SocialPaywall.com - Get paid for your Premium Content

What is SocialPaywall.com?

We all love social media, social networking, facebooking, myspacing, etc. We build followers and friends though sharing links, videos, coupon codes, and other electronic content. Up until now, only the social networking websites see any kind on financial benefit from all of your hard work. SocialPaywall.com is an online service that allows you to create that same content, publish it through your social networks, and  make money by selling subscriptions.

How does it work?

With SocialPaywall.com you can save your “Premium” links, coupon codes, video podcasts behind an electronic toll booth or paywall. Then you share a brief description and link to that content on all off your favorite social networking websites. Your friends and followers click the link and are directed to a page allowing them to pay to see your premium content.

Example SocialPaywall links

Here’s the Kicker

We’ve created a browser extension that allows your followers to view your Premium content directly in several of the most popular social websites. Namely twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr, and myspace. Once you have installed the extension you can subscribe & view content directly on the websites you frequent on a daily basis with no need to go to socialpaywall.com. This is the game changer. Imagine the ecommerce possibilities that are now open to you on several of the most popular websites on the Intenet today.

Example SocialPaywall Subscriptions

Viewing socialpaywall.com content directly in twitter.

We’re in Beta

We’re still pretty early in the beta, so be warned. Also take notice that the financial transactions are all simulated at the moment. We want you to play with service and explore it’s uses without the hesitation of real money changing hands. As we get closer to an official launch we will turn on the payment system. So for now spend all of the “fake” money you want.

So Sign Up and Have Fun

To get started, go to http://www.socialpaywall.com. Create an account with your Google ID. Create some “Premium Content” by sharing your favorite recipe, selling a coupon code, publish a youtube video. Then share your content through your social networks. To see some examples follow us on twitter (@socialpaywall).

A big thank you goes out to Kynetx. They have a great technology platform that we have used to let  you to view SocialPaywall content directly on your favorite social networking websites. So sign up at socialpaywall.com and install our browser extension.

Update:
Here is an example of SocialPaywall.com in action.

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As many of you know, I recently spent 2 weeks in Peru and Ecuador seeing the sites and working on content for our new travel site,

Ever since I saw my first GPS I’ve had an strange desire to go to geographically significant places. Last year we took a road trip to Bad Water, Nevada in Death Valley National Park which is the lowest place in the western hemisphere at -282 feet below sea level. This year we went to the equator near Quito, Ecuador.

First thing I found is that their are two "equator places" in Ecuador. The first is Ciudad Mitad Del Mundo or Middle of the World City. This is the bigger and more commercial place to see the Equator. This traditional site was based on work of 2 french geographers during the 1700s .  Interestingly enough, this is not the true location of the equator. It’s actually 240 meters to the north at what is called the Intiñan Solar Museum.

  The Intiñan Solar Museum is billed as the actual equator based on measurements taken by military GPS. This fun little museum has some fun equator experiments and Incan cultural exhibits. 

They have a number of different sun dials which show you how the sun spends half of the year in the northern sky and the other half in the southern sky. No trip to the equator would be complete without trying to balance an egg on the head of a nail. Which I have to admit was pretty easy.

One of the most mind bending demonstrations was of the Coriolis effect. This is the force that supposedly causes drains to flow in opposite directions depending if your in the northern or southern hemisphere. To demonstrate this behavior our guide took a mobile sink filled with water, pulled the plug, and tossed in some leaves to show the direction the drain was flowing. He did this 3 times: once on the equator (no drain rotation), once on the South side (clockwise), and finally once on the North side (counter-clockwise). Some say it’s a trick. Here’s the video for you to decide.

One thing was bothering me at both of these sites. My Magellan Explorist 600 GPS wasn’t reading all zeros for Latitude. So I started walking north, through the Intiñan Solar Museum  grounds, out through the parking lot, and finally out on to a busy road. And wouldn’t you know it, right on the far white line the counter hit zero. So dodging big trunks and heavy traffic, I got my picture to prove that I had been  to the Equator!

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One of the most interesting things we saw was the use of solar panel technology throughout both countries. One such example was on the Eros floating Islands on Lake Titicaca near Puno, Peru. For those of you not familiar with the Eros Islands, it’s an amazing collection of 70+ floating islands built entirely out of tora reeds. The early inhabitants used these naturally growing reeds to build floating platforms to escape persecution from the Incas and early Spanish colonizers. 

