Spot.IM Turns Any Site Into A Social Network

Facebook and Twitter are essential tools for social marketing, but user engagement on those networks doesn’t necessarily translate into more visitors to a site. Created by the founder of a former TechCrunch Disrupt winner, Spot.IM wants to solve that problem by making it possible to turn any site into a social network with two lines of code. The company says this gives site owners more control over the management and monetization of their traffic.

Spot.IM was founded by Nadav Shoval and Ishay Green. Green’s previous startup, Soluto, which created software to monitor PC performance, won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010. Then in 2013, Soluto was acquired for between $100 million to $130 million by device insurance provider Asurion.

Spot.IM’s beta version is currently used on about 1,000 sites, including Time Out, Kerrang, and Suamusica.
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“Basically, we have built a technology that allows any website to become a social network, resulting in the first ‘everywhere’ social network, built up of mini-communities, distributed across the entire web,” Green and Shoval said in an email.

“Today, publishers work extremely hard to create good content their visitors will enjoy, but end up exporting those visitors to external social networks so that they can socially engage around that content. We want to help those publishers keep that traffic on site by allowing them to offer the social engagement right there, where the content was created.”
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The two say that Spot.IM’s beta users have already generated over 250,000 registered users, and over 2 million messages were sent last month. “Approximately 20 percent of the messages sent in Spot.IM are private, hence 1 on 1 conversations between individuals that met in those embedded communities are a major part of what we’re seeing.”

Spot.IM is currently talking with investors and honing in on a monetization strategy.

“In the near term, we are focusing solely on adding more features to enhance the community experience,” say Green and Shoval. “Building a platform for a real-time conversation is a huge achievement, but it’s just the first step. Our larger goal is to focus on building the tools to create complex and multilayered communities.”

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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