Reuters is reporting that AdBrite had raised another $23 million in a round C financing from existing investor Sequoia Capital, alongside with new investors that are DAG Ventures and Mitsui Ventures. Currently, AdBrite is the third-largest ad (advertisement) provider in US, just behind Google and Advertising.com in term of page views, and its ad products more or less as reputable as Google AdSense. Though this funding is expensive for the investors, it is a key decision for venture capitalists to keep on commit to this ad provider as both the growth outlook for this burgeoning ad industry and AdBrite were very good at this moment. With AdBrite currently serve their inventory of ad on over a billion of pages a day, from a conservative view, investors could actually get back their capital in near future.

In the past twelve months, AdBrite has been very aggressive in the industry by launching few initiatives such as real-time auction model, sell ad on Facebook, as well as offered the full page ad. AdBrite previously raised $4 million in Series A financing in 2004 and $8 million in round B in the year of 2006. With this round C financing, they have successfully raised a total venture capital of $35 million.

What can Adobe do about a static PDF file, now that they have found a newer solution to this established document file standard, i.e. to monetize it. Today Adobe and Yahoo! have jointly launched a program called “Ads for Adobe PDF, Powered by Yahoo!” I see this is a first step for Adobe to push all its established products as Web products that could help them made a lot of dough on the Web. For Yahoo!, it’s more than a milestone for them, since this partnership will put them right back in the online advertising game against Google. In fact, it’s interesting to see how Yahoo! pursue this game, they changed the platform for advertisement, i.e. from Web page to static document, can they make it this time? On the other hand, will Buzzword, the word processor of Adobe, will Adobe put the advertisement onto the Buzzword in near future?

This Ads for Adobe PDF is currently in beta phase, only invite-only beta testers can enjoy the benefits of upload the PDF files to the Yahoo!/Adobe portal, and the vendors will then send the files back to the publishers with the advertisement functionality are enabled for the PDF documents. Since the Adobe PDF has now became the long-tail inventory for Yahoo! Publisher Network, and this network is only open to US publishers, we will not see this kind of advertisement in any of the publishers outside of the US by end of this year. Currently, publishers that participated in this beta program include: IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, Reed Elsevier, just to name a few. They’re the first batch of publishers with the golden opportunity to generate another stream of revenue in a radically different approach. However, advertisement can only be displayed on Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat document. As you know, PDF document is static, and the advertisement for the PDF is contextual, which mean Yahoo! serve the advertisement based on the content of the PDF document, it offers an entirely new way to view a static document that appeared advertisement in a dynamic way.

My sense for this move is that it is a forward-looking strategy for Yahoo! and Adobe, but they definitely face the challenges of integrating lot of PDF files into the Yahoo! Publishers Network, and assuring the pay-per-click reports for the publishers are concise, and real-time.

Hot on the heels of the brand advertising program come another one, the statistical data search. This is Baidu’s second attempt in a week to widen their reach in the China’s search engine market. The statistical data search that offered by Baidu, will enable an user to search whatever statistics available on the Web that indexed by Baidu. However, as I tried the service, not every keyword will return result, I tried 网民, i.e. Internet surfers, it returns nothing. On the contrary, while I type some keywords such as 爱情, i.e. love, 银行, i.e. bank, and 职业, i.e. occupation, several results appeared especially for the hot keyword “职业”, i.e. occupation.

Some said successful companies have built their very businesses on their ability to collect, analyze as well as act on data. With the introduce of Baidu Statistical Data Search, we now can see some market data of China through this service without any charge, as a young man who like to read research reports, I particularly find this service extremely useful for me.

Source: available at http://tjsj.baidu.com/pages/jxyd/20/37/90ffc86ca2be8d208a0b3e4d5aa2cda5_0.html, accessed 29 November, 2007.

Baidu has launched a new advertising program to serve the big corporate clients in China. This new program is Baidu’s latest attempt to maintain its China’s market share and acted as a permanent marketing strategy to tout several China well-known players to use Baidu’s search services. Currently, there are two companies that joined this program which are Gome, China’s largest electrical appliances retailer and China Construction Bank. These two companies are given privilege to be appeared at top of the search results page when an user type “国美”, i.e. Gome and “建行”, i.e. China Construction bank. Visually, logo is shown and the links to few subdomains of these companies are provided in a separate section of the page, as shown in the below picture.

