901am

New Media News Every Morning

Making The Most Of Your Online Startup

By

The internet has made it so anyone with a big idea and a little motivation can start their own online business. This has led to an explosion of blogs, online stores, and services. This is great news for entrepreneurs or people just starting out, but it also causes a problem. When everyone is selling something, how can you stand out from the competition?

Find Your Niche

The internet is a great place to begin a business. It is cheap and easy to put up a homepage for your business, and advertising through social media brings potential customers straight to your website. [Read more…]

Originally posted on October 5, 2015 @ 9:00 am

Lunchwalla Checks-In at Foursquare Not Gowalla

By

For awhile I thought Lunchwalla which we featured not so long ago was related to Gowalla. So, It was quite surprising to know that the site which lets you organize everyday social events like breakfast, lunch, dinner, movies and more has integrated with Foursquare. So this means that aside from voting in on what to do, you can now check-in when you get to the events you helped organized.

If you’re a regular Foursquare user and have also used Lunchwalla before, this integration would complement each other now. Meaning, all the check-ins you make on the events you organized or helped organized through Lunchwalla will be counted to your quest for mayorship of the place where the event was held. This is in addition to the fact that your check-in appears on your Foursquare profile which you can also display as an update to your Facebook profile. It’s like hitting three social networking sites with one check-in.

Best of all, if you’ve got hooked into Lunchwalla since we’ve featured it on this blog, you must be earning Lunchwalla points right now.  Of course, you still remember that those Lunchwalla points can earn you some schwags from participating merchants, right?

And while we’re at it, the Foursquare – Lunchwalla integration also lets you import your Foursquare friends into your Lunchwalla contacts list. So, planning events and coordinating them with your friends is now easier.

Incidentally, Lunchwalla is holding a gig right now which might earn you free tickets to see Iron Man 2. So, if you haven’t checked Lunchwalla yet, this gig might entice you to start using Lunchwalla.

Originally posted on May 3, 2010 @ 4:56 pm

Lunchwalla Answers the Question – “What’s for Lunch?”

By

Frankly, the first thing that came into my mind when I stumbled upon new social media site Lunchwall was the location-aware social media site Gowalla. Not only does these two services’ names sound alike but somehow they offer similar services.

Gowalla is a social recommendation site of sorts, built upon crowd sourced experience when visiting restaurants and other places of interest. Lunchwalla on the other hand is also banking on the social aspect, this time of planning gigs and events by group of people or network of friends.

Basically, Lunchwalla answers the most pressing daily question – “What’s for lunch?”  The site is for coordinating events at millions of eating and drinking establishments with friends, colleagues and family. Don’t get me wrong here, you can also use Lunchwalla for organizing breakfast, dinner, drinks and other gatherings. It is not just limited to lunch events.

From the official press release – Lunchwalla changes social planning by combining reviews, reservations, menus and local coupons into one site that lets friends, colleagues and family vote on where to go.  It aims to cut down cost on sending text messages the hazzle of calling back-and-forth just to finalize on where your friends would be holding your next small gathering.

To find out whether Lunchwalla suits your needs, you can check out the site at http://lunchwalla.com and register to join. You can create a new account or use your Facebook login credential to start planning your next lunch gig.

Lunchwalla is currently web-based service only. Although I’m pretty sure a mobile application is already under way.

Via Market Wire

Originally posted on March 8, 2010 @ 5:30 pm

PleaseRobMe Hits on FourSquare, Other Location-Aware Services

By

A new site called Please Rob Me is getting some media mileage not only because of its intriguing name but also because of its equally intriguing purpose.  Please Rob Me describes its goal as follows:

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page (link). Everybody can get this information.

So, what does the site actually does? Well, controversial as well. It compiles and lists down all the status updates published on FourSquare and perhaps soon other location-aware services as well, that pertains to individuals saying that they are about to leave their homes to go somewhere else. These are posted on the site and on Twitter.

While Please Rob Me’s goal is unquestionably noble, the way it is pushing things to achieve this goal is not. Raising the level of awareness of the public over some dangerous matters is a good feat, but actually giving the would-be perpetrators an idea about this whole thing is certainly not commendable.

The site posts those updates on their Twitter account for all its followers to see and monitor.   They say that FourSquare, Gowalla and the others are just dressed up Twitter where updates live links that anyone can click through and access.

But the thing is, those location-aware service still give users the options to set up their privacy settings and control who among their contacts they would allow access to their updates. So, I guess location-aware services are still safe, just like Twitter.

Originally posted on February 17, 2010 @ 5:44 pm

Social Search Engine Aardvark Joins Google

By

Whenever I’m looking for an answer to a trivial question I normally type in the question on the Google search box. Yes, that’s how lazy I am. And so far Google search results are pretty much accurate and were able to give me some good links. Interstingly, most of the links to the answers given by Google are entries from Yahoo! Answers.

The point I’m trying to drive at here? Google badly needs a Yahoo Answers-like service. A crowd-sourced database of information that is of capable providing the best answer to the most mundane question that could possibly come up from anyone’s mind. And Google seems to be embarking on achieving that feat. To start off, it just acquired a social search engine called – Aardvark.

Aardvark’s model is pretty simple, you ask a question and Aardvark will find the perfect person to answer your question in minutes. Aardvark has several interfaces, via an iPhone app, IM, email and of course its web interface at vark.com.

Aardvark’s technology taps into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts. It analyzes your questions and determines what they are about until it is able to match each question to people who are knowledgeable about it to give you the final answer to your question. And it does that as quickly as it can.

Google has not announced yet how it is going to take to integrate Aardvark to its various products and services, but as soon as the deal was finalized, Google quickly put Aardvark into Google Labs.

With Google Buzz as a social sharing site and now this social search engine, Google is really getting into the social game.

Originally posted on February 12, 2010 @ 6:05 pm