Atebits is a Philadelphia-based software start-up. Atebits makes a $2.99 iPhone application called Tweetie.

The idea

Twitter is free to use, which means you can send and receive messages free. However, people don’t mind paying for an app which makes it easy to use on the go.

Atebits was started by 25-year-old founder Loren Brichter. He wants to create a Microsoft Outlook for the 140-character set of Twitter. “Twitter is like e-mail,” Brichter says. “The vast majority of people use it for superficial crap, but a small percentage uses it for something useful and powerful.”

Brichter put the first version of Tweetie up for sale in November 2008. To promote it, he sent a message to his friends on Twitter.

The result

The popularity of Tweetie can be gauged from the following points-

Tweetie is the most successful iPhone app for Twitter

About 12.7 percent of all Twitter users have bought it (Twitstat.com)

The most recent version, reached the top of Apple’s bestseller list within 36 hours (leaving behind popular titles such as Electronic Arts’s Madden 2010 and CNN’s iPhone app).

How Twitter applications work

You can create Twitter application and sell it to people who like it. Twitter applications incorporate, organize, and rearrange tweets in real time. Twitter applications can be created for mobile phones such as iPhone.

Examples of twitter applications- collecting messages written by professional athletes (using the app called Twackle), translating tweets into the language of the high seas (an app called Post Like a Pirate).

With their applications are sold from $1 to any higher amount. As the number of twitter users grow continuously (which is in billions), the chance of making money by selling twitter applications is enormous.

Find the online visual guide here

This is a simple and visual guide that describes every step that leads to a free blog of your own.

The Guide mentions:

“Welcome to the new world of blogging. Here we will show you how to create a blog of your own. Create a free Wordpress blog of your own within the next 10 minutes.”

About 60% of Indian population is unbanked and Eko targets them and right now it focuses on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar.

The accounts created for the users are actually held by the State Bank of India. It insures up to 100,000 rupees per account. But that does not mean Eko’s customers have to go into the banks, they don’t ever go. The tiny corner groceries available in every neighborhood and street corner, urban areas and expansive rural areas in India work as the “tellers”. In India these stores has a very important role, specially for the poor and rural people, which sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko wants to tap this trusted source of vendors to sell one more thing.

The interface is simple enough for anyone to use (even it has crossed the language or literacy barriers)-

• Eko transaction
• Eko customers type the bank’s short code
• then an asterisk
• then the mobile number of the person you are paying
• then an asterisk
• then the amount
• then another asterisk.
• Then comes the signature.

Signature is an important part because the account is solely on phones, which can be stolen. In general RSA token is used to validate such online transactions involving money. But Eko’s founder Abhishek Sinha wanted a cost-effective equivalent of an RSA token. So, he created a paper version of it. A Eko account holder gets little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Among these 11 digits, 7 digits are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. This means security because even if the booklet is stolen, no one can find out the PIN number and can’t access the account. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution- instead they endorsed his and every booklet has got a VeriSign logo on the back.

Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked-turning those

Turning the trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers is a costly and time-consuming effort because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages.

Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. “I thought it’d be a million by now,” Sinha says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts.”

The service was launched in late 2007. Eko first outsourced the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But the product needed more hand-holding and so the number of accounts wasn’t growing. Since last November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts. It has assigned employees to each neighborhood and invested in street promotions (it has used Bollywood cinema-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking) and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now opening of new accounts are increasing. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days.

But costs of managing and operation have gone up a lot. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, self-funded the venture until now. Eko also got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that will not be enough. Sinha is working on raising a venture round now and he hopes to get a whopping $10 million.

The business has a huge social need and business opportunity and it is scalable but it lacks capital. With enough investment it can become a profitable business model soon.

Rose Associates is an 80-year-old real estate marketing and management company. It is based in New York City. The company has 200 employees. It manages about 20,000 luxury apartment units.

