SEO Werkt!

Introducing our August Book Club selection, Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to Stay Forever by Ric Dragon, CEO of Dragon Search. “CEO and co-founder of DragonSearch, Ric Dragon has more than 20 years of extensive experience in graphic design, information architecture, web development and digital marketing. He is a sought-after speaker, having spoken at numerous marketing and technology conferences.

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Social media sites like Facebook have become a central part of the lives of many families, letting them keep tabs on each other’s lives through pictures. But they’re not for everyone. My mom and dad, who live in the U.S., have no interest in joining Facebook. They are okay with email, and my dad will even video Skype if his wife, my stepmom (a computer scientist, as it happens), sorts it out for him. But you know what? They still really love it most of all when I send them a real letter with photos of me, my husband and our two kids. And you know what else? I’ve really fallen off the wagon where letters are concerned. I’m terrible at finding time to sit down and write them, and then getting around to sending them.

So I was especially excited to hear about HiMom, a YC-backed mobile app, part of the current class, that lets you create postcards from pictures you’ve taken on your phone, and then send them to your parents — or anyone else you’d like to keep in touch with on a regular basis. To me, it seemed like the perfect union: it takes something I am already doing to record and create things (using my phone) and matches it up with how my parents like to get their content (in a physical form).

“HiMom is about improving engagement between the young social networking generation and those who are not connected there,” co-founder Martin Poschenrieder says. As with a lot of YC products, the founders have been using their YC classmates and past work contacts as guinea pigs, and the service, they’ve found, is being used just as much by those living near to their families as it is by those who are many miles apart — the latter use case coming out of the founders’ own backgrounds, two Germans in Silicon Valley whose families are still back in their home country.

The app works simply enough: with the iPhone app, you can use any picture you have taken on your phone, or from your iPhone library via iCloud, and turn it into a postcard. You have some options for borders and filters on a full-sized postcard picture; and you can type a message. And in a nice touch, you can also “sign” the card either with a scribble of your name or another doodle. You can then send it as a postcard for $1.99 or as a free email.

Before I go any further with this, I’ll say yes, I know there are already a bunch of photo sharing apps, and even hundreds of postcard apps, out there already.

Postagram is one of the biggest, and its developers Sincerely are now working with Facebook on a postcard service to create images out of Facebook photos specifically. And with so many more, is there really room for another?

I think yes, particularly if HiMom follows through on the trajectory its founders have started. HiMom does what its name says: it is about creating and sending postcards, and building up a relationship specifically around one or two particular people — in this case between you and your parents, grandparents or others who are not necessarily connecting with you in your busy life.

By narrowing the focus, it becomes something you could potentially use more regularly as part of that specific relationship. In that sense, it’s not unlike Pair and Cupple, social networking apps designed for groups of two. By focusing on building social relationships outside of the more established social networking norms, it’s not unlike YC alum Family Leaf (a family-based social networking platform for families who don’t want to or can’t use Facebook).

HiMom has some automation built into it as well: an upcoming update will offer a daily alert at 11am, and future versions of the app, Poschenrieder says, will let users change how often and when this alert comes, to remind you to send over a card your contacts. Other features to come will include a read receipt, “so that you see when your mom opened the notification email,” Poschenrieder says, as well as a “thank-you” button for your recipient to reply automatically, as well as address book integration: right now you have to enter recipients’ addresses manually. Integrating the address book might widen the number of people you would use HiMom for as well.

What’s potentially even more interesting is how the HiMom framework could be developed for more than just postcards: think of how, say during a birthday or special occasion, you can add a bouquet of flowers or chocolate (or other gift) delivery, in addition to the postcard.

And that could loop in with some of the e-commerce knowledge of Poschenrieder and his co-founder Markus Jura.

The pair are both German and met while working for Accenture in Europe. When they were in London applying for Y Combinator, they actually pitched a completely different idea, around product sharing between people. (That idea was parked when they realised that “acceptance from local merchants in the U.S. was different than in the UK,” Martin told me.) It’s not too surprising to see YC startups changing this way; after all, the incubator has an ethos of backing talent, not specific ideas.

Things like physical gifts could be something to explore further down the line. For now, it’s about sending a beautiful postcard in place of what was there before… which, for many busy professionals, may well have been nothing.

