Last week I had the opportunity to speak with the NutshellMail co-founders, Mark Schmulen and David Lyman, about building their company and the quick exit to ConstantContact. While we had a long conversation, I’ve cut down the interview to 7 key points that we covered during our conversation. There are some great takeaways for entrepreneurs looking to build their own businesses.
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What better place than among your friends to find free stuff?  As soon as someone gets a tip on something, they are sure to pass it along their social network first, right?  Surprisingly, the freebie game has not lit up on Facebook just yet.  Sites like slickdeals.net, dealcatcher.com and redflagdeals.ca don’t really have much of a Facebook presence, and it’s somewhat surprising.  That doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t affecting these sites.  Here, we talk with Ryan Eubanks from HeyItsFree.net, a site dedicated to alerting people to free giveaways on the web, and ask him about how Facebook has changed his business.
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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Will O’Brien of TrialPay to discuss the company’s offering and the current state of offer-based advertising on the web. While there has been the argument that social applications don’t have effective monetization strategies, there’s no doubt that social games have already cracked the monetization nut and are bringing in significant revenue.
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Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Sean Flannagan, the product manager at Etsy responsible for their recent Facebook Connect implementation. Numerous companies have been implementing the service and we’ve been keeping track of the experience for developers as well as marketers. Etsy recently launched their first integration with Facebook Connect and from the sounds of it, have a number of other exciting Facebook-enabled products on the way. Below is my interview with Sean Flannagan about the company’s experience with implementing Connect.
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Last week we got the opportunity to speak with the team behind NutshellMail, a recent fbFund winner. NutshellMail enables users to manage all of their social network email accounts through one system. I took the time to sign up last week and I have to admit that the service is pretty slick. I actually don’t use multiple social networks to manage my contacts (although I still occasionally log in to LinkedIn), but many users have distributed contacts across many networks making this product extremely useful. Check out my interview with founders Mark Schmulen and David Lyman below.
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MyChurch, the winner of the most recent fbFund incubator program, has undergone a lot of changes this year. A relaunch of its application a few weeks back and the participation in fbFund ’09 has provided a wealth of opportunity for the MyChurch team, as they find useful ways in which to create an application around existing faith-based organizations that need additional social networking tools. I had an opportunity to interview Joe Suh, CEO of MyChurch, who speaks on the relaunch of the application, as well as being a winner of the fbFund.
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AdNectar is one of the most interesting advertising companies that currently service the Facebook platform as well as other social platforms. What makes them unique is their laser focus on virtual gifts. When I first met them in person earlier this year, they were one of the presenting companies at a conference in New York and I had a chance to learn more about what their company offers. AdNectar is in an interesting position in that they are competing directly with companies like Facebook who currently offer branded gift campaigns outside of the platform.
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When Facebook hosted the first ever governance vote a couple of weeks ago, one of the biggest winners of the vote was Wildfire Promotion Builder, the company that developed the Facebook Governance voting application. As soon as I noticed that Facebook hadn’t built the application internally I had to find out who was behind the company.

After doing a little digging I found out that the company was a winner in the last round of the fbFund, Facebook’s seed fund for entrepreneurs looking to build applications with Facebook’s social technology. The company appears to have perfect timing, offering a suite of tools for developing branded interactive promotions, many of which are targeted at leveraging Facebook’s new public profile format. Last week AllFacebook had the opportunity to talk with Victoria about the company’s plans.
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Online social networks lend themselves to anonymity, but sometimes you just need to know if a person is really who they say they are. Purewire Trust offers a service that verifies the reputation of online users, breaking search tabs down into people, things and places. The purpose of Purewire Trust is to make the web a safer place for communication, and its recent support of Facebook Connect is the latest step Purewire Trust has taken down that path. Below is an interview with Purewire Trust CTO, Paul Judge, PhD.
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fbFund winner LuckyCal is a social calendar tool that takes advantage of Facebook for its connectivity amongst users and application platform for interactive purposes. Months after being awarded funding from the fbFund, LuckyCal has been pushing forward and seeking growth. One way in which this application is looking to gain more users is through a promotion where users are entered in the chance to win a prize by inviting their friends to join in on the LuckyCal fun. I took the promotion as an opportunity to catch up with LuckyCal, and learn more about the promotion.
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