Nada Collar

Tumri Cornerstore launched some time at the beginning of this January. But there hasn’t been much information about it around the place. Perhaps the most information is over at 5 Star Affiliate Programs, especially in the forum there.

The idea of Tumri is similar to MyPickList and FavoriteThingz, although from an initial look it appears to be implemented better than those two. It also seems that Tumri is marketing itself towards publishers rather than social network users, so that might help them.

Apparently for users that signed up in January receive 70% revenue share, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is now.

User Experience

One thing I found interesting was that on signing up I had to select my target audience based on gender, education level and average household income. I guess this will help target the widget, but I would have thought that this information would be better to be added when the widget is created. It would seem that I can only have one widget per account, which is not perfect if this is being targeted towards publishers who likely have multiple places (with different targets) they would like to use this widget.

On signing up the site seemed to hang, but I got an email and was able to access my account, so just some small hiccup. On signup there was also mention of a conditions for a “widget sweepstakes”, but the link didn’t seem to have anything related, apart from a small box stating that every 100th signup would give me a free iPod shuffle. I assume a signup is a new publisher (found from my widget) who creates a widget, but who knows.

Once inside the publisher portal Tumri has a very clean looking user interface and creating a widget is fairly simple, however I found that I could not target my widget any closer than a category, unlike the write-up which said I could “select or block CornerStore offers by item, brand, keywords, product category, price break, location, and many other criteria”.

Conclusion

Overall it looks like a product that could be useful with some more work. But given the apparent success of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz they are going to have to work hard.

What does it need? Firstly a blog to inform people of updates (there is a news page on the publishers section which kind of resembles a blog), secondly some decent help (any help at all would be good), and finally and most importantly the ability to actually target certain products like they promised.

View my widget here.

This is certainly a form of revenue sharing that I didn’t see coming. Sonopia have just launched a DIY MVNO (Do it Yourself Mobile Virtual Network Operator).
They use Verizon as the carrier and provide a service whereby you can setup a network and receive 3%-8% of the revenues generated from the users you enlist on your virtual network.

It would seem ideal for non-profits, schools, community groups etc as a fund raiser. I imagine that will be its core market.

I can only imagine the schemes that are going to pop up around the internet for using this service. Although I suspect that the type of schemes would be - get your commission back etc - and the type of people that sign up for such a scheme are more likely to buy the cheapest service they can find (which would not be Verizon)

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reviewed the service and came to the conclusion that their user experience was a little lacking. It seems that its difficult to use their website for creating or managing a network. They will certainly need to fix this issue if they want to stay out of the TechCrunch deadpool.

I have not tried to setup a network but two immediate problems I see with their service relate to the user experience also.

1. Plans?
There are no mention of plans. I’d be interested to know what kind of plans they will offer, but I don’t want to sign up to find out. Maybe they are relying on the Group itself to inform its customers about the plans, but it would be nice for some sample plans for general users.

2. Association Validity.
How do I know that the Sonopia Group is run by who it says it is? If I got some marketing material from that association then I could assume that everything is legit. But if I just look through the list of available Groups then I could be giving my money to anyone.

I assume that the associations list on the front Sonopia page (National Wildlife Federation, National Parks Conservation Association) have been enlisted by Sonopia themselves. However they all have pages on Sonopia NOT on their own sites.

If you go to “Join a Sonopia” you see a listing for World Ocean Federation. How do you know that it really belongs to World Ocean Federation? Has someone just picked a well known charity and is hoping to cash in?

Sonopia, please make associations add a link to their own websites with news about their partnership with Sonopia. Then I can be more confident that my money is going to the World Ocean Federation and not John Smith of Las Vegas.