Ajax Girl

TextMarks will announce a new product tomorrow that allows publishers to charge people to receive breaking news and other information via text messages. It’s available now under a new “monetize” tab on the home page of the site.

To use this, a publisher signs up for a TextMarks account and chooses a price to subscribers (either $4.99 or $9.99 per month). Readers subscribe to the alerts via a Flash widget that’s embedded on a website or by sending a text message to 41411 plus a unique keyword, confirm the subscription on their cell phone, and then receive the alerts. The service is currently only available to U.S. cell phone users , using Cingular, Verizon, Sprint or Alltel services. Publishers decide what news is important enough to send out as SMS alerts. Up to 100 alerts can be sent per month to subscribers.

This is an excellent idea and could be a good revenue generator for blogs and other websites where readers will pay for instant notification of breaking news. The only downside - huge service fees. Carrier and TextMark fees eat up around 2/3 of the revenue, so publishers will only receive $3.00 of a $9.00 monthly subscription. Most of the rest goes to the carriers, and Textmarks keeps 15%.

TextMarks offers other products as well, including group messaging and free one to many alerts. It is one startup in the increasingly saturated U.S. SMS market. Mozes is a direct competitor, and 3Jam, Twitter and others offer somewhat overlapping services. See Marshall Kirkpatrick’s recent overview of eight SMS services for more information.

We’re probably going to be testing this service out in the near future to see if some readers have an appetite for instant notification of breaking tech and startup news.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/92570246/

The company SimpleStar released a new version of its PhotoShow product Friday and brought the popular photo and video sharing service up to speed with a number of developments pioneered by early adopters you’re more likely to have read about here on TechCrunch.  The service now supports the social sharing and online categorization that’s typical of other media sharing services; the change is comparable to what Yahoo! Photos did last summer when it changed for a largely private service into a much more Flickr inspired phenomenon. Photoshow combines sharing online with a desktop application for managing your media.

The most notable thing about SimpleStar, though, is the company’s incredible acumen in business development.    The company reports an amazing 20,000 new installations of its desktop software every day, thanks to partnerships with companies like Comcast, Walgreen’s and Wolf Camera.  SimpleStar received $6 million in funding from Venrock a year and a half ago.

There’s a certain flavor to PhotoShow, consisting of the product’s price point ($40), Windows-only desktop application, being in bed with big cable companies and ISPs and the photos of software in a cardboard box all over its website despite being available primarily by download.  That particular flavor makes me want to turn my snobbish Web 2.0 nose up at the company - but the fact of the matter is, they know how do get the job done.  

PhotoShow monetizes the initial product, an inexplicable upgrade for $20 that apparently consists of a number of graphic themes for your photos (”Kids, Love and Patriotic Theme Packs” etc.), DVDs of your media and anything else it can think to charge users for.  

SimpleStar says its PhotoShow service appeals not to early adopters but the the last 2/3 of the adoption curve.  It appears to be successful so far in reaching out to that market; though Alexa does indicate that the humble Photoblog.com gets 4 times as much traffic as PhotoShow.com - that’s probably less relevant because of PhotoShow’s reliance on desktop software.  

I personally find the service patronizing and obnoxious, but perhaps that says more about me than it does PhotoShow.  There’s no doubt that the company deserves recognition for its large partnerships and decision to add more social features to the service with this newest upgrade.  It may be a prime example of the strategy many people recommend - focus on making money, let the early adopters take the biggest risks and implement what sticks with the market later.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/92550909/