Tumblr Wants Fashion Brands to Pay for Blogger Coverage of New York Fashion Week

Fashion industry marketers are up in arms over Tumblr's sponsorship proposals to brands for product placement and branded content on Tumblr blogs for the upcoming New York Fashion Week. These plans would also violate federal rules about disclosure for paid content.

For the second season in a row, Tumblr is sending fashion bloggers who use its platform to cover NYFW [ see our story ]. Tumblr is asking major brands to spend $10K+ for private events with bloggers, $100K+ for "partnered content" -- four bloggers would produce a minimum of 15 posts each for the brand -- and at a price to be determined for product placement on each of the 20 blogs [ see proposals further down ].

Additionally, sponsorships on Tumblr's official NYFW page tumblr.com/tagged/fashion are priced at $150K and $350K for the week. With the 1M impressions Tumblr is claiming, that's a CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) of nearly $70, far more expensive than advertising on the front page of the New York Times website or buying a premium package from Conde Nast, as Mashable reported.

Tumblr is still searching for a business model -- right now the company only sells...

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Forget Fantasy Football, Make Real Money Trading NFL Player Shares with StarStreet

Just in time for football season StarStreet, where traders buy stock and invest actual money in "shares" of professional athletes, has opened its first National Football League market after an invite-only test run in 2010. StarStreet also has a Major League Baseball market and plans to expand to the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association markets as their seasons begin.

To start trading, you need to add at least $25 but no more than $500 to your account, although that ceiling will likely increase to $1K by Tuesday. For every person you refer who becomes a trader, you and that person receive $5. No person can own more than 20% of a player's stock. StarStreet makes 4% on the sell side of the trade and covers all PayPal fees.

"If you think about it, there really has been no innovation in fantasy sports since they came online...

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Yelp Deals Still Alive Despite Rumors and Loss in Revenue

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman recently confirmed that Yelp will continue to offer daily deals, despite rumors that Yelp Deals would be no more. 

"Well, contrary to popular belief Yelp is not killing Deals (gasp!)," Jeremy writes on the Yelp blog. "We did take a 30 person team that was selling daily deals and local ads and made it a 15 person team focused solely on daily deals (note: no salespeople were harmed in the making of this announcement. All are still doing great as part of our 400+ member sales team)."

 

While Yelp is not leaving the deals space, it's no surprise that they are revamping the program by narrowing its focus. In August, Yelp Deals witnessed a sharp decline...

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Search By Drawing: Google Correlate Matches Trend Graphs with Search Terms

Google Correlate, which reverses the Google Trends process of inputting a keyword and viewing the trend to drawing a trend and viewing the keyword, has officially graduated out of Google Labs. 

Launched in May, Correlate can now be found on the Google Trends page. Correlate lets you draw a trend pattern graph without actually knowing which search terms the graph will correspond with. Correlate then analyzes the pattern and populates a list with the most correlated terms. (See Google's comic explanation.)

In July, just a few months after Larry Page took over as CEO, Google announced it would begin phasing out its experimental prototype generator Google Labs. At the time, Google Correlate was still...

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Excelerate Labs Demo Day: Complete List of Companies and Links

[Excelerate Labs Co-founder Sam Yagan. Image from http://bcove.me/cevko4q8]

Excelerate Labs [ @exceleratelabs ], an accelerator in Chicago, showed off its second summer class at Demo Day on Aug. 31. Led by Sam Yagan and Troy Henikoff, Excelerate invests $25K in each company in exchange for 6% ownership.

LAUNCH profiled all 10 companies in the summer '11 class. In alphabetical order:

BabbaCo www.babbaco.com @babbaco
WHAT: A monthly box, curated around a certain theme, with physical materials and other content to help parents engage with their 3-to-6-year-old kids. The box contains four types of items: projects kids do with their hands, activities, books and stories, and approved apps/downloads.
LAUNCH profile: http://www.launch.is/blog/for-busy-parents-babbaco-delivers-monthly-box-of-projects-st.html
AngelList: http://angel.co/babbaco

Buzz Referrals www.buzzreferrals.com @buzzreferrals
WHAT: Companies get a branded referral program that...

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