SocialCash, Monetize Those Social Apps

After the first day of the Graphing Social Patterns, I was lucky enough to score an invite to a launch party for a new product by Gratis Internet called SocialCash.

Gratis Internet is a local internet company based in the Washington, DC are, so I was happy and excited to see and hear about their new product.

Gratis Internet connects advertisers and consumers worldwide with innovative online marketing techniques. Since its founding in 2000, Gratis Internet has pioneered the incentive marketing industry.

When I arrived I was fortunate to get some time to chat with Gordon Peters, Vice President of SocialCash, for him to give me a little insight into their newest offering.  Gordon told me that SocialCash is a way for social application developers to monetize their applications.  One of the themes throughout the conference the last couple of days was social applications and monetization strategies.  The great thing about SocialCash is the ability to take that burden off the shoulders of the developers and let SocialCash take care of that.

SocialCash, which is Web-based and self-service, simplifies advertising and allows application developers to focus on what they do best, developing viral and engaging applications. With more than 70 percent of social network users residing outside of the U.S., SocialCash customers also benefit from Gratis Internet’s eight years of experience working with high-quality advertisers worldwide through its network.

Initially SocialCash will have two ad products, BannerCash and PointCash.  BannerCash is an ad network that delivers banner ads into social network apps and PointCash is a virtual currency engine allowing users to complete ad offers for points or coins.  A third product to round out the service will be added soon.

Gordon told me that SocialCash has been running in a private beta period with 15 partners and over 200 Facebook applications with very positive results.

We look forward to keeping an eye on this new venture and its impact on the social application advertising space as we move forward.

Recap: Day 2 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Well we have wrapped up day 2 of Graphing Social Patterns East 2008 and it was a huge success.  Dave McClure and the rest of the O’Reilly team should really be congratulated.  Thanks to all of them for putting on such a great conference, especially in our backyard here, DC.

HERE are my live notes from the day.

In any case, day 2 here was a great follow up with some more great content for us all, and the popcorn and snacks at the break were not so bad either The day started off with a couple of geat talks by Google and MySpace.

Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald gave a great talk about Google’s newest product, the Google App Engine.  It is their foray into the cloud computing space aiming at making the barriers for entry to developers very very low.  I have beena huge Amazon EC2 fan and am happy to see Google get into the mix.  Then Allen Hurff of MySpace followed up with a really good presentation of MySpace’s foray into building out their developer platform.  They have done a lot of work in a very short amount of time and really opened up to the community.

The next session was a panel from Facebook with Dave McClure at the moderator helm, and it was a great time.  He gave no slack and asked the tough questions to the panel.  Unfortunately there was not too much info spilled by the Facebook team.  They must be some sort of politicians or something.  When Dave asked how many companies Facebook has invested in from the Facebook Fund, Ben Ling answered, “somewhere between 2 and 10″ …..  ahh very specific, thanks for the details

Patrick from Google came back on with a small panel to chat about OpenSocial, Google, platform it teamed with Yahoo and MySpace to open up, consisting of RESTFul API calls and some javascript to give users across many platforms a better experience.

After lucnh we heard from a great panel on platforms, building it or buy it.  There was representatives from Mashery, Bebo, Friendster, and Salesforce.  Again the talk was about applications and platforms along with the security implementation.  I found Salesfroce.com’s approach interesting.  Since all of their app’s are installed by users on a pay per app basis, they only workd on creating their platform as a server (paas).

We then had an interesting panel on metrics and a number of companies who have cropped up in this area to help users and developers of these social applications good data.  According to the panel, Google Analytics are not built ot gather this type of data, wherewas their apps are from the API on up.

Nick O’Neill, local DC blogger and founder of Social Times, moderated a panel on the virality and “stickiness” of social apps.  The consensu was that due to some policies put in place on platforms like Facebook, virality seemed to have diminished somewhat.

The conference wrapped up with a couple of talks on monetizing those social apps and also a very important topic of data portability.  Head over to Inside Facebook for a great detailed wrap of each session.

Again, it was a great time.  I met some great people and saw some old friends.  We can only hope we are lucky enough to host this event next year.

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Recap: Day 1 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Day 1 of O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns is in the books and it was a great day with a lot of great content.

I live blogged the event HERE, so check it out.

A lot of the talk today revolved around widgets, it seems to be thehot topic of the day as we have seen a couple of funding rounds recently for the local Clearspring and also RockYou from out west.

Hooman Rafdar, CEO of Clearspring, gave a great talk on widgets.  He had a couple of interesting points but the one I took away most form it was

the only constant in all of this is change …

try new things FAST and use data.

Between his talk and another panel on widgets moderated by Allen Stern of CenterNetworks a key concept was to make sure that you take the time to develop a good widget strategy before diving into the deep end.

Another one of tha talks was by Adam Nash of LinkedIn.  He talked about LinkedIn’s stratey in buidling a business social network and their tring to make it all very relevant to the professional.

There was a lot of talk about the differences between Advertising and App-vertising, and how social applications have become a new way to advertise by combining content and the ad into one unit.

Frank Gruber moderated a panel on White Label Social Networks.  There was a good discussion on building out of these kind of instant on social networks and the tools that are the best to use.  There is a video of this talk HERE, so check it out.

We had a great look into the class taught by Dave McClure at Stanford on building Facebook apps and how succesful it was,  They have had over 20 million installs of some of the apps that were built out of the class.  Several companies have been formed and many of those students have no shortage of job offers.

And finally there was a great panel on “Need for Feeds” and how networks and users are using their news feeds.  I found the talk of making those feeds even more tailored to the user and how this will play out in the future extremely interesting and engaging.  It seems this is the next direction for many.

Off to Day 2 !

Note:

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Frank Gruber of www.somewhatfrank.com

Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns 2008

We are here at Graphing Social Patterns here in Crystal City VA and Dave McClure the conference organizer is giving the welcome speech !

Making some great points about what works and what does not.

Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns 2008

This week is quite the busy week for the local DC tech scene.  Tomorrow is the start of Graphing Social Patterns East in Crystal City.  It looks like it is going to be an awesome lineup and I am totally excited to be able to attend and cover the events for the local readers of the blog here.  One of the tools I really want to use to capture the events, besides a little video from the Flip Camera, is the new live blog platform I wrote about yesterday, Scribble Live.

Like I was saying, one of the cool things about Scribble Live is the ability to collaborate on that event with others.  With that said, I have created a live blog to use during the conference and would love for others to join me in making it a great capture from many angles of the events.

If anyone out there would like to add to the live blog, simply go here and add your observations:

Graphing Social Patterns East Live Blog

Also, you can email text and pictures to the live blog as well.  Simply email them to this address and they will also show up in the live blog feed.

03CA5617-AE45-4DD9-A0B8-C0DDEC25EDD8@scribblelive.com

I think it will be great if some of you can collaborate so we can really create a rich and varied “living” document that others can enjoy and learn from the what is being presented that were not able to make it.

Look forward to seeing many of your updates !

UPDATE:  To simply follow the events go to this URL

http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Graphing_Social_Patterns_East_2008