The latest Tech.MN startup profile is on The AdSight. While the "green" spin is a novel addition, this is yet another Get Paid to Watch Ads startup. They've been tried before, and they don't work. Russel Buckley nails it: "The paying-people-to-view-ads model is the vampire of digital marketing."

(It's only slightly less obnoxious than the ( Read more... )

Minnesota was already the home of W3i and their "pay people to buy iPhone games" product (the discontinued "Apperang"). Now we have another entry in the "shortcuts to building a user community" field, Wahooly. This MN-based startup recruits users for other new startups, by offering equity to the users. Signing up (and blogging/tweeting/FBing ( Read more... )

Google's ad network seems highly influenced by my most recent searches, rather than using a predictive model of "you might also like". This got annoying again lately after I searched for a particular virtualization storage company and kept getting invitations to download their white paper appearing all over the place ( Read more... )

Benjamin Edelman reports that Sony's Crackle.com may have charged advertisers for invisible web ads. Crackle.com accepts money from advertisers, and buys traffic from external brokers or affiliates. Some of those external networks have displayed the crackle.com iframes in 1x1 windows, or used other techniques to hide the ads, while still ( Read more... )

If there is any company that should understand what sorts of books and music I am interested in buying, it is Amazon. Yet what do I find in my email this morning? "Amazon MP3: Download Pop Music Now." There is absolutely nothing to suggest that I would purchase an MP3 from Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani, or Norah Jones. And at least ( Read more... )

Project Wonderful is a new ad service used by a bunch of the webcomics I read. In brief, you place a bid--- for a particular page--- to have your ad displayed for the day. The highest bids get shown for 24 hours at the winning rates. The bidding page provides information about visitor stats etc ( Read more... )