Tomorrow, I will publish steps on how to make money with your Facebook app.

The company I work for has successfully monetized a few Facebook applications as a Beta trial and are ready to release the steps to the developer community.

One of the recent Facebook apps we have monetized is Chizzat.

Please check back here tomorrow for all the details or comment with any questions that you might have.

(you can only make money on the Facebook canvas page)

6/15 Update: We have given out ad code to a select number of developers today. If you want to be included please comment below. Expect a full write up either tonight or by tomorrow afternoon. Sorry for the delay.
Update: Here is text from the FAQs:

Can Facebook applications include ads?

We want to enable developers to build a business on their Facebook applications, so we’re giving developers the freedom to monetize their applications as they like. Developers can include advertising on their applications’ canvas pages, though no advertising will be allowed within the application boxes that appear within user profiles.

AOL added an easy to use video blogging feature to AOL Journals using Userplane’s Webrecorder product.

The Userplane Webrecorder enables bloggers to record posts via their webcam. The feature requires no special plugins and the webcam is instantly recognized. Possible use cases for bloggers include daily video blog recaps, blog announcements, or even full post video recordings.

How to Video Blog on AOL:

1. Setup an AOL Journals Account

• Go to AOL’s People Connection
• Click on the “Blogs” tab
• Click on “Create a Blog”
• Enter AOL screen name or sign up an account (free)

2. Create a Journal

• Select Journal/Blog type - Public or Private
• Enter a name a description for your Journal
• Select a category for you Journal (ex. Technology)
• Choose Simple or Custom setup (custom will allow you to the blog layout, colors, features and more)
• note: video blogging is available on both “simple” and “custom” journals

3. Create a video blog post

• Click on “Add Entry”
• Enter blog post “subject” (title)
• Click on “add video” or click camera icon
• Select “Record” on left side of video screen
• Allow camera detection

The Userplane Webrecorder application will appear once the camera is detected. Make sure to allow web cam connection. Once your camera is active use the simple recording function buttons to record, stop, play or cancel your video.

You can save a recording that you like by pressing “save” button located underneath “new recording (red)”. This will dock your recent video. Now you can “Add Video” or record another video to take the place of the original.

Once the blogger has successfully added the video a camera icon will appear in the blog post. To polish off the post text can be added before or after the video clip. The completed video blog post must be saved and then will be published.

Example Post - Click Here

How to video blog screencast:

Disclaimer: Ian Swanson works in business development for Userplane, an AOL Company

Last night, the instant messaging mashup company Meebo added videos to their chat. The new product, Meebo Rooms, allows users to create a room where visitors can embed video clips and chat live. Guests can add videos to the chat by inserting the video link in the chat text area. The videos can be viewed by all chat participants, but it is important to note that the viewing experience is not synced between users.

The public nature of the Meebo Rooms leads to high risk of spam. While Meebo might have the technology to omit profane text and ban users accordingly, I’m very curious how the company will combat video spam… Without chat moderators, Meebo Room visitors will be able to add potentially disturbing video clips to the viewing area (porn?). How will chat room video spam affect Meebo’s business relationships (branded Meebo Rooms)?

Meebo Room Features:

• Add videos from YouTube, Metacafe, etc. to chat room
• Videos do not sync between users
• No live webcam audio and video
• Invite friends via email, AIM, NSM, Google Talk or Meebo
• Limited to 80 live connections per chat room
• 15-30 second video ads
• Embed chat four different ways (sidebar, w/o media, full room, and custom size)
• Pop out chat room from Meebo browser

Keep reading to view the full Meebo video chat room.

Read the rest »

There has been quite a bit of talk surrounding OpenID in 2007 as many popular web companies have decided to use the login solution. OpenID is an open system that essentially allows you to log in to multiple accounts with the same ID.

Who is using OpenID?

Wordpress.com: Very popular hosted blogging platform
ProductWiki: Consumer reviews in a wiki format
Live Journal: Web journals, blogs and forums community
Vox: An easy to use blogging and social networking site by Six Apart
Cerado Haystack: Social networking platform for organizations
Zooomr: Share, search and store your photos
Wikipedia: The information super site

Others joining the OpenID revolution in 2007 include Microsoft, AOL (openid.aol.com/username), Yahoo and Digg… Yes, we thought we’d through Digg in there with the big guys (a small shout out)!

