mashup, which runs 'digital' events, is launching Mashup Demo on Oct 2nd. It's been put together to provide startups and growing companies in the digital sector with a platform from which to demo their services to an audience of investors, corporates, bloggers, journalists and industry influencers. This allows them to overtly sell and flaunt their products and services, gain feedback on concepts, develop or find partners, seek investment, practice the pitch, test the proposition, refine the model or simply find customers. If you'd like to be considered for the event email a brief overview and maybe a YouTube video pitch to demo@mashupdemo.com.

Coverage of this year's Edinburgh TV Un-Festival 2007 and the Media Guardian International TV Festival will appear across both tbites.com and - where the topic is on digital media - mediabites.com. Stay tuned...

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NEXT EVENT: Brunch Bites 1.5 (BETA)

Date: Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Time: 10:30am - 12:00pm

Location:

The Dana Centre Cafe

The Dana Centre

165 Queen's Gate

South Kensington

London

SW7 5HD



The nearest underground station is Gloucester Road, on the District, Circle and Piccadilly lines.

Contact: 07720291095

Email: editor [at] bitesmedia.com

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What is Brunch Bites?

Work in digital media, marketing, music, mobile or "Web 2.0"? Working in or on a startup?

Brunch Bites is a new "salon" style event built around discussion and open networking over good coffee.

Are you a developer with a strong interest in taking something like Yahoo Maps and mashing it together with your Salesforce.com data to come up with some cool new innovative Web-based application? Or, are you thinking of building something unique and interesting on top of the application programming interfaces (APIs) from Amazon.com and Eventful.com? Check out MashupCamp in Dublin Sept 12-13.

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups.

First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week.

But research by tbites has found that adverts continue to appear alongside groups associated with the BNP, including the groups BNP - People Just like you making a difference, Old-Fashioned Fascists and Vote BNP and Save The World.

In each case the advert in question is for Searchanything.co.uk, an affiliate advertising search engine run by Advertising.com International Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US-based Advertising.com Inc, one of the world's largest interactive advertising network. There is no suggestion that Advertising.com is aware that their adverts are appearing beside these groups. In all likelihood there is an automated script making these ads appear which Facebook appears not to have taken down.

The WSJ's Kara Swisher visits Bebo London. Why is it so small an office for such a high-profile startup? Its development team is in San Francisco, while much of the commercial deals take place in London, since Bebo is growing fastest in the UK and Europe. Featuring an interview with Joanna Shields, "President of International", a former Silicon Valley executive with extensive European experience at companies like RealNetworks and Google.

Plaxo plans to release a social network "aggregator" on Monday. Its key features look likely to be an independence from platforms like Facebook, the ability to add information about the social networks your contacts use, feed aggregation and control over your owen data.

Plaxo hopes its independence from closed networks like Facebook will give it a competitive edge, although all the evidence is to the contrary right now. While many commentarors have been saying that users owning their own data would be an idea which triumphed in the end, so far the fastest growing network - Facebook - has disproved that theory by making the process of social networking very user-friendly by locking users into a closed environment. Not unlike the way Apple locks people into hardware by focusing on the user experience.

In the past Plaxo had a reputation for eating into a PC and spamming all your contacts with Plaxo invites. As a result it was usually used by small businessmen with zero idea about tech. It's unlikely to get much traction amongst the hip-young things on Facebook.

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook's PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it's the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

John Dvorak is an old-fashioned tech jounralist in the US who thinks we're going to have another dotcom bust:

"Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust...Today everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle. And this doesn't even consider the actual social-networking sites, from MySpace to LinkedIn to Facebook to even Second Life. This scene is totally out of control and will contribute to the collapse for sure."

Marshal Kirkpatrick is a startup guy and a former TechCrunch writer who nails this rubbish to the wall:

"I say: Social networking is an emerging utility that combines the functionality of blogging's self publishing with the usefulness of email list serves. Social networking services make these activities more accessible than ever before... Why on earth is this man considered a leading voice on tech? I'm guessing that it's because he speaks to the potent paranoia of much of the aging population - afraid in the face of a changing, confusing world that they will face humiliation if they bet on new tech, that they will be unemployed if things take a downturn or that they will lose their self-righteous know-it-all credentials if this new economy does succeed."

King of Shaves, the shaving brand and e-commerce site, is planning to release a Facebook application in what could be the first ever brand marketing use of the social networking site in this manner. Word leaked out via Twitter and a screen shot has been posted to Flickr.

