StreetFight: Hyperlocal Biz News

An interesting blog about local SMBs. Here is one entry about thoughts on self-service ad platforms:

Over the past decade, self-serve advertising platforms have been seen as a potential lynchpin for creating successful hyperlocal business models —potentially bringing down the cost of merchant acquisition and management to the point where serious profit can be made by aggregating smaller-sized SMB ad insertions. But self-serve is easier proposed than done. And many companies have found that while their self-serve platform works just fine, many small business owners require the kind of high-touch hand-holding that only a real-life salesperson can provide.

MyAds: Self-Serve Ad Platform

Self-service advertising platform for the Rubicon Project.

Summary from Programmable Web:

The MyAds API allows users to develop applications that create and manage their MyAds advertising campaigns. Through the API users can gain access to campaigns, accounts, performance and more.MyAds is a self service ad platform that lets users build and customize ads to reach new customers. The API uses SOAP protocol and responses are formatted in XML.

The Rubicon Project

In contrast to a small company, if you are a premium publisher or large company wanting to explore what ad revenue you could be making and use the right technology to sell and trade your advertising space, then look no further than The Rubicon Project. In their own words, here is a summary:

The Rubicon Project is the leading technology company automating the buying and selling of advertising globally. REVV, the industry's largest independent technology platform is used by more than 500 of the world's premium publishers to transact with more than 100,000 advertisers across a massive marketplace that powers more than 180 billion ad trades per month.

ShinyAds: Self-Serve Ad Platform

White-label, self-server ad platform for smaller advertisers and publishers.

If you are a small company and want to offer your customers a nice interface for them to place an ad on your app/website, ShinyAds.com may be able to help. From a developer's perspective, here is a summary of what can be done:

The REST based Shiny Ads API allows developers to integate operations into their own applications. Shiny Ads provides a self-serve advertising platform that allows publishers to control the ad purchase process by directly offering an ad purchase system to their advertisers. With the API, online publishers can manage their self-serve advertising offering as well as be notified of events such as new orders. Responses are formatted in either XML or JSON. Full documentation is not publicly available.

GetStartUpTools Dot Com

A new convergence of startups and Internet companies has come together to provide other early-stage companies with the tools required to get up and running quickly, and most importantly, cheaply. It's sort of like a Humble Indie Bundle, except instead of gaming,GetStartupTools.com offers software from Wave, Box, MailChimp, Zendesk, Uberflip and General Assembly that most brand new internet companies would need or at least appreciate.

GetStartupTools.com

AllJoyn Is My Personal Cloud

Imagine walking into a new room and, like Harry Potter, being able to control all the devices in there with a few gestures. But (because you are a Muggle) instead of a wand, you use your smartphone. Developed by Qualcomm, AllJoynis an open source peer-to-peer software designed to give manufacturers and developers the framework to seamlessly connect a wide range of devices, appliances and mobile apps.

TC review

AllJoyn.org

Fade In Images

Cool javascript trick used by Pinterest for fading in images after they finish loading. This one relies on using Embed.ly

http://embed.ly/docs/tutorials/background

Social Network Data Heaven

If you have social network data anywhere, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you want to archive it and search it, then ThinkUp.com is the way to go.

Here is a snippet that better explains it:

ThinkUp, the social media management tool that matters most, hits version 1.0 today. It lets you store all your social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database you control and search, sort and analyze it. If you have a Web server that can run a PHP application, you can take control of your social network data. Ever wanted to search for a tweet more than a couple days old? Don't bother with Twitter search. ThinkUp is the only way.

ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.

CDN For ALL Your Stuff

Regardless, CSS, Javascript, and so on, you can probably find a reference at this Content Delivery Network: http://cdnjs.com/

LESS Compilers

So if you are using LESS to code your CSS, you must know about these compilers:

For Windows: http://wearekiss.com/simpless

For Mac: http://incident57.com/less/

You can also reference the javascript less.js file in your code from a CDN like: http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/less.js/1.3.3/less.min.js

Best 3D Canvas Javascript Library

Threejs is the best library I've seen for drawing 3D objects within the HTML5 Canvas element. The examples shown at http://threejs.org/ are amazing. There's a very nice intro to Three.js at https://learnable.com. You can even make games with it.

FontSquirrel Fonts & Converter

If you ever need to look for monospaced fonts and others, look at FontSquirrel.com

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/style/Monospaced

If you ever need to convert any font file to another, for example ttf to eot, woff, or svg go to

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

Best Wholesale SMS Provider

The best and most affordable SMS provider I have ever seen. Nexmo. International reach. All inbound SMS are free. Outbound SMS are 0.0071 USD in USA.

What's more impressive is that with their API hitting your server, you can have as many and unique SMS SHORTCODES as you want. They are also integrated into AppFog so that is very cool.

MIT App Inventor

There's a new generation of mobile app programmers and they are using the MIT App Inventor. Here is a story about all this:

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/02/this-is-what-the-next-generation-of-programmers-looks-like

CashFly: Shortens Links and Pays You

CashFly.com wants to pay for using their service to shorten URLs. Anytime you share a link and someone clicks it, you get paid. It's like a Bit.ly service that pays you.

WSJ review

Fabric Printing

SpoonFlower.com offers custom printing on fabrics. Your designs on fabric.

TC review

Niice: An Even Nicer Design Search Engine

Niice.co is yet an even better search engine for finding great design stuff. For example, I want to find "pink" stuff.

TheNextWeb review

Psddd: Dribbble Has It

You can find that freebie design you are looking for at Dribbble.com. Trouble is it is buried somewhere there and Dribbble doesn't have the search tools to find it. So here comes Psddd.co to help.

TheNextWeb review

An API for Email Marketing

Who would have thought that email marketing services needed an API for developers to use in integrating a great email marketing service into any website, whether small or large? Sendicate is introducing such an API and their pricing is very affordable. I wonder what interesting email marketing campaigns we'll soon see showing up in our in-boxes. 

TC Review

Software-based Networking

Forget about investing millions of dollars on building out your big network for that next big idea. Now you can use Pertino to build out your network with little to no hardware. The entire network runs in the cloud. So what's your next big idea that needs that great big network?

TC Review