Vinny Lingham's Blog

The innovative guys over at Quirk, have put together what seems to be a world first, an eMarketing textbook, which is offered online for free – but also available in stores in print.

The book, entitled ‘eMarketing – The Essential Guide to Online Marketing’ is targeted mainly at universities (and businesses). Quirk is supporting the Creative Commons licensing pogram.

Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing and author of the book says, “We have been working with various tertiary institutions, including University of Cape Town (UCT), AAA School of Advertising and the Red and Yellow School for the past nine years. It became clear that there was not enough source material for lecturers and students who wanted to learn more about online marketing. And, what was available was based purely on American case studies which don’t always make sense in the other markets. The thing I am most excited about is that this book is freely available for download. It’s the distillation of all of Quirk’s knowledge and to be able to offer it to all without any limitations is a privilege.

To add to the innovation, Google South Africa is also supporting it!

Stafford Masie, country manager of Google South Africa was very impressed, saying eMarketing – the Essential Guide is “the perfect starting point for anyone entering the world of online marketing.” Google has also included a $15 Google Adwords voucher in every printed book to give people who have never tried the service an easy way to do so.

I really think that this is a phenomenal effort to try and increase the level of education in schools and universities about the area of online marketing – it would be great if this book could lead to more programs and curriculums being created in parts of the world where it’s especially expensive to obtain this type of material for coursework. The future of the Internet is “Free!” – you heard it here first

I’m proud to announce that Synthasite has finally gone live today (as promised!), into Alpha. Remember, this is basically a technology teaser, which will indicate more about what we are doing, but we are still a long way off! Comments, feedback and reviews are most appreciated – please blog about it, tell your friends & spread the news – Synthasite is now live!! We’re limiting accounts right now to the first 1500 users, hurry and get yours now, even if are only going to play with it later!

Please feel free to distribute the following press release:

For Immediate Release:

Synthasite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform, emerged today from stealth mode. The 6-person startup based in Cape Town, South Africa was recently spun out from the incuBeta group as a separate stand-alone company that will focus on delivering a world class web based software platform for web publishing, focusing specifically on Widgets & Mashups. Synthasite looks and feels like desktop software, but remains firmly rooted in the browser with no reliance on client side technology.

Synthasite CEO, Vinny Lingham (Founder of a leading Search Engine Marketing company, incuBeta), said the following: “Synthasite’s Alpha [Tech Preview] release today was a milestone in the company’s aim to become the standard for web publishing. We’re releasing it at this early stage in order to allow the community to assist in the direction that we will take Synthasite and we are very excited about the potential for this space, especially with the rapid rise of Mashups & Widgets. Synthasite ushers in a new era for web publishing; where people construct using existing building blocks, rather than build everything from scratch, and publish collaboratively from any machine rather than being stuck on a single PC or OS. We’re very excited about rapidly releasing many of the features on our extensive roadmap. We’re opening the Synthasite framework to the developer community so that they can build their own components and templates, and we will also be enabling source code level editing – although this will only be available in the Beta released, scheduled for Q4.”

Synthasite is also being tested on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which in theory allows it to be infinitely scalable, although accounts will initially be limited.

Synthasite is currently being seed funded by Lingham Capital, incuBeta & Miombo Capital, all South African based investment firms.

Update: 5 June

Less than 1000 accounts left! Here is a quick video of the Synthasite Alpha Release:

I’ve been very quiet lately, mainly because there are a lot of changes happening at the moment back in Cape Town.

As many of you know, Synthasite is launching soon (final confirmed date for the Technology Preview / Pre-Alpha is 4th June 07). We are looking forward to showing the world what we’ve been up to. Just to set expectations, we’re not releasing a fully functional application, but instead we’re trying to get feedback from our users in the early stages of development, in order to ensure that Synthasite will ultimately meet expectations by the time we get into Beta. In my previous blog post on Synthasite, I explained that I will be taking over Synthasite as CEO and spinning it out of incuBeta as a separate company, with incuBeta still retaining a small stake. I also indicated that we were going to attempt to move it to Silicon Valley in order to be closer to the action.

To this end, I’ve spent the better part of the past two months chatting with a few of the VC players in the space, both in London & Silicon Valley in order to get feedback, and potentially, Series A funding. The feedback we got just from the meetings were excellent, but most importantly, after speaking with VC’s in London, the view is that if development work can be done in a lower cost marketplace, such as Cape Town and the business development team is based in the business area’s that really meets the requirements of most startups.

