Qumana has been selected as one of the select IT companies in British Columbia on Rocket Builders ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list for 2007

Compiled by the Canadian-based firm Rocket Builders, the ‘2007 Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ named a small select group of  British Columbia technology companies gaining traction within the information technology trends that contribute to faster growth than the IT sector as a whole. These companies represent high-potential growth in revenue and profile and that are beginning to be of real interest to potential partners and venture capitalists. 

“Companies that make our annual ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list come from a variety of technology businesses and industry sectors across British Columbia, and Rocket Builders has a credible track record of identifying these emerging companies,” says Geoffrey Hansen, managing partner at Rocket Builders.  "Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list."

About the Ready to Rocket 25 and the Ones To Watch

Each year, based on analysis of trends that will drive growth in the information technology sector, Rocket Builders identifies twenty-five (25) private companies that are best positioned to capitalize on the trends for growth. This selection methodology has been an accurate predictor of growth with "Ready to Rocket" companies exceeding the industry growth rate. Also, many of these companies raise investment capital and each year many of the profiled "Ready to Rocket' companies are acquired. To be eligible for selection to the "Ready to Rocket 25" list, companies must be a nominated Canadian-Controlled Private Corporation, and have a commercialized product on the market that has customers and is generating ongoing revenue.

Additionally, Rocket Builders also identifies early-stage high-potential companies it places on its 'Ones To Watch' list

"Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list."
Visit: www.readytorocket.com

About Rocket Builders
Rocket Builders is a market strategy and consulting firm focused on helping technology companies to capitalize on market opportunities. Since 2000, we have been engaged in market research, market planning, business development initiatives, strategic selling, and product launches for over 100 organizations. As a service to the local community, each year Rocket Builders shares its insight on market trends to showcase the most promising information technology companies in British Columbia through its “Ready to Rocket” event.
Visit: www.rocketbuilders.com

Tags: Rocket Builders, Ready To Rocket, Ones To Watch

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The recent announcement that YouTube will share advertising revenues with members who contribute their work to YouTube is yet another marker is the steady march towards dissembling the structure and dynamics of the traditional broadcast media industry.

The other service cited in the article has been sharing revenue for a while, but is not the Web 2.0 darling status acquired by YouTube based on it's acquisition by  Google.

Qumana's business model has since the beginning been based on sharing advertising revenue with users who use the Q-Ads service to attach relevant advertising to their social media content.

The bulk of social media sharing (the 'social' in the term social media, tho' there's more to it than that) still happens on and in blogging networks, and IMO this is unlikely to change in the near future.

As advertising gets more and more relevant to niche markets, and gets easier to identify, pull and place into or alongside media-born work created by personal publishers, we believe that Qumana's value proposition will get stronger and stronger.

Via the Globe and Mail ...

Today's YouTube addict, tomorrow's Web tycoon?
SIMON AVERY

Joe Eigo, a martial arts expert in Toronto, used to pay hundreds of dollars a month for computer and hosting services to distribute his own acrobatic and martial arts videos on the Web, in the hope of raising his profile in the TV and film industry.

Today, not only is he able to distribute his content to millions of people at no cost using a popular online video-sharing site, he has also been paid nearly $26,000 (U.S.) by the site owner.

Welcome to the new world of user-generated content on the Internet. What some people consider quirky material at best, companies are increasingly starting to view as a valuable asset. So valuable, in fact, they're willing to pay for it.

Metacafe, a private firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has been paying thousands of dollars to participants for over a year.

Every video on Metacafe that is watched more than 20,000 times, and is rated 3 out of 5 or higher by viewers, starts earning the producer $5 for each subsequent 1,000 visitors.

Metacafe rates Mr. Eigo as its top earner. One of his clips has been viewed more than five million times and has helped him attract the attention of several producers and film companies, he said.

“It's an amazing opportunity for anyone who wants to produce their own material now. The Internet has become more popular than television,” he said.

Tags: Qumana, YouTube, Metacafe, online advertising, revenue sharing

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I'm a bit tardy on my blog browsing, so only tonight (24th) caught this item from yesterday (23rd) on TechCrunch about difficulties at Performancing.

We consider Performancing to be a competitor for both Qumana and Q-Ads, and we have noted in the past that they offer a fine blogging editor for Firefox and have or had a good concept for an advertising network.

Personally speaking, I hope things over at Performancing get sorted out .. they are or were helping with progress in this space.

TechCrunch is considering adding Performancing to the DeadPool.

Yesterday evening we wrote about the shuttering of the second of three services at Performancing, as well as CEO Nick Wilson’s recent departure.

Apparently Wilson, who says he still owns 35% of the business, isn’t happy about the closing of Performancing’s ad network. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have known it was happening. On his personal blog, he writes:

"I don’t know what the communication problem between Performancing management is, but there appears to have been some decision making without the benefit of having all the facts.

When I resigned from the company and passed the reigns to Chris, the situation needed a lot of work, but was OK - we had a couple of options on the table for moving forward including picking up talks with one prominent blog player re the aquisition of PFF, or ScribeFire as it’s now known.

