Super news in from Flirtomatic Towers. I had a note from CEO, Mark Curtis this morning with the details. Have a read…

Hey Ewan - I think Neil may have told you but today we’ve launched a new premium service - Flirtwords.

It’s quite exciting in a couple of ways…..in essence users can now buy any word they like on the service for 24 hours and whenever anyone searches on that word, they come top of the results list.

So it’s pretty much like Google Adsense, but for people. And mobile (we’ll do the web implementation later).

The other interesting feature is that we have given over 5% of our ad inventory to boosting results for a user. Basically if you sponsor a word, we automatically make an ad for you “Ewan IS mobile” and show it across the site during your 24 hours….

We’ve got no idea whether users will grasp the concept and naturally we’ve done our best to make it super easy to understand and buy. The ad banners should really help explain it.

It’s going to be fun watching what happens now.

Let me know if you have any questions…..

Best

Mark

The results of this, on the top of the innovations Flirtomatic have added recently, is going to be fantastic to examine. They’ve become brilliantly adept at meeting their user requirements retailing all sorts of virtual goods — from virtual rings, hugs, kisses to actually allowing members to send each other physical products (most notably, a rose that includes some knickers - imagine my shock at discovering the contents of the rose I was sent as a trial from Flirtomatic included some knickers - read the post here).

I’d like to draw your attention to one of Mark’s videos on Mobile Developer TV. Episode 5 is the one to watch in particular. You’ll see Mark describe how they developed their virtual (and physical) retail offerings — mostly underpinned by the Flirtomatic audience’s insatiable desire for profile raising.

Yet another reminder not to write off the mobile web. Flirtomatic, remember, have absolutely no mobile applications to speak off. It’s all mobile web browser based.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that Flirtwords are going to be a success. Provided the users get their head around the concept — and I’m sure they will — I reckon they’ll run away with it.

If I was hunting for some female attention on Flirtomatic, what are the words I should be using? What are the females on Flirto searching for? Hunk? Bentley? N97?

I’m looking forward to seeing some good examples of ingenuity from the Flirtomatic users.

I’ve been international for three weeks now and SpinVox is dutifully keeping me in the loop. For the first two weeks, I turned my phone off. I couldn’t stand giving Vodafone the additional cash.

Since I went out and got a T-Mobile sim with unlimited data (and put it in my unlocked G1) I have been getting the SpinVox email notifications on a regular basis. Absolutely fantastic.

Again, it would be simply brilliant if SpinVox integrated with my address book (a la HulloMail) so that I could see exactly who called — instead of reading the message. Often, because folk are so used to their MSISDN identity proceeding them, they tend not to say who they are. Fine if you’re listening to the voicemail. Not so fine if their speech to text translated message simply says ‘Call me’.

Very useful, even though I’m abroad.

How are you finding SpinVox? Any recommendations for other services I should be trying out?

About two weeks ago I saw a Twitter message from colleague Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group. Steve is usually riffing on the enterprise IT marketplace — and particularly storage — over at his IT Rants blog. My attention was piqued by his Twitter message — he asked his followers to pass on a message about a Leukemia sufferer looking for a particular type of match. I immediately re-tweeted.

The sufferer, Nick Glasgow, is a 28-year old employee of EMC. His VP of Marketing, Mark Fredrickson, put out a note — which Steve picked up, and I picked up — and hundreds more picked up via Twitter and other social mediums.

Turns out there’s some potentially good news in just two weeks.

Mark from EMC writes:

We learned yesterday afternoon that Stanford Cancer Center has found two donor matches for Nick out of the thirteen potential matches that had been developed by the national registry. Human leukocytes antigen (HLA) typing is used to match patients and donors for transplants. The immune system uses these antigens (markers) to recognize which cells belong in your body and which do not. Stanford was searching for a set of ten markers for the best match. Each of the two donor matches that were discovered, match ten out of ten criterion markers. Further evaluation needs to occur on the two donors by Stanford before a final selection can be made. Moreover, up until the actual transplant event, the national registry will continue to search for other possible donors that might make an even better match.

In any event it looks like Nick is going to get his chance at a transplant procedure which is heartening indeed for all of us. Nick and his family are so very grateful to all those people behind the scenes at EMC, as well as the other large companies that joined in, The Asian-American Donor Program, the Be The Match Donor Program, all the media involved, and the Stanford/Kaiser medical teams that have helped bring about this hopeful development. We are equally thankful for all of the outpouring of personal support by individuals all over this land and around the globe for their good wishes, prayers, support, and for all the donor volunteers who have come forward this past month.

Excellent, excellent news. I hope it all goes well for Nick. This is a super example of how personal social media really can be influential in making the world a smaller, personal place.

