Simon Gelfand

Hey all,

Its been a while since my last post.

I have been working extremely hard during the past weeks getting all the final features ready for the Bukisa Launch.

We are nearly there and only a few modules remain.

I am aiming for a closed beta in August, so don’t worry - you will be getting your invites

I would also like to share a couple of interesting stories I came across this week:

• VideoEgg Launches New Video Ad Units. Maybe YouTube Should Pay Attention
• Watch Over Your Gmail Account Activity
• Involver Replaces Banner Ads with Custom Video Widgets

Simon

I got a great email this morning from Yedda, their newsletter and we got featured thanks Yedda!

Here’s what they wrote (click for a bigger image):

At a time when anyone can broadcast their opinions about your startup to the world, public relations requires a new level of engagement on the part of companies and entrepreneurs. But what are the new rules of PR?

Great post over at Techcrunch, check it out.

Hi All,

After months work and planning I am happy to announce our latest project - ForexFace.

ForexFace is a joint venture with Compucall Web Marketing and the purpose of the site is to be a all in stop shop for people looking to educate themselves on Forex Trading.

ForexFace.com is a top notch Forex trading education site, offering free Forex articles, currencies trading reports, Forex tutorials and all you need to learn Forex and open a trading account. Find also reviews of the best Forex eCourses and trading tools. Expert Advice on Day Trading, Money Management and others.

Here are a few to get you started:

• Forex Trading Learning Steps
• 14 Rules for Successful Forex Trading

Hope you like it.

Hi All,

I am extremely happy - we have launched the new author section on our Hebrew articles directory Reader.co.il

The new author home page makes it easier for authors to publish & manage there articles and account on the website.

Here is a screenshot of my Author home page on www.reader.co.il

I am also very happy to announce that we are the first articles directory to supply a per article analytics solution. Each author can now drill down and see all the keywords & referring websites for each one of their articles, along with a graph showing the traffic over the selected date span.

The analytics section is completely Ajax powered so it very fast to jump between the time periods and see data.

Here is a screenshot of the Analytics page of my published article:

All of the above was done over the past few weeks, kept me very busy also and I personally am very pleased with the results.

So if you have articles on Reader. better go and check our your Article Analytics.

Over the next week or two we will be rolling out the new features over at ArticlesBase.com

Hey everyone, it’s me again with the week in review.

It was a pretty slow week as it was the Pesach holidays here is Israel, spent most of the time working on the new Forex Education site that is set to launch sometime next week.

I am happy that we managed to introduce a new layout for all the Article listings on Reader.co.il – including a Digg inspired way of displaying the ranking for the articles. I am very happy with the way it turned out.

Here is a screenshot:

As you can see the author’s pictures blend better with the text as well as a better display of the ranking of the article.

As I mention last week here is a list of interesting stories I tagged during the past week on my Google Reader:

• Social Tools for the Office Worker: How to Subvert I.T. and Play at Work – For all of you that have your favorite social sites blocked over at work. Full Article Here (ReadWriteWeb)
• Yahoo SearchMonkey Launches Into Private Beta - A service announced in February that allows site owners to customize their Yahoo search result listings.
  
  Full story over at TechCrunch
  
• Sprout: Now A Viral Distribution Platform for Web Services - Full Story at TechCrunch
  
• 10 Services To Send Text Messages From The Web - Full Story at Mashable
  
• What makes a design “Googley”? - Full story at the Official Google Blog

Sunday I am take a day off so talk to you all soon … (Buying an iPhone)

I just found a really cool way of organizing cluttered desktop on Gizmodo, its called Desktop Art - here are a couple of really cool examples: (click for the full version)

Pretty cool, ha?

So gang what did open over the last 7 days.

• I participated in the first day of TheMarker Com.Vention, you can read my full post about it over here.
• ArticlesBase.com reached over 350,000 articles, you can read all about over at the ArticlesBase blog post.
• Work as started on some ’stealth’ features for Reader.co.il, I can’t let the cat out of the bag yet - but I assure you its going to be great!
• FTT our new Forex Education site has made some great advancement over the past week and is scheduled to launch sometime in the next 2 weeks. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:



• On a personal note it was Passover and I got to do a great video with my friends at Compucall, you can check out the funny video that was made on the ‘Pesach Project’.

From next week I am starting a section of my favorite news stories and articles from the past week that happened around the globe… Just things that I find interesting and I thought I should start sharing them with you all.

All the best!

Simon

On the 17th of April Yedda announced they reached 100 content partners.

I was most pleased to see out of the 100 partners only 4 were mentioned in the blog post and we are one of them (Thanks Roy!)

We are long time partners of Yedda on ArticlesBase.com (you can see it on all our article pages).

Here is an example of what it looks like (click to view the full image):

Its a great service for our readers.

This morning I noticed the Alexa ranking on ArticlesBase.com go from 12,000 to around 8,000 in one day.

I found this quite strange at first as I hadn’t noticed such an increase in traffic.

Then I noticed this nice button:

Alexia explains the difference in numbers:

Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter. The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

So does this mean they are trying to take on compete ?

Personally no one for the last 2 years has taken the Alexa ranking seriously anyway.

You can also read Techcrunch coverage of the story.