It seems that brand advertising is the fastest growing segment of search on the Web today and Baidu is on its way to monetize this market.

Example 1: When I type 国美 in Baidu search engine

Example 2: When I type 建行 in Baidu search engine

Media Temple has announced the launch of the first phase of their Django GridContainer program. This program is currently in the beta phase, and potential testers can apply and participate in this program by visit the sign-up page and fill-up some common questions about Media Temple and Django. I’ve heard of Django for quite some time and I know it is a powerful Web framework for Python developers. As of present, there are more than 800 Websites that powered by Django, as listed in djangosites. With the introduce of Django GridContainer, it will allow the existing Grid-Service customers including me to have our own dedicated Django server. This is an emerging technology but is not fully understood by all of its potential users, if you want to know more, there is some extra information on the Django GridContainer page.

The Django GridContainer utilizes lighttpd in front of FastCGI processes. Currently, lighttpd powered some popular Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and etc and some argue that lighttpd can perform some complex tasks faster than another popular open source Apache Web server.

Note: Media Temple provides hosting services for TagEdge.com.

Ever heard a Chinese quote “Spend more, you’ll earn more.” I believed many people have such understanding regardless you’re a Chinese or not. However, this advice will not be applied in every situation as money is so central to all aspects of our lives. Sometimes I am thinking that when we treat money more seriously, not only money, also our lives, we can have a more meaningful lives and together we can build our tomorrow better collectively. Now that a new Web application that namely Banzai has released to the market to serve the needs of personal money management. Banzai has a trademarked “The Banzai Way,” and The Banzai Way is indeed a finance philosophy that emphasizes on individual responsibility for spending decisions.

Banzai is a Web application that sell a potential user an idea on how she can control her flow of money through the existence of a Web system. However, this doesn’t mean that this system is extremely great as it can do what human being cannot do, we must remember that the personal money management shall always start with us. Unless we make up our mind that we want to change the way we spend money, otherwise good things will not happen to us. The core concept of Banzai is the jar balances that help their users to know their spending flexibility and the impact their spending decisions will have in the future. Banzai Web application uses the virtual jars to show users how much they can spend, if they’re spending more than what they’re earning in a given period, a trade-off must be identified. By this logic, this correspondence with the belief that our income might not always go up as we need to maintain a good discipline in proper manage our money. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not propose the idea that the accumulation of money is the most tangible indicator that we’re making progress in our lives. Love, family is far more important than the money. Meanwhile, you can watch a demo video prepared by Banzai in order to know better how these jars work, as embedded in the below.

For a new registered user, she will be assigned a Banzai coach, whose role is to help an user know how to live in the Banzai way. No doubt the service rendered is good, but it is a paid service as they charge $1 for the first month and $4.95 per month thereafter.

Banzai is managed by a startup namely Kendagriff, LLC that based in Provo, Utah with data operations in Salt Lake City.

KickApps, a social media platform provider has a new customer today, i.e Guinness World Records (GWR). The Guinness World Records Community is now built on the KickApps platform, and users that want to break the world records can now upload their videos to this community site since the “white label” solution provided by KickApps is a natural fit for an authoritative site for records like GWR. Click on the left-hand side of the landing page of GWR will bring you to this community site, and you’ll find this online community is a fun place, occupied by all the passionate people that willing to share their videos, to get involved as well as connect with one another.

Today Google has added another new experiment to its lab, the “keyword suggestions,” as shown on the above picture. This keyword suggestions is a form of keyword results, something look like an auto-complete of an user’s search query that is derived from Google’s overall aggregated data, according to Google. It is an optional service that would not automatically added in the Google search engine. In other word, users that want to test this keyword suggestions, they must go to the Google Experimental Search and enable this feature manually.

I think this feature is terrific. However, being transparent all the results of the keywords in the world, i.e. millions of results of a single keyword recommended that keyword selections is no longer a viable technique on the Web, but I can understand keyword marketing experts will not agree to this statement.