Thursday, January 31, 2008

Exciting Opportunity:
Invitation to Closed Private Beta

madKast is offering you an exciting opportunity! In the next two months, we will be releasing what one might call madKast v. 2.0: a revolutionary and highly evolved way to share content on the web. At the moment, the madKast widget allows you to share blog content with others via e-mail and social bookmarking tools.

What we are working on now will let website visitors share and recommend ANY content with their friends where they "live" online -- Facebook, MySpace, the blogosphere, etc. This evolution of madKast will provide publishers with tools ranging from a fully customizable share widget to a completely implicit sharing mechanism.

We are looking for people who are interested in joining a closed private beta in the future as we get closer to the launch date of this ground-breaking new concept.

For these customers, madKast will provide custom integrations at no charge. If you're interested in being one of the first to check out what we have in store, please send me an e-mail at josh AT madkast DOT com, and we'll put you on our exclusive list to test this new technology before we officially launch it.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Evangicamp v 2.0

A last minute reminder that Evangicamp v 2.0, or as Tara refers to it, Evangicamp Part Deux will take place this evening at 5:30pm at the me.dium headquarters.

The first Evangicamp that we had -- back in December -- was a great success, with lots of food for thought and great discussions.

I have no doubt that Evangicamp v 2.0 will also be fruitful, with people from madKast, Lijit, me.dium, Fuser, Filtrbox, Villij, and other tech startups attending!

Full wrap-up on how it goes later in the week!

Friday, January 25, 2008

madKast Adds One!

I'm delighted to introduce you to the newest member of the extended madKast family: Michael Restuccia. He is the beautiful baby boy born last weekend to our CTO, Tony, and his lovely wife, Apple.

Michael arrived on January 20th and came into the world as a 7lb 11ounce, 20 inch long bundle of joy! Mom and Michael are both doing well.

We're ecstatic for Tony and Apple and wish them and Michael the best.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Do What We Did: Apply to Techstars!

As most of you who read this blog know, madKast had the profound honor and privilege of being one of ten chosen (out of more than 300 who applied) to the TechStars program in Boulder, CO this past summer.

While we received $15,000 in seed funding from TechStars, this number only tells a tiny fraction of the story. From late May through mid August we, along with the nine other startups chosen, received first-rate, invaluable mentorship, advice, guidance and support from some of the brightest in the tech community.

We had workshops, discussions, and individual meetings with some of the top venture capitalists and investors in the area, from founders and directors of some of the most successful tech companies and startups (like NewsGator, MyBlogLog, Yahoo, PayPal, Microsoft, etc), to design firms as well as access to legal help.

Because of the priceless mentorship we received, and relationships we built during our time at TechStars, we were able to successfully raise a Series A venture capital round of $300,000 less than a month after the program ended. That is what is allowing us to continue to build and grow madKast into the bright vision we have.

Why am I writing about all of this now? Quite simple, really: TechStars applications have opened for the 2008 summer session, and we’d let people know that TechStars is a truly invaluable experience and that if you have a startup idea or company you’d benefit immensely from the same guidance and support we did. Plus, Boulder is a pretty amazing place to live, especially during the summer.

We are very grateful for the TechStars program which helped nurture and support our ideas into a successful tech startup company whose growth (number of active blogs) has increased by 40% over the past two months.

Check out the TechCrunch article on TechStars and consider applying today!

If you’d like to know more specifically about madKast’s experience at TechStars, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at josh AT madkast DOT com.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Introducing Detailed Analytics from madKast!

Though I gave a brief teaser of it in the last post, I'm happy to report to you that madKast has launched a detailed post-centric analytics package that will provide bloggers with details about how their readers are interacting with their blog content.

All you need to do is visit madKast and type in the name of your blog in the search field in the upper right corner of the site. You will then be directed to the analytics for your site.

I’d like to give you a preview of some of the stats on the analytics page. First, there is a chronological graph (in green) of the number of the times individual posts on your blog have been read. Also on this graph (in blue) is a plot of the number of times readers have shared your content through e-mail and social bookmarking sites. In addition, on the left you’ll see the percentage of your readers that also read other sites madKast is installed on. Below that, you’ll see a tag cloud showing which words or topics are mentioned most frequently on your blog. On the bottom part of your page, you can see which of your blog’s posts have been shared most frequently as well as which posts are the most frequently shared within your blog’s “community” – which includes other blogs your readers visit.


If you are unhappy with the number of times content has been shared on your blog it is most likely because your readers are not familiar with using madKast. We’ve found that both sharing and readership of content on blogs that madKast is installed on increases noticeably when the blogger mentions what madKast is and how to use it. If you haven’t yet introduced madKast to your readers, and are comfortable doing so, you’ll probably see a spurt in sharing and readership. And finally, if you have blogging friends who don't have madKast on their sites, tell them about it!

We value your opinions and feedback at madKast, so please let us know if there are other statistics you’d like to see or improvements you can suggest to us to make the analytics page even more useful and informative for you. Either leave a comment here or send an e-mail to feedback AT madKast DOT com.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Off to a Great Start in 2008

We've seem some pretty impressive growth in the number of blogs using madKast in recent weeks and months. In particular, we've seen a 20% increase in the past month and a whopping 50% increase over the past two months. Now that we have added compelling, detailed site analytics to madKast -- type in the name of your blog here to retreive them -- we should see these numbers increase at an even faster rate.

I'd like to mention some of the recent blogs that have installed madKast:
Thanks to these sites and many more who are every day installing or using madKast. And if you have madKast on your site and haven't yet checked out your site analytics, I urge you to; there's some neat information there!