So far brands in the UK (outside of media companies like Virgin and the BBC, see comment) have hung back form developing full-blown applications, preferring instead to use traditional advertising banners on the site.

moblog:tech, the new name for UK moblogging pioneers MoblogUK, has entered a new phase and is now looking for an 'equity for investment' deal.

The privately owned moblog:tech (MT) launched Moblog.co.uk in 2003 and is now now one of Europe’s biggest moblogging community sites. In fact pictures from the London bombings appeared first on the site, showing at the time that the emerging phenomena of 'citizen journalism' and user generated content could have dramatic impact on new events.

Moblogging - as they define it - is the process of posting online images, audio and video from mobile phones. Right now the site generates advertising and subscriber revenues, and features "Promoblogs". These are branded promotional websites to which a rock band, or event or a community can send content from their mobiles. These are then customised or held as standalone micro-sites, and are also featured within the moblog:UK community. Clients pay a license fee for a 3-month or annual Promoblogs.

MT also offers the Participation Toolkit which allows them to create a separate white-label moblogging community site for a client and their target audience. This is possibly their most valuable asset at this time, outside of the online community of MoblogUK. A major client for this so far is Channel 4's Big Art Mob project.

MT has a pretty experienced 5-person management team which includes, Mat Brown and Ben Godfrey (tech), Jonathan Allen (community), Lori Faye Fischler and Alfie Dennen (sales and marketing).

Dating site Match.com is to launch a mobile web and text service for mobile phones in the UK, US and Canada, expanding out to a further nine countries by the end of the year.

Subscribers will be able to search Match.com from their mobile's browsers and receive an SMS text message whenever another user sends them a message. According to research firm M:Metrics 3.6 million US mobile users made use of a mobile dating service in May 2007.

An earlier version of Match.com for mobile phones was used by nearly half a million subscribers, but the new service will allow subscribers to tap into Match.com's database of nearly 15 million registered users.

Here in the UK two startups will be keenly interested in this news. Flirtomatic which has been playing in the SMS flirting game for a while now and newer startup Flirtnik.com.

Jaman, California-based company that offers full length movies for either downloads or rental via a P2P client is planning to launch a European arm. The move is prior to an expansion of its programme of buying up rights to "mid-tail" independent and niche films.

Unlike Joost, which is really aimed at TV viewers, Jaman is going for audiences who want successful independent film (the kind of thing "Trainspotting" was once before it hit the big time) which they can't get in their local cinema. (You might think that would mean that there would be a lot of Bollywood movies and Asian or Latin American cinema on it as a result. There is indeed much of this content, but so far 60% of Jaman's content is actually English language based).

Babelgum is closest to Jaman's model, with it's emphasis on independent professionally produced video content, but unlike both of the aforementioned, Jaman is about downloading high quality HD film to rent or keep, rather than P2P streaming.

Jaman's player works on Windows XP, Vista and Mac. Jaman has also developed an unofficial plug-in for the AppleTV device which syncs content downloaded via the Jaman player (they have their own proprietary DRM player which, like Apple's Fairplay DRM, allows the sharing of the content across 5 devices) to Apple’s box. They're lead engineer on the project actually came from Apple, in fact.

Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon previously co-founded Informatica in 1992, which IPO'd in 1999. Jaman is not short of friends in high places. Backers include Hearst Corporation.

Although Jaman's video downloads to a PC, evidently they expect people to hook up the PC to a proper HD-capable TV and watch it in all its glory there. Any user creating an account - the sites is on an open Beta right now - will get three free film downloads before they have to shell out any money.

So far Jaman has aggregated over 1,500 international movies, and plans to acquire more content after its series A funding round, which should be completed this Autumn.

I met with British-born Faisal Galaria, recently appointed General manager EMEA, who was at one point a European director of Skype...

[continued]

Click To Play

An interview with Geir Freysson from Walletproof.com at the rather raucous Chinwag Big Summer Party. WalletProof allows you to track your purchases and operate within a budget, all within a quite nice Ajax-style interface which seems to take a lot of the headache out of keeping track of your spending.

Click To Play

An interview with Rob Wells, head of global marketing for the X-series handset at the Three mobile network in the UK. Rob talks about the X-series strategy, which is designed to make the mobile Web and data experience more mass-market, offering services like Skype and Slingbox form the mobile. [Apologies for the bad lighting on the video]