider which counts Cisco Systems, Eastman Kodak, HP, Motorola, Dell, Oracle, and more as customers — to produce its kiosks. The startup has also raised $2 million in seed funding to get the ball rolling, and is currently in the process of closing a much larger Series A to help it expand to universities across the country. The team is tentatively planning to be in up to 30 universities by the year’s end.

Right now, Evive is testing its system at West Virginia University, where it’s placed four stations in various buildings. Over 4K students have signed up to use Evive, and the co-founders tell us that they can’t distribute water bottles fast enough. So far, they’ve had a lot of interest from both big state schools and private colleges. They aren’t ready to say who they’re working with yet, but they’ve been encouraged by the interest both from campuses, organizations, and investors.

And to that point, the team is focusing on universities now, and for the near future, but eventually wants to open up its service to businesses, corporations, and more.

What do you think? Is Evive an innovative, ergonomic solution or just full of water?

For colleges, universities, or anyone else interested in the service, check out Evive at home here, or in the video below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flattr, a social micro-payments platform which we’ve likened to a “Like button with cash” is to partner with the second biggest video site on the Web, Dailymotion. The distribution deal is targeted at Dailymotion’s key content creators in its Motionmakers category. A cynic might call this a mere test of the platform to see if it can be rolled out across the site more widely. But both parties insist this a card-carrying ‘deal’. Suffice it to say Flattr has ben crying out for a big distribution partner and yearned after one for the last two years. But TechCrunch remains sceptical that even this deal will lift the startup out of the early adopter crowd into the mainstream as there remain significant issues with its business model. Then again, at least they now get a real stress test.

Luckily Dailymotion is one of the top sites on the Web. It has one 100 million unique visitors every month and users create over 1.5 billion video views monthly, with over 20,000 new video uploads per day, according to comScore.

Users will now be able to “flatter” (get it?!) those content creators with cash, where 90% of the revenues go to the creators, 5% to Flattr and 5% to Dialymotion in a break-from-the-norm 50/50 deal. Flattr plans to roll out this 50/50 arrangement with other large content sites, assuming it gets any more.

How Flattr works is that users pick a monthly ‘donation ceiling’ ranging from a few dollars to several hundred then click to donate funds directly to the content creator. Each month, the number of total donations from each Flattr user is calculated and payment is divided evenly among all recipients the user has chosen. Recipients also register for Flattr accounts to receive funds, which they can in turn donate to others as they see fit or withdraw to a bank account.

Ironically, Flattr was created by founder Peter Sunde in part as a response to the problems experienced by The Pirate Bay, where he was a co-founder and (now) ex-spokesperson.

There’s a little friction to this deal though. Content creators have to take part in DailyMotion’s ‘Motionmakers‘ program, although it’s free to do so.

Before they can add the Flattr button to their videos. Motionmakerscan upload HD content, such as the Ithaca Audio music composition sound design studio and NYC filmmaker Casey Neistat.

But we remain sceptical this is going to get the lift Flattr needs. Fifty thousand content creators is a drop in the ocean on Dailymotion and Flattr’s business model remains the same monthly debit amount. We think it will only take off when it become a pay-as-you-go platform where people can flatter content at will. True that may lead to ‘Flattr bill shock’ but there are simple mechanics that could be used to get around this, such as a ticker or chrome plug-in. In addition we think users should be able to set their own levels, such as giving more cash to sites they choose to do so, perhaps in a Flattr ‘currency’.

There are currently 50,000 Motionmakers, representing about 5% of all traffic on Dailymotion (10-15 million visitors per month in reach).

Flattr works on browsers, tablets, while Dailymotion’s iOS, Android and Xbox LIVE apps will be added ‘later this year.’

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Local advertising startup, and recent Google Offers partner, Signpost is announcing its Series A funding round this morning to the tune of $3.75 million, led by Spark Capital. Other angels also participated in the round, but the company isn’t disclosing names. This new round is in addition to previous funding of $1.25 million, which included an investment from Google Ventures.

The company is also announcing a new hire today: Christopher DePatria, who most recently led AOL’s Patch sales force.

DePatria started his career at Yahoo, where he was the youngest director at age 25, managing a sales team of 40. Just prior to joining Signpost, he worked at Patch, where he scaled the sales force to 80 reps. (Patch and TechCrunch are both AOL properties). And before Patch, DePatria was at Yodle, where he was involved with direct sales, sales management and planning. At Signpost, DePatria’s title will be VP of Revenue, putting him in charge of its sales operation and revenue strategy, which includes overseeing and scaling the sales force.

