I was talking today with the Noah Paessel and Elnor Rozenrot, the CEO and COO respectively of SNiF Labs a developer a next-gen place-aware dog tag system. It’s a pretty darn clever little piece of hardware.

I asked how product development going and Elnor said “slowly, carefully” and then “fast and furiously.” Which I think is an excellent way to describe true start-up development. Only those of us working in a start-up could concurrently feel that they are working in a thoughtful, methodical manner that moves at a breakneck speed.

It made complete sense to me, so I hope they don’t mind I’m blogging it ;> I’d like to suggest the acronym SCFF. In honor of SNiF, of course it should be pronounced SCiFF.

It reminds me of another conversation. I recently asked Keith Teare, CEO of Edgeio, and an old friend of Dogster, how it was going. He paused for a second and simply answered, “start-up.” It made so much sense to me. I’m sure the real answer could actually along the lines of “well, we just landed a new client and our migration to a new database server had to be rolled back and we just found a great new hire and I’m going to have to work this weekend again and our product is more popular then ever.”

It’s just so much easier to say “start-up.” So now it’s a adverb as well as a noun in my book ;>

Loki the Cat is vlogging on Catster and he is killing it! Mark my paws, Loki is gonna be bigger than the iPhone in a LOL Facebook App.

They’re informative: Learn How to Make a Cat Shirt

Or Deep Sci-Fi! Such as Fargate Trekwars 01: “Luna the Geek”

Check out his whole Catster Video Book. You’re going to need to block out some time on your calendar.

Oh the catmanity, I love it!

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit last Friday. It was a great conference with lots of great dialogue around this hot topic. Hats off to Susan Wu and Charles Hudson for putting together a great day!

One of the most interesting concepts discussed at the conference was the difference between “functional” and “decorative” goods. Functional goods are items that can give a user (or a player in the gaming worlds) additional tools or skills. For example, in a game this might be a better sword or the ability to run fast. Decorative goods are ones that help you spice up your online presence. Everyone agreed that the term “decorative good” was not the best as decorative goods definitely have a function too – they help you express yourself through your page, avatar or character. Whether it be a fly badge on a profile page or a cool hat for your Gaia avatar, these goods help you define who you are.

In our panel,”Virtual Items: Mainstream or Not?” we took this a little further with virtual gifts. Gifts really are both functional and decorative. In giving a virtual gift you are sending a message with implied or explicit meaning attached to it. The most common reasons for sending a gift on Dogster and Catster are friendship, support of sick or dying pet, acknowledgement of kindness or knowledge, reciprocating a gift given, and for tail wags to members who go out of there way to make the communities fun. Virtual gifts on your page may look great but they also represent social currency and status in that community. A person with 20 Rosettes (our most common virtual gifts) on their pet page is someone who has a lot of clout in the community.

Whether gifts and goods are functional or decorative it is very important to consider balance within the game, virtual world or community. The goods should enhance a user’s experience but not upset the balance. Other users who do not have access to these goods, should still be able to thrive in the environment.

Virtual goods are going to be huge. Some of the Asian gaming companies presenting had huge revenues ($65M per quarter from one) from virtual goods as they have been focusing on this whilst in North America we have been more focused on online advertising. But make no mistake, virtual goods are coming to all online communities. Dogster and Catster (a mainstream demographic) have had great success with virtual gifts. Our members have given away over 50 million virtual gifts (treats, bones, rosettes and stars) in the past two years. Advertisers have sponsored our virtual gifts. Members have taken to both the free and paid-for gifts in ways we could not imagine. Not only has it provided a significant revenue stream for us and contributed greatly to our expansion and profitability, but it has also has made our community more connected and made the experience more meaningful for hundreds of thousands of members.

Big thanks to everyone at the conference for coming and sharing their thoughts!

Since March 2004, we have used the amazing open-source workhorse phpAdsNew (now called OpenAds) to serve all 357,993,568 ad impressions on our sites. For three years, phpAdsNew has been extremely reliable and impressive. We have been very encouraged by their renewed code development and think their plan to follow in MySQL’s footsteps as a for-profit open source company will be very successful.

However, we’re about to outgrow phpAdsNew (if we haven’t already) and we’re looking for the ad server that will take us to 10 million impressions per day.

