Its with great pleasure and way too much excitement that we welcome our new CTO, Jayson Minard to the Tiny Team. Jayson will lead Tiny’s technology strategy including the upcoming launch of the company’s comparison shopping site and enhancing the company’s existing widget network, TinyEverywhere.

Jayson has more than 25 years in the information technology industry including the roles of CIO and CTO at Abebooks, the world’s largest online marketplace for books that was recently acquired by Amazon.com. His in-depth background in technology spans top world-wide companies such as Borland, BEA, Endeca, AbeBooks, Boeing and Zend.

Its a shame he isn’t a girl but we won’t hold it against him.

I’m pleased to annouce we just closed funding with Canaccord Adams. The funds will be used to complete product development of the TinyMassive comparison shopping engine and enhance and expand our existing shopping widget network, TinyEverywhere. A huge effort went into this process on several fronts so our thanks are well deserved and particularly directed at Penny Green and her tremendous team over at Bacchus Corporate Law here in Vancouver.

A quick update on the addition of specific reporting on referral data to Publisher’s dashboards.

- Number of Referrals = Check!
- $ earned from Referrals = Week of August 4th. This is mostly completed and passing through final testing.

“Hey! I love the widget but how about a 468 x 60 display?”

Good call. And we’re constantly working on new designs to apply to different sizes. It gets a little tricky due to the interactive nature of the widget.. i.e making it sing and dance in a little space but rest assured we’re working on it.

TinyMassive’s Most Popular Banner Sizes

1. 250 x 250
2. 600 x 160 (Wide Skyscraper)
3. 768 x 90 (Leaderboard)

I’m not sure I would be gungho about having a TV in my living room made by Zoombastic. Actually.. that could be kind of cool! However, the key point here is some products in our system don’t have a product description which results in a white space on the wide skyscraper and leaderboard widgets. Here’s why and what we’re doing about it -

Why

We rely on merchants and manufacturers to upload descriptions about the products they sell and occasionally this doesn’t occur. Because we come from the merchant world we know that quite often merchants are waiting on product descriptions from manufacturers, particularly brand new or obscure products and merchants are very loathe to make up descriptions in order not to mislead shoppers. The result, some products make their way onto the web sans descriptions for a period of time.

What we’re doing about it

Are you kidding me? Its Friday! Friday is the new Monday where a new launch is concerned so this issue has been added to the list of features and improvements our brilliant publishers are tossing our way. We’ll be working on a way to have the widget identify the lack of product description and display reviews instead. We’ll let you know as it comes out of the room with no windows where strange smells emanate and engineers look sort of ‘wild eyed’. We don’t go in there. Expect an update soon.

We hope the sun is shining where you are because for the rest of you - the weekend is about to arrive!

Publisher Reports accessed via the dashboard -

Currently, referral stats are grouped with stats from the widgets deployed on Publishers blogs, personal sites etc. We are in the process of adding seperate line items for referral performance to publisher dashboards so publishers can monitor performance. How can we improve? Email Us!?

Finally! We are here and excited to be rubbing shoulders with some of the most innovative people in the world of comparison shopping. We should briefly explain why we think we warrant a place online, let alone a blog. As merchants, we loved to sell online but lamented the lack of tools and solutions to make our life easier, better manage our marketing campaigns and ratchet up conversion. When in that situation you are faced with two choices. Continue to criticize existing solutions or prove there is merit to your argument and that you can do equally as well or better.

In this case, you is a we is a trio. We began work on this project in early 2007 by talking to anyone who would listen and contribute their ideas to our vision. That entailed listening to just about everyone we knew (and we know alot!) from the merchant community. Brand leaders, Mom and Pop etailers, data feed aggregators, order management systems, ad networks.. the list goes on. TinyMassive.com took shape and we spent considerable time simplifying the concept on all levels to bring together a meld of comparison shopping with social interaction that addressed a collective audience in a quick and simple manner.

Our shopping widget, fondly referred to as TinyEverywhere was the first to roll off the production line ahead of the launch of the TinyMassive.com comparison shopping site, scheduled for late summer 2008. We couldn’t be happier with the results. Built using AJAX and XML, our widgets deliver product information, lowest prices, best rated stores and accepts reviews within multiple IAB approved ad sizes. Rapidly becoming the fastest growing shopping solution in the blogosphere, sociosphere and webosphere - too many ’spheres’! - we are working continuously to improve TinyEverywhere by listening to our publishers who are thankfully, as verbal as our merchant community.

And on that note, we would like to thank everyone who has touched TinyMassive in some way. You know who you are and we are humbled by your hard work, patience and passion for this tiny idea that became massive.

Kate, Lauren and Marcia =)