Techcrunch writes:

It’s a real time research suite tracking RSS, deep web, static web changes and many other sources with multiform alerts, semantic analysis, extensive domain knowledge concerning financial markets and high profile VC backing.
...
Monitor110 gathers information from 40 million sources of various types (100 million by the end of next year they say), ranked by financial market knowledge through a proprietary algorithm that takes 50 factors into account - inbound links being just one reputation metric. Users can chose between top sources preselected for their market sector and subscribe to sources of their own. Static sites can be monitored for changes with good granularity. Premium subscription and other deep web sources, blogs, forums, news and regulatory filings are among the sources included. The end results will be delivered through the company’s RSS reader with email, IM and SMS alerts as appropriate.

[via News.com] Metropolis writes:

Mixi is Japan’s biggest cybercraze. A community portal like the US’s MySpace and Korea’s Cyworld, the two-and-a-half-year old site has quintupled its user base in the past year and now ranks third in page views nationwide, trailing behind Yahoo! Japan and Rakuten, but beating out the massive online bulletin 2ch.net.

Mixi’s 5 million-strong user base comes nowhere near the 54 million unique users of MySpace or the 18 million of Cyworld, which amounts to more than a third of the population of South Korea. But a decade ago, the concept of a public forum where people shared ideas was virtually unthinkable in Japan. Today, networking sites are creating a new dimension of social interaction in Japan, bringing us in step with the netizens of the US and Korea. And, like most other cultural trends that sweep the land, it’s happening in a uniquely Japanese way: it’s heavily mobile-based, it’s privacy-oriented, and it’s happening concurrently on both a mainstream and niche market level.

Ajit Jaokar writes:

Movietally is a website for indexing, tagging, and sharing movies (note – sharing involves sharing recommendations not ‘movies’ themselves i.e. its not napster like).

In addition to tagging movies, users can choose whether they recommend the movie or not. From these questions, the collaboration effort of movietally emerges. Different tag clouds are generated, some of which display the most popular tags, a user's most popular tags, movietally's most popular tags, movietally's most popular movies, movietally's most recommended movies, and many other types.

In addition, movietally will automatically recommend movies to a specific user with a
matching algorithm involving numerous factors including the user's recommended movies, the user's tags, other user's recommended movies, and other user's tags.

Ajit Jaokar quotes Tomi Ahonen from a recent forum: "The most insightful presentation I think was that of Peter Miles the CEO of university TV broadcaster SubTV here in the UK. Peter was amazing and I can't do justice to all he said. So just a bit of a highlight - in the last three years the university student population mobile phone penetration went from about 85% to 99%. When they enter university they are 80% prepaid, and when they leave they are 80% postpaid. While all have access to online internet of course - and 90% access the web daily (51% access a social networking site at least once per week, wow) - very importantly the university age student is both online and offline. Their lifeline is the mobile phone. 74% say they "would lose their mind" if they lost their phone. Not because of a loss of contact info and stored messages etc. But because they would be out of contact. (reference the Ampd stuff above). As most don't have a fixed landline connection, the phone is the ONLY way to contact them. E-mail and IM instant messenger is not an option. You reach someone via the mobile phone - but you can interact with them with any of a wide range of communication tools from online gaming to myspace to skype etc."

Paul Kedrosky writes: "Too many startups (and not-so-startups) struggle describing what they do, why they're different, and why they'll win. Today I ran across this useful template for helping in that process."

Part 1: What We Do

* For [insert customer company/department/type here]
* Who want to [insert what prospective customers want to fix/improve here]
* Our product is [insert how your technology helps the people in line 1 do line 2]

Part 2: Why We’ll Win

* Unlike [insert competitors here, whether direct or indirect]
* Our product [insert customer- and competitor-relevant points of differentiation here]
* As supported by [insert technology that underlies this differentiation here]
* And protected by [insert protectable IP, unique relationships, etc.]

People with mobiles can be content creators and consumers. 'Networked Journalism' is how Jeff Jarvis puts it:

“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources. After the story is published — online, in print, wherever — the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news.

Great thought goes into the packaging of a product, but one thing is put on every package that brands have never been able to use before, until now. The barcode. Its universal, can be scanned/typed, doesn’t take up any more room on the product to market, and can now provide a direct connection w/ the Internet…a Physical World Hyperlink.

Brands have the opportunity to create their own “soft innovation” by turning on their barcodes. By turning on the barcode, you have created a physical world hyperlink. A hyperlink offers a direct connection to the wherever the brand owner wants you to go. Leverage the existing product package and turn it into a portable website.

Brand manager creates the ad that makes a consumer click/type a barcode (already existing) and creates an innovative marketing tool.
What brands or brand manager will be the first to start marketing this tool? Do brands even know they have this tool?

The killer app for Mobile Advertising will be a portal/platform that “turns on” those physical world hyperlinks.