Coull Video Performance Network
Over the past year i've been over at Coull.com as head of design and tech, building a brand new Affiliate Network focused around video. This is quite an exciting prospect, given that the growth in online video is showing signs of accelerating further this year, teamed with the continued strength of the global Affiliate market.
Coull's proposition differs from legacy Affiliate Networks like AffiliateWindow and Commission Junction, in that instead of competing with them, we add to them by combining all of their strong points in the form of their Merchants under one roof, and then provide the ability to link those Merchant products to video. Whether that be a Television ad looking for longtail internet usage, or joe blogs doing a product review at home. We can even use videos straight from popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Delivered straight to publisher sites enabling them to make a new, exciting and very profitable source of revenue.
As technical architect of the network, I've placed a heavy focus on openness not just of our technical API's, but also on our plans for the future. Now the hard work of creating the Network is complete, me and my team are working hard to add new features and provide close support to Publishers looking to use our Network, or simply giving advice on making money from video where ever we can.
As such this blog will now be dedicated not just my work at Coull, but news and comment and free code on the cutting edge developments in the Affiliate Market space. This year will undoubtedly feature, video, mobile and of course using Facebook apps, games and updates to transform social marketing.
Here's to 2012.
Aden Forshaw, CTO - Coull.com
Using the Amazon Product API with AS3 – #FreeCodeSunday
This is really an update to an earlier post on how to use the Amazon Product API search and retrive products, all tied to your Amazon account. Using this information you can present information about each product, and drive traffic to the product page on Amazon. If the user then purchases the Product then you recieve a small amount of commission.
The problem with the old post was that Amazon changed their API requiring the request be signed and have a timestamp, so really the main new part is the included .php file, which you will of course need to edit to include your Amazon secret api key. To get one and see their documentation click here...
So if you can intergrate this information into a fun game or app and drive engagement through to the Product on Amazon in a way that is useful enough to your users that they then purchase the product, then you can make a few pennys. Well... maybe enough to buy lunch.
The source code goes into how to change the filter to search dvds instead of music, and there's full API code to parse the XML for each Product into a Class instance to code against.
Credit for how to intergrate the Amazon signature methodology must go to www.ilovebonnie.net
An easy to use AS3 shape drawing class, gear, cogs, wedge, arc, star, burst
Every other Sunday i'm going to try and release some free code. Things like projects i thought had legs, got to the prototype stage but never had time to finish, or Actionscript libraries that i think other might find useful.
In this case i'm releasing my shape drawing AS3 class. This is mainly just an Actionscript 3 implementation of the hard work done by both Kevin Williams and Ric Ewing. I've also used a Minimal Comps Slider as well and included the slightly amended code for that which does not require the Flex SDK (makes it easier for people not familiar with it).
Any comments, suggestions, or shapes you'd like to add just comment or send me a mail.
Enjoy, Aden.
EDIT -
Sidney de Koning has done exactly what i hoped and taken this on and made some improvements. Along with some nice speed tweaks, each method now takes in a reference to a Graphics instance instead of a Sprite class, improving the performance and making it move useful.
Nice work Sid, i've ammended the demo below to include his class and the associated source code. His related article...
Click to download free source code
Horrendous #Bing marketing
Shame on the lazy Creative Director who signed off this terrible idea.
I can imagine the meeting, "Interns, this charity is getting a lot of press, how can we get in on this.." Intern 1: "How about something lazy we could do in a banner ad but in a shopping centre instead" Intern 2:" And what if we top it off with a really ugly stand that looks like a prison" CD: "Love it. Charge the client a week of my time while i shop for ironic t-shirts on ebay".
People are in a shopping centre for a reason - they have money to burn. So instead of trying to get people to search for ideas on how to raise money for sport relief, let them search for all the great things that people are doing already for sport relief and encourage them to donate instead.
As a added extra you could advertise how good your engine is at localised search by showcasing activities by local people to raise money instead. None of the terrible branding on the booth supports this.
One day i'll be suprised by some decent microsoft advertising, not today... Bing!
Standing Wave 2 – Open source AS3 sound engine
I've been messing around with recently released Standing wave 2 engine over at JoeberKovitz.com. He used the initial version for his online musical composition app NoteFlight which is very polished, if a little hard to get into for a non muso like me.
I'm planning on using it in a child orientated music composition game, and using standard mp3's it's very smooth and solves most of the problems with timing sounds in As3. You can work with standard mp3's or synthesise your own sounds as well.
I'd also recommend having a look over at PlayWithMozart by Jean Marc Bara, he's a top dude and has created a really interesting app with smooth sound playback.
BristolFUG Talk
Been a while since i've had a chance to post i know, now i'm back fulltime freelance i can add some more tutorials, free code and tips and tricks and reply to comments a little bit more often.
Tomorrow i'm giving a talk to the Bristol Flash user group on 3d in flash. We'll be going through the whole process, from building and texturing a model in blender, exporting it into flash, and then using Away3d engine to load in the model and manipulate it with code. The aim is to give a medium level overview of the process, and provide the source code to work from.
If we get time or in future talks, we'll look at integrating open source physics engines into a 3d application.