If you haven’t heard about Lyro yet, is the newly launched competitor of LinkedIn, the company where you can stay in touch with your colleagues, make new connections, business opportunities or share advice.

Because they have a business plan that is already on the market, to be considered a successful startup, Lyro needs to bring something new. Why would anyone move from LinkedIn unless there is something free that can bring benefits.

The first thing the company brings is some sort of online business cards (a profile) that you fill in with all your info and can be saved to your “pocket” or on your computer (yes it has Outlook Integration).

Another good point is the fact that these, online business cards on Lyro can get easily used on widgets, emails or even FaceBook applications that makes it a great tool for self promotion, like a real card.

The third thing I would have expected was finding connections easier, because getting info about particular users is not really easy on Lyro, and same goes for LinkedIn. It needs improvements and it can be done, but I am curious to know what will the price be.

Lyro might get its feet wet after a quick swim in the dead pool soon, but until then I will have my eyes on them.

In a Series B Round led by Masthead Venture Partners and Canaan Partners, video advertising network Tremor Media managed to raise $11 million. Being a “seismic shift in advertising” the company has grown since 2006 by more than 50% and managed to sign deals with partners such as EyeSpot or ExpoTV.

A recent comScore study revealed that Tremor Media reaches more than half of all internet users in the US to a total of 90 million unique visitors in November and is now on the 18th place on the largest advertising network list that include Advertising.com, Yahoo or Google.

With the online video advertising growing steady, Tremor Media is expected to invest the money in operations and advertising efforts to increase their reach.

Web 2.0 blogging platform Profy announced the Alpha launch of their service today. Profy combines a WYSIWYG text editor with a feed reader and a social network. A dashboard on the start page shows your posting activity, feed items, reader’s comments on your blog, and instant messages from other Profy users. You can read your blog feeds, write posts, find out what other Profy bloggers and commenters are reading in their feed readers (like sharing in Google Reader). If you don’t have visual editing skills there are tons of templates and layouts you can choose to style your blog.

Profy’s vision is to provide single, comprehensive seamless access and friendly navigation for the many stages of the blogging process – news reading, sharing selected news stories with a group of readers, writing posts and publishing them, discussing posts with readers, and communicating with readers on other topics.

Profy will aim to compete with tools like Squarespace rather than WordPress or MoveableType.

Here are some of the most popular posts published on Bandwidth blog since its launch one year ago. Thank you all for reading. Happy Holidays… (;

South Africa’s top startups to watch (Was published in print)

Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by ReadWriteWeb)

24.com launch Laaik.it social media aggregator (Breaking news)

The offices of todays internet companies (Reached the Digg homepage)

Microsoft wants Yahoo – $50 Bil (Our best rumour published of the year)

24.com, the digital arm of South African media giant Media24, has expanded it’s social networking portfolio with the launch of their video sharing service, PLAY. Earlier in the year 24.com launched Laaik.it – their content bookmarking service – which was their debut in social media market. Elan Lohmann – head of social media at 24 – informed me of PLAY a few months back to help beta test the new video sharing application.

Play has been created to enable the 24 blogging community to seamlessly create and post video content to their blogs. Although any member of the public can upload, view and discuss videos on the site with your 24.com login. Play has all the usual characteristics of a video sharing service such as ‘Flavas’ which is your content channels and your own personal profile showcasing your uploaded and bookmarked videos (Favs). 24.com have also built their own flash video player featuring media embedding functionality, full screen viewing, content rating and discovery of other videos after the clip has finished playing.

Play has numerous content channels each with their own rss feed for keeping tabs on new videos through your reader. Some of the more popular channels (Flavas) are Sport, Pets, Geek and Cars.

Conclusion

Not a bad effort for a first try keeping in mind the service is dedicated to the 24.com bloggers. The service wasn’t launched aimed at taking out the likes of Zoopy or MyVideo just yet. Although with their traffic volumes they could become the biggest video sharing site in SA over night.

The only small issue I noted was bad SEO on some pages – If you surf through the site you will see each page has the same title tag “Play – powered by 24.com” – they should automatically set the title of the page the same as the title of the video or channel page your viewing. This will help with keyword indexing for Google, Yahoo or even their own search engine, 24.

Screen shot

Viewing a video

Visit Play.24.com