That sales force is about to grow quickly, too. Signpost’s CEO Stuart Wall says the company is adding 25 to its sales team (now just seven folks) during this quarter alone. For a company totaling only 24, that’s a big jump.

For a bit of background on Signpost, the startup is focused on operating what’s basically an “AdSense for local commerce.” Businesses use Signpost for access to its 1,200 partners (including Google Offers), to run their marketing campaigns on both web and mobile.

Wall notes that around 93% of merchants renew with the service monthly, a testament to the success they’re seeing with the product, which is more about bringing in “quality” customers than it is about targeting them with daily deals. Wall says merchants on Signpost are moving away from daily deal outlets, like Groupon and LivingSocial. “There’s a realization that you might get a thousand customers from one of the daily deal sites, but probably less than a hundred of them ever come back. So that’s not worth the investment,” says Wall. “We’re increasingly focused on platforms that reach a more targeted group of consumers, which means lower volume but higher quality,” he says.

In addition, Signpost is focused on helping merchants with so-called “utilization offers,” meaning offers that are targeting customers during slow periods. The offers run online and/or on mobile, depending on the businesses’ needs. However, with this latter category, mobile offers make sense, given access to location-based services on mobile devices.

Prior to closing the funding round, Signpost recently rolled out several new features targeted towards its merchant customers, including a new website, cleaner emails, and a more powerful merchant center with improved analytics reporting. The company added comparison metrics for viewing Signpost’s performance alongside averages from other services, like Google and Yelp. Also new is integration with Constant Contact and MailChimp, support for rewarding customers for their Yelp reviews, and a feature that lets Signpost add a tab to a company’s Facebook page.

With new funding in tow, Walls says the focus is now on improvements to the publisher side of the business. While he couldn’t get into specifics, the overall goal is making the process easy on their side, with little to no technical integration, a good user experience, incremental monetization, and no need to build a sales force.

Signpost doesn’t talk total merchant customers at this time, but says that since January (when it shifted to the monthly subscription plan offering), it has added 3,500 merchants. And while there is a bit of churn, says Wall, “the majority stick around.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Edmodo is one of the startups whose name pops up a lot when you talk about “edtech.” Founded in 2007, the company is almost old school, yet, in spite of the influx of new education-focused startups, Edmodo continues to press forward. This is largely due to due to its appeal as a social learning platform for K-12 education — one that has earned it the “Facebook for the classroom” moniker — meaning that Edmodo enables teachers to share to share content, manage projects, assignments and notifications, distribute quizzes and events — both among students and colleagues. But the real key, and where it departs from being synonymous with an “educational Facebook,” is that all this collaboration and classroom management takes place within a network that it completely private and secure.

This is the core value proposition that has led to Edmodo’s growing adoption among teachers and school districts. Case in point: The startup is today announcing that it has officially crossed 7 million users and is now being used in over 80,000 schools. Districts across the U.S. are now doing wide-scale implementations, and 80 of the top 100 largest school districts in the U.S. are on board, including Chicago Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, Delaware, Palm Beach, Florida, Clark County, Nevada, and Wake County, North Carolina.

In fact, the Edmodo founders tell us that the service is now being used not only in every state in the U.S., but every country in the world. The team also said that it’s growing steadily in international markets, especially in southeast Asia, as well as Australia and the U.K.

For a little perspective on the timeframe of this growth, in September 2011, Edmodo counted 3 million users in its system, which means that, over the course of the 2011-2012 school year, Edmodo has more than doubled its user base. Again, part of the explanation for this is that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” That is to say, schools and teachers are, en masse, looking for smarter ways to integrate technology into the classroom, and, as a result, there’s been a growing demand for blended learning solutions — i.e. those that enable teachers to combine in-classroom and online approaches to better address the diversity of learning styles among student populations.

Educators and administrators are moving away from the monolithic, traditional learning management systems (like Blackboard and Moodle) in favor of collaborative, stream-based social environments — a trend on which Edmodo has thus far been able to capitalize.

On the one hand, it’s important to celebrate the growing number of online and blended learning solutions that are attempting to address the sky-rocketing costs of education in the U.S., and in turn, both higher ed and K-12 institutions’ openness to adopting fresh, disruptive alternatives to their legacy systems. So, while growing user bases thankfully represent a growing demand, on the other hand, these vanity metrics mean little without viable revenue streams.

In December, Edmodo raised $15 million from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, which gives the startup plenty of cushion as it moves to scale its business across the U.S. and around the world. Its venture investment notwithstanding, up until recently, it hadn’t really been evident how Edmodo planned to make money.

