The London-based company that revolutionized advertising, allowing small and medium websites to sell advertising on their own, OpenAds, managed to get a second round $15.5 million funding led by Accel Partners, PaidContent said. The money will be used for hiring more staff and product development but I can only ask, how will they make money from an open source product?

The answer could be simple,  because OpenAds just announced they will offer a hosted version of their software. No need to upload the files and host it yourself. But still is this a good business plan? Probably so, because they may think of a commercial version.

Take Wordpress for example with their free blog hosting until you need more features and you give them some money. Wish you luck OpenAds and we shall see what the $15.5M funding can do for them.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Laaik.it, 24.com’s social news site, unveiled a new look and feel yesterday with layout and visual styling changes. Elan Lohmann, one of the brains behind the project, noted to me when they launched late last year that the project is still in early stages of development and the new interface update is evidence of that.

Some of the new additions include the news categories moved to the top of the site in a horizontal navigation which makes it easy to find popular or upcoming news in your category of choice. They have also added a ‘how to’ area to help educate users on how to use Laaik.it.

Down the right side of the site ‘Top 5 today” have replaced categories and features the top stories for the day to quickly determine popular breaking news as you arrive.

It’s exciting to see social media properties in South African being continuously improved and redeveloped on - it shows social networking is alive and well in South Africa.

When asked about the new release Elan had this to say

The first cut was rough and there were many constraints on resources. We took a step back, listened to what our users had to say - as well as the local blogging community - and implented a percentage of it. We still have a features list as long as my arm, so Laaik.it will continue to develop over the year. We have some other great projects lined up for 2008 and are focussing on those now. Watch this space” Uptake in this space in the local market is slow but we know it’s a marathon and I still believe that Laaik.it will crack the local market over time.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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

Popularity: 5% [?]

“twaction is a simple and useless, but fun, tool that turns tweets into action”

Tyler Reed launched a Twitter api application today called TWAction. Like SuperPoke for Facebook, TWAction can be used to send a variety of actions to your Twitter friends through any Twitter client. Your actions can be anything from giving your friends something to a Facebook style poke, all featured in a public stream on the homepage. Also placed on the homepage are two flash charts showing recent and most popular TW-Actions. Tyler managed to code the application in less than 72 hours and went from alpha release to ‘launch’ in one day. I asked him some questions about TWAction -

Why did you create it?

Just to mess around with the Twitter API. It’s given me a lot of ideas to create useful applications build on the Twitter API in the future.

What’s next for TWAction?

It will be updated continiously throughout the week.. we’re going to focus on intelligent actions and statistics …

A list of all the Twitter apps can be found here.

Carry on reading for a list of all the actions you can use

e.g.

@twaction @TylerReed kick for ignoring me 

Popularity: 5% [?]

Paul Jacobson reported earlier this week about the launch of the new Zoopy. The social media site has expanded its functionality and wrapped it up in a new rounded corners look (I love Vimeo). The ability to post blogs and podcasts have also been added which all aggregates onto your Zoopy profile showing all your published media.

Other changes include the flash video player being rebranded in a black sleek look and tabs for navigation and content search. On each content area - blogs, videos, photos, podcasts - you can discover content through a few filters - recently viewed, most popular and recently commented. These filters also flow throughout the site’s tabbed navigation.
We recently reported about MyVideo’s interface upgrades and exciting new content channel ‘iViews‘ - its good to see healthy competition amongst competing startups in the video sharing market locally.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I attended the 27 Geek Dinner last night at Melrose Arch and witnessed the unveiling of Afrigator beta by one of the founders, Justin Hartman. Afrigator launched earlier this year in Alpha and has now emerged with the ‘beta tag’ and a host of new functionality.

With the new release the Afrigator team has focused on really turning the startup into a social media aggregator instead of just aggregating blogs. This is one of the most notable changes on the new homepage layout which now features podcasts and videos together with the latest blog posts. Down the right hand side the country channels have been kicked further down and have made way for a nifty tabbed content box featuring the latest and most popular aggregated data. Also down the right is the new home for content tags which have been moved from the original loading view.

Venturing deeper into the site you will find a host of new areas - News, Podcasts and Videos. Afrigator has been integrated with the Youtube api so you can provide your Youtube account details and see your videos stream onto the site. They plan to integrate various api’s from the leading social platforms on the web likely Flickr as well which will be a part of a new images section launching in ‘3 weeks’ according to Justin/Stii. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, has revealed the sectors and brands where South Africans are spending the most time online. Categories where online South Africans are spending most of their time online are as follows. News & Weather sites accounted for 23% of all time spent by South Africans online (1.1 million hours) followed by Media & Publishing sites – 16% (0.8 million hours). The ten most engaging categories account for 92% of all time spent by South Africans online.

Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, at Nielsen//NetRatings, comments,

“The online sectors where South Africans spend most of their time highlights the power of the Internet as an information resource. Almost one in every four minutes online is accounted for by a news and weather site.”

It’s also worth noting that the popularity of a sector isn’t necessarily aligned with how much total time it accounts for. Employment, for example, is the ninth most popular category but ranks as the sixth leading sector by total time.

Alex comments further

“The dominance of Media24 in the South African landscape is astonishing when one considers that just over one in every four minutes online is spent within their sites – and when comparing that to the most dominant brands in other countries.

MSN, for example, is the most dominant brand in the UK in terms of time, yet accounts for ‘just’ 12% of total time. Similarly in Australia it’s Nine/MSN which also accounts for 12% and, in the US, it’s AOL which accounts for ‘just’ 9% of total time.”

By category

By Brand

[Source Nielsen//NetRatings]

Popularity: 8% [?]

I received a pleasant surprise this morning when I got a Hulu private beta invite to check out the site and write a review. There has been wide spread coverage of the launch with mixed reviews. Mainly because NBC and News corp (Myspace owners) failed to pick a name for the project right up until the launch - they eventually settled on ‘Hulu’ which means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili (apparently). Before Hulu was called “Clown co.” for not picking a name some called the site the “youtube killer“, not likely. There is no video sharing and very little user interaction besides creating your own play lists from all the titles available. Hulu is more an online distribution channel for premium video content, including TV shows, movies, and short clips which is all supplied by the big media houses such as NBC.

Content on Hulu such as TV shows will come from Fox and NBC, and over fifteen cable channels. Movies will come from Fox and Universal, and following a deal signed just this Friday, from Sony and MGM as well.

Hulu’s design is very impressive - minimalist, clean and sleek. Hulu has done a good job keeping the user interface simple and highlighting the actual content of the site. The video is high quality which is one positive it has compared to the compressed low quality videos you experience on Youtube and co.

Hulu also exists as a distribution network of premium video content for several online destinations - AOL, MSN, MySpace, Comcast, and Yahoo - that will display Hulu’s videos for free but in their own branded players. In addition to these partnerships, users themselves form a viral distribution network for Hulu since they allow its videos to be embedded in any website and shared via email. Unfortunately, (for us) no videos can be downloaded from the site or from their media partners but only viewable through the web based flash player.

My first impressions of Hulu are satisfactory and I think the media had it all wrong about the project killing off other video sharing sites - It’s merely a destination to catch your favourite shows in case you missed it on the PVR the night before

Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar, describes why Hulu?

“Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

Hulu screens -

Video player - quite nifty

Popularity: 8% [?]