Crenk

I came across some very interesting tech news yesterday, the Apple iPhone will be launching in India in September with Vodafone as the exclusive partner. There have been so many reports that huge amounts of people have iPhones already in India, but purchased at a premium price from all over the world. Thus, im sure that the iPhone will be a huge hit in India and I would even bet that they sell more units in India than they do in the UK over the same period.

Mashable is one of the worlds largest technology based blogs, and they are obviously in the same market as us but there is now way at the moment they are our competitors. Anyways, that all being said I have noticed some big changes over at Mashable. Pete now seems to have a lot of fulltime staff writing for him, and how does he pay their wages, advertising! Mashable at the moment seems to have more advertising than ever before and also more advertising an any other blog in the tech market.

In the left column on the Mashable front page there is currently 6 ad units and in the right 4, but they have just open up another section in the right column for another 6 units. Thus bringing the advertising space totally to 16 adveritsing spaces on the front page alone. Is this amount of advertising over the top? Do the readers actually care about the amount of advertising? Do they even notice?

I think advertising is ok if it doesnt actually seem like advertising. If the website had a right side that was sponsored, but only allowed companies to sponsor if they were actually tech products that are worth using. This is what im hoping to achieve with Crenk one day, well when I actually get a new theme done.

Back in early November of last year, I preempted the launch of Spottt. Spottt is a free link exchange between sites via a 125 x 125 widget. Spottt is developed by the guys over at Adbrite, so they have a product that needs to work and actually launch into something worthwhile. Since Adbrite has had a lot of VC Funding, they will be really expected to not just launch a product for the sake of it, and actually turn it into a commercial entity.

This brings me to the all important point, is Spottt actually going anywhere? Currently, the site is so simplistic and has a lot of competitors doing exactly the same thing. So where is it unique selling point? If I was the VC in Adbrite who put in a slice of the money, then I would expect an out strategy for Spottt and within a year or two at the most. Will this actually happen? and what features are really missing from Spottt or sites like Spottt?

I came across this interesting site yesterday when it hit the front page of Digg. The site is AprilFoolsDayontheweb. I still have no idea why all the blogs get involved in April Fools’ Day so much, but it just seems to happen. Im always up for a good prank, but how does April Fools’ Day differ to any other day for Tech news blogs, most of the time they just make stuff up anyways or even just get the story completely wrong. Well anyways check out the site and see what happened this year.

If you are looking for a complete list of all Technology and Web 2.0 Conferences for 2008, make sure you head over to our list and check them out. If any conference is missing that is worth its wait in gold, please let us know.

GoLark is an events and places website. It is similar to Upcoming.org, which is now a Yahoo service. GoLark provides information on concerts, museum exhibits, lectures and shows. The site works in a similar way to Digg, in which GoLark allows the community to submit events and then you can “hype it up” to get it to the top of the tree.

GoLark also has a great search function which is visible on all pages in the left column. It has a slide ruler in a few different categories which allows a user to find events in his or her local area quickly and easily.

The site is so simple to use and can actually be very useful, but due to the lack of users and events it is very hard to for the site to build moment, basically a catch 22. Events are need to bring in the users and users are needed to bring in the events. However, it is definitely worth joining GoLark to simply keep up on events in your local area.

P2P music sharing and sales service Grooveshark has raised their level of compensation for sharing music from 10 cents to 25 cents a track, their entire profit on each sale. Users upload their music to Grooveshark, and any member can listen to those tracks for free. If they want to download a song, they can purchase it DRM free and the user who uploaded the song gets a cut of the sale; previously this was 10c and now its 25c. The remainer of the 99c sale goes to the record companies; the service is legal and Grooveshark has agreements with the record companies to provide the service and to cover copyright obligations.

I dont see how this program can actually succeed! I really need someone from Grooveshark to explain to me the finer details. As far as i know it runs the same as any other P2P, where companies and users each run their files from a folder on their computer and thus allowing other users to purchase audio tracks, movies, etc. How is Grooveshark going to monitor copyrights on songs for example, because i know a lot of people out there have illegally downloaded songs on their computer and if they are in the same folder that Grooveshark is using how will they track it all and keep control? Especially also considering a user could change the name of the songs in their folder and then make it more suceptable to being accepted at owning a copyright.

Finally, why would i want to purchase from a P2P network when currently I can head over to LimeWire and get it all for nothing??

It has been reported by Techcrunch that Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC.com. It is reported that the deal was closed on October the 5th and all in cash. This is MSNBC’s for acquisition in its 11 year history. Look out for the site to become a citizens journal with social media thrown in.

I have always thought that MSNBC was just a copy of news stories from other Microsoft or NBC sites and not a stand alone news site and entity.

In this day and age there are so many technology weblogs out there, how do you know which ones are worth reading and which arent and dont some of these tech blog combined to strengthen their push power.

I have long been toying with ideas of how to expand Crenk and which areas will actually help readers in the overcrowded space that is tech news. There are a few ideas I will be exploring over the next few months but for the time being I am looking for some writers interested in either Guest Blogging or Lead Writing on Crenk. If you might be interested please let me know via our contact form.

Anyways back to which tech sites are worth reading. There are really 10 or so big tech news sites that are really driving traffic numbers at present, but how does a smaller blog break into the market? Techcrunch, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are all growing fast and they are based around very professional writers and good journalists. Here at Crenk we would like to compete on traffic numbers with the above 3.

If you have a smaller technology blog and would like to help build the next large Technology Blog site, then please let me know and submit your articles or becoming a fulltime writer. With every article you submit, if the material is used you will receive credit for the article and links to your site.

20minutenap.com is a place to head if you are in need of some rest. They want to spread the power and benefit of the 20 minute nap across the globe. The site itself is a music player in which plays soothing music for exactly 20 minutes. Now personally, Im not too sure why someone would come online just to have a nap. Im not totally sure about the full concept but if you have a take on it make sure you let me know!