The blogger’s best tool for affiliate marketing, 123Linkit, has just announced its acquisition by Netline, a B2B content syndication network. 123Linkit will be integrated into Netline’s suite of offerings.  Yasmine, 123Linkit’s founder, will help with the integration and join the team at Netline full-time.  123Linkit is providing additional revenue to tens of thousands of blogs and is the realization of Yasmine’s own desire to make affiliate marketing simpler and more scalable for bloggers of all types and sizes. This has definitely been a story of hard work and dedication to a vision that we are pleased to see come to fruition.

Yasmine at 123Linkit writes:

We have been working hard to help bloggers make money from what they are already doing since early 2010. We believe by seamlessly transforming product and brand keywords into money-making opportunities, we enable bloggers to effortlessly build passive income from their published content.

After integrating our software with tens of thousands of blogs, we believe now is the best time to expand our efforts with another team that shares our vision of enhancing the online advertising process. We’re excited to announce that we have been acquired by Netline and will be joining their RevResponse team to continue creating an enriching and unobtrusive advertising experience on the web.

What does this mean for you? Continue using our product as you normally would. Stay tuned for more improvements to your blogging monetization experience. For feedback or suggestions on how we can progress, do not hesitate to reach out to us at any time using our GetSatisfaction page. You can also email us your questions atyasmine[at]123linkit[dot]com.

About RevResponse: RevResponse is a B2B ad network that enables publishers to generate revenue with free business resources such as trade magazine subscriptions, whitepapers, eBooks and software trials.

Happy blogging,

Yasmine Mustafa
Founder & CEO

This post originally ran on Technically Philly. It is re-purposed here with permission, as part of a previously announced partnership.

Josh Kopelman is angry.

When Technically Philly pops into his office, the normally cheery venture capitalist is busy trying to figure out why First Round Capital’s email service is down.

“They say six minutes of downtime,” he says. “but they’re way over that.”

After a brief phone conversation (he would later blog about the downtime) he immediately returns to his normal upbeat demeanor and for good reason: Kopelman is one of four founding partners of one of the most active early-stage investment companies in the country. The firm has become as much of a brand as the companies it invests in, boasting the most-visited VC site on the web.

Located in a small, nondescript office building in West Conshohocken, the firm has expanded to San Francisco and will open its New York City offices next week, giving it a headquarters in two of the largest technology communities. The firm is setting a new standard in investment by making a high number of smaller, early stage investments while nurturing companies from the ground up.

First Round, however, is just the latest chapter in the Wharton grad’s career. Kopelman, a New York native, started Internet information company Infonautics while still in college and almost didn’t stay in Philadelphia.

“Once you have 17 people in the company with mortgages and me without, that pressured me to stay,” he says, “Then I grew attached to the area, built networks and planted some roots here and started Half.com.”

Since then, Philly has treated him well: Kopelman and his partners sold Half.com to eBay for $350 million in 2000, giving Philadelphia one its biggest tech “wins” in the Web 1.0 times. After starting and selling Turntide to Symantec in less than a year, Kopelman switched from entrepreneur to investor, making Philadelphia home to one of the most influential Internet investment firms in the world.

We sat down with Kopelman to talk about his take on Philadelphia, what kinds of companies he looks for and why Philly (and every other city) has no comparison.

Read the rest here on Technically Philly.

This post originally ran on Technically Philly. It is re-purposed here with permission, as part of a previously announced partnership.

Austin Lavin is excited.

During his phone conversation with Technically Philly we can nearly hear the 25-year-old smile through the phone. His excitement is well-founded.

Austin, along with his 19-year-old sister Celeste, just sold their first company: myfirstpaycheck.com.

The siblings founded the Ardmore-based Web site in 2007 when then-15-year-old Celeste Lavin began looking for her first job. The family noticed that, in an age where teenagers spend increasing amounts of time online, there were no career resources for teens.

The duo built a job board that also featured career resources for young people, a niche popular enough to attract the attention Phoenix-based Simple Employment Solutions.

We sat down with the Penn grad to ask him what it felt like to sell, his advice for others and when he will be buying his yacht.

Read the rest here.

TechCrunch is reporting that local startup NearVerse has raised $1 million for mobile proximity technology that power things like their own mobile social network LoKast, which they launched last month at SXSW.

From the NearVerse site:

With its use of short-range wireless networks within its system, NearVerse’s platform is also inherently proximity-powered, and supports a range of rich, real-time, proximity-based services and applications, including LoKast

LoKast users broadcast and share their content and information about themselves to those other users in close proximity to them.  It is currently available for the iPhone with an Android version in the works.

Marketplace, from American Public Radio (heard on our own WHYY), ran the piece A gene for entrepreneurship? today.  At the heart of the issue of course is the question of nature versus nurture.  They interview one particular family of somewhat claimed entrepreneurial success discussing the parent’s endeavors and that of two of their three children.  They also go on to discuss the issue with Scott Shane, business professor at Case Western Reserve, specifically around his new book “Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Worklife.” Shane goes so far as to say that “About a third to 40 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is innate.”

This was right on time following a piece by Fred Wilson (of our 2nd favorite startup city), Nature vs Nurture and Entrepreneurship.  Wilson was having a discussion with Professor Raffi Amit who runs the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs.  On the one side Fred asserted that “you can’t teach people to be entrepreneurs but you can teach entrepreneurs business.”  Professor Amit however disagreed stating that his research indicates “there are no unique and defining characteristics of entrepreneurs.”  In other words, you could teach entrepreneurial skills.

Read the rest of this entry »

The virtuous are the collaborative ones

After announcing their one-year birthday at Technically Philly and following a few relatively successful months starting here at Start Philly, our two organizations have decided to form a bit of a working relationship.

We met last week inside a Sansom Street restaurant and got familiar over drafts of Yards and comped whiskey. By the end of the night, we had an understanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

TicketLeap, an online ticketing platform enabling people to sell, market and manage their events, launched a redesigned version of their site last night.

Chris Stanchak, President & CEO writes,

The homepage is now designed to help patrons find events they are interested in quickly.  We accomplish this through geo ip that automatically detects where you are located and displays popular events near you – as well as cities nearby.

We have also completely rebuilt the way our search works to enable you to quickly find events that are upcoming in your area with the ability to drill down by time and location.

Finally, we have updated all of our marketing content and it is hosted on a customized WordPress instance so we can make quick updates easily without messing with our app.

The site looks great and in fact, going to the site I am instantly provided a list of events going on right here in Philadelphia and was able to  narrow down my results to a few events that were most interesting, local to me, and going on today.  Very cool guys, keep up the great work.