The first candidate is OpenAds2.3 (previously called MediaMaxManager) the two year old development branch of phpAdsNew that is far more robust. However, it’s not 100% stable, and has the same problem we currently have which is that the IT departments of our big advertisers and their agencies consistently blame any reporting inconsistency on the fact we use open source software.

If our top priority was reflecting our advertisers ad server then DoubleClick DART would be our choice. Every advertiser uses it, I believe because every advertiser uses it. To us, their software feels as if it has hardly been updated since 1998 and DoubleClick has a very bad reputation for significantly under-reporting impressions.

Others we’ll probably considering are Accipiter (recently acquired by Microsoft) and Mediaplex.

Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations, reservations, critiques on these or others?

Who are we missing from our review list?

To be honest I would have thought that by 2007, enterprise ad serving software would be in far better state. I would have expected competitors with far better offerings to be have come to market.

All the more reason to expect OpenAds’ $5M investment and plans to become the MySql AB of enterprise ad serving to be that much more successful.

This afternoon we got some great news! Dogster and Catster won a CNET “Webware 100″ Award for Community! We had some impressive competition, to say the least. And we’re so very honored to have been chosen the winner.

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As you know, the “Webware 100″ Award recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. Finalists were selected and featured in an online voting poll, where users voted and ultimately selected the winners.

We’ve always been very proud of our community. To be surrounded by such a passionate, energetic and engaged group of individuals is nothing if not inspiring. And the fact that all of the energy is focused around loving dogs and cats, makes it all the more special.

Woof and Meow!

Today we launched an entirely new Catster Adoption Center sponsored by the amazing people at 9Lives Cat Food. We’ve always made it easy for people to post and find adoptable pets, but we’ve completely rewritten the system so adoptable pet profile pages are completely focused on them finding new homes. You can now search by pets, by their age, proximity to you, and compatibility with kids, dogs and cats, as well as by breed and gender. Furthermore adoptable pet page show that information as well as if the animal has been spayed or neutered, when it’s available and how far away the adoptee can live. Finally we’ve also added a ton of resources to learn about adopting a cat, taking care of a new cat, and shelters near.

9Lives has a inspiring goal of getting 1,000,000 cats adopted from shelters in by the end of 2008 and that is now our goal too! We’re going to make sure very cat lover knows how important this is and how easy it is to find the perfect cat for their family.

Another BIG enhancement is that animal shelters can now make their own profile pages. Their profiles appear with detailed contact information, interactive maps, reviews and helpful information as well as a list of all cats currently available in their shelter and also those that moved on to furever homes. Each shelter also has a Catster group open to anyone who adopted a cat through that shelter so everyone can stay in touch and help each other out through the life of their cats.

For those readers that that are interested in our business, I can’t say how perfect a partnership this is for both 9Lives and Catster. Helping people find the pet of their dreams and getting wonderful cats out of overcrowded shelters is the role we were born to play. By the power of the internet and the passion of our team and our 450,000 members we’ve been able to become a household name, both nationwide and around the world. Now being able to reverse that to bring important national-levels problems back down to the local and household level. People often imply to me that passion is nice (or worse, cute), but it’s not how businesses are built. To them I say “do you get it now?”

The Catster Adoption Center Homepage

Exemplary Search for Adoptable Cats

A New-style Profile Page

A New Shelter Listing Page

A New Shelter Group Page

 
We just launched a partnership with astrology.com to provide our members with their dog’s and their cat’s daily horoscope for FREE! YES, you heard that right, dog and cat horoscopes.

Don’t believe me, here’s today’s horoscope for my dog Moxie

Your owner turns out to have good taste. You’ll enjoy chewing on an unusual material that he or she picked out on his or her own.

I’ll make sure to hide those new hiking boots I just got!

You can see all of today’s horoscopes at Dogster Astrology and Catster Astrology

We’re happy to report that this star-crossed partnership includes Astrology.com including Dogster and Catster brand messaging in their pet horoscope newsletter, which goes to hundreds of thousands of pet lover each day.

As obvious as a match as this is, it’s taken a while to get the blend just right. I’d like to say it’s been great working with the Astrology.com folks so far and we look forward to expanding our joint services moving forward.