Tag Archives: web

Seminar on OpenSocial presented by Google – 20 July

Events,

(This information was sent in by PuneTech reader Shardul Mohite)

CSI Pune presents
What: Seminar on Google’s OpenSocial platform
When: 6:30pm to 8:30pm, Friday 20th June, 2008
Where: Persistent Systems, “Bhageerath”, SB Road
Who can attend: Free for CSI members, Rs. 100 for others. Registration will be at the venue

Details:

Writing Apps for Orkut and Other OpenSocial Containers

The web is better when it’s social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Overview of the talk

  • What is OpenSocial?
  • OpenSocial current status
  • Building an OpenSocial Application
  • OpenSocial container
  • What is next for OpenSocial?
  • Where to find the information about OpenSocial?

About the speakers

Rajdeep Dua

Rajdeep is with Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial Advocacy. He has around 10 years of experience in Middleware, Web Services and Integration space. Before joining Google he was leading development effort for CSF: Connected Services Framework Initiative in Microsoft India. He has also contributed to JBoss Open source development in the Past.

Rajdeep holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow, India.

Rohit Ghatol

Rohit is part of Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial Advocacy and support. He carries around 6 years of experience in Java Enterprise and Web 2.0 technologies space. Before joining Google he was a Project Manager with a firm in Pune working exclusively on Ajax Technogoly.

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PubMatic Launches Default Optimization Service to Recapture $1 Billion in Lost Advertising Revenue

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A large number of websites rely on advertising as their primary source of income. Typically the ads are served by third party ad networks (for example Google’s adsense). When an ad network is unable to find an appropriate ad for a specific page being served to a specific reader, they put in default or public service ads (PSAs). This is not good because the website makes no money from PSAs.

Ad optimization service Pubmatic, says that more than half the ads that get shown at an average website are PSAs:

Over the past several months we’ve studied just how severely default ads are affect our publishers and the numbers are jaw dropping. We found that ad networks defaulted 56% of the time on average and as much as 87% of the time. We also found that that the traditional static daisy chain of ad networks may be effective at reducing blank ads but is highly ineffective at maximizing a publisher’s revenue. Between 20% and 30% of publishers’ ad inventory is going to waste.

(Source.)

This is of course terrible, if true.

Now Pubmatic has just launched the default optimization service that automates the process of contacting other ad networks whenever the ad being served by the primary network is a PSA

PubMatic’s default optimization service automates the reselling process, allowing publishers to instantly redirect unsold ad inventory back to PubMatic, which fills that inventory with the highest paying ad impression every time. PubMatic’s new service is an automated solution for the billion-dollar loss that plagues the industry.

For more details, see the press release.
Related articles:
Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads
PubMatic releases AdPrice Index: Sensex for Online Ads
See also:  The PuneTech wiki profile of Pubmatic , and Mukul Kumar, head of engineering at Pubmatic (based in Pune).

Monkiri adds Blogger/WordPress support – becomes more useful

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When Pune-based social web-clipping service Monkiri had launched a couple of weeks ago, I had complained that it’s utility is very limited because it does not allow posting the clips to the user’s personal blog. They have moved quickly, and fixed the problem. They now support Blogger and WordPress blogs. That should certainly increase its adoption rate.

See also: SocialMedian, a personalized news recommendation service, whose development is being done in Pune. There are some similarities with Monkiri (i.e. the social bookmarking aspect), but significant differences too (i.e. the personalized recommendation part). The other big difference is that SocialMedian has a world-wide focus, whereas Monkiri appears to have an India-only focus.

Company Profile: Monkiri – Webpage clipping service

Overviews, ,

Pune-based Monkiri is a browser plugin (IE & FF) that enables a web user clip portions of a webpage, comment on it, and post it to a blog hosted on Monkiri.

Literally Monkiri means the Japanese art of paper cutting. Monkiri lets one read and write blogs about any item published on a website. At this time, this facility can only be used to post to a blog hosted on Monkiri.

