Rev2.org

RingRevenue.com is a new service that allows advertisers, affiliate networks, and the like track purchases that are made by phone. So if your affiliate network tracks products for online sales, but a customer makes a phone call instead, the affiliate still receives credit for the sale.

They call it a “pay-per-call” platform and it makes it easy for publishers to track campaigns that are carried over over the phone. Both online and offline advertisers will definitely like this addition.

RingRevenue includes a lot of targeting and tracking as well, including demographics, geo-location, and other marketing information for the sales made. This information could potentially be extremely useful to a marketer who’s aim is to convert more phone sales or add phone sales to the mix.

Campaigns must be made to include phone calls as their tracking, or the system won’t work, of course. Promotions for specific products or affiliates will include a special phone number for tracking their sales. So a website which allows customers to call in their orders, for instance, would have to integrate dynamic scripts to display phone numbers based on the tracking cookie or other affiliate model.

Specific campaigns made for telephone are where RingRevenue really works best, though. In this case, the affiliate advertiser would just list their specific campaign phone number in their ad. The call is then tracked by the network when a customer calls in and the affiliate’s cut of the sale is automatically attributed when the operator finishes the sale.

Sales and information are reported real-time on the RingRevenue website when clients log in to view them. A full demo on the website will give you a better idea, in more detail, of how the process works.

Earlier in June, RingRevenue managed to pull $3.5 million in Series A funding from GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, and Great Pacific Capital. The idea behind RingRevenue is to tap into the $300 billion in yearly sales that take place offline.

One of the world’s largest affiliate platforms, Commission Junction, has signed on to offer the RingRevenue platform for their clients. RingRevenue is based in Santa Barbara, California and was co-founded by Jason Spievak, Robert Duva, and Colin Kelley.

It appears that what a lot of insiders had been predicting has come true.  Last night, the Time Warner board of directors approved the spinoff of its America OnLine (AOL) unit.  While AOL was operating as an independent company within Time Warner, it was not independently traded on the market.

Currently, AOL is owned almost entirely by Time Warner with Google holding a small, 5% share.  That share will be bought out in the spin off process, which is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

Kara Swisher at BoomTown is reporting that sources inside are saying that Tim Armstrong (AOL CEO) plans to make sweeping changes to the company’s structure.  This includes pigeoning many of AOL’s recent acquisitions like Bebo into a ventures unit  to attract outside investors.  Another big change will be to the various attempts at re-branding the company has seen under past leadership.  Anderson reportedly plans to focus on pumping the AOL brand as well as key AOL services like ICQ and AIM.

Meanwhile, as Anderson continues with his 100-day sweep of AOL, buzz has been happening around what the removal of leadership of both People Networks and Platform-A units in AOL has meant.  It appears that the plan is to consolidate like services into departments and combine services.

Of course, speculation over the valuation of the new AOL is also underway.  Frederick Moran, a respected analyst at Benchmark, figures that the new AOL is worth about $5 billion.  He arrives at this figure by separating the dialup business that AOL still dominates (AOL owns Earthlink) and it’s other top performer, the Platform A ad grouping.  Between them, they have a valuation of close to $5 billion.

Further, AOL has 107 million unique visitors per month across its properties and several advertising networks and other sources that provide revenue steadily.  The separation and independent stock holding will also allow AOL to better leverage itself for acquisitions and transactions.

The official press release from Time Warner is, of course, generally un-revealing.  Some base information on the deal, including how the 5% share Google holds will be moved into Time Warner shareholder’s portfolios in a tax-free move, are given, however.

Overall, this is probably a very good move for AOL, since it’s seen nothing but stifling and heavy decline since being brought under the Time Warner umbrella.  Now it’s a question of whether Tim Anderson’s vision can carry AOL into a new market.  AOL’s brand stigma is fading, so the time may be right (as Anderson is apparently guessing) for the AOL brand to be brought forward once again.

As you might have noticed, VOIS.com recently acquired Rev2.org, and Craig Agranoff, who has been filling in for me for the last year or so, has now taken on the blog full-time as Editor.