You can find out more about bone marrow matching here: http://www.marrow.org/.

You know things are getting ridiculous when the United States Government reportedly (Washington Post) asked Twitter to delay it’s scheduled maintenance to avoid disruption for the protesting Iranian citizens.

It is a brilliant, brilliant public relations coup for Twitter.

But it’s ridiculous that the United States Government is asking a private company to delay it’s scheduled maintenance for the benefit of the Iranian people.

If it’s that important — if it’s that critical to the United States international interests, why hasn’t the US State Department nationalised the service?

It’s not official, of course. Let’s have a read of some comical text from the Washington Post.

“One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter,” a senior State Department official said in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity. “They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to.”

So was Secretary Clinton rushed from meetings to a secure bunker to scream down the phone at Twitter?

Not quite.

A White House official said “this wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff.” The official said Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted, according to news reports. “Twitter is simply a medium that all Iranians can use to communicate,” the official said.

Riiight.

I had a note in from Matt Mikulla this morning telling me about his new service, NumberGarage.

It’s beautifully designed — the service makes we want to sign-up and be a customer, just by looking at the front-page.

This is a service for Americans, only. Although I definitely reckon Matt should see if they can extend the service internationally.

Over to Matt for an explanation:

I just wanted to tip you off on our phone number parking and forwarding service NumberGarage, http://www.numbergarage.com .We allow the customer to control the phone number and choose what to do with it similar to a domain name. Many folks use the service in combination with Google Voice or when moving area codes. There’s a million reasons.

I’d love to know what ideas and opinions you have regarding NumberGarage.

I think the reason most relevant to me would be if I wanted to keep my number if I was planning to move home/mobile service provider. I can then sit on the number if I like, before moving it to another provider when convenient — or I can simply have it forward to another number. Brilliant! I reckon I’d find NumberGarage hugely, hugely invaluable.

Nice one.

Have a look and tell me what you think?

If you’ve got a feed of 140-character-friendly data that you’d like to monetise, take a look at TwitPub. It launched 2 months ago and it’s beginning to attract attention.

If, for example, you’d like to get daily Feng Shui tips from a master, or if you fancy daily reviews and perspective from an Anim guru, TwitPub is for you.

I really like the concept. Anyone can sign-up and begin retailing premium tweets. The question is whether the market is ready to accept and pay for 140-character updates.

In many cases, I think it could be a winner. For example if you’re trying to get fit, stay healthy or any kind of self improvement, I could see people signing up for a $9/month ‘bug me with updates’ or ‘encourage me with updates’ feed.

Indeed the more I think about TwitPub, I think they should zero in on self-help categories. I don’t necessarily see the value in paying for 140-character updates on subjects that I have a passing interest in.

For example, there’s a chap retailing the latest updates, tips, tricks and social media stuff for $1 monthly. Although the chap’s knocking out around 372 tweets a week, I feel I’m in that no-mans-land between thinking $1 is really… REALLY cheap (ergo, what’s the quality like?) and wondering whether or not my current social media knowledge needs to be augmented to the tune of $1/month.

But I can really imagine going to a local gym chain and ’signing up’ for their 3-month improvement special plan. And I can imagine being offered premium encouragement/updates/tips as part of this deal for an extra $9/month. If the tweets are sent into my twitter feed at predefined intervals (e.g. before lunch/dinner) that could be rather valuable.

Another viewpoint: Pregnancy. I can imagine pregnant mothers (and fathers) signing up to one of those your-baby-is-the-size-of-a-peanut-today updates. Indeed you could sign up the whole family.

I’d also like to see examples of the kind of premium Twitter messages I’m buying as well.

I like the concept TwitPub. Good idea and good effort. I reckon focus it a lot more into the real pain-points where folk will really see value.

Check it out and sign-up at www.twitpub.com.

I came across Android Storage the other day.

The service is in ‘coming soon’ mode and is set to offer:

- 2GB of free music, video and image storage for your Android phone
and
- A whopping 50GB of mobile media storage and streaming services

All for only $10 per year.

The service looks to consist of four separate applications: -

- AStunes™ - Play all of your uploaded music with this streaming music app
- AScinema™ - Watch your uploaded videos and movies with this streaming video app
- ASpics™ - Display all your photo and image collections with this photo app
- ASdisk™ - Easily deliver files to and from your phone via our mobile storage servers

Although I’m tempted to wait for the likes of ZumoDrive to launch their own Android application, I’m attracted to the Android Storage concept.

There’s an API too for developers who’d like to integrate Android Storage services into their own applications.

If Android Storage can seize the initiative and deliver a collection of super-useful applications, they could well begin counting an increasing number of Android users as customers.

I look forward to trying out the service when it becomes available.