New York Weather News - Jeff's Weather Blog

I apologize for the lack of activity the past couple months. As some of you already know, I left Acronym Media, a leader in search marketing solutions to head up business development and partnerships for Buddy Media. It has an been amazing first month with many new client acquisitions and explosive user growth. I've never seen anything like it before. Buddy Media's Acebucks has become the largest loyalty marketing program on Facebook. Acebucks has grown to over 1.2 million users and has been adding 40,000-50,000 users a day. Our current focus is creating sticky, super viral applications that help users get more out of Facebook and other social media. Michael Lazerow, Founder and CEO secured some of the biggest investors in the industry (Howard Lindzon, Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus and James Altucher). Mike's got a killer background-- He was the founder of University Wire (owned now by Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and GOLF.com (owned by Time Inc.). I'm really enjoying working with him.

Here is the idea behind Acebucks: Users who install the application get rewarded to do the things that we like them to do. Play games, purchase merchandise, and complete offers. They do all this while being part of a fun growing community. Acebucks are redeemed by the user to buy real ticket items like Ipods, electronics, airline tickets and more. We have also launched Storefront, an ebay-like application where everything is bought and sold for Acebucks. On Friday, November 29th, BBC World news came to the buddy media offices to find a little more about the people behind Acebucks. They were very interested in hearing how our company is now creating a micro-economy in the social media world. In recent news, Buddy Media acquired Crushes on Thursday. Crushes has over 1 million current users and will be tied in with Acebucks. This will increase Buddy Media's user base to over 2 million. A public API is also available to developers who wish to integrate Acebucks with their applications.

I recently spoke at the Web 2.0 Meetup
run by Brett Petersel and Oz Sultan and I had a blast. They did an amazing job at organizing many thought leaders and web strategists in one venue. There were hundreds who attended. I look forward to the next one. Some shots from the event: ( Right : Jeff Ragovin and Brett Petersel)