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Interview With Murti Hussain, President of Peanut Labs Posted: 02 Jun 2009 06:32 AM PDT Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Murti Hussain, the President and Co-Founder of Peanut Labs about the company’s advertising strategy and the social advertising landscape in general. Peanut Labs helps publishers monetize their sites (largely game publishers) through survey offers from large brands. The company actually got started through their own gaming site which used peanuts as a form of virtual currency. After turning profitable, the company decided to provide services for other publishers to help them monetize their games. Monetization is one of the biggest challenges for publishers across the web, especially on social platforms. By organizing a targeted demographic within your application, there is the possibility of generating a substantial amount of revenue since at the end of the day, advertisers want to reach targeted segments of the population. As Murti describes during our interview, targeting mothers is currently a huge opportunity on social platforms since many social applications are not targeted to them. That’s not to say that mothers is the only demographic to build applications for. XBox for example, continues to pay Peanut Labs for surveys targeted at the younger male gamer demographic. We had the opportunity to speak about a number of other things but I’ll let you check out the podcast below to hear the rest of the conversation. Thanks to Murti for taking the time to speak with us! This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

hi5 Gets Virtual with SmallWorlds Partnership Posted: 02 Jun 2009 06:00 AM PDT hi5 manages to keep our attention lately, with all the product roll outs the social network has, geared directly towards its Game channel and virtual goods-based economy. The latest to team up with hi5 is SmallWorlds, the 3D virtual community that launched last year. The SmallWorlds integration with hi5’s Game channel is pretty seamless, as SmallWorlds already took advantage of several social media services for building out its own feature set. Incorporating things like YouTube video channels and other media consumption options, the virtual world is one of the more robust offerings out there. Part of what makes SmallWorlds so robust is its presence as a stand-alone service as well as an integrated application in other social networkding destinations. Already having launched a Facebook application earlier this year, SmallWorlds is looking to expand its own presence across the social web. Having a cross-network presence makes the 3D virtual world more seamless for its own end users, and can eventually take advantage of some of the more social capabilities of existing social networks. For hi5, the integration of SmallWorlds expands its Game channel even further, which is a goal the social network has been working towards for some time. It’s evident that hi5 is really looking to further differentiate itself as a social destination site, having bulked out its virtual goods marketplace, and integrating several aspects of its own network and platform with its virtual economy.

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