More On Widgets

Ok, so I've been getting a lot of great feedback on our new widgets tool, a lot of people want to know how to get it on their site/blog. I am hoping to have the feature available in the next few weeks. In any case check, if you really want it in part of your site, let me know and I'll hook you up with the link.

Cardvio Widgets

After some handy work by our technical team, we made it so you can embed cards directly into your blog, Myspace page, or any other website for that matter. If you click the card to the right it will bring it up directly in our editor so you can start customizing the card and send it to your friends. Very cool and easy to setup. Enjoy.


Carm

Joost and Disruption

While this is rather off topic from Greeting Cards, I came across this article on my Google Reader and couldn't help to post a link to it. The article is a review of Joost, the new TV platform that is coming out and I think it makes a couple great points. First there is a reference by Mark Goldberg to The Iridium Syndrome' - an engineering-led solution solving a non-existent problem resulting in massive flushing of cash?". Which I think is a good way of describing a lot of web products we see today in the marketplace. There are a lot of neat ideas, but what problem are they really solving.

Secondly, talking about disruptive technologies in that the " ...most successful market disruptors start with inferior goods or services that are aimed at marginal markets." The article gives the blackberry as an example.

Now in my mind this is kind of a brain twister. The logic being that most really good products like the blackberry started off as a really bad product aimed at really marginal market. I think the only concern from this viewpoint is that this involves some serious risk because for every one disruptive product there are thousands that just don't make it (i.e. the apple newton).

-Carm

Why it's going to get harder for Social Networks

I found this article on Techdirt that shows how even the top players in the social networking space are having trouble making money. It seems that while Myspace boasts some impressive membership numbers their revenue seems to be much less. In my opinion this is where companies like ours step in to help out. Generating offline opportunities that social network users are willing to pay for could be a huge money maker for these sites but many are too focused on ad revenue. They are going to have to drastically change their thinking if they truly believe that there are enough ad dollars out there to go around. Once the venture capital runs out I see two options for many top sites, either they get rid of all their overhead and become lifestyle business for the founders or they get innovative and figure out a way to monetize their traffic and users and ad dollars are most likely not going to cut it. More importantly investors will want to see a better return on their money and my hope is that they will seriously consider using products like Cardvio to help them make money.

- Carm