There are few services that I love to use. One of these is Mailchimp. It’s a great Email Marketing platform that you easily use and have fun! It’s the company that when you send an Email campaign, it tells you: “Great Job Nikos, have a banana!” These are some of Freddie’s (the chimp) messages that I see every day on my screen.

Anyway, the reason of this post is a video that they posted today on their blog. They talk about the story of “Rudy”, an Email Marketing guy who spams people in order to satisfy his boss. For you that are working in the email marketing (or you want to know more about that) take a look:

Mailchimp has also a Blip.fm account where you can subscribe and listen to their music selections. Good job guys!

Flought, a really fun project, was the winner of this idea. You can find more about the teams that participated, here.

These are some of the pictures that I took during the event. The Startup Weekend took place at the Kicklabs Offices, a very cool place! (Look at the pictures)

It’s one of these times that you find a website that you like. You add it in your bookmarks, you watch all its videos, you buy the book and you even buy one of its notebooks. The 99 Percent is not about ideas.. It’s about making ideas happen. It started in 2009 as a conference and now is a website with videos, articles and tips on how to make your ideas happen.

The creation of 99%, which was launched with our inaugural conference in 2009, sprung from the belief that, as creative professionals, we often focus too much on idea generation and not enough on execution.

There are several inspiring videos on 99%. Seth Godin talks about quieting our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. Jack Dorsey talks about Twitter’s success and Threadless founders say: The Do-First Work Ethic. Take a look on the 99% latest videos.

Stop thinking and start making this brilliant idea come true!

For one more year, O’Reilly and UBM Techweb co-produced a very successful conference on May 3-6 in San Francisco,CA. One of my favorite presentations was the one from Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Adam Smith (Xobni) with the title: “From Zero to One Million Users” This is their presentation:

Many great keynote speakers and some of them were: Tim O’Reilly, Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), Ge Wang (Stanford University, Smule), June Cohen (TED Conferences), Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare, Inc.) and my favorite Steve Blank (Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia) You can view all the keynote speeches here

Photos from the event:

For the last four years, Twitter makes no money. Today (Tuesday 13, 2010), Twitter announces its Business Model! Promoted tweets are coming in your Twitter feeds even if you use a Twitter client (third party application). Twitter can analyze your tweets, keywords, searches, followers and lists and serve you targeted ads! 

Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital.

The promoted tweet is one of three streams of revenue Twitter will have available, including a data fee from search engines indexing Twitter in real time, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the coming “professional accounts.” Professional accounts will include the ability to have multiple users on one account — much like some of the clients such as CoTweet do today — plus a dashboard that shows what’s happening with a brand on Twitter and integration with promoted tweets.

(AdAge.com)

This is what @biz Stone wrote on Twitter’s Official Blog just an hour ago:

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Q. You said, “first phase”; what else do you have planned?
A. Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.

Q: Is this what you said we would love and would be awesome?
A: While we are excited about the platform in general, there are several specific aspects of the launch that we are delighted to highlight. Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Q. Anything else to say?
A. This is a new thing and we expect to iterate to make it better. We’re really excited to get it out to you and look forward to getting your feedback.

This is a cool idea. It’s a brand new website that was launched 10 days ago. In Rentalic.com you can share your guitar, camping tent and iPod dock with others and get some money. Do you need some speakers for your party this weekend? Don’t buy them.. Just rent them for just few dollars.

About Rentalic.com:

Rentalic Inc. is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California. We provide an innovative web platform that enables person-to-person renting between friends, family, and communities. It is an online marketplace where owners can post items or services to rent out and borrowers can rent items or services they need. By offering a wide assortment of products and services that are conveniently located and cost effective, Rentalic.com provides a high value service to everyone!.

It’s very new and has few staff there but get there and support it! It;s a great idea that let you rent, share and be green!

Follow them on Twitter and Become a Fan on Facebook!

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..

This is a great idea. The BC Dairy Foundation (British Columbia, Canada) created a new campaign to promote the power of milk. They created ‘The Week Shop‘, an online (and offline) store that sells products for people that are ‘weak’ due to lack of milk consumption. There is a YouTube Channel, a Flickr account and a very good website that supports this campaign.

This is a funny commercial of Chair Pants.

So, drink milk if you don’t want to be the future customers of “The Weak Shop”

I guess that most of you have noticed or read about the change in Flickr‘s logo.. Yahoo recently added “from Yahoo!” next to Flickr logo in order to enhance its brand through this very successful image and video hosting service. What yahoo did is very reasonable and it might help the company’s brand. Apparently this action is a part of its new campaign. Why Yahoo chose only Flickr and some others and not all of its websites? For example Zimbra and Delicious, two very successful websites, don’t have a yahoo logo in the header or the footer. I can understand that the audience of Zimbra is much different than the one of Flickr but Delicious focuses on the similar target market that Flickr does. Interesting..

Yahoo has several websites, services and divisions. It is quite difficult to have a uniformity across its websites but it is important. I navigated through several Yahoo websites and I noticed that there are some differences in the logos (old red and new purple) and in favicons (the small icon next to the web address). Yahoo has several logos: ‘a Yahoo division’, ‘a Yahoo service’, ‘this is Yahoo’ and ‘from Yahoo’. Why all these different? Some of them in the old red and some others in new purple.

With favicons, Yahoo has not a uniformity across its websites. In most of them we see the new purple Y! and in some others the old red one.

I like that Yahoo has a very modern logo. I also like that on the web purple means Yahoo! and they chose a unique and rare color instead of using blue that most companies do! But.. They need to pay more attention in uniformity across its websites..

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices. October 15, 2009

The theme of this year is “Climate Change”. I think that it is overused but still important.

We encourage you to write about climate change in the context of how it relates to the topic of your blog. To help you start thinking, here are a few ideas about how you might connect climate change to things that you might already write about:

• A Technology or Business blog might write about emerging clean tech and how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change.
• A Health or Lifestyle blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and daily living.
• A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues – such as poverty and conflict.
• A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design.
• A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.

This is also a great opportunity for companies in Sustainable Business industry to participate, promote and support this ‘online event’. ImNikos.com will participate in Blog Action Day! These are some very well-known blogs that will participate too.