So how does OpenID work? Check out the tutorial video below. Simon Willison does a great job of demonstrating the service by setting up an account and logging into a website.

Video demos have been all the marketing rage for Web 2.0 companies over the past six months. LaunchTube has been showcasing these video web gems and can even create a video demo for your company (send us a message if interested).

Last Friday, YouTube utilized their own marketing machine by adding a video that summarized the 3/28 site updates. Updates to the YouTube site included the addition to feature groups and channels on the homepage, subscription to favorites, channel browse display, etc.

Does your company have a demo on YouTube? (Leave a Comment)

Founded by two web developers that have worked on Fortune 500 web applications, Workspace is an online dev enviroment to manage all your web-based projects. The company is currently in Beta (Sandbox release) and invitations are being sent out.

With a syntax highlighting editor built right in, it provides the ability to edit text, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, Java, Perl, SQL and other types of files directly on a remote server. Finding and managing those files is made easy with a cutting-edge file management utility embedded right in the app. With this utility, users can connect to, and manage the files on an arbitrary number of ftp sites simultaneously. Don’t have access to an ftp server? No problem — every account gets a bit of storage to play with on our servers. Utilizing the latest JavaScript techniques, Workspace can be used without any plugins at all!

Check out the video demo created by the Workspace team:

ZenZui, a Microsoft Research company, is trying to revolutionize the way consumers browse the web on their mobile device. The product has a very easy to use GUI that utilizes a “zoom” feature instead of traditional scrolling. In addition, ZenZui constantly caches and refreshes the content in the background for a faster and more enjoyable web experience.

The product will be available soon for free download and will only require the typical data plans from your wireless provider. I can’t wait wait to test it out on my Sprint EVDO phone. Make sure to check out the ZenZui website frequently to see if your phone if supported.

ZenZui created this teaser/demo video clip below…

I suggest listening to the podcast of of the ZenZui founder’s explaining the vision behind their product (download mp3).

Do you browse the web on a mobile device? What phone/browser do you use? (Leave a Comment)

Earlier this month, MojoPages launched their Alpha and changed their popular video series name to Mojo Rising. The series chronicles the launch of MojoPages - the web 2.0 version of the YellowPages. New episodes are posted to the MojoPages blog every Tuesday.

In my previous post on Mojo, I applauded them for their new age marketing tactics. MojoPages blog is creative and adds a personal view into the daily struggles and rewards of launching a startup. A corporate blog should not be dry and could use MojoPages as a great example of a blog that creates an exciting buzz. In addition, the team has completely embraced the blogosphere by allowing videos to be embedded on other sites, active participation in MyBlogLog and by acknowledging the marketing power of blogs within their video series (thanks!).

Just one question: Where is my Alpha launch invite?

Mojo Rising Episode 1

Episode Highlights

• Jon pitches business plan to SDSU MBA students and Angel investors
• What is the secret sauce in creating a web community?
• Operations Pie - a Bill and Paul relationship
• Angel Eyes - the “magic” of Jon Carder
• Frank Asaro planning the financial forecast
• Good Investment? GO GO GO!
• Episode Blog Post

Mojo Rising Episode 2

Episode Highlights

• Blog talk with Rodney Rumford - LaunchTube Featured!
• PR - capitalizing on high pre-launch Alexa ratings
• Web site financial algebra
• MojoTour - LaunchTube can create a 10 minute version!
• Episode Blog Post

Mojo Rising - Holiday Episode

This episode is an extension of MojoPages episode 2 (not to be confused with Mojo Rising) where John Assaraf interviews Jon Carder. The original video post can be found here.

In my younger days, I used to look forward to the latest issue of Punisher or X-men and was excited when I came across the Techcrunch review of ComicVine. The site is graphically designed very well and with vibrant colors that seem to come straight from a comic book. The comic content so far is top notch and is completely user generated (moderated by ComicVine staff). Traditional comic websites CBR and GCD have been around for years and are filled with content, but lack the excitement of ComicVine’s layout and features.

What does this site have to do with Tech 2.0? ComicVine has the make-up of a web 2.0 site: user generated content, social network, blogs, etc (could use some RSS though). This is social community/wiki that focuses extremely well on a niche market, comics.

