The Round-Up Volume 1, Issue 8: Wedding Bells, Summer Sunshine and The Round Up! - MediaBizBlogger Cory Treffiletti

Hello again and welcome to this week's edition of The Round Up!

It's been a few weeks since our last edition because our editor, yours truly, took off for a couple weeks to get married and go on honeymoon, but now we're back and ready to go! It's amazing how a few days on the beach will re-energize your spirit and re-charge your batteries!! Of course, you don't subscribe to the Digital Influentials to hear about me. You subscribe to hear about the new and exciting companies we've uncovered in the last few weeks of our digital marketing excursions. Shall we…?

Gaming is always a hot topic. It's funny because gaming is consistently brought up as an emerging media platform of interest for marketers and advertisers, but it's rarely one that gets tested. The perception seems to be that getting into gaming is tedious, takes a long time and a lot of new creative. Sooo, you can only imagine how hard it must be to get into mobile gaming! Well, GREYSTRIPE has taken care of that! These guys have some great tools and platforms for allowing advertisers, especially brand advertisers, to get into mobile gaming. I have to honest in saying that I haven't used them myself, but I was referred to their company and they appear very strong and to have built a sustainable business.

Gaming is a huge part of popular culture, but there are many other components that make up the popular culture landscape. That's where FANPOP comes in. I can't say exactly how you would categorize their business, but it's sort of a social community merged with a search engine. As is my typical path, the first search query I ran was “Pearl Jam” and up came a bunch of surveys, links and fun information about the world’s greatest band (don’t fight it). FanPop is billed as a network of fan clubs, but when you lift up the hood, there’s a little more in the engine than you would’ve originally thought. It might have a hemi!!

Finding a way to harness the power of popular culture to drive business growth is the goal of every marketer. If you tap into the zeitgeist, you can build a successful business. That’s how I came across YODLEE. Yodlee is that one step beyond your personal online banking. It aggregates together all your accounts, makes it easy to create new ones and manage money between the accounts and build a stronger personal financial management system. In the economy we see today, every consumer should be finding more and better ways to manage their money for the long term and Yodlee may just be that tool.

As we get into financial management we can’t overlook Real Estate, right? That’s where I found ROOST. I‘ve mentioned some real estate sites before, but this one has a great interface and it’s updated very regularly, so the information is relevant as you look for a place to live or just determine the value of your own home. Of course, if you live in an area where home prices are dropping the information you find may not be enjoyable. Don’t blame Roost. It’s not their fault.

And last but not least we discovered a new way to share information with others in a secure, private manner. It’s called DROPIO. We can’t figure out yet what the business model is, but you can share any type of file with another person through a series of “drops” that you create. They’re not searchable and they cannot be uncovered in any other way. It’s rare that we see a basic service online with no hooks or gimmicks, so we figured you had know about it now!

That’s it for this week’s edition. As always, if you have something you see and think we should know about it, please drop me a note at info@catalystsf.com and let me know, or email on the Facebook page!

Talk to you in 2!

Cory Treffiletti & The Digital Influentials

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