Editor’s note: Iris Shoor is co-founder and VP Product Marketing at Takipi, a service for managing software downtime in the cloud. Before that, Iris was co-founder and VP Product at VisualTao, a B2B web and mobile service acquired by Autodesk.

For a long while I thought about marketing as wordsmithing –  putting an abstract idea into a sentence, picking just the right words. But then things started to change – less text please, more graphics – we’d rather see it than read it. This year more than ever, visual content is going mainstream. Pinterest is using imagery as its main content, and within a few months hundreds of different websites have adopted a ‘Pinterest like’ design. Companies are switching to Tumblr instead of traditional blogs, with little text and lots of imagery. Facebook is making your profile more visual with the Timeline and the new image gallery, not to mention Instagram. There’s a change in the air and this time you don’t need to smell it – you can actually see it.

I have to admit that I started using visual marketing not because I identified a trend but because as an architect by trade that’s the way I think – visually. I founded two companies (you can read more about our journey from 0 to 10M downloads here) where visual marketing is used as a main marketing strategy. To make things more interesting, both companies are as far away from being visual as you can possibly get – a B2B app for engineers and a Cloud/Big Data tool for developers. Here are 5 ways you can use visuals to increase traffic, get more buzz and reach more users:

“Say Cheese” – How A Team Picture Helped Us Get Better Reviews On The App Store

After every update to the App Store/Google Play we used to send a newsletter to our user base, highlighting the newest features and asking to review the version. On one release, after sending the newsletter we got 3X more reviews than usual (although there was nothing extraordinary about that version). It took us a while to figure out the reason. For that release we placed a picture of the team – the engineers who worked on the app right next to the ‘review us’ link. While traditional marketing uses people’s faces for just about everything (why do you always see smiling faces next to cheese, cars or real estate?), startups tend to restrict their team pictures to the ‘about us’ page. People are immediately attracted to human faces and react to action, when they feel it is called for by real people.

Want People To Remember Your Product? Look Different

When introducing a new product to a market, one of the main challenges is to have users remember your product and easily tell it from others. You want potential users to remember reading about your product two months ago, or recall seeing it being used by a colleague. Using a memorable image or a unique visual language is a great way to do just that. MailChimp is bringing their brand to life using a humoristic visual of a mailman monkey. DropBox is using childlike illustrations as a visual language, and by doing so differentiate themselves from other storage services. Heroku is using Japanese elements from Origami to Japanese mythology, so people would remember and emotionally relate to their product (which BTW has nothing to do with Japan).

[DropBox and Heroku using memorable visual styles]

Reality Check – Show Your Product In A Real World Context

Look at a screenshot of your product. Now take a step backward and look at the full picture. What does the user look like? Is the product being used at the office, at home or outdoors? Is it daytime or nighttime? When the product is displayed in context users can understand much more within seconds. This method is also more credible, as once you see a product used in a real world scenario it makes it harder to doubt it. For example, on Square’s homepage the main content is an image of the product being used in a farmers’ market. This picture is the main message and they’re not backing it up with text. With just a glimpse users can understand how the product works, where you’d likely use it and eliminate the ‘who needs it’ reaction.

Having A Hard Time Getting To Bloggers? Great Visuals Might Help

There’s no magic trick when it comes to getting media coverage. A great product and a trendy market surely help, but so do beautiful and funny images. A common mistake is to send bloggers product screenshots. Most screenshots don’t capture the essence and magic of a product. In fact, you’re asking the reader to work pretty hard to understand your product by looking at a screenshot. When placed in a minimized/cut version it will most likely become a ‘generic’ screenshot, looking like any other app or website you’ve seen before. Here’s an example from our first product where we tried to capture the essence of a localization feature with visuals, and without screenshots -

“Ouch, That Looks Painful” – Explain The Pain Using A Visual Analogy

Explaining the pain is always a main challenge when introducing a new product – no one really wants to hear what’s wrong with the way they work now. You can probably recall numerous videos of new products where almost half of the video is dedicated to telling you how much your life is a mess. With our second company, Takipi, the pain we’re trying to present is complex software debugging – looking for the source of a problem in the code. We’re not telling developers what they do today is wrong or difficult, but rather use a fun analogy for debugging and the pain they’re experiencing every day.

[Developers - know this feeling?]