I’ve emailed Chris and Patrick, though at the time I’ve no idea if Patrick will still be playing an active role as him and Bill, from Text Link Ads need to dump their shares in Performancing this year due to non-competes after their MediaWhizz aquisition.

Dont count Performancing out just yet."

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January 16, 2007 – Vancouver, B.C.:   Qumana Software Inc. (Qumana) is pleased to announce it has released a version of the Q-Ads tool for IE 7, Microsoft’s newest version of its flagship browser.  The new Q-Ads tool for IE 7 can be downloaded at the Qumana web site (http://www.qumana.com/qads)

The Q-Ads tool for IE 7 helps users who have upgraded to MS IE 7 choose and place text-based advertising into content that they have created.  It provides an easy-to-use and innovative way to add advertising to the content people are creating for the Web.

Q-Ads for IE 7 complements the existing versions of the Q-Ads tool, which work with IE 6 and with Firefox 1.0 and 2.0.  The Q-Ads program is designed for personal publishers who want to add advertising to content they create, and for social media and web properties who want to offer their users ways to create and share advertising-based revenue.

Qumana also offers the Q-Ads tool for MS LiveWriter and the leading Qumana offline blogging editor Qumana 3.0, designed specifically for bloggers and others who assemble and remix content from the Web.

Content attracts attention ... attention drives advertising.  Use Qumana’s Q-Ads to place effective text-based advertising directly into your content … like online direct mail advertising meeting your readers’ attention.

About Qumana

Qumana Software Inc. is an advertising and web services company that provides web properties and personal publishers with market-leading methods for delivering and adding advertising to online content. Qumana’s mission is to make blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers globally. Qumana is run by Internet industry veterans, hardcore bloggers, software purists, and world-class designers committed to keeping things simple.  For more information, visit http://www.qumana.com/

For more Info:   Fred Fabro - CEO and President, Qumana Software Inc.

Email: fred@qumana.com       Tel: 604.837.0400 

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Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid, arguably an important voice in marketing philosophy and practices in the blogospere, if not Web 2.0, points to Christoper Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto and accompanies it with a provocative cartoon.

THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER MANIFESTO

* I want to have a say.

* I don't want to do business with idiots.

* I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.

* I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.

* I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.

* I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)

* I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.

* I want to know your selling process.

* I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.

* I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.

* I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?

Tags: Gaping Void, social customer, transparency, wirearchy

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Can the Internet ever be controlled as governments might wish it to be ?

Blogging grows in China, despite obstacles.  I think I take issue with the headline ...  "Monster" ?  From whose perspective ?

Via the Globe and Mail

Beijing's censors unleash a monster
A farmer's son is using the blog to change Chinese web culture

The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.

"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."

Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.

"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."

Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.

Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.

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B.L. Ochmann has forecast some developments in the blogging arena.

At leat two of them are pertinent for users of Qumana, and those who may have heard of Qumana and Q-Ads but have yet to try the tools and service, or are wondering about why and how to integrate them into their work flows.

3. Blog advertising will become the hot ad medium of the year and ad agencies will screw up big-time as they learn the ropes.

Savvy advertisers have already learned that it is possible to have outrageously high click through and conversion rates through obscenely cheap and highly targeted blog advertising.

Bloggers won’t tolerate invasive, annoying, flashing, heavy-handed ads, and agencies will stumble as they try to understand the type of advertising that can beat any traditional medium, hands down, when properly executed. I have consistently achieved click thru rates as high as .857%, and averaging .268% with niche-focused blog ads.

People who read blogs are looking for specialized, high-touch information from experts in particular areas. The right ads directed to those niche audiences can work wonders.

4. Widgets in new Mac and PC operating systems will introduce millions to truly customizing their online experience.

The age of invasive advertising is over and companies will have an enormous branding experience if they provide/sponsor the information people need and want to see every day in widgets.

Essentially, widgets are a way to provide RSS feeds in a frame the user loads onto the page or site of their choice. They allow people to use stupidly named RSS feeds without understanding that they are transferring code.

By lightly branding widgets, companies that provide information consumers want to keep on their desktop or home page have the enormous opportunity to have their brand name in front of customers every day in a positive, almost subliminal way.

Tags: Qumana, Q-Ads, B.L. Ochmann, online advertising, blog advertising, marketing widgets

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Brilliant synthesis and summary of what we all know is going on ...

Random excerpt:

"Part 1: Protecting A sharing economy ..

Part 2 is something we've just begun; a new way to use metadata in the infrastructure to link the sharing and the commercial economies ... to produce the opportunity for people to live in a sort of a hybrid space ... where for the sharing economy their stuff is free, and if their creative work is to be used in a commercial space there's a simple way to clear and understand what the permissions are for that to work

For example .. MySpace, Gary NewVision artist .. what's really creative is the way he's begun to deploy his rights .."

It's a great presentation .. watch it !

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