A new online advertising network was launched on Christmas in Asia, called Nufflets. It is probably a new startup that want to build an empire based on online advertising. They currently ran a promotion whereby a new publisher that approved by them will be entitled to US$15; at first they credit an approved publisher $5 and the remaining $10 is credited after the publisher provide a link back to this Ads network. Additionally, they have some strict requirements on the approval processes. The publishers that they approved must own the domain names, and the publishers must reside in Asian countries, mainly Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, China or Japan. The entry requirement for a blog or Web site is that it must generate at least 3,000 page views per month and Nufflets reserve a right to terminate a particular blog or Web site when its page views is below 2,500.

I think they trying to compete with Google in this field when I saw they payout a check when publisher accumulated $50. This contrast to the minimum payout $100 by Google. Instead of fearing gorilla like Google, I think that they used Google as a motivator but their market is completely different.

An Israeli startup TripTouch has launched its new version. It is a site that provides users a personalized travel taste, while taking into account key travel and local information. When a user enters the site, it first brings her to the local site. Put an example, if she is resides in New York, the site she first enters will definitely the New York TripTouch site. On each of the local TripTouch site, a user will find the local information, such as the brief introduction, accommodation, events as well as travel booking of a particular city. Some travel-planning features has been offered and deployed by TripTouch, so if a user want to know the currency exchange rate or the local news, it is available on the site. Local news and weather are updated daily using the RSS news feeds from Yahoo!, CNN, and etc. For some cities in the US, example California, they have added the map support, i.e. Google Maps. Additionally, a new page with all the travel locations, amounted to more than 2,500 was also prepared by TripTouch.

For a registered TripTouch user, she is allowed to build her profile, add the location to her planned trip, find friends, invite friends and allowed to access her own Webmail. The implementation of social networking in the travel site will greatly benefit the travelers as they find the latest updates of their friends, and enabling them to keep in touch in a much easier manner. Most recent, they also added the community feature that is travel network one, and thus travelers can get connected each other in a lively community.

TripTouch is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was founded in 2007 by Gil Ruda and Ron Mertens and the current business model is Google AdSense.

Finally, Microsoft decided to move itself quickly in order to close the gap with Google. They have released the overhauled version of search engine, with main emphasis on vertical search. And today, they acquired an e-commerce search engine, Jellyfish for an undisclosed sum. Jellyfish was created with a little more than an excellent business concept and an experienced founding team. It was based in Wisconsin and previously raised $5 million in a round A financing led by Kegonsa Capital Partners and Clyde Street Investments. Founded in January 2006 with a principle of “we share,” this startup was capable to establish itself by sharing with its customer at least half of all revenue derived from sales through the Jellyfish site. The adoption of 100% cost-per-action model, albeit that sometimes mistaken as a cash back-focused affiliate marketing strategy, successfully create more tangible value by form of rebates to the Jellyfish customers. Google followed a similar strategy in this year by opening “pay-per-action” advertising opportunities within their AdSense network.

Clearly, Jellyfish’s business model attracted to the big players. By using Jellyfish, customers can browse and compare prices of products from the member stores listed in Jellyfish. Moreover, Jellyfish offered an unique form of auctions in which the prices of certain products get progressively lower until someone buy those items. The longer potential customers wait to buy, the deeper the discount. This trademarked smack shopping is their core marketing strategy that designed to drive more traffic to the main shopping site. However, at the end of the day, Jellyfish learned that they had to find ways to attract more visitors. I don’t know how Microsoft going to integrate this shopping engine into their existing Windows Live platform, but Jellyfish’s technology certainly fill the Microsoft’s product gap and able to transform Microsoft to a better online shopping player.

Google is testing its beta version of AdSense for Mobile. Though it’s a limited beta testing, every Web publishers seem to be relatively interested in this new product that to be launched by Google. It was a product quietly introduced by Google but catches most of our eyes. I wonder this AdSense for Mobile is designed to optimize the dot mobi Web sites. Not long ago, somewhere in last August Google launched Google Mobile Ads, now they want the developers/publishers to test out this sooner-or-later-gotta-launch product.

No doubt AdSense is Google’s core product on Internet advertisement market and their so-called core-competencies. They have rolled out the mobile advertising in the same way that they did on the Web, first by testing the market acceptance by released the mobile AdWords, later they will begin to have sponsored results on mobile search pages, and now they open the new arena for publishers to earn some revenues on the mobile Web industry.