Editor’s note: Adam Rifkin is co-founder and CEO of PandaWhale, an online network of interesting things and people. He has never owned Facebook or Zynga shares. . You can follow him @ifindkarma.

Facebook and Zynga have experienced similar roller coaster-like devaluation from their peak stock valuations, and they’ve been partners for years, which is why MarkZ and MarkP often get lumped together in the same sentence by fearful investors whose stock is underwater: “Facebook and Zynga (insert analysis here).”

Such bundling masks a deeper structural truth. The reasons that the two companies have tanked in the market could not be more divergent, and more indicative of the character and strategic vision of the startups’ respective founders. Forget any analysis that lumps the two companies together, and instead find lessons in Aesop’s fable that are important to every startup founder.

Zynga is the Grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, playing and trying to get others to play. The fundamentals of Zynga’s business – even when it was working perfectly – are to ensure a steady stream of new games (often via M&A), to grease the user acquisition machine via advertising on other venues (largely Facebook), and to incent users to rope in their friends (via in-game promotions). This strategy depends on playing with copious amounts of capital to buy companies, ads, and promotions, and yet Zynga’s IPO and secondary seemed less concerned with raising capital for Zynga’s corporate coffers. After all its financings, BusinessInsider estimates that Zynga has about $1 billion in pro-forma cash on hand.

Grasshoppers just want to have fun. In March, Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus enriched himself and a few other large shareholders with giddy abandon; the goal of their secondary offering was to provide liquid exits to several existing shareholders. A longer-term thinker would NOT have cashed out a lot of his stock, but Pincus did. In fact, Pincus sold 15% of his ZNGA stock.

A lawsuit against Zynga contends that Zynga executives were selling even though they knew the quarterly numbers were weak. Long-term-focused management does not sell its stock in blocks of 15%; it sells cautiously in tiny amounts scheduled regularly over many years. Examples include Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Pierre Omidyar, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

Facebook is the Ant, stashing resources for the winter with grim determination, regardless of which interest groups might be hurt in the short term (among them: investment bankers who were squeezed down to 1% commissions and retail investors who bought high). Mark Zuckerberg’s goal for Facebook’s record-breaking $16 billion IPO was to put as much as possible into Facebook’s corporate coffers, not his own; through financings to date, Facebook now has over $10 billion in liquid assets.

In retrospect, it’s extraordinary to think about Mark Pincus selling $200 million of Zynga stock and $38 million of Facebook stock to enrich himself, while Mark Zuckerberg only cashed out barely enough to pay his tax bill. Let that fact sink in for a few moments, and then compare how Zynga employees feel with how Facebook employees feel about their respective stock prices going down.

Ants work hard, driven by a higher cause. Mark Zuckerberg truly believes that Facebook’s mission – to make the world more open and connected – is the biggest and most important in Silicon Valley. I’ve heard stories that even his relationships with close friends have suffered if those friends chose to sell Facebook stock on the secondary markets or otherwise showed a lack of faith in the long-term mission of the enterprise. His motivations are far closer to messianic zeal than most investors (and David Fincher’s Social Network movie!) recognize… and simple pattern-matching shows us that the greatest companies in technology are started and sustained by founders like him, who live for the mission.

Mark Pincus, by contrast, seems obsessed with his wealth. With some of his early stock gains, Pincus bought a posh 11,500 sq ft, $16 million mansion on the Gold Coast. He has been living large for years, with multiple homes. Zynga evidently spends $1.37 million a year for Pincus’s personal security – in the top 3 of all public companies behind Lockheed Martin and Oracle. Pincus’s stock obsession was first demonstrated by his attempt to claw back stock grants (extra classy touch to do it during the “quiet period”!) from loyal long-term employees — a move so audaciously selfish that I heard entrepreneurs muttering about the long-term damage to the entire startup ecosphere if early employees started thinking their stock could be taken away within weeks of an IPO.

Compare that with Mark Zuckerberg, who lives more like Larry Page than Larry Ellison. He has a single Palo Alto abode that is biking distance from Facebook HQ. His wedding was a backyard affair for fewer than 100 guests with “catering” that appeared to consist largely of tacos, followed by a honeymoon that was newsworthy largely for the money he DIDN’T spend (no tip on a $40 dinner! lunch at McDonald’s!). He lives a life that allows him to focus his energy on Facebook.

