So - outbrain has been nominated as one of the top-10 finalists in the best blog plugins category. Cool!
Now we need your help to get nominated as the winner... So take a minute to fill your email and hit the 'Vote Now >>' button below. Thanks!!
If you have a minute, and like what we're doing at outbrain - then please help us get to the next stage of Mashable's Open Web Awards - we need as many nominations as we can get.
We're looking for a great product person to head product management over at outbrain. The timing for joining us couldn't be any better - We have a huge and growing distribution network, we've recently closed a $5M A-round with top-tier VC's, and we have a great little team in which each person has a huge impact.
I'm looking for someone for our NY office who can be hands-on in spec'ing a web product and can work with our engineers in Israel to create the best blog ratings & recommendations service out there. In the long term, I'd like this person to be able to hire and manage our PM team. The title would be Director or VP of PM. Any experience with online advertising products is more than welcome.
If you're a *great* product person at any of the following companies, the timing now is PERFECT to switch over to a well-funded startup with lots of upside... (note: the folks that joined us at a similar stage at my previous company - Quigo - did fairly well... ;-)
If you're at any of these companies, now is the time to jump ship. Drop me a note to: galai [at] outbrain [dot] com
We've finished a major product release earlier today, mostly around the website. Bloggers can now register with us (registration is optional), or claim their blog to get access to reporting, etc. We'll be covering some of the new features released in our company blog over the next few days.
CenterNetworks and Mashable have coverage of this release.
We've just launched the outbrain rating widget in 14 new languages (bringing us to a total of 20 supported languages). All translated and verified by the community of bloggers. Cool!
If you have a blog in any of the following languages, head to our 'get widgets' page and install it:
(note: You may have noticed a slightly strange image at the top of this post... It's from a cool new service called PicApp that allows bloggers to post high-quality, copyrighted stock images for free (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to the company). If you have any feedback on that image - please submit it in the comments. Thanks!)
We just released a bunch of new stuff over at outbrain today:
We're also running a support forum on Satisfaction. So if you have any questions - check us out here.
{Image CC by jared Thanks!}
Rogel rants about social networks here and here. We (=outbrain) are often categorized as being a social network focused on sharing of blog content. I had this question come up on several occasions, especially with VC's, and I get annoyed every time. After all, I've been known to quote this...:
"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people..."
I always argued the notion of outbrain being a social network. That's exactly what I was trying to avoid! I didn't want to enter my contacts in the 173rd site where my only real practical use would be invitation management... I have enough of that on LinkedIn and FaceBook, etc, etc!
But it kept bugging me... after all, it is true that outbrain is a platform for social recommendations of blog content... hmmmm - did we fall in the trap we were trying to avoid?
Then one day, my co-founder Ori made a brilliant observation:
outbrain is an implicit social network
That's it! The world of social networks breaks into 2 categories: explicit networks and implicit ones. I think they can roughly be categorized as follows:
The power of implicit social networks is that they are not limited to the people you happen to know. Their weakness is in letting algorithms make social decisions for people. If the algorithms are good and the data set is comprehensive, magic happens. We're getting there...
Since introducing its Facebook app, iLike has been growing like crazy (300,000 users per-DAY????... wow...). A lot of people obviously find this to be a very very very useful tool.
In ways, iLike is doing with music what we aim to do with blog content over at outbrain.
So I was wondering - what can we learn from them? If you like iLike (hmmm...) - what is it exactly that makes this app work so well for you? Why do you recommend it to others? Is the Facebook virality its main cause for success? Or would it be as successful independently?
I'd love to get any feedback you have on this subject in the comments. Thanks!
A couple of weeks ago we released the v.1 of the outbrain API. This allows RSS feed aggregators (or publishers) to integrate full ratings capabilities into their services.
This week we're adding a neat little feature to the API, enabling partners to get the top rated posts for each blog, as rated by the outbrain community. I posted a few top-5 lists (for Seth Godin's, Guy Kawasaki's and Joel Spolsky's blogs) over at the outbrain blog.
And here are the current top-5 favorite posts of this blog, as rated by the outbrain community:
Cool!
This morning we announced the closing of our seed financing by LGiLab (www.lgilab.com), GlenRock Israel (www.grg.co.il), and Sigma PCM (www.sigma-pcm.co.il) among others. We wrote about this on the corp blog, and more coverage is on Mashable, TheMarker (Hebrew only), alarm:clock, Ouriel's blog and StartupIsrael.
One of the reporters talking to me this week asked/hinted at outbrain being a bubble company founded with the intention to flip it to a Yahoo or Google in a few months. As I'm allergic to that notion of 'build-to-flip', I thought I'd share some highlights of my email response here:
I know this probably sounds to you like a Bubble2.0 thing, but -
My track record has been in building a long-term, sustainable, revenue-generating and independent company. That is the *ONLY* model I am aware of for building a company. I don't think there is such a thing at all to 'build a company in order to sell it'. The companies that are sold (or - flipped) are the very few that happened to luck out. Statistically I think you probably have better chances of beating a Vegas casino than you would in selling a company that was built to flip (and Vegas is much more fun than the blood, sweat & tears of entrepreneurship!!... ;-)
I think it's foolish to start a company without a clear path to making $$. Given my experience in building one of the only contextual ad networks in the world that's successfully competing with Google AdSense, I (and my investors) have a lot of confidence in our ability to monetize the outbrain service when the time is right. We all felt that focusing on that part of the business now would be a distraction, and I think our community members will agree.
Feel free to take the angle that will interest your readers, but you should just understand that my approach to building companies is very very very different from that of a 1st-time entrepreneur who's dazzled from acquisition like those that Flickr or del.icio.us had, and is starting a company that will be built with $50K and sold to Yahoo within a year for $10M. All that stuff is completely not in our lexicon... ;-)
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