London Archive

Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.

The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.

The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.

Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.

Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

Musician ecommerce widget service TheBizmo has announced their public U.S. launch today. Previously TheBizmo has been operating in private beta here in the U.S. and in full operations mode in the U.K.

TheBizmo has a NYC presence as well – David Hazan heads up their U.S. operations. You should see TheBizmo around NYC this summer as they are sponsoring a number of music conferences.

TheBizmo is described as offering, “a new embeddable e-commerce widget that enables artists to sell MP3s, videos, merchandise and more, straight to fans, from any social networking page, website, or blog.”  The service is free to setup and both the musician and TheBizmo share in the revenues. The musician earns the following:

• Music – 70% of retail
• Tickets – 100% of the face value of all tickets
• T-shirts – musician decides on the share
• All other offerings (ringtones, e-books, sheet music, etc.) - 70% of retail

After the musician creates their store, they can push it to Facebook, Ning, MySpace and other social networks. And since it’s a widget, it can be embedded anywhere. The service could be a good way for musicians to gain more visibility and new fans.

The LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) is a commuter rail line that runs from NYC out to the Hamptons. Yesterday on our sister blog InsideTransit, we wrote about a proposal from Senator Charles Schumer. Schumer has reached out to the Long Island Rail Road to get WiFi access for passengers noting, “make commuting more productive and pleasant.” Apparently Obama’s stimulus funds can be used to pay for the $1,000 per train fee to get the access installed. If we can get WiFi on a plane, why not on a train as well? It appears many other commuter rail lines around the world have WiFi access already. No word if commuters will have to pay for the WiFi access.

Robert Andrews from MocoNews is reporting that the UK regulator is investigating whether the UK’s National Rail violated any rules when they forced some third-party mobile apps developers offline while pushing their own new mobile train tracking application. Interestingly, the two apps that were pushed offline were free while the “official” app is just over $8.

The two apps in question are the  UK Train Times mobile web app and the MyRail iPhone app.

Robert notes, “Now the Office of the Rail Regulator (ORR) says it’s ‘investigating the supply of Real Time Train Information (RTTI) (by NRE) under the Competition Act 1998, having been made aware of concerns in this area including from members of the public, and from Members of Parliament on behalf of their constituents. RTTI is a key input into the provision of live train running information to passengers through media such as train information websites or services accessed over mobile phones.’”

I’d love to see real time tracking for bus and train service in the U.S. — it would be a great way to create more usable time for passengers.

After the major launch of “Where It’s At” yesterday, today AOL has announced the launch of the AOL portal to the UK market. Last month we wondered why AOL pushed their big acquisition of Bebo aside to pimp Facebook and Twitter. The good news is that it seems Bebo is one of the top four being pushed in the UK version of the portal service.

It appears in the UK users prefer different types of content than we do here in the U.S. Here are some of the differences between the UK and US AOL portal sites:

UK version of My Stuff – shows Horoscopes over AOL Radio – all other items are the same

UK version of My Networks – here we see the UK version pushing Bebo over AIM and also pushes Twitter to slot 4 while the US version pimps Twitter first (which is a huge mistake) and doesn’t even list Bebo in the top 4.

The content and stories on the UK version appear to be UK-based which is a good thing.

The Marketing Donut launched today and their goal is to, “provide small and medium-sized businesses with tools to make their marketing more effective.” The site is based out of the UK and they guarantee not to show any ads (although they show sponsor offers). The first two sponsors are Google and the Royal Mail (the post office for the U.K.).

The Marketing Donut gathered 100 experts to provide advice in a number of categories including PR, marketing, advertising, customer support, market research, events and strategy. There are also a number of pre-packaged themes for startups.

It looks like the experts traded their content for a listing in the consultants directory. The directory is broken up by location in the UK and each expert has a bio page and contact information.

The site has a lot of good content but what’s missing are the connections and subscriptions. For example, there appears to be no way to subscripe to the different content sections – either via RSS or an email notification once new content is added. They have a Twitter account but it’s not listed anywhere on the site. There’s a share button but only on some of the pages – sharing should always be everywhere! Same goes for the tools section – give me a way to be notified when you add more tools! This is the type of site that a person will visit and then might not return to – the email/rss is critical to get users to continually return.

Earlier this week there was chatter about some schools in the U.K. swapping out normal education for more new-tech-oriented education. I mean who cares about what happened in the past, just how quickly we can type a SMS, enter a Google search or post a lolcat to Twitter.

Gumshoo has put together a comic strip related to the announcement which I thought was worth sharing: