Anyone out there relate with similar experiences? Enter WakeMate to the rescue! Launching today, the startup WakeMate manufactures a Bluetooth wristband that connects to your smartphone. Once you set your alarm, the wristband tracks your sleep patterns throughout the night.

Twenty minutes before your alarm goes off, the wristband will sense your lightest sleep moment and wake you up by setting off your phone’s alarm.

The wristband will send all the data about your sleep patterns to your phone and then to your WakeMate account where you can review your sleeping patterns and ideal amount of sleep.

Genius! I love it! I’m going to go buy one right now… Wait a minute. They’re  not out yet. The first pre-orders are being accepted and get $5 the $50 price tag. However, they don’t ship till January. Another cool feature – power nap and regular nap settings to help you get the most from your mid-day snooze.

Apparently ♫ the best part of waking up is WakeMate in your cup ♫ (…or on your wrist).

The promotion is to help her kick off her show’s twenty-fourth season; meaning she’s been on the air almost as long as I’ve been alive (I just turned 25). Wow, that woman has staying power. I guess giving stuff away helps.

Thanks for the deal Oprah.  You just earned a handful of cool points. Keep it up!

Almost forgot – the promotional code is KICKOFF24

Enjoy your new phone!

Daily Booth Screenshot

From what I’ve gathered after exploring the site and reading various CNET and TC articles about it – Daily Booth is like a Twitter  that uses pictures instead of 140 characters. You can add text subtitles to the photos, but the core of the communication is focused on photo interaction. For example, most of the comments on other people’s photos are photos.

One of the cool things about DB is that you can click Snap A  Picture from within the site, allow it access to your webcam and viola – no tricky camera downloading, formating, or resizing on your computer before uploading. It’s all very easy/user friendly.

Snap a Picture

The CNET article I read basically dishes it out against Daily Booth saying it doesn’t measure up to Daily Mugshot – a site dedicated to watching your own pictures over time to see how you’ve changed. I agree with Jerry Cooke’s comment on the article, that the comparison was made incorrectly as each site serves very different functions.

We’ll see if DB gets any traction – other articles I’ve read are impressed that teenagers are getting so plugged into it (something Twitter isn’t so good at).

My only doubts come from the failure of video phones to really launch. We’ve had the technology in place for a long time now but no one seems to want to be seen in their PJ’s or wherever else in whatever else they might answer the phone in. I think the same might eventually be true for Daily Booth and other sites like it.  We still live in a culture where people like to look put together and presentable as much as they can help it – which might put ceiling on who signs up.

But the recent actions of some Limewire employees have challenged where my loyalties lay. As I was browsing through Tech Crunch I found a disturbing article (The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco) chronicling a physical altercation between the employees of a small New York music label, Dovecote Records, and employees from Limewire.

Limewire

Limewire

According to the story, the Dovecote employees mistakenly took some pizza from a tray set out for a Limewire company party.  After useless apologies fell on deaf ears, the truth about the employee’s identy as Limewire staff came out, enfuriating the small record label’s employees – who quickly calculated the value of their 2 stolen pieces of pizza as incomparable to the money and music stolen by the file sharing giant.

The Dovecotes grabbed full boxes of pizza and made their heated escape, but not without being showered by pitchers of beer and roucous threats from Limewire staff.

I understand this is a war for freedom of file sharing, but come on – 2 peices of pizza.  Limewire, if you’re really about sharing everything royalty free, then lighten up a little – it’s only pizza.

One of the most helpful learning tools I’ve come across (from my buddy Mike) is the SEO Fundamentals Pyramid created by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org. It’s really helped me focus my efforts in a diverse and confusing SEO world. Plus all the podcasts and articles I’ve read back up the Pyramid’s basis that all good SEO stems from having solid, accessible content.

I mentioned podcasts – Webmaster Radio has a great podcast called SEO Rockstars.  Most of the show is over my head but there are tips, advice, and tricks scattered throughout the show that I pick up on.  Plus Dave Ramsey says if you want to be a millionaire hang out with millionaires.  So I keep listening hoping to rise to that level.

I’ve also got a few of Firefox add-on toolbars – SEO Book toolbar, SEOmoz toolbar, SEO Quake bar, WebDev bar, and the Google toolbar.

SEO Quake: has my favorite density feature. And easily toggles on and off.

SEO Book: I very much appreciate the Search Engine Ranking Checker built into the SEO Book toolbar.  And I love the SEO X-ray tool, which reveals headers, title, META description, META keywords, external/internal links, and has a keyword density tool.

SEOmoz: is the only one with unique tools and rating systems such as Domain Moz Trust Rank.  However you have to have a registered SEOmoz account to log-in to enable the basic tools.  If you want to see the ratings for the other tools you’ll need to pay for a pro-account. The toolbar also has quick link access to SEOmoz SEO tools which are awesome if you are willing to pay for a pro-account. They also have an awesome collection of SEO articles to check out.

WebDev: Just helps me strip the site down to its basic text and links – to see what the spiders see.

Google Toolbar: I know what you’re thinking: “The Google toolbar?!?” But I use it
because it provides the most up-to-date and accurate Google Pagerank.

That’s basically it.  Those are the main tools I’m using. Feel free to comment if you have any advice or better tools.

While looking around at the competition I found it interesting that the second most used keyword – “Free Online Gradebook” was completely was available as a .com domain. I purchased it immediately and setup a free wordpress blog there. Mostly for curiosity to see how it would rank. The results?
Astounding – Within a month – with no inbound links, no traffic, no posts, no content (besides what you see up there currently) I was on page 1 for the keywords, and then page 2 for the keywords “online gradebook“.

Take it or leave it – online gradebook and free online gradebook test results may very – but I’m pretty sure google places a lot of importance on domain.

“… there is no point… I just had my biggest day ever,125 visits, and I just read that you can’t make money advertising until you have 10,000 visits a day and even then your only looking at a couple dollars”

It’s true – monetizing a traditional blog can be difficult. Between writing content, doing research, having a “real job”, and trying to live your life, not much time is left to seek out advertisers and market your real estate to them. Easy solutions like Google Adsense and other drag n’ drop solutions provide easy but hardly sufficient income.

Here is the solution: Don’t compete with traditional advertisers! One of the sites that we advertised on (with very little success, and littler ROI) was Move.com. They built their business on this model. Get page views, sell pageviews. It doesn’t work anymore (don’t believe me, check out their stock).

Spend your time building a network of trusting readers! Give them content for free! Answer their questions and provide them with a resource / entertainment / interaction. Seth Godin said (and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the post) – You should be able to build a very profitable and successful business off your 1000 best customers.

That may be a bit much for the internet world – 1000 visits a month is hard to monetize past a certain point. But 10,000? I think that’s doable.

Query: If you have 10,000 subscribers, each of whom read 80% of your blog posts, how could your monetize that trust?

Joel and 37Signals built databases of their readers interested in jobs.

Seth uses his blog as a platform to sell his books, some of which are just collections of his blog posts!

SEOMoz has paid subscriptions to premium content and tools.

If the most innovative idea you have for monetizing your blog is simply signing up for Google AdSense then you probably aren’t delivering the quality content people want to read in the first place.