The idea

Bob Scaglion, Rose’s senior managing director of residential marketing, had the idea. The company generates lead for their business using Twitter. It uses Twitter’s search function for lead generation. The strategy works fine for them. In Twitter many people often send messages about apartment hunting travails and these people are targeted by Rose Associates.

 ”Our clientele is young and upwardly mobile,” Bob says. “Twitter is where they are.”

It is easy to find customers who are looking for what you sell. Simply visit search.twitter.com and type in keywords. Rose uses 10 key terms for their Twitter search- such as New York City apartments, moving to New York City, and no fee rentals.

When someone uses one of these phrases in his/her tweet, the marketing department sends a reply message with a link to Rose’s apartment listings.

The result

No followers? No problem!

Rose has only 200 followers on its Twitter account. Not great right! Well, it’s great for Rose Associates. It generates 100 leads a month from Twitter by sending a few targeted replies every day. According to Bob, about half of those leads convert to actual rentals, which is pretty good, because this marketing system does not cost anything.

How to find leads faster

Finding leads faster through Twitter is easier now. There are many Twitter applications that will continuously search Twitter and will send you an alert when a keyword is used. Try using TweetDeck and a Web service called DemandSpot like Rose Associates (both are free).

How a personal brand can be created

How to sell a blog

What people can do after getting the pink slip (after getting fired)

This is a story about Michelle Leder

She lost her job, but by then Michelle Leder parlayed a unique skill — the ability to translate turgid documents into usable news. She made a business out of it. Leder is no 43 years old.

Michelle Leder isn’t the first entrepreneur to find success post-pink slip. But her story can help us to understand why finding a niche is important and what is personal branding.

Start

In 1998, Leder, a financial journalist, was fired from her business-reporting job at Gannett’s Poughkeepsie Journal. She was able to parlay her skill parsing complex Securities and Exchange Commission documents into a business. She ran the business from her home office.

Recently  investor advisory service Morningstar, the $2.2 billion company mutual-fund rating company, bought Leder’s tiny company for an undisclosed sum.

How did this laid-off journalist turn financial voyeurism into a paycheck?

SEC filings first attracted Leder while writing about a small Florida bank’s aggressive accounting.

When she lost  her job, Leder became an expert at panning the arcane documents for news nuggets. She wrote a book called Financial Fine Print in 2003. She wanted to promote her book and so she started a blog, called Footnoted.org. The blog included articles about corporate shenanigans and other news investors could use buried in the SEC documents’ fine print.

Slowly the readership of the blog grew. Leder sensed financial opportunity. She started selling advertising space on the site and also peddled reprints and original content to customers including the New York Times’s DealBook.

Leder started promoting herself as an expert. Her blog helped her a lot as she and her blog were quoted in newspapers. She appeared on TV, and wrote freelance articles.

The year 2008, brought new changes. Leder found that advertising was never going to sustain the site. So she kept part of her content free and put the premium stuff (the scoops most likely to affect stock prices) under a subscription-only paywall. Hedge fund managers paid over $2,500 per year or $250 per issue for Footnoted Pro service.

Finding Suitors

Next, Chicago-based Morningstar came calling last spring. Recently her company was acquired by Morningstar. However, she will continue to run Footnoted (soon to becomeFootnoted.com).

Now she will put her focus on growing the Footnoted business. Now she has hired a full-time employee and handed over the sales part of the business to Morningstar.

Three of Leder’s top tips for start-ups:

1. Quality is key. “There’s so much content out there,” she said. “People recognize quality.”

2. Don’t need office space? Don’t fork out for it.

3. “Have a backup plan.” (Part of Leder’s: Her husband had a job.)

Woot is a $164 million online retailer based in Carrollton, Texas. It runs 6 online shops selling deeply discounted products.  Each Woot shop sells only one product at a time, for one day only. The products may be anything -a cheap GPS device or a case of wine.

The idea

Woot is one of the first retailers on Twitter. Woot uses Twitter to let its customers know what is on sale that day. Their tweets (twitter messages) go out at midnight to the company’s followers. It has about 1.5 million followers.

