Paying Bloggers For Online Reviews Can Fan Fame

Apogee Search

William Leake (left) and Brian Combs

Online-marketing company Apogee Search isn't a household name. Yet hundreds of bloggers from all over the world laud the company and its services.

"I just found the coolest site for search engine marketing," reads a post on a blog called Neptune Baby. "Apogee uses proven techniques to provide measurable results for your Web site...How cool!"

How did this happen? The 50-employee company pays bloggers -- most of whom it knows nothing about -- to write about Apogee, a practice known as pay-per-post or sponsored reviews.

Apogee executives knew they could never pour as much money into buying search keywords as big companies could. That's how some companies get noticed on the Web -- by offering search-engine companies the highest bid on keywords related to their business. Apogee decided to explore other, newer tactics, hitching a ride on the growing popularity of online communities, blogs and social networks to get people talking about its Web site.

Have a brilliant startup idea? TechStars is listening!

tech-buzz.net
Jan, 21, 2008

If you are a flat broke entrepreneur with a brilliant startup idea, you just cannot afford to miss this unique opportunity. TechStars, the famous startup fund/incubator, is currently accepting applications for its 2008 intake. Applications close March 31, 2008, that means you have exactly 71 days left to apply.

Remember what happened last Halloween when Condé Nast acquired YCombinator-funded Reddit. Like YCombinator, TechStars too helps in getting your idea off the ground. By taking up to ten companies each summer, TechStars fills the huge startup-funding gap.

Each selected company receives 15k U.S. $ in seed funding ($5k per founder, maximum $15k) and a chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists by the end of summer.

Delivering Web 2.0 User Interfaces Using AJAX

By any reckoning, the Internet and the World Wide Web have remade the way we do business. The ascendance of the Web-based enterprise has come to be seen as inevitable. But anyone who takes a hard look at the serious limitations of first-generation Web applications is likely to have a renewed sense of wonder at the spread of their adoption thus far. Users experimented with e-mail, instant messaging, and search engines and turned them into real communication, collaboration, and information-gathering tools. Those same business users endured their fitful interactions with static HTML pages and moved applications to the Web anyway because of the substantial savings promised by the shift.

Now their patience is about to be rewarded. Emerging from a decade of groundwork is Web 2.0, which offers dramatic gains in productivity for individual workers and whole enterprises. Web 2.0 applications are distributed collaborative tools available on-demand from any browser anywhere. And those tools are constructed to be at least as intuitive and easy-to-use as any application loaded on a desktop.