We stopped at the Island of Apu Inti which some of you might recognize from Elder Rasbands recent talk. This little island, that is home to a handful of families, sits in about 55 feet of water and is 7-8 feet thick. Most life on these islands centers around tourism, with the natives showing the traditional tasks of life, the uses of the tora reed, how the islands are built, and dressing their guests up in native costumes.

Not being one who likes to dress up and dance, I quickly grabbed the nearest native and with my broken Spanish asked to see his solar setup.  The 53 watt solar panel, made by Condumex,  feed through a charging unit in to a water proof 12 volt car battery. He also had a circuit breaker / distribution unit that powered a compact fluorescent light bulb, his TV & Stereo (so much for be true "natives"), and his neighbors house.

I asked how long he had been running this setup. He told me that the President of Peru had given the solar panels to the people of the Eros islands 6 years ago. Apparently they had been using candles and had trouble with their homes and islands burning down. Go figure. No doubt the gift was an attempt to help keep the tourist trade going.

The Eros Islands were not the only places we saw solar panels.  We found them all over Peru and Ecuador and on the islands of Amantani and Taquille. Look for pictures of these wonderful islands on our MunchkinTravel.com  website in the coming weeks.

I think the wide spread adoption of solar is directly related to the lack of quality power infrastructure. In many ways, countries with emerging markets are perfectly positioned to leap frog the US in the coming green technology revolution because they don’t have existing infrastructure that is still trying to pay for itself. It’s true that  technology is often driven by the underlying business model. It’s also true that disruptive next generation technology is also held back by existing entrenched infrastructure and it’s associated economic model.

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So, I thought I would cover The Big Business & Technology Expo at the McKay Events Center on the campus of the soon to be Utah Valley University. Being armed with my camera and a couple of extra free tickets (explained later), I was off for my conference experience.

After seeing the big press coverage and the expo’s PR machine at work I knew I needed to show up early.

Parking was crazy, even at  11:10am on opening day, just 10 minutes after the show opening. These people were so excited to get here, they stole cars from a local dealership and had to park on the grass just to get a close parking spot.

The show floor didn’t disappoint. It seems like it is exactly the same size as in years past. Among the many marketing companies, banks, and promotional item salesmen, the big surprise was how many people were playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero in their booths. There is nothing like a good guitar riff that screams "We should be your business partner."

The highlight of the expo is the free lunch from Bajios (Fresh Mex), Goodwood BBQ (BBQ at it’s best), or Rumbi Island Grill (Hawaiian goodness). Your entrance ticket is also your meal ticket. Thus, the best tip for those of you going to the Big Business Expo: Take extra tickets. That way you can get multiple meals (which are currently running small on portion size.)

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To be fair, he hasn’t had that much experience with Ethernet, 10-base-T, CATV, or the like. He was able to run all of the cabling himself. He followed the instructions on modular wall jacks. He had picked a wiring scheme (T568A) and was consistent. The problem was getting connectivity. There was none.

We were able to isolate the problem to one section of cabling and the connectors on each end. We verified the right order of the colored wire pairs on each end of the connection. But still no luck.

We came to the conclusion that it had to be one of the follow problems:

1. He had miss labeled the some/all of the 15 different cables.
2. The cable had been cut or damaged during the dry wall installation.
3. The ends were incorrectly wired despite following the diagrams.

This is the point when a good cable tester is an invaluable tool. Luckily I had suggested that he pick up a LinkMaster – Network testing device from IDEAL.

This little tester is great. It was able to quickly show us the problem with one of the connections. Despite following the wiring diagrams exactly, the tester turned us onto a problem that the manufacturers connector wiring diagram was printed incorrectly. It showed the connector upside down, from the text. A quick fix on that end of the cable solved everything. It’s a good thing we had the LinkMaster CATV/10-base-T tester.

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Original Article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196900575

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FEMA already have 2 of these $500,000 units and the military is looking at sending them to Iraq. I’d love a personal/family size unit if they were priced in the $200-$400 range.

