October 2009 Archives

Techcrunch reports that Twitter has struck deals with both Microsoft Bing and Google search to help integrate real time results into their engines. They've been partially indexing what they can already, but Twitter hasn't given them full access to the real-time stream. Until now.

Looks like they may have found a revenue stream. I always thought an ad model wouldn't work with Twitter, and that some type of licensing deal would be their best bet, whether it be via charging users, creating professional accounts, some type of rev-share with app developers, etc.

I wasn't exactly expecting them to sell the data to the major search engines - thought they might give it a go building their own engine actually, but I guess that's a less likely scenario now. Why not just take an $undisclosedsum and let the Google and Microsoft PhDs work it out instead?

Often times the most creative ideas are a little subversive. Trying to do what everyone else does - only better - sometimes boils down to a game of one-upmanship rather than true innovation. But when you start to delve into the dark side, well there's a lot of places where one can find things that others haven't thought of...or at least weren't willing to pursue.

Maloney & Porcelli's, a (very) high-end steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan, did just that (well, at least they OK'ed their agency's idea anyway).

Knowing that big-ticket dinners and lunches are often the domain of corporate outings, they realized that in this economy nobody would have the cajones to try and expense a $500 lunch, and in many cases they're expressly forbidden to do so.

So what is this magical app? Well, basically you go to http://expenseasteak.com/, enter your total, and out pops a bunch of seemingly innocent - and very realistic looking - receipts for things like cabs, "regular" lunches, etc.

Ethical? Probably not...for the user anyway :-) They're just providing a service, it's up to each user to use/abuse it. But the idea is great none the less.

//via AdAge