VigLink Raises $800K To Take Hassle Out Of Affiliate Programs

VigLink Raises $800K To Take Hassle Out Of Affiliate Programs: "

Most online publishers are at least vaguely familiar with affiliate programs, which can help them generate revenue from the stores and products they link to. Unfortunately, actually managing accounts with these programs can be a bit of a pain, and many people simply forget to use them. VigLink is a new startup that’s looking to help by automatically inserting affiliate links whenever you link to a product from your site. The company has just disclosed a $800K funding round it raised last summer that was led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, with a number of angel investors including Reid Hoffman, Dipchand Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler.

For those that aren’t familiar with them, affiliate programs are often offered by online retailers who pay you a commission to drive traffic (and purchases) to their webstore. Amazon is best known for their program, but many other businesses now feature them as well. VigLink looks to help you use as many as these programs as you’d like with a minimal amount of effort. The site is currently in a private beta, but plans to launch publicly in the next few months.

To start using VigLink, publishers simply drop a snippet of JavaScript into their pages. Then, whenever the publisher links to a valid product (say, some shoes on Amazon), VigLink will automatically convert that standard link into an affiliate link. The publisher still determines which stores and products they’re linking to — VigLink simply modifies that link to include the proper affiliate program URL.

VigLink further streamlines the process by maintaining its own account with these affiliate programs, and any publishers using VigLink are housed under these accounts. This makes it relatively easy for a publisher to get started (they don’t have to sign up for anything other than their initial VigLink account). But I’m not sure it’s a foolproof setup: if one publisher using VigLink starts behaving badly, there’s a chance that the affiliate program being abused will ban the entire VigLink account, which would affect all publishers using it.

CEO Oliver Roupe says that the company is being as transparent as possible with affiliate programs to make sure that doesn’t happen. He also says that VigLink has a system that constantly monitors its publisher sites for spam, even long after they’ve signed up for the service (he likens it to the system Google’s AdSense uses).

VigLink generates revenue by taking a percentage of the affiliate fees it generates (the company hasn’t settled on an exact amount yet). Roupe wouldn’t comment on any features that are in planning stages, but I suspect that they’ll eventually help publishers monetize by suggesting when they should insert affiliate links at logical places in their blog posts (say, when they mention a product). Likewise, VigLink could potentially offer a feature that would poll all of the affiliate programs in its system before inserting an affiliate link to determine which one would generate the most money for the publisher.

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VigLink

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Immunet Protects Online Communities From Viruses

Immunet Protects Online Communities From Viruses: "

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Immunet

Quick Pitch: Free community-centric AntiVirus software leverages collective intelligence of cloud computing to protect the entire userbase from virus threats and malware.

Genius Idea: Immunet bills itself as the next generation of protection. It monitors an entire network of computers for viruses and malware, and when it finds something nasty on one system, it pushes out protection to everyone else.

Instead of combating real-time threats with virus definition updates, Immunet monitors an entire network of users and when it is alerted that one user has encountered something bad, it passes on protection to the rest of the network in real time. Right now it runs on top of your existing anti-virus software to help give real-time protection, but eventually it will be able to be used as a standalone product, too.

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Immunet is free and works with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It’s recommended (although not explicitly required) that you also have another anti-virus solution until the program exits beta.

Although I don’t deal with virus or malware threats on a daily basis (I’m a Mac user), the speed with which trojans, worms and other malware can spread through social networks like Facebook makes Immunet’s community intelligence approach really intriguing.

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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Reviews: Facebook, PHP

Tags: antivirus, immunet, software, Windows

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Foreign Apps and Valentines on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging List

Foreign Apps and Valentines on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging List: "

New applications from around the globe and a non-Zynga attempt at a Farmville gifting app brings in players on this week’s top 20 emerging list for the week ending January 7. The emerging list is a way to spot rapid growth in titles that ended the week with below 1 million monthly active users.