So, not unlike Facebook, Edmodo has been making an effort to transition from a free collaboration and communications network into a platform — through which others could leverage its growing network to sell their own products and applications. In March, Edmodo opened up an API to third–party developers, enabling any and all ed-focused builders to create apps on top of its platform.

While this may not sound particularly mind-blowing, it actually represents a big opportunity for edtech developers, which have traditionally met with more than a few hurdles when trying to sell products to schools and teachers. The kind of investment in sales and marketing, for example, that is required to gain significant traction in K-12 classrooms really isn’t within the budget of most small development operations — or startups, for that matter.

With Edmodo’s app store on the market, app developers and startups won’t have to be as reliant on closing district-wide sales, and can instead sell their wares direct to those who will find them most applicable to their daily operations. Plus, teachers are able to connect these new apps to already-existing Edmodo features, like badges, assignments and quizzes to make learning more engaging for their students.

And, as edtech startups look to establish viable revenue streams, for Edmodo, the app store model means being able to take a step in that direction. The platform launched with more than 35 partners, which developed everything from educational games to subject-specific learning solutions, and are offering both free and premium apps. Just like the App Store et al, Edmodo gets to take a cut of app sales, and steer toward profitability.

While it’s still too early to say whether its app store is on the way to becoming a big money-maker, because the app store really won’t take full effect until students go back to school in September, the team is jazzed about the progress thus far. (They’ve added at least 5 more partners since March, on top of Mathalicious, Late Nite Labs, Desmos, BrainNook, Aviary, etc.)

As to what’s next? As hinted previously, Edmodo Apps will go into wide release to all U.S. teachers at the beginning of the school year, and the company plans on launching a slew of new features as it gears up for September.

For more on Edmodo, check ‘em out at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Mitch Lazar is CEO of Taptu. He Founded CNN and Cartoon Network Mobile. He was a former journalist at CNN and one of the co-founders of CNN.com. Prior to joining Taptu, Mitch headed Yahoo! Mobile Europe.

Staying on top of your game and understanding the competitive landscape is essential to winning in the modern business world. A huge component to staying ahead of the curve is keeping a close eye on competitors in your market, which entails maintaining a watchful eye on industry news. Some companies turn to expensive news monitoring services to keep track of their respective industry, but in reality there are more viable options. Emerging tablet news and information services like Flipboard, Pulse and others are proving an incredible companion to business and consulting executives in staying current with industry changes occurring around them.

Jeff Cavins, CEO of Fuzebox, recently wrote in Business Insider that the explosive uptake of tablet computers is fueling the growth of what he called the new “iPad economy.” Cavins said: “The iPad is shifting the way businesses function, changing how executives interact and transforming the economics of today’s business operations.”

The iPad economy is a growing reality across the globe, and businesses are turning to enterprise apps to help them succeed. Simple RSS readers are used to condense multiple streams of content from a variety of sources into single channels, granting users access to diverse content all in one place. Some applications have further simplified news aggregation by using innovative search technology that goes beyond the function of RSS readers to deliver richer streams of highly targeted information to business users – a critical asset to businesses large and small.

Better Search and Filtering Offers Essential Time Savings

Improved search and filtering techniques make it simple and easy for a business to set up a Web-monitoring service. Google News and Google Alerts were an early step in the right direction, but anyone who monitors news on a daily basis knows that these services don’t always give you the news you want when you need it.

As users continue to adopt tablets as a primary reading outlet, there is a huge opportunity to create real-time, targeted news experiences. Apps like Zite, which was bought by CNN in 2011, aim to learn about users’ interests through the stories they read, and provide related content based on those preferences. News-reader apps give users the power to create their own streams of content based on keywords to offer analysis of the topic across any genre of content, keeping them constantly updated in the ever-changing world of business.

Recently we have seen innovative companies like Wavii launch to further personalize the way users get their news, and as this vertical continues to mature, we should see more sophisticated technologies making their way onto tablets.

By utilizing apps that filter and search, tablets are changing the way news is channeled and consumed. Best of all, once streams are set up, they can be shared business-wide or between colleagues so the wheel never has to be re-invented.

Gesture Based Information Consumption Increases Efficiency

Touting efficiency, news-readers give users the opportunity to scan hundreds of articles in a few moments and immediately delve deeper into the most interesting content. News-reading services do all the heavy lifting by aggregating the stories that match your interests, giving you more time to spend reading the news you care about rather than searching for it. The same way Evernote helps you save your daily thoughts and ideas all in one spot, news-readers concisely track what’s going on in every field that interests you.