Features

• Index of comic book characters, issues, photos and story arcs
• User generated content - Wiki Style
• Bookmarking - adding content to “favorites” list
• All content can be tagged for indexing and grouping
• Blogs and Forums for registered users
• My Vine - social network where users can add photos, email, create their own comic book identity and communicate with friends

Registered users have the power to create and edit comic book characters, teams, writers, story arcs, volumes, objects, concepts and locations. All categories or tags can be linked and grouped within, for example, a character’s profile.

The Wolverine page displays his orgin (James Howlett was born in the late 19th century….) along with graphical links to issues, powers and stats. Based on ComicVine stats, Wolverine has appeared in 1140 comics and boasts 11 powers. What is his best power? Healing. Currently, Wolverine is the #3 most popular character on ComicVine. Superman holds the top spot and is followed by Batman.

One of my favorite features of ComicVine is the voting system that helps rank comic book characters within many “power” categories. Utilizing the popular “HotOrNot” easy voting method, registered users can even rank who is the most “Attractive Female” comic character.

The team behind ComicVine has developed a great niche site. I expect more quality sites like this to pop up throughout 2007. With plenty of scripts available, the cost and time to put together a “Web 2.0″ niche site has increasingly become easier. ComicVine’s concept could be used for wrestling, trading cards or even Star Wars. The future looks bright for all our “nerdy hobbies”!

Yesterday, Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOM wrote that mojungle, mobile media sharing site, was for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $60k and the auction ends on December 14th. Can a company expect to achieve fair market value through an eBay auction?

I decided to scout around eBay to find other websites and businesses for sale. My goal was to discover what types of companies could sell and how much activity do the auctions get. My first search was to find “Websites & Businesses for Sale” with an emphasis on internet businesses. Not to my surprise, most of the results were turn-key adsense and adult content websites. I then refined my search by filtering out internet businesses that were listed for under $50k.

There were 2 pages of internet businesses that had a starting bid of 50k. None of these auctions had a single bid. In fact, most of the auctions were for domains names with a description that included a hyped up business plan meant to sucker the potential bidder.

A few of the auctions found in my search:
Turnkey Website sales, ebooks, software,scripts etc - Typical site auction
Microjets.com and VLJs.com - Domain names with hyped up sales pitch
PLASTICFENCE.COM - Domain name… Are they serious?

Does mojungle have a chance? Well, mojungle has a better chance of selling the company than most others on eBay because of media attention in popular blogs. Blogs like GigaOM have helped drive a considerable amount of traffic to the site and eBay listing. Aside for the recent GigaOM article, mojungle has been reviewed on Mashable, SmartMobs, eHub and MediaBistro. These positive reviews and general articles might entice a potential buyer.

In addition, the mojungle team has created short and fun video clips to promote the company through the popular site YouTube. The videos have been viewed over 200k times and boast some positive comments. This is a smart marketing concept that is being adopted by quite a few startups.

Use your mobile phone to begin recording your life. mojungle allows you to save and share your memories.

The company is a mobile media sharing site that is centered on taking photos/video from a wireless device and displaying the information in a flash widget. The widget can be added to a user’s website, blog or social networking page - MySpace. There are many companies out there that offer a similar service, but mojungle’s good reviews have been based on how easy the product is to use.

The directions, on the mojungle site, state to simply take a picture and send to now[at]mojungle[dot]com. Once the photo has been sent, the user will receive a text with a registration code. This code will then need to be sent to code[at]mojungle[dot]com to claim your pictures/video as your own.

I actually had a few problems with this process and was surprised considering the great reviews I read on Mashable. The mojungle site would not recognize or complete the registration process for my Sprint phone number. The photo that I sent to mojungle did appear on the site under “browse all photos”, but it was already registered to another user before I could claim it. I suspect the problem is that my cell number may have been registered by another user or issues with my wireless carrier/device.

Do you want to learn more about mojungle? I suggest checking out there eBAy listing and corporate blog. Selling the company through an auction could be difficult, but I might be wrong if popular blogs continue to drive traffic and spread the word. I look forward to seeing if the company is sold and using the service (if I can get it to work). Good luck mojungle.