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http://news.com.com/1606-12994_3-6150150.html?tag=ne.video.6150150 

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What do you get when you combine the human intelligence behind Amazon’s MTurk and Google’s clean and accurate approach to web searching: ChaCha.com

For a search engine ChaCha.com provides a clean interface and good results. But what is interesting is the human intelligence that’s injected into the equation. Can’t find what you need with other search engines? ChaCha.com offers the option to search with a “guide”, (someone trained in all things search.) This human factor is interesting and much more interactive when you can chat with someone to explain exactly what your looking for.

Unfortunately when I asked my guide for help finding a store in Salt Lake City, Utah that sells racellete cheese, I got back the digital equivalent of a blank stare and then she promptly ended the chat. So much for the human interface.

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I just stumbled upon an interesting consumer voice mail business called GotVoice. They offer a free service to have your home of cell phone voice mail sent to your email in the form of an mp3 file.

I had this years ago at Echopass called unified messaging. We had voice mail and fax all sent to your email inbox. Very convenient. Minus the fax component (which you can get at PremiereWebPages.com by the way), this service is missing the ability to read back your email through your phone via text to speech.

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Check out this 1″x5″ PC from Gumstix. It comes with 64MB of RAM, 16MB Flash, Compact Flash, and an Ethernet port. Add a wareable display from Microvision and a halfkeyboard from Matias and you can take your office with you.

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Bruce Fryer with a new startup Digisense brought up the Amazon S3 web service is being used by JungleDisk.com to provide super low cost online backup.

An interesting part of the discussion turned toward how to improve the agility of an organization. Scott Lemon brought up the idea that bi-annual layouts encourages healthly innovation. Phil mentioned that sometimes you need to cut of the head of the organization. And the way to do that is to create a separate organization and have it compete with the old one. The history of HP and Target are good examples of this.

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Thanks to Amanda Congdon @ Rocketboom via Phil Windley’s Technometira for the lead.

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First off, Nathan Conger from Novell showed us some of the latest features of the SUSE Enterprise Linux desktop. I must admit that it’s been a while since I’ve played with Linux desktops, but this latest version (available at openSUSE.org) looked really good. With multiple desktops on a rotating cube and the recent enhancements to the OpenOffice, I can start to see Linux as a corporate desktop replacement for some users. Especially if they spend most of their time in email, on the web, and using MS Office.

Another interesting item was a presentation on WeRelate.org. A non profit geneaology search engine that uses a user contributed wiki to fine tune / direct the search engine’s behavior. This site is unique in it’s mashup of a vertical search engine driven by an integrated web 2.0 user community. Another interesting twist is the adoption of community controlled related words / terms to make sure users semantically find what their keyword search is looking for.

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I found it particularly interesting to see the characteristics of what Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Company is currently investing in.

Opportunities

• White space–not open source ERP
• Low effort improvement–install software faster, for example
• Free now, pay later–trust that the customer will see value
• Individual value–take the mindset of individual in the enterprise

Challenges

• Evaluation cycle–long bureaucratic
• Integration–a integrated platform
• Installability–hours not years
• Value creation–immediate and apparent
• Business model–customer centric
• Renewal

He described the three characteristics of enterprise software companies as follows:

Low resistance
Clear value to user
Immediate value
Short decision cycle

TCO (viral)
Low cost barrier to adoption–get the value and pay as delivered
Encourages viral spread

Intallability (viral)
Easy to install and use
Increased installation increases personal value
Viral effect

He gave iPod, Razor or Palm Pilot as examples of how a viral effect can take over.

The key themes, buttressed by cheaper and cheaper broadband, improved storage, etc.,  for enterprise software going forward include: 

Collaboration
Virtualization
Convergence
On demand
Contextual search
Anytime, anywhere
Anonymous connection
Visualized search

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Let me introduce Josh Coates and his company Mozy.com. Mozy offers 2GB of free online storage to back up all of your critical data. (They also offer more space at a very reasonable prices.) After small download, you can schedule automatic backups and rest assured that your data is safely encrypted in their datacenter.

I’ve worked out a special deal for my InfoTech readers. By clicking the following link you can get an extra 256MB of storage absolutely free.

Check it out at: Mozy.com

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One other interesting item here is the use of natural language processing to create new calendar items. Type in the phrase “Lunch today at 11:30″ and it automatically creates an appointment for 11:30am titled lunch. This is a great example for other developers to follow: Use the context of the users request to extrapolate the actions they want to perform.

http://calendar.google.com

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