Beyond increasing efficiency, news-readers also allow for easy sharing of any stories of interest with your community of colleagues or friends. Every blog and news site has its own way to share stories you enjoy with friends, but they are not always convenient for users. Tablet apps make sharing simple, while still driving traffic back to the original source.

Bookmarking Makes for Easier Follow Up

When browsing a vast number of stories every day, it’s often hard to keep track of the important ones, or to flag them down once you’ve flipped past. Easy in-app bookmarking tools such as Pocket or Instapaper make for a better overall experience because returning to a piece of interesting news is simple. Creating your own playlist through bookmarks is intuitive, as is sharing that list with colleagues, which is an asset for group collaboration.

Apps are abundant, but the ones with the potential to make a difference to the business world are those that improve productivity, efficiency and knowledge sharing. Discovering and utilizing these gems in a marketplace that has become a sea of apps is a difficult task. Apps like news readers set themselves apart by providing essential tools for businesses and adding value to help them win in their respective vertical.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

ComScore today released its analysis of this month’s top properties on ye olde Webernets in the U.S. There are a number of points of interest, but among them, it seems that lotto sites were the top beneficiary of U.S. Internet traffic. This was largely a result of the unprecedented Mega Millions jackpot, which became the largest jackpot in U.S. and world history, reaching $656 million in March. Lotto sites drew nearly 29 million visitors (with MegaMillions.com grabbing the top spot), up 25 percent from February, making it the biggest mover in March.

Travel info sites were the next biggest beneficiary of traffic, according to comScore, as Americans looked to book last-minute spring break trips and summer travel. This made travel one of the top-gainers, up 10 percent to 69.7 million visitors in March. Of the web’s growing number of travel properties, TripAdvisor saw the biggest boost, up 5 percent from the prior month, to a total of 18.1 million visitors. TripAdvisor was followed by Travora (which today acquired NileGuide) at 15.5 million visitors (also up 5 percent), and Yahoo! Travel was up 9 percent with 11.1 million visitors in March.

As is expected in the travel vertical, a rising tide lifts all planes — that is to say that airline sites benefited from travel’s boost in March traffic, growing 8 percent to 29.8 million visitors, with Southwest nabbing the most traffic, up 17 percent to 10.9 million visitors. Following Southwest was Delta at 6.1 million, United Airlines at 5.4 million, American at 4.8 million, JetBlue at 3.3 million, and U.S. Airways at 2.6 million.

As to the top 50 web properties, comScore found a usual suspect at the top of its rankings, with Google Sites bringing in 189.7 million visitors in March. Microsoft Sites came in second at 178.9 million, followed by Yahoo! Sites at 175.4 million, and Facebook.com at 158.9 million. In terms of March movers, Ask Network rose into the seventh spot, while ESPN vaulted six positions to 26th place.

Google also grabbed the top spot in comScore’s “Top 50 Ad Focus” ranking, with its ad network reaching 91.7 percent of U.S. consumers online, followed by AOL Advertising at 83.1 percent, Yahoo Network at 81.4 percent, and AT&T AdWords at 81.1 percent reach in March.

As for the top properties seeing the biggest change in unique visitor counts from February to March, interestingly PerformerSoft.com — the makers of software like PC optimizer, driver automatic updater, data recovery, etc — saw a 152 percent hike in traffic, up to 9.2 million visitors. Rounding out the list, in order, were Sun Microsystems, Babylon.com, College Humor, TheStreet, MLB.com, DailyMotion, SB Nation, Instagram, and ESPN.

More from comScore here. Charts below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the dot-com boom I lost $15 million cash. Yes, I am an idiot. You know what happens when you lose that kind of cash? When you go to zero? You lose your libido. You don’t want to have sex ever again. And even Viagra won’t help. I lost my house. I lost my family. I lost all my fake friends. I was sick all the time. When I passed people on the street who were laughing I was definitely sure they were laughing at me. $15 million cash. One million a week in the summer of 2000. I could’ve saved lives with that money.Instead every night I would lie on the floor and try to mentally force my body to die. [See, "What It Feels Like to Be Rich"]

So now I will save some lives. You Facebook shareholders are about to make a lot of money. One friend of mine made one of the most common features on Facebook we use every day. He’s going to make $15 million. So my message is to him but the rest of you can listen in on the conversation.

1.) The One-Year Rule. Don’t change your lifestyle at all for at least one year.

No new house or apartment. Don’t buy a fancy car. Don’t buy expensive artwork. Don’t take on a mistress. This is not to say these things are bad. It’s just that you need to let the new wealth marinate your soul a little bit.