[edit] Features

With the help of the Monkiri button a user can snap required portion of the item on the webpage and blog it. The user can then give a comprehensive review of the same and add on his comments. The ‘View Entries’ feature from Monkiri menu enables other interested users to visit the blogged item and comment on the same. In this way everyone visiting that page can review the comments giving one a potentially large audience. Over a period of time users can build up an online journal of articles of interest. In other words, Monkiri makes blogging and sharing a simple affair.

[edit] Links

[edit] Articles

Final Thoughts

Monkiri is entering a very crowded space which has had established players for many years. <s>Also, restricting users to only post the clippings on Monkiri hosted blogs (as opposed to the users’ own blogs) is a serious limitation</s> (Update: Monkiri now supports posting to blogger/wordpress). In my mind, Monkiri joins FlockPod in the list of Pune-based companies that are doing something in the “commenting on other websites” space, but who need to figure out exactly what the value proposition is.

PubMatic releases AdPrice Index: Sensex for Online Ads

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Pune based online advertising optimization startup PubMatic has announced the availability of the PubMatic AdPrice Index – essentially a sort of an Sensex (or S&P 500 Index) for the online advertising world.

The AdPrice Index essentially reports on the average online advertising revenues earned by 3000 web publishers worldwide who are PubMatic’s customers. And it only counts the income earned through use of ad networks like Google’s Adsense, or Yahoo! Publisher Network. Specifically, it does not account for revenues earned through ad spots sold directly, or through other channels like TextLinkAds or Amazon’s Affiliate marketing program.

The index does give some breakup of the information – small niche websites earn more ($1.18 eCPM, i.e. earnings per 1000 pageviews) compared to large websites ($0.38 eCPM). However, variation across websites (based on the area, geography and other factors) is so large that I doubt that the actual numbers are directly useful to anybody. However, the main value I see is in the variation over time. PubMatic will release these numbers monthly, thus giving publishers a feel for the general state of the market – just like a stock market index for stocks.

I am sure PubMatic is also in a position to answer the question on most bloggers mind – “Is there an ad network for me that performs better than AdSense?” However, PubMatic is not releasing a breakup of earnings by ad network. Of course, they want you to not care about this question. Because, if PubMatic works as advertised, you wont need to answer that question – PubMatic will automatically only show the most lucrative ads and in fact, their claim is that by allowing PubMatic to broker the ads between different ad networks on a per impression basis, you will end up earning more than you could have earned through any single ad network.

Of course, this is not really guaranteed to work. The main problem is that information about earnings from individual ads is not directly available. Hence PubMatic has to guess. Here, it ends up using lots of complex mathematics (data-mining, machine learning, and I assume bayesian reasoning) to make those guesses. If all this guessing works in the case of your website, you will be richer (some websites report upto 90% increase in revenue), but it it does not, your revenues might actually drop a little bit. This can be especially true in the case of smaller websites in the early days of installing PubMatic – because its algorithms work better with more data. Smaller website + fewer days of operation = more chances of guessing wrong. The longer you keep PubMatic running, the better it should get. In theory.

See analysis of this news at TechCrunch and at Mashable.

Links:

Related news:

Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads

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eBay India), today announced an exclusive advertising relationship with Indian ad network Komli Media. Komli is now the exclusive seller of all of eBay India’s banner advertising inventory up to end March 2009.

In addition, eBay India will also use Komli’s Pubmatic ad optimization service to improve ad revenues. Pubmatic can estimate the revenues that a website can earn from any particular ad, and thus improve revenues by comparing ads from different ad networks (e.g. Google Adsense, Yaho! Publisher Network, or even Komli itself) and then only showing those ads that are likely to generate the most revenue. This service (which is available free of cost to any web publisher) will now get used on eBay India’s pages.

The Pubmatic service is developed in Komli’s engineering center in Pune.