IZEAFest Day 1: Tweets Galore and So Much More : Venture Capital Blog : VC Blog : Venture Blog : Florida Venture Blog by Dan Rua

No-BS Venture Thoughts for No-BS Entrepreneurs.

A running perspective on Florida's growing tech and venture community, with an occasional detour to the Southeast/national scene, venture capital FAQs and maybe a gadget or two....

By Dan Rua, Managing Partner of Inflexion Partners -- "Florida's Venture Fund".

Call me tired, but instead of detailing the first day of IZEAFest, I'm just gonna share live-tweets and the video streams. I'll also provide a quick report card on the sessions:
- ShoeMoney Keynote: A-
- Improving Your Content: C
- Big Money Bloggers Panel: A
- Growing Traffic: B
- What Advertisers Want: B
- IZEA Innovations: A
- Overall: A-/B+

The IZEA Innovations unveiled were many, but I particularly liked SocialSpark Causes (Blog for Charity), Smart Blog Rolls, Sponsored Blog Networks (easy-button for large-scale, targeted blog advertising), Affiliate/CPA Posts and CloudShout (real-time presence/communication & one-click blog apps) -- including private alpha keys under our chairs. I'll provide more detail on CloudShout after I've had more time to play with it, but Tony Hung did a good job of capturing the potential of CloudShout -- imagine an iPhone Apps or Facebook Apps platform, built for your blog or the whole blogosphere.

As I often do for conferences, I decided to award a Day 1 Golden KangaRua to ShoeMoney -- delivering great knowledge pulling double-duty for Keynote and the Big Money Bloggers panel. Congrats Jeremy...don't we need to talk about your next project ;-)

OK...OK...it's self-serving, but I also gotta give major KangaRuas to IZEA's dev team -- the team looked like zombies (worse than the Facebook kind), but their innovations rawked!

Related posts:
ZacJohnson.com
ShoeMoney.com

Labels: cloudshout, izeafest, kangarua, shoemoney, socialspark causes

Comments (5)

Tim Trent said...: IZEA amuses me. Zookoda support comes from the IZEA site, but they say "no-one is paid to support Zookoda" and things kind of don't get put right, or support runs rather slowly. But they can hold a very good jamboree! Any thoughts, Dan?

Of course I may have got it wrong!; 2:16 AM
VC Dan said...: Tim, IZEA has multiple properties and a support team managing them all. Their formal support channel is their comprehensive ticketing system which can be found here.

I hope that helps!; 12:08 PM
Tim Trent said...: @Dan: That is what I thought. But not, it appears, what they think!

I'm "in" the ticket system, but one of the replies to the ticket says: "Zookoda is a free site that is maintained by developers in their own time. We do not have a large staff of developers ready to fix every problem that comes up at a moments notice. We offer the best service we can for the resources we have available."

And yes, they do offer a good service. And no, they don't need a large staff of developers, but, er, well, erm, (coughs politely) it does seem strange.

I like them. I like the weekly email facility for the blog and not being beholden to Google for Feedburner. But I'd quite like it to work right.; 12:58 PM
VC Dan said...: @Tim: Thanks for the detail. I hope it doesn't seem strange that each of IZEA's properties (SocialSpark, PayPerPost, IZEARanks, Blogger's Choice Awards, Zookoda, etc.) consume different levels of resources and even tickets within a given product have different priorities. That said, I hope you ultimately get any tickets resolved. Zookoda's free RSS-to-email has worked very well for me so far...I like knowing the email of my readers rather than just subscriber counts.; 1:21 PM
Tim Trent said...: @Dan: Not strange at all. I just didn't expect the guys to do it for free in their own time.

The`way I read that is "Team individual commitment to a new product line", my only nit pick is "Guys, make that a feature!"; 2:35 PM

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IZEAFest Day 1: Tweets Galore and So Much More

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