Get comfortable with it before you try on new clothes that might not fit yet. Once you buy some massively expensive toys or homes, it changes your whole perspective and might make you much more foolish than you were when you were first climbing the ladder of success.

Remember: One year.

2.) The No-Friends Rule. Don’t lend money to old friends. Don’t be so quick to make new friends. Once you make money, everyone will approach you about new investments you can make. Or people will want to borrow money from you.

Don’t do either.

It’s very hard, of course, to deny a friend who says, “listen, I just need to borrow $100,000 for 90 days.” Or “I have a great new start-up that looks like Twitter but better. I’m just raising $500,000 and I left $300,000 for you to come into the round.” I probably lost a few hundred thousand in loans that were going to be repaid the next day.

Here’s what you can say, “I’d love to do it. It sounds great. Right now everything is tied up with my financial adviser and you can talk to him. I have to go by what he says because of all the legal stuff I don’t understand.”

And you aren’t lying. Make your wife or husband or mother or whoever your financial adviser and tell them to say no to everything. But it’s necessary if you want to keep your friends. Particularly in Year One (see previous rule).

3.) Don’t Invest. What’s the rush? You just made your money. Put it in a savings account for one year at least. Or under your mattress. No stocks. No paintings. No private investments. Try not to start a business again so quickly.

A friend of mine recently won $3 million in a poker tournament after being broke for many years (all his life). Right away he wanted to buy a hotel.

Don’t do it.

This was right before the entire housing crisis and recession that followed. Thank God he took my advice.  If you feel absolutely compelled to do some investing then follow the next rule.

4.) The 2% Rule. If you really feel that Google is going to $5,000 per share and you have to buy some stock at $500, don’t put more than 2% of your money into it. Then, if it all goes to hell, you’ve only lost 2% of your money (or more likely, 1%, since Google will probably never go down more than 50%).

This is hard for entrepreneurs who come into sudden wealth because they are used to making their money by having most of their net worth tied up in one investment (their business).

But this is probably the most important rule on the list. After the other six rules of course.

5.) The Good Health Rule. Believe it or not, your health is now at serious risk if you just came into sudden wealth. More risk than ever before.

A friend of mine had a very stressful business in the online gambling space. He was worried the Feds were going to outlaw him and arrest him. He was broke and the business was always in a state of running out of money.

High, high, stress.

I thought he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack but he always stayed in great health. Then he sold his business and made about $50 million. Three months later he was on a ski slope in Aspen, enjoying the fruits of his labor, when he suddenly had a major heart attack and only survived because of immediate medical care. He was essentially dead for five minutes on the operating table.

Your body, in a high adrenalin situation, will postpone punishing you until the situation is over. But don’t think when the stress is over that your body will forget. It doesn’t.

You must focus on health after achieving sudden wealth.

Here is the key thing to remember. When you are mugged, your body goes into a fight or flight mode. Adrenaline shoots up. The same thing happens when you start a business. Only difference is: you are mugged every day and you sit immobile at your computer. So once that adrenaline calms down your body is going to do some very weird things. Unless you keep in good health.

6.) Try Not To Burn Out. You worked hard to get here. You worked 120 hours a week. You gave up watching “Mad Men”. Your girlfriend cheated on you. Your missed your parents 50th anniversary. I get it. Congratulations.

But don’t burn out just yet. You need to be responsible and show the people around you that they all made the right decision in trusting you, hiring you, paying you, inspiring you, feeding you. You have few chances in life to demonstrate that you’re made of the right stuff and this is one of them.

And what to do if you lose it all? Don’t worry. Do the next item:

7) The Daily Practice

Should you happen to implode and lose everything, here is the technique I used to get off the floor and get motivated again and start new businesses and go from failure to success (and I had to repeat that a few times). Basically, I view the body as four bodies interconnected: physical,  emotional, mental, and spiritual. They are all connected. It’s like if one path to your heart is blocked then blood and oxygen won’t flow through your body properly and you will get sick.

It’s the same here, if everything isn’t flowing properly then you’ll get sick, lose all your money, and die. But if you check the boxes on what I call The Daily Practice, your life will be completely different in six months, no matter how badly you fell apart before. Trust me, my life still changes completely ever six months.

Note: There’s no such thing as luck. In the chess-playing world there’s a saying: “Only the good players are lucky.” That applies to business as well. People can say you were lucky. But the truth is you’ll be able to do it again and again, no matter how deeply you fall.

Trust in this and follow these rules and sudden wealth will become permanent wealth.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch