Archive for: service
Major newspapers have been seeing major ad declines in the past several years, but now Reuters is hoping that the time is right to sell a new product designed to enhance understaffed business sections. The news wire plans to unveil its Reuters Financial Infographics initiative, which provides automated delivery of customizable, print-ready financial data layouts to U.S. papers.
The new product will be available as an addition to Reuters main news offering at an attractive price. Interested publishers can get a free trail until March 31st.
Over the past year or so, there has been much talk about paid subscriptions coming into effect for some of the bigger websites. Undoubtedly, this will begin to work its way down the scale. Hopefully this will improve web content and keep some faith in media which democracies rely on. So, what if your website needs a subscription service to keep afloat?
Well you could spend thousands of dollars getting in developers to set one up for you or you could use Recurly. This is a service which will enable your users to subscribe to your blog, pay their fee each month and thus have access. There is no need for your to manage or oversee anything once it’s set up as Recurly will handle all new subscriptions, fees, payments, outstanding bills and customer support.
You can also either embed the service seamlessly on your site using their API or have your subscription redirect to their site.
It is free for the first fifty subscribers and after that you can either pay a flat monthly fee or give Recurly a small percentage of your revenue intake. For bigger publications, the flat fee will work out best. So if you’re looking for a way to set up a paid subscription for your blog or website in just a few minutes, check out Recurly here.
A big part of writing online, and even just being alive today, is knowing what’s happening around the world. One way I do this is to set up Google Alerts so I know what’s happening in my field. Another way is to use an online tool to see what’s being searched and posted on the Internet such as Trends Buzz. This is how many news firms pick up stories in far away lands quickly.
As you can see from the screenshot above, it takes note of what people are searching for in Google and Yahoo!. They also have Twitter monitored so you can find out what’s happening there too which is significant considering news spreads fastest on Twitter. Then, smaller sites such as the New York Times and Alexa are covered followed by smaller search engines.
The service is currently in public Beta and it will be interesting to see what the team comes up with once its ready for the full launch.
More and more people are accessing the web via their phone. Statistics show that the iPhone and other smart phones are leading the field in the US and Europe where as cheaper Java cell phones are number one in Africa and South America. By making a mobile version of your website you are putting yourself ahead of the competition by giving your users an extra feature. One which could earn you extra ad revenue.
Mobify is a free service which allows you to do this in less than five minutes. Basically, it takes your website or blog and compact it into a basic format so it ill load easily on mobile devices. You’re also given a custom URL so your users can access the site. You can see a sample website above on the left and it’s mobile version created using Mobify to the right.
There is a premium version which offers more customisation and you can keep your won URL so users can access the mobile version through m.yourblog.com. This is a great service and it’s well worth a look if you want to offer your visitors an extra level of compatibility.
Less than a month ago, FourSquare, a location based social network commonly used to post your location on Twitter, announced that they were getting an update every second from their users. So that works out at around 600,000 updates per week. Not bad for a small start-up. However, in less than thirty days their user rates have doubled.
They shared with the world yesterday, via a tweet that they were getting over a million updates per week. 1.2 million to be exact.
That is a phenomenal increase in user ratings which most companies can only dream of achieving. I’ve noticed this increase myself on Twitter and am strongly considering using the service. After all, it’s more fun than our standard geo-location tweets, more social and have cool games to go along with it!
Over the past week, Yelp and Google have been in heated debates concerning Google acquiring the service which was founded by two former PayPal employees and allows users to submit reviews of their local services. After days of deliberation both parties had agreed on a price – half a billion dollars. It seemed that everyone was quite happy with the deal until the CEO of Yelp Jeremy Stoppleman notified Google over the weekend that the deal was off.
What happened?
Well nobody knows for sure but it must have taken something big for Yelp to walk away from half a billion dollars and pressure from internet giant Google. My guess is that another offer has been tabled. Obviously, Yelp wan to keep their cards close to their chest should this deal fall through and need to go back to Google. Perhaps one of Google’s rivals such as Microsoft or Apple have decided they want Yelp?
Getting paid to blog is a distant dream of most bloggers. The initial high hopes for Google ad sense will have vanished after just a few weeks, even days. So what is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get paid to blog? Today.com seems to have the right idea.
The service allows you to establish your own blog as a sub-domain of Today.com. E.g. Myblogsname.today.com. You can then customise using the Word Press tools and begin blogging as you normally would. I tried this out and my third post was featured on the international homepage within hours of it going live. This got my page quite number of views as I’m sure you would imagine.
Today.com do pay you, however, it’s not a set rate or pay per post (at least for most bloggers – there are some who gain popularity and get a pay per post). Instead they pay you depending on how many impressions your page gets. For each impression you, $0.002 is added to your account ($2.00 CPM). This may seem minuscule but if your blog gains popularity you could be earning hundreds each month.
Today.com is different from other blog providers as they actually publicize your blog on the homepage rather than just leave it to it own devices at the mercy of the search engines. Users can search for terms on Today.com and your blog will appear if appropriate.
All in all, it’s a good service that is a step above the rest with the highest industry payout. However, the blogs themselves are always kept looking similar to Today.com and as such you can only really customize basic features such as colour etc…
It could be a good earner for bloggers but keep in mind – to get regular readers and thus impressions you have to blog regularly (one or twice per day) and also publicise your blog. 6/10
With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.
Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.
Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.
It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”
You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.
Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
