He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.

HootSuite describes itself as the professional Twitter client. With Hootsuite you can: Monitor your personal brand Schedule Tweets Personalize your view Embed columns into other web sites Manage multiple accounts on various social networks Use Hootsuite with your iPhone Track statistics Manage Twitter lists Create Team workflows Watch this video tour of Hootsuite’s features:

I haven’t seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I’ve listened to and read reviews.  From what I’ve heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose.  Jeff Jarvis on a recent This Week in Google, however, pointed out that the Google app for the iPhone provides [...]

Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.

Who wouldn’t want to launch the next Twitter, Facebook or Google? Everyone in the tech business is asking the question, “What is the next big thing?” Clearly the most recent “big thing” has been the social networking boom. But what’s next?

This presentation by Kevin Rose of Digg.com provides us with fantastic and timely information for how to grow a site and cultivate the community of followers you gain. I have outlined the highlights of his presentation here for easy reference. For further discussion, visit the Tech Cast Talk Discussion Forum Post for this topic.

On TWist Episode 16 Jason talked about an idea to have fans of an artist pay a subscription fee to receive news and bonus mp3s from the artist.

I am a big fan of Pandora.com. Jason’s idea inspired me to start thinking about the possibilities for Pandora and a subscription model. On Pandora, a user creates a custom “radio station” that the user seeds with artists and songs and then trains by giving selections a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In addition, users are offered the ability to bookmark a song or even purchase a song.