Zuck’s goal is to deploy Facebook’s giant war chest and tremendous talent to build a “social utility” that will outlast his lifetime, like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs before him. Pincus, on the other hand, is so out of ideas that Electronic Arts is suing Zynga for copying them too much. Perhaps he’ll get lucky and online gambling will become legal in America soon. But even the gambling-will-be-legalized wager is a demonstration that he’s willing to bet the company on something that MIGHT happen, and lose. Zynga may still have $1 billion in its coffers, but the actions of Pincus do not demonstrate that he knows how to prudently employ that capital. If Zynga fails, whatever, at least he got rich in the process. If a Game-of-Thrones-like Winter is coming, it will be game over for Zynga as they burn their remaining cash and run out of resources.

If Mark Pincus wants to demonstrate that he’s in Zynga for the long run, he will deploy the $200+ million from his March payout, to buy ZNGA shares on the public market the way Netflix CEO Reed Hastings just did with FB stock. A great poker player demonstrates commitment by going “All In”.

The values of startup founders are baked deeply into the DNA of their startups, from inception on. A founder’s character, attitude, and strategy contribute significantly to the corporate culture, so it’s interesting to compare the “culture of play” with the “culture of making the world more open and connected.” To understand the two Marks is to appreciate how they’re making choices now that affect their companies’ future prospects profoundly. Zynga is having fun, like the solo Grasshopper, because times are good. And Facebook, like an army of Ants marching, works tenaciously and tirelessly towards its vision of a better future every single day.

Inuit says 53 percent of companies “reinvented their business” to survive since 2010. The pivot is a buzz word in Silicon Valley, but may be one of the smartest moves an entrepreneur can make.

A good business owner can’t be afraid of change. Markets change, consumer attitudes change, technologies change, and so companies must also change. The majority of changes small businesses make today come in the form of “overhauling” the product or service. Next in line are changes to infrastructure within the company or changes to the staff.

Pulling the trigger is undoubtedly one of the hardest decisions to make, but you are in good company. Some big names in Silicon Valley have performed the pivot, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams who originally founded Odeo, a podcasting company. It didn’t take off like Twitter has, but while it didn’t crash and burn, Williams eventually put the Odeo up for sale.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was also in the pivot boat. His app Burbn was a location-based app, which included users taking pictures of their surrounding and tagging the location of those pictures. Systrom noticed that people were more interested in the photo features than the app itself. So, he pulled the photo technology out of Burbn and created the very popular Instagram, which recently sold to Facebook for a whopping $1 billion.

Need more pivot inspiration. Check out this infographic from Intuit below:

via: Is Your Small Business in Need of Reinvention? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Kevin Systrom image via LeWEB12/Flickr

Filed under: Entrepreneur

InsideSales.com has raised $4 million from Hummer Winblad in a Series A Round that the
company will use to grow its big data analytics sales force automation (SFO) technology. Joining in the round were Josh James, co-founder and former CEO of Omniture.

Mark Gorenberg, managing director, Hummer Winblad, said before the funding, the company was profitable and had not taken any investment. He said the company reminds him of Omniture, which the firm funded under similar circumstances. Omniture was also profitable when it accepted its investment. Omniture was acquired for $1.8 billion in 2009 by Adobe Systems.

InsideSales serves small and medium sized companies. It uses predictive analytics to help serve inside sales professionals. Its algorithms are designed to tell the sales professional who to contact, when to contact and how to tailor the message for the sales target.

The company has increased its employees from 65 to 140 people. In the past several months the company has increased from 600 to 900 customers. It has recently started expanding into the enterprise market by adding customers such as Dell and ADP.

InsideSales is one of a growing number of startups to come out of Utah. The company is based in Provo, also where Qualtrics, the online marketing intelligence company is located. Qualtrics raised $70 million in capital earlier this year from Accel Partners and Seqouia Capital. Omniture was originally from Orem, Utah.

Competitors to InsideSales include Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle and Sage,

It’s a strange thing to hear from the co-founder and CEO of a photo startup, but DMD Panorama‘s Elie-Gregoire Khoury tells me that panoramic photos will become “a commodity at the end of the day.” That doesn’t mean it’s time to get out of the photo business — instead, Khoury wants to see panoramas become a standard feature in a wide range of websites and apps, the way that regular photos are now.

