I recently had a chance to connect with gWallet’s Gurbaksh “G” Chahal regarding gWallet’s new Brand Bar, which aims to better engage social gamers with brands. We discussed the current state of the industry, Facebook Credits, the history of the advertising game and what’s next for gWallet. Click below to listen.
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the chance to talk with Manu Rekhi, the Vice President of Marketing, Business and Corporate Development with Lolapps and a former Senior Product Manager with Google.  Socialtimes.com had recently covered the implementation of Lolapps’ Dante’s Inferno application and we wanted to get a bit more information on the development of the application, the social gaming industry in general and the next steps for Lolapps.  Click below to listen.
Read the rest of this entry »

This evening MySpace sent out a press release announcing that the company’s CEO, Owen Van Natta, is stepping down and will replaced by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn who will serve as co-Presidents. There are a number of interesting components of this news story. The most interesting is that we’ve been hearing rumors that Owen Van Natta was under strict orders to turn the company and if it wasn’t turned around within 6 months he was out. The other interesting tidbit is that Techcrunch recently published that Jason Hirschhorn was exiting the company.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Will O’Brien of TrialPay to discuss the company’s offering and the current state of offer-based advertising on the web. While there has been the argument that social applications don’t have effective monetization strategies, there’s no doubt that social games have already cracked the monetization nut and are bringing in significant revenue.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Murti Hussain, the President and Co-Founder of Peanut Labs about the company’s advertising strategy and the social advertising landscape in general. Peanut Labs helps publishers monetize their sites (largely game publishers) through survey offers from large brands. The company actually got started through their own gaming site which used peanuts as a form of virtual currency.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Lauren Bigelow, the General Manager of WeeWorld. Recently I’ve become increasingly interested in following the ways that virtual worlds are generating revenue as virtual worlds and social networks have become increasingly integrated. I’m also interested in them because I want to know how social networks and virtual worlds are making money since that’s a fairly important factor in running a business.

While Lauren wouldn’t talk about the specific amount that the company is generating she mentioned that they have relatively strong monthly growth which is great considering the current economic environment. As with most other virtual worlds, WeeWorld generates revenue through the sale of virtual goods as well as advertising.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Kevin Marks of Google about the current state of Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and the future of the social web. Friend Connect was initially seen as one of the methods for “out opening Facebook”. In other words Google was concerned about Facebook’s growing ownership of users’ identities on the web. While the initial steps were made for competitive purposes, OpenSocial has become part of a greater movement to simplify the models for sharing our social data around the web.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Playdom, formerly known as You Plus, announced their expansion from MySpace to Facebook. I took the opportunity to speak with them about their thoughts on the state of social gaming as well as the differences between building on the MySpace platform versus Facebook platform. One of the most interesting things about Playdom is that like other large social gaming networks, they have a large percentage of users returning on a daily basis.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I had the opportunity to interview Tim Schigel, the CEO of ShareThis, about the new ShareThis service they released today and what the future holds for the company. We had an interesting discussion about the future of sharing and how Facebook and Twitter are gaining traction at the expense of other “sharing distribution channels”.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night Meebo announced a slew of new partners for its white-label instant messaging service. The announcement also included statements that the company now has almost 73 million monthly users which is most definitely a bold statement. I took the opportunity to speak with Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo, about what these announcements mean for his company and what the future holds.

We discussed Meebo and potential integration with mobile platforms as well as how his product fits on the social web. Meebo offers a product which is nearly identical to Userplane and heavily resembles Facebook’s new chat client. I spoke with Seth about these similarities and what all of the recent chat services means for the future of chat on the web.

Check out our interview below to learn more about the future of Meebo and chat on the web!