“We used to say that there’s a ton of people who’d visit Woot every day if they thought about it,” says Dave Rutledge who handles Woot’s creative efforts.

“Twitter can help trigger that.” He uses it to get customers in two ways-

1. Initially he reminds people about Woot and its sales and helps them think about it.
2. When Woot has sold 90 percent of its inventory for a particular product (this generally happens within just a matter of hours), Rutledge sends a follow-up tweet to alert potential buyers. This tweet is for people who may be sitting on the fence about buying the product. The tweet tells them that time is running out. “That shows people that the item has been approved by the community,” he says.

The result

Does its Twitter campaign help Woot? The answer is yes. Tens of thousands of people click on Woot’s Twitter links every day and visit the site. In case of rapid-fire sales, or Woot Offs, the number is in the hundreds of thousands.

Conversion rates (percentage of people buying the products) are substantially better than the site’s average.

The Twitter stream of Woot was introduced in January 2007 and since then annual revenue has more than doubled.

How to get retweeted:

You should keep your messages short. Twitter has a limitation of 140 characters in every message but Woot keeps it lesser than that. This is a well thought strategy and not a coincidence. Woot leaves space in their tweets so that people can add a brief comment of their own with the tweets while telling their friends about it. Let’s see how it appears -

“RT @woot: $19.99 : Samsung Bluetooth Headset WITH $20 mail in REBATE!!!!! http://www.woot.com < pretty awesome, just pay 5 bucks shipping!!”

For Rutledge, the magic number to ensure lots of retweets is 110 characters or fewer.

The company:

SkinnyCorp is a Chicago based company that runs online T-shirt retailer Threadless. It was started in 2000, Threadless sells an estimated $30 million worth of graphic T-shirts a year. It gets the designs from a community of hundreds of thousands of amateur designers, who then vote on their favorites. Threadless production is based on the shirts that get the most votes. It pays $2,000 to the winning designers.

The idea:

Threadless CEO Tom Ryan and founder Jake Nickell thought about a new idea of using  Twitter messages on t shirts. Threadless created a website that which allowed its Twitter followers (about 490,000) to turn their favorite tweets into shirts. Users simply visit the site, log into it, enter their Twitter username and password, and then submit tweets for consideration or vote on other people’s tweets. The winning slogans appear on T-shirts and sold for $18 each.

“We figured if we built something on top of Twitter, we’d drive participation really quickly,” Nickell says.

The result:

They were right. In its first five months, the Twitter experiment attracted 100,000 submissions and 3.5 million votes. “I’m huge on Twitter” and “Iowa: Cooler than California Since 2009″ are the two most popular.

Results-
Till now, Threadless has printed and sold 23 designs.  This has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue in the first five months. The promotion also got it one million Twitter followers. This meant extra traffic and buyers who not only bought the Twitter slogan t shirts but also bought other t shirts. That meant a jump in the revenue.

How to do it (get retweeted):

Simply ask your existing followers for help. Offer a prize. Threadless’ one of the  most successful tweets came when it offered Twitter followers a chance to win $100 if they passed along the news of a $9-per-T-shirt sale to their friends. The contest became one of the most popular topics on Twitter that day.

Recently Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar proposed a bill in the Senate advocating a new type of visa for immigrants who create startups? and jobs in the U.S. A similar proposal is part of an immigration reform bill in the House.

This is a startup visa. The StartupVisa has been controversial. Anti-immigrant forces and xenophobes are opposing it already. However, it is sure to win some hearts of the people who generally oppose immigration because of the fact that these visa will be given to people who will help build the U.S. economy and create jobs is hard to argue against.

How does the Startup Visa Act of 2010 work?

The immigrant get a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs provide he/she is able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor.

After 2 years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.

This will create a new “EB-6? class of visas from the existing “EB-5? class of visas that makes immigrants a legal resident. The EB-5 requires immigrants to invest at least $1 million in the U.S. and employ ten people.