So, in order to cut a long story short, I, along with the Synthasite team, will be basing ourselves in Cape Town permanently to develop Synthasite, and instead of moving the entire team across (disruptions and all), we’ll instead look to setup a Biz Dev office when the time is right, in key markets. The best part is, if we keep Synthasite in Cape Town, then there is really no need for a Series A type round of funding.

In order to focus on Synthasite, it was announced internally, and now to the rest of the world, that I will be leaving incuBeta on a full time basis, and moving directly into Synthasite, effective 1 August. It’s been really great growing a startup into an award winning company, but my passion has always been startups and I’m finally able to move into a full time role doing that in Synthasite. I’m lucky that there is a strong management team in place at incuBeta to drive the company forward, and the people on the ground are very capable of delivering. In order to ensure that the company can operate independently of me, there will be a full operational and relationship handover before 1 August.

In many ways, this has been a lifestyle decision, and I’m going to also try to cut down on the tremendous amount of air miles that I continue to rack up! As many of you may understand, the disruptive nature that flying around the world has on a person, on an almost monthly basis will eventually wear you down! I would like to spend at least the next few months firmly grounded in Cape Town, enjoying the life there (and I’m in Johannesburg right now!). Charlene, my wife & co-founder, will also be leaving the company to pursue her studies further and we’re planning on taking some much needed time off and we’re going to spend those airmiles going to places that we haven’t yet seen over the next year.

On a final note, in addition to Synthasite, I have setup a small Venture Capital fund for Cape Town based startups, called Lingham Capital (no site just yet), and I will aim to assist them with small amounts of seed capital and expertise in building their businesses, all of which will need to be globally focused in the medium term. I do not intend on investing in more than 5 startups at any one time, including Synthasite. My only other investment so far is SkyRove, which is a Social WiFi business based in Cape Town and after 1 August, I will be assisting Henk (the CEO) with taking his business to a global audience.

It’s really sad to be leaving incuBeta, but I know that all my relationships both internally and externally are all intact – so it’s not really a goodbye! I’ll probably post more reflections on this, and a slideshow later this week – but this was just a relatively quick heads up.

I announced late last year that Commission Junction was establishing their Publisher Advisory Board, which was finalised today.

The full members of the board are:

Adam Viener, Imwave, Inc.
Connie Berg, FlamingoWorld.com / iShopDaily.com
Craig Cassata, MrRebates.com
Dan Murray, Ravenwood Marketing
David M. Lewis, 77Blue
Eva Klein, FatWallet
Jennifer Nissenberg, Upromise
Jeremy Palmer, QuitYourDayJob.com
Michael Coley, Amazing-Bargains.com
Paul Nichols, Ebates.com
Scott Jangro, MechMedia, Inc.
Scott Kluth, CouponCabin.com
Steve Schaffer, Vertive, Inc
Vinny Lingham, Clicks2Customers.com

In addition, Kerri Pollard made the following message:

At Commission Junction, we are always looking for ways to develop sustainable relationships and improve our services to our clients in order to drive quality results. Keeping with that tradition, we aspired to enhance the communication channel between Commission Junction and our publishers. As a result, I am proud to introduce our Publisher Advisory Board (PAB).

The objective of the PAB is to help Commission Junction build mutually beneficial solutions for the future. To meet this objective, we have recruited a group of notable, established publishers from within our network to serve as the voice for their community.

Commission Junction will proactively obtain feedback from the PAB regarding successes or opportunities they observe throughout the lifecycle of a business or technical initiative. The PAB will collaborate with the Commission Junction executive board to implement enhancements in order to warrant success for all parties.

I look forward to working with this esteemed group of individuals, and I cannot wait to watch their ideas come to fruition at Commission Junction.

Sincerely,

Kerri Pollard
Vice President, Client Performance
Commission Junction, a division of ValueClick, Inc.

I’m very pleased to be able to be the first to announce that Yahoo! has established an Affiliate Advisory Board and has invited me to sit on this newly formed Board that will deal with issues related to affiliate marketing for Yahoo!, across the company. The Affiliate Advisory will be meeting in May, as per the invitation:

“The two days will consist of meeting the CJ/Yahoo! Affiliate Team plus top Y! Executives, product discussions from each property included in the Y! Affiliate Program, Panama roundtable session, Yahoo! Developer Network presentation and the future of the Yahoo! Affiliate Program.”

This is a hugely positive move by Yahoo! and kudos to them for driving affiliate marketing into the mainstream online marketing channel. This cements affiliate marketing as one of the key online marketing channels, and for a group the size of Yahoo! to embrace affiliate marketers so closely, it really does show both momentum in this space, as well as recognition of the value that affiliate marketers can offer to both large and small enterprises.