And if Khoury has his way, that will all happen through DMD’s new API.

Since launching in June 2011 on the iPhone, DMD Panorama has been downloaded 4.5 million times, Khoury says. His aim was to build the fastest, easiest way to take panoramic photos, and he may have succeeded — this Wall Street Journal article, for example, describes the app as “the easiest-to-use panoramic picture app on the iPhone.”

I was definitely impressed when I tried the app out for myself. To take a panoramic picture, you just activate the camera and move the phone sideways, bringing together the yin and yang signs on your screen. The process is only slightly more complicated and time-consuming than taking a normal photo.

DMD Panorama was built by a five-person team in Lebanon. Khoury says the country’s infrastructure presented a few challenges — like only six hours of electricity per day and a 2 gigabyte monthly download cap on the office Internet connection — but the company succeeded in making hit app, and itrased raised angel funding from investors including early Googler Georges Harik and the Berytech Fund.

Now Khoury is hoping to enlist app developers to use DMD’s free API. Ultimately, Khoury wants DMD to power the photo-taking experience in any app where panoramic photos might be useful — for example, Khoury suggests that DMD could bring panoramic photos into a postcard app, or it could help people take panoramic pictures to show off their homes in rental apps like Airbnb.

Users will need to have DMD Panorama installed in order to take advantage of the integration, but once they do, the goal is to create a seamless experience between DMD and integrated apps. So when using another app, users could hit a “panorama” button (or whatever) at the appropriate moment, which would either open DMD Panorama or prompt them to install it. They take the photo in DMD, then they’re returned to the original app.

Khoury says he’s testing the API out with a few partners before opening it up more broadly, so interested developers should email api (at) DerManDar (dot) com.

Howdy all. We’re a month away from the fourth annual TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon.

To meet the demand, we’re releasing more tickets to the public. If you haven’t already gotten your ticket, go get one now. This will be sold out.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3689591668

It will be a great weekend of hacking and learning, culminating in minute-long presentations with hundreds of the Bay Area’s best on Sunday afternoon. To add to the pressure cooker, we’ve handpicked a crew of the industry’s best to lend their wisdom and good looks to the event. You’re bound to recognize some of these heavy hitters.

Kent Brewster
Web Guy
http://kentbrewster.com

Kent Brewster won the Ship It Now award at three different Yahoo! employee hack days. (Sadly, none of it ever shipped.) He built the iPhone app for Netflix using nothing but stone knives, bear skins, and open APIs, and is currently the guy whose fault it is if the Pin It button is broken on Pinterest.

You can follow Kent on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/kentbrew

Josh Elman
Principal, Greylock
http://bit.ly/joshelman

Currently a VC at Greylock, Josh has spent 15 years building products in Engineering, Product Management, and Platform roles. He led the team for RealPlayer and RealJukebox at RealNetworks, early growth at LinkedIn and launched LinkedIn Jobs, and led product at Zazzle. More recently, Josh led the launch of Facebook Connect at Facebook and helped user growth at Twitter grow by over 10x. Josh has a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford.

You can follow Josh on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/joshelman

Bradley Horowitz
VP Product, Google+
http://www.elatable.com

Bradley Horowitz is vice president of product for Google’s social products, including Google+. He has also led product for Google’s consumer application division which includes Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Voice, and Calendar. Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo’s vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in media science from the MIT Media Lab.

You can follow Bradley on Google+ at: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871

Peter Pham
Co-Founder/Partner at Science
http://www.science-inc.com

Co-Founder and partner at Science in Los Angeles. Built a few startups in the past like Photobucket, BillShrink and Color. Now at Science is behind companies like Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee, DogVacay, Eventup, and Uncovet.

You can follow Peter on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/peterpham

Vivek Ravisankar
Co-founder
http://rvivek.com

Vivek has a Bachelors degree in CS and graduated in India in 2008. Following that, he worked at Amazon for a year in the Kindle team. He started Interviewstreet in 2009, had three failed ideas, got rejected by YC twice and finally built a tool that helps companies screen programmers and was a part of YC last summer.

Currently, the team is building HackerRank – a fun social network for hackers to solve and learn interesting programming concepts.

