An exemplary exercise in collaboration

As I write, the first Australian StartupCamp is half-way through. Three new startups have been created from scratch and launched live via UStream.tv. The projects are traffichawk.com.au, linkviz.com and uT.ag.

Traffichawk is a live feed of traffic problems combining Google maps and feed data from the RTA. Unfortunately, there weren’t any reported problems on the roads when I looked, so I couldn’t see the system in full swing, but the demo looked good, at least Of the three, I’d say this has the most mainstream appeal.

Linkviz provides a visual depiction of the popularity of links posted on Twitter. The larger the image, the more popular the link. Nicely put together, but I’m not sure if it’s something I’d use personally. Broad adoption will also be limited by the fact that the service is not available on internet explorer. I’m assuming this was to focus efforts on one browser due to the time constraints.

uT.ag was the most popular application on the night and caused quite a stir because it provides a system for monetizing outbound links on blogs/websites. It does this by framing the link destination page and adding an advertising bar at the top of the page. The person that clicks the link still gets the content, but with an unobtrusive AdSense bar at the top. All you need to start using the system is a PayPal account. Most of the links on this page are uT.ag’d, so if you’d like to see what a page looks like, just click.

uT.ag is available in two forms. A ‘tinyURL’ style link generator will transform individual links into uT.ags. There is also a snippet of Javascript code you can add to your webpages to transform tags across a whole page on the fly. However, my tests showed up what I think is a bug where page text of the form ‘www.yoursite.com’ is translated to a ut.ag link at the text and href level, which makes a bit of a mess of the page content. I’ve let them know. Hopefully this will be a quick fix.

Another problem appears with the PayPal link above. I’m not sure what they do, but it appears they reload the page, and that kills the uT.ag ad bar. It’s the only site I’ve come across that does this, but I wonder if some site owners will implement uT.ag killing refreshes to prevent their pages being shown with ads at the top? What would Google think, for example, of someone presenting the Google homepage with AdWords ads at the top?

I have to say, despite initial skepticism and these small teething problems, I am thoroughly addicted to uT.ag’ing. I thought that manually tagging all links in a blog post would be a real drag, but it’s actually not that bad…no different to converting to tinyURLs, anyway, and it’s sweetened by the potential of earning money for your efforts. Congratulations to Kim (TechNation), David, Matt, Nick and Hugo…just remember the little people

The next step for the three teams is a pitch tomorrow morning, presumably to someone within the Geekdom/Photon organistion, who have hosted the event…hey, this uT.ag’ing is very addictive! Can’t wait for the WordPress plugin.

As an example of what can be achieved with a bit of collaboration, this surely can’t be beaten. In 24 hours, 3 teams have created 3 new startups. Well done and good luck to all teams.

StartupCamp is the brainchild of Bart Jellema, founder of tjoos.com and www.startup-australia.org. More information on the event can be found on the Silicon Beach Google Group page. At the post-launch after-party tonight, Bart confirmed that there are likely to be more StartupCamps in the near future, perhaps in other cities, too.

–
Paul
http://webequity.org/