The decision to sell Rev2 came as a difficult one seeing it has been a part of my life for the last five or so years, but given my lack of time and neglect for it, it was either a case of watching it die a slow death with the lack of content and missed hosting bills, or hand it over to Craig who would attempt to resurrect it with fresh, regular content, with the freedom for me to move on freely with other projects.

Rev2’s history has been an unconventional one, and there have been too many ups and downs to count over its existence. In 2005, I decided to evolve my personal blog at the time, The Daily Rundown, to review web apps and services and cover note-worthy web news. Something I found after I started my personal blog was that I was much more in touch with particular happenings when I got to write about it, so having it evolve to Rev2 was my own way of saying to myself, “this web 2.0 thing is going to be big, and I need to start keeping up with it.”

I wrote around 3 posts a week throughout 2005, reviewing some of the apps that released over the week. While there were other, better blogs such as ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch budding at that time, I could never find myself doing what I did full-time, so I was happy with learning a thing or two by covering something I was passionate about, and informing a couple readers along the way.

As things got serious through 2005 with services like MySpace and YouTube just getting traction, I noticed TechCrunch and some of the big blogs at the time putting out 125×125 ad inventories on their websites and having it full within days. First reluctant about putting advertising on the blog (this was a big point of debate back then), I decided to offer a couple myself and was able to attract a couple of sponsors within the following weeks.

The financial support allowed me to look for writers, as some of the other blogs started to do at the time, and by 2007, Rev2 had around five to six part-time writers posting fantastic content, with a traffic graph relatively small but up-hilling (at our peak, we were close to doing 260,000 pageviews for a month, FWIW.) Through the writers I hired for Rev2, I got to meet and work with exciting and fascinating people, most of whom I’m still in touch with and one of whom is my business partner on a startup I’m working on.

Obviously, great things don’t last forever, so by the end of 2007, things started to get a little hectic on the financial side, with me having to let-go writers and the flow of content coming to a halt. After my one month-long trip to U.S. at the end of the year, I found it difficult to return to blogging having little or no chance to do so in that couple of months. After some months of writing on-and-off, Craig stepped in, and he’s been at it since then.

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you would have noticed Craig’s writing style grow in the past year or so, and with the content he’s been putting out lately, I have no doubt in believing that Rev2 is in capable hands and here to stay. There’s no question that Craig has taken the blog much more seriously than I have in the last year, so his taking over only reflects what has been true all this time.

This is my final official post on Rev2, but I have always found the blog a fantastic place to talk about my achievements, or scramble out a 2,000-word essay on a topic I know little about, so as long as Craig allows me, I’ll hopefully be able to step in once in a while and give the Rev2 audience their much-missed (or much-loathed) words of wisdom.

Meanwhile, you can check out my personal blog, follow me on Twitter, use my micro-diary service Memiary, and keep up with my startup-in-stealth Nincha (we’ll be launching soon, I promise.)

To keep up with updates from this blog, I also recommend you follow @Rev2 and @Vois.

Apple took another hit to their iTunes service yesterday when Walt Disney and Hulu announced a new partnership while current partners NBC, ABC, and Fox all re-upped their agreements with the streaming service as well.  CBS is probably kicking themselves for signing that exclusivity deal with YouTube about now too.

Gartner analyst Michael McGuire says that “Over time, perhaps the direct-payment model goes away.”  This is a direct reference to the iTunes pay-as-you-go model versus Hulu’s free-to-watch model with limited commercial interruptions during the show–the same model YouTube is using.

Rumor has it that Hulu might be in talks with some major cable television giants too, which would make them king of the streaming broadcasts online–much to Google’s chagrin, I’m sure.  iTunes, of course, still reigns supreme in digital music content.

Now for the ringer: Hulu is apparently working on an iPhone and iPod Touch app to stream content to those portables.

BusinessWeek’s Cliff Edwards writes that while all of this is happening, Apple has some summer surprises to release this year in the form of a “media pad” handheld.  He also mentions that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder–an interesting conundrum for the legendary geek.