You can follow Vivek on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/rvivek

David A. Shamma
Research Scientist, Yahoo!
http://shamurai.com

David Ayman Shamma is research scientist at Yahoo! Labs where he runs the Human-Computer Interaction Research group. He investigates how people interact, engage, and share media experiences both online and in-the-world. He is also the co-editor for Arts and Digital Culture for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on MultiMedia. When he’s not wearing a lab coat, Ayman has been known to choreograph dance & technology performances, design electronic fashion, and make mallets for hitting touchscreen devices.

You can follow David on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/ayman

Editor’s Note:  Semil Shah is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a columnist at TechCrunch since January 2011. He hosts a weekly TCTV show In the Studio and pens a weekly column, Iterations. Follow him on Twitter @semil.

“In the Studio” rolls into the dog days of summer by welcoming a guest who, originally trained in computer science, went on to found a large consumer website, worked in venture capital on Sand Hill Road, and after helping out his would-be business partner learn the ropes of “hacking” the fundraising process, set out on a journey to build what a platform for startup investing and other related activities that has been gaining momentum and strength over the past few years.

Naval Ravikant, the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, originally began helping his current co-founder, Babak Nivi, navigate the funding process years ago. Nivi began writing down the ideas, and their blog, “Venture Hacks,” born. Since then, the duo has known they’re committed to doing something meaningful at scale, but had to take many attempts. What first started out as a social network (“Dealflow”) morphed into a Google Group, then a Yammer setup, and then in 2010, AngelList was born with an email list. The initial response was so positive, Naval and Nivi realized that they may had found the initial product their market craved.

Since that point, AngelList’s influence has compounded. More and more companies, investors, and other startup ecosystem players began not only creating official profiles, but also searching for and discovering information on the site. Companies began not only being able to raise small seed rounds via introductions channeled by the site, but also closing larger financings, sometimes even with institutional players participating in the rounds. As more and more information about fundraising has come online, and as more and more companies are being founded, and as people look to the web to help create and maintain a reputation, AngelList has been a key force in the current overall reinvention of venture capital, though it has not occurred without differences in opinion among some of the web’s savviest investors, as well.

I invited Naval in for a discussion because most people think of AngelList as “a place to get funding,” but when you start to peel back the layers, what he and his team are building is really a full-blown product, a powerful platform with an API already in use by some of the largest venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road. In this video, Naval also shares more nitty-gritty details about how he and his team think about product features, their hopes for their API, and examples of the vertical and horizontal features they are playing with. AngelList feels poised to be *the* startup ecosystem identity platform, and while Naval concedes some limitations about how much of the process can be facilitated online, this discussion brings to light just how much AngelList is doing to create more transparency and efficiency within the process.

Selling ads online isn’t easy and unless you have a site with a large audience, chances are the major advertising networks aren’t interested in working with you. Direct ad sales are often an attractive option for smaller blogs and online publications, but managing them can be a major hassle. Skyscrpr, a new startup launching out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator today, wants to make direct ad sales easy for publishers. As the company’s co-founder Paul Burger told me yesterday, SkyScrpr wants to take the hassle out of direct ad sales and let publishers focus on creating content. The service offers a very well designed and easy to use drag-and-drop interface to set up ad units on your site.

SkyScrpr is targeting everything from smaller personal sites with 50,000 pageviews per month to mid-tier sites with 5 million pageviews. The service handles the complete workflow from getting the ads set up to handling payments after the deal is done. There are, of course, other direct ad sales solutions available for bloggers and small online publishers, including iSocket and BuySellAds. For the most part, their features are comparable, but SkyScrpr doesn’t currently focus as much on marketing its publishers’ inventory as much as BuySellAds does, for example.

In return, SkyScrpr offers a beautiful interface that makes managing and tracking ad campaigns easier than any other tool out there and, as Burger told me, he and his co-founder Jacob Reiff are working on adding more marketing solutions for publishers. Unlike other solutions, SkyScrpr also doesn’t have any minimum pageview requirements for sites that want to implement it.

As Burger told me earlier this week, the service is currently available for free and the team is still working out the details of how to best monetize the service. Chances are, SkyScrpr will take a cut from all ad sales generated through its site, but the team seems open to experimenting with other solutions as well.

The team is currently in the process of raising a funding round, but because the negotiations are still ongoing, Burger wasn’t able to reveal any details just yet.