Despite the fact that AdSense for mobile as well as the mobile advertising industry is heating up, the integration process seems not an easy task for most of the publishers. My sense is that mobile integration is not just simply cut and paste the Javascript, i.e. AdSense code like some of us did onto their blogs, or on any Web page.

Google’s new pricing model, as stated in the title, pay-per-action is now available worldwide, according to the latest blog entry of Google’s press center. This system was launched in March this year and still in beta mode, however, it should be considered as an indication that Google is working on their own way to fight the click fraud, given the estimation of invalid clicks is not the only solution that Google could provide to its publishers. I wondered the fundamental flaw in the process of research in discovering how third parties detect click fraud has helped reinvigorate Google’s pay-per-action model, as we all know that the goals of advertising business model shall not always correspondence to the quality services Google AdWord’s publishers expected.

Some publishers may agreed to this statement, “I don’t trust cost-per-thousand basis paid listings,” but I think now they should trust this pay-per-action program, at least at this moment.

Today Yahoo! News ran an interesting story that entitled, “Ad software maker OpenAds girds to take on Google,” and this story was on the potential growth opportunities of this open source advertisement maker. Openads, based in central London and started their open source advertisement project in year 1999, has growing to a stage that attracted the interests of a lot of venture capitalists recently. They have raised $5 million in a round A financing from Index Ventures, and joined by early-stage First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Currently they have more than 25,000 Web site publishers in more than 100 countries and 20 languages. The uniqueness is its global distribution whereby only 30 percent of its customers come from the United States.

There are few things that I like about their project: They are relatively small, as stated in Yahoo! News, Openads was a 10 man company and I always wondered small team can work the same productive and profitable way as a big corporate such as Google. Secondly, economic theory stated that if there were a demand for something, the marketplace would supply the means of achieving it. In this view, open source project was no longer termed as a “bungled attempt,” nonetheless we should realize of this fact by looking at a lot of open source projects that worked remarkable well, i.e. in terms of revenue on the Web nowadays. Thirdly, since this software is free and fully control by the users, we may see this is a better step to assure security and privacy. Perhaps the most interesting part is they planned to take on Google AdSense system in which both companies are striving for the lower-end market.

Well, I don’t know how far this company can go, but certainly most of us are penchant for the ambitious projects.

Tumri, founded in 2004 is aimed to serve the future needs of the growing number of advertisers and bloggers. It is the world’s first integrated merchandising and advertising network that can intelligently deliver targeted products to the online consumers. In other words, if the owner of a site that didn’t like the advertisement units appeared on her site, she can tweak and choose over what the advertisements that should be displayed on her site. According to the newest press release of Tumri, they have just raised $10 million from Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, alongside with existing investors, Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners. Its proprietary technologies included AdPod that is an AJAX built-in and Tumri believed it would increase the click-through rate and customer interaction. Currently, Tumri’s advertiser network includes Zappos, Macy’s, Wal-Mart and Sears.

No doubt, they’re poise for growth now, albeit that several sites have the preference to use Google AdSense system in which this particular platform has recently introduced the beta testing of streaming video advertisements. But I believe it won’t stop Tumri from becoming the leader in the field of Advertising 2.0.

From the recent buzz in the blogosphere, it seems Google is buying FeedBurner for $100 miilion. Apparently, Google liked the acquisition of FeedBurner, but the one obvious question was its evaluation. Furthermore, Google own product, i.e. Google Reader had the similar business model as FeedBurner when compare to each other face-to-face. But it’s seems this is not very important when the growth of the blogosphere is fit to Google’s assessment of FeedBurner’s worth.

Read a blog of HitWise gave us the answer of the potential and growth of FeedBurner in recent months. Not only this, this particular post also discussed the increased need of analytics products in the blogosphere. Of course, the size of the market determine the attractiveness of its future growth. It was on the basis that the potential of a market is always far more important than how Google made the $100 million valuation on FeedBurner. But we shall not forget about the Google plans of the AdSense for feeds. Though still in beta testing, with the existence of more than 400,000 publishers FeedBurner had got in hands, any perception of overpaying for this FeedBurner acquisition by Google could prove the industry pundits wrong in the future. I believed it was only a matter of time before Google building another strong feeds provider in order to visualize their AdSense for feeds’ dream, if the above acquisition didn’t happen.