The Deal with Disney took months to complete.  Peter Kafka at MediaMemo explains this.  The situation basically boiled down to coordination between five different parties in multi-million dollar discussions.

This joining of Disney to the Hulu venture is an interesting addition that will play out some exciting (to watch, at least) goings-on in the next few months.

The latest in online games doesn’t appear to be another fantasy RPG, but is instead an analysts’ hair-puller like Deal or No Deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, but without Howie Mandell.

The search engine turned Web portal has been in talks with Microsoft and most seem to agree that it’s been about search. Yahoo could potentially outsource their search to the Seattle giant, but nobody appears to want to confirm or deny any deals that might be coming from the talks.

Just to stir the pot and ad more confusion to the whirlwind of rumors, Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz made sure to dance around the subject without confirming, denying, or even keeping board room rancor in place during the corporation’s first quarter earnings conference call. She F-bombed the end of the call, just to prove her point.

The call’s emphasis was on both Yahoo’s lackluster numbers (which were expected) and on Yahoo’s future going forward. ZD Net says “It’s unclear whether Yahoo’s earnings call dance was choreographed but it was quite effective at confusing the hell out of people. ” She stated that:

“It is critical to our customers and partners that they have a combined search display experience on the Internet and so I haven’t changed my position on that. Relative to anything else with Microsoft, I actually have no comment.”

A big part of Yahoo’s troubles lies in their internal employee balance, she went on. Yahoo has one product person for every three engineers, so those engineers spend more time responding to requests than they do developing anything. Which makes me wonder if working at Yahoo isn’t a lot like a real-world version of The Office.

It was at this point that Bartz dropped the F-bomb.

“So we had a lot of people running around telling engineers what to do but nobody is f—ing doing anything.”

The really amazing thing in all this is that despite the totally confusing conference call report and the flood of analysts spouting opinions based on confusion, Yahoo’s stock actually pipped 5% in after-hours trading right after Bartz hung up.

No one is sure what Yahoo’s plans actually are. Bartz made it clear that they are cutting 5% of the workforce, outsourcing something (not a lot of detail on WHAT, exactly), and continue to “leverage strategic partnerships.” That could mean a partnership with Microsoft. Or not.

So which is it? Deal or No Deal?

The big news in today’s business world is Sun’s setting on the proposed IBM deal in favor of taking the Oracle offer instead. Both Oracle and Sun Microsystems announced today that they’ve reached an agreement wherein Oracle will acquire Sun common stock in a $7.4 billion deal. This will move about $5.6 billion of Sun’s net worth into Oracle’s portfolio.

Oracle has high hopes for the deal, expecting to reach $1.5-$2 billion in profit per year for the next two projected years from Sun operations alone (Sun has lost 11% of its revenue year-over-year). This would make Sun into the most profitable acquisition Oracle has made yet.  As Tech Crunch points out, this is a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology.

Sun’s board of directors unanimously agreed to the buyout and the deal is expected to go through this summer. The board had serious reservations about IBM’s offer made last month, it’s reported, which explains why that merger didn’t happen.

Oracle’s largest plans are for Sun’s Java programming language, of course. Oracle themselves have stated that Java is a critical part of their Fusion Middleware offerings and the company plans to push them into as much prominence as their largest business: database systems (Exadata).

It’s not likely that Oracle will promote Sun’s hardware business too heavily, as the company has stated in the past that they “aren’t in the hardware business.” It’s also unlikely that Sun’s server technologies will be dumped altogether, either, being the behemoth in the market that they are.

The choice of buyout isn’t overly surprisingly, at any rate, as the two companies have been close partners for over two decades. Ad to that the fact that Sun’s Solaris OS is the leading platform for Oracle’s database and that their Fusion Middleware line is built on Sun’s Java, and the acquisition gains huge implications. Obviously, Oracle will become even more of a powerhouse thanks to this deal.

This merger is likely the single most important change in the technology world in the past decade and will have far-reaching implications for a very long time. It’s probable that the next two or three years will see huge shakeups in the tech world as companies adjust to this merger and the troubled economic climate we have today.