2010’s first app to go from zero to first on the top 20 emerging list is FarmVille Gift Sender. According to AppData, the Farmville “add-on” (it’s a separate app) shot from nothing to reach more than half a million people in its first week. This isn’t surprising considering Farmville’s 30 million plus daily active users who presumably make up most of the app’s audience. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Zynga get this app shut down shortly due to its intellectual property issues.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille Gift Sender	504,499	+455,155	+90.22
2.	Garden World	438,570	+433,115	+98.76
3.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	460,090	+202,415	+43.99
4.	Will you be my valentine?	394,672	+187,112	+47.41
5.	My Town	320,996	+176,592	+55.01
6.	Yılbaşı Kartları	259,136	+163,923	+63.26
7.	zelim ti..	262,980	+143,178	+54.44
8.	Who Has The Best Profile Picture ?	192,030	+130,451	+67.93
9.	Travel Balloon	889,498	+127,313	+14.31
10.	Bite Me	510,929	+124,920	+24.45
11.	快打之王	728,072	+122,745	+16.86
12.	Poll Daddy Polls	274,976	+120,725	+43.90
13.	New Year Wish!	228,531	+117,014	+51.20
14.	Chinese New Year Gift – 新春禮物	128,234	+104,393	+81.41
15.	歡樂癲地 Funland	587,289	+94,413	+16.08
16.	Warstorm	313,678	+92,698	+29.55
17.	I Love Chocolate	449,577	+92,119	+20.49
18.	Happy New Year!	107,286	+89,707	+83.61
19.	傾城 Online	166,927	+89,381	+53.54
20.	Birthday Greeting Cards	597,641	+87,121	+14.58

Garden World is Tall Tree Game’s flower-growing app, and a game that has been live since last year. This week sees a restart for the app with the ability to see neighbors/friends gardens adding to a new overall total. That addition has boosted the app to have the highest gaining percentage of any app on the list with 99 percent this week, or 433,000 new players.

Users must have been inspired by the confident name, because Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009! is in the top five two weeks in a row. The app moves up one spot to third and has a MAU of 460,000 players.

Perhaps speaking too soon about seasonal apps, Will you be my valentine? makes a strong showing with 47 percent an MAU of 395,000 and over a month to gain users before Valentine’s Day on February 14th. The app is benefiting from a strong showing last year and it will be interesting to see if any new titles are released this month to capitalize on the season the same way developers did for Christmas.

Foreign language apps appear to be coming in to their own with regular appearances on all top 20 gaining lists. Six foreign language apps make up this weeks top 20. Four are Chinese-language apps: 快打之王, Chinese New Year Gift – 新春禮物, 歡樂癲地 Funland and 傾城 Online.

Chinese New Year Gift – 新春禮物 gained the most users from last week, making its first appearance on the list at 14 with 128,000 MAU and rising 81 percent this week. Meanwhile 快打之王 (“King of Kombat”) fell the most spots this week of any app, eight spots from last week where it ranked third overall.

Yılbaşı Kartları (“Christmas Cards”) is in its second week on the list and is the first Turkish app on a top 20 list. Turkey typically trades gifts around New Years which explains the Christmas theme, but its still a large number for any Turkish app.

zelim ti.. (“I want you ..”) is another small language app making its first appearance on the list. The app received a 54 percent increase for a seventh place spot on the list, its first appearance on the emerging list and probably the first Serbian language app on a top 20 as well.

Travel Balloon has the highest MAU this week and should break through the emerging lists restrictions once again to top 1 million MAU next week as long as its growth stay consistent. It will be joining last weeks title Ma Fiche which broke 1 million users this week.

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Boxee Beta Now Available To The Masses

Boxee Beta Now Available To The Masses: "

Boxee fans, today’s your lucky day: the service has just released its Beta to the general public. You can download the new version of the steaming video hub here.

The new version is really a complete overhaul of the app — it’s received a new, sexier UI that makes it easier to browse through the service’s content (and anything you might have saved locally too). Niceties include the ability to filter a show by season and episode and easier sharing using Boxee’s social features. There’s a lot that’s changed in the background too, including a switch from OpenGL to DirectX and support for hardware-accelerated video decoding for Windows users.

Today’s launch also brings with it some new content partnerships, including TV.com, blip.tv, and IGN. Unfortunately, the Boxee/Hulu cat and mouse game continues. Boxee says that some Hulu content now works in the app, and they’re working to get the rest of it added.

The Beta has been a long time coming — we first saw pictures of it back in June, when it had a planned September release date. It was finally unveiled in December, with a projected CES launch date (which they hit). Now the Boxee team says they want the 1.0 release to debut at next year’s CES.

Boxee has been making a lots of waves at CES, primarily with its new Boxee Box — a hardware device built specically to let people stream content to their TVs using the service. The device will sell for under $200 and comes complete with a QWERTY remote.

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