Tuesday, March 14, 2006

lycos Lycos.com. What they do: Lycos is one of the largest general interest portals on the web, providing quick access to news, entertainment, multimedia, shopping, yellow pages, weather, e-mail, blogs, job finding, and a comprehensive search engine. Lycos.com’s many affiliate sites offer users the latest in technology/media news through Wired.com, advanced music file sharing through Rhapsody, interactive gaming through Gamesville.com, and several free and premium web publishing tools like Angelfire and Tripod. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Lycos is a wholly owned subsidiary of Daum Communications Corp., a Korean web portal company. Why you should buy: Lycos caters to a wide variety of demographics, from professionals looking up stock quotes, to families sharing pictures and blogs, to young people playing games and downloading music. By advertising on this popular portal, you will be presenting your message to a high volume of traffic which consistently relies on the site for many different web activities. Format/How Much: Lycos offers a great variety of advertising options which enable you to customize your targeting strategy. Lycos Co-Registration, powered by GetRelevant, allows you to pay only when a customer takes action on your offer. When consumers visit a popular membership-based website and click to register, they are served a special offers page that displays your message and gives them the opportunity to opt-in. These consumers can be easily presented with additional marketing messages, and targeted for long-lasting profitable relationships. Lycos InSite AdBuyer offers an auction-based pay per click system of generating qualified leads from keyword-targeted ads. You can actively manage your own campaign, controlling price and budget, adjusting creative as frequently as you wish, and taking advantage of Lycos’ keyword suggestion tool. Bidding starts as low as $0.05 cost-per-click. 24/7 Real Media handles all of Lycos rich media and standard banner ads, which include but are not limited to the following formats: 728 x 90?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ.leaderboard 300 x 250?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ..box 120 x 200?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķbox 160 x 600?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ?Ķ..wide skyscraper Contact: For Performance-Based Advertising: Ted McNulty (781) 370-2716 ted.mcnulty(at)lycos-inc.com For Banner, Rich Media, and Display Advertising: Ari Bluman - 24/7 RealMedia (212) 231-7115 ari.bluman(at)247realmedia.com [Adotas] 10:22:41 PM

S3 Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches. Amazon Web Service is launching a new web service tonight called S3 - which stands for “Simple Storage Service”. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”. I was able to speak with Adam Selipsky (Amazon Web Services VP of Product Management and Developer Relations), Dave Barth (Product Manager for Amazon S3) and Andrew Herdener ( Seniro Public Relations Manager for Amazon) today about the service. They’ve built the back end for the number one requested company that I wrote about late last year - reliable and cheap online storage. I’ve been watching this space very closely, even profiling a number of new entrants, and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now). Until now, a sophisticated and scalable data storage infrastructure like Amazon’s has been beyond the reach of small developers. Amazon S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure. Here are the facts: This is a web service, and so Amazon is not releasing a customer facing service. They are offering standards-based REST and SOAP web services interfaces for developers. Entire classes of companies can be built on S3 that would not have been possible before due to infrastructure costs for the developer. Virtually any file type is allowed, up to 5 GB. Files may be set as public, shared or private and will have a unique URL. Pricing is cheaper than anything else I’ve seen: $0.15 per GB of storage per month, and $0.20 for each GB of data transferred up or downstream. This translates to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage, net of any transfer fees (to move that much data on to S3 would be a one time cost of $20). These prices are going to be significantly below the development and ongoing costs for small or medium sized storage projects - meaning a lot of the front end services I’ve previously profiled will be much better off moving their entire back end to S3. This is game changing. See Rob Hof at Business Week for his thoughts on S3 as well. He says “it should put to rest the notion, still popular among a few analysts, that Amazon is just a retailer.” Amazon S3, S3 Tags: mashup, storage, onlinestorage, webservice, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0 [TechCrunch] 9:50:45 PM