Chris Sukornyk, ongoing…

Startups fill the gap

It sometimes amazes me how startups form, seemingly out of thin air, to fill unoccupied niches.  Twitterimage.com is a perfect example; it is a new graphic design business that specializes in creating custom Twitter backgrounds.   Only a few months ago, this would not have been a viable business.  Yet as more and more people hack their Twitter backgrounds, an opportunity bubbled up and a new startup was born to fill the gap.   They also seem to have a pretty clear focus and strategy to get noticed (free backgrounds to people with 5,000) followers.  My Twitter background needs some love, but I’m no where near 5K followers!

Youtube Video Annotations

YouTube recently launched a feature that allows you to embed clickable regions within a video.   Unfortunately you are prevented from linking out to external sites and can only link to other Youtube videos or search results.  So while the feature might lead to interesting pick-your-plot vidoes it isn’t going to change the world.

The ability to link-out would be a huge benefit for affiliate marketers looking to drive traffic to their campaigns.  If external links were allowed you could imagine a great deal of effort would be used to produce viral videos that ultimately are used to sell a product (the soap opera model). Until then, the only way to add links are to use services like LinkedTube which lets you add links to YouTube videos embedded on your site.

Checkout this demo:

How are you watching Obamapalooza?

I’ll be watching using this slick app by Ustream from my iPhone.   I downloaded from the App store in a few minutes and was able to pick a feed.  Decent video so far, we’ll see how it handles a million streams or so.