The Startup Visa sends one signal- create jobs, get a green card.

A group of 160 venture capitalists and angel investors support the bill, including Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Dave McClure, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Reid Hoffman, Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier, Bijan Sabet, Josh Kopelman, and Chris Dixon.

If you agree that the Startup Visa is a good idea, support it.

Now Grogger? brings a new service that will help community members or the general people to share their knowledge.

Why is this helpful for bloggers and Internet Marketers?

This will help bloggers and Internet Marketers to tap into this community knowledge. Using this feature, you will be able to create a site that includes posts written by both you and your audience. This means you can create content without writing it yourself. So, you can create a business out of other people’s knowledge and efforts.

Grogger is an easy-to-use blogging platform. It will allow you to edit the user created posts through a few site administrators. A user can visit your Grogger site and write an entry (called a Grog). The entry can be posted directly to your blog or added to a moderation queue for site administrators to edit it.  When approved entries are published, other users can vote it up using a ‘Like’ system, and administrators can ‘feature’ it to make it even more prominent. Users can also leave their comments on your blog and posts.

Grogger is now open to the public and is free, with plans to eventually roll out some premium options.

Now everyone and his mother has a Facebook page. Every month millions of people flock to Facebook every month. General people are using it for social networking, business owners are using Facebook to promote their companies and create customer communities.

Some of the entrepreneurs are using social networks as a useful advertising platform. Facebook ads are more affordable than the high pay-per-click rates keywords on Google’s AdWords.

But there is a problem- Facebook is crowded with status update, party photos and comments. You need to make sure that your ads stand out in the crowded place.

Here are four tips to help you get started.

1. Choose your target

First of all you need to carefully choose your targets. Today marketing is more targeted. In Facebook, people often divulge a host of personal information in their profiles, which can be very useful to advertisers like you.

Facebook allows you to pick and choose which groups you would like your ads to reach. You can target your ads based on a user’s profile information (age, gender, location, college, relationship status, and interests).

Some examples-people you can target - Fans of your company’s Facebook page or friends of your fans. If your product is for teenagers, then target people from the age 16 to 20.

You can also target people who have a certain words in their profile or in the status messages. Suppose you have a hair salon and spa and you want to target people who are in the age range of 20-40. In that case you can target people who mention the name of few celebrities in their status message or profile provided you claim to offer the same look like those celebrities.

Targeting a specific audience will ensure that you get back the most from your investment. However, too narrow targeting is not a good idea as it may not get you the required clicks.

2. Test, test — and test some more

Testing what you need to do. Like AdWords, costs of ads on Facebook are determined by auction. You can decide to pay based on either the number of times people see the ad or the number of times people actually click on it.

With just $20-$50, you can test both the ways to find out which one works for you.

You also need to test your targeting. Test different target demographics because your tests may result in surprises and gold sources which will boost your business to a new height.

3. Do your own tracking

Tracking is very much important because it helps you to optimize your ads to get the maximum return on your investment on advertisement. Facebook keeps tabs on how many times your ads are shown and the number of clicks they receive. However, it doesn’t track what users do after they click. You need to know what the users do after clicking or seeing the ad- did they make purchases or just browse and move on? It’s a drawback of the Facebook ad system.

Even though Facebook is working to include more information in its reporting tools, you need to do your own tracking. Microtargeting based on location, age, and sex can get you valuable data not taking advantage of that would be a terrible waste of an opportunity.

Use Google Analytics, which is free, and HitsLink, which starts at about $10 a month, to track which Facebook ads result in purchases.

4. Make your ads pop

Your ad should pop up to people notice you. You should write your own ads which include a short headline, ad copy of 135 characters or fewer, and a small image.  You will have your ads to attract people to see your ad and through it your website. There will be competition from fellow advertisers, competitors, Facebook updates, and photos of friends and still you will have to pop up among them.

For Facebook’s list of common advertiser mistakes, go to facebook.com/ads/mistakes.php.