v-shake - digitization of business networking with a new revenue model

I was going to focus this blog on digial media in terms of technologies pertaining to digitizing all forms of content. Since content and communities are now interwoven, I think its appropriate to comment on social and business networking- on the increased digitization of our community interactions with hosted technology solutions.

V-shake brings a market-driven model to linkedin

I love linkedin. I get lot of people who google me and get frustrated and cannot find my contact and finally sent for introductions thru linkedin.

But, the limitation of linkedin is that the real people who vield power - particularly executives investors can rule out that they don't want to receive any inmails or introductions. So linkedin has resorted to selling some service as a membership package to allow spamming a whole bunch of people, atleast once. I think that revenue model is highly flawed because the segment of paid consumers is small and doesn't scale revenues much.
So linkedin has resorted to being yet another job site by targeting recruiters to reach potential hires, downplaying the whole potential of business networking.

I recently found v-shake.com, a new startup just launched in beta. They take a market driven approach, allowing people to charge different rates for people to contact them through different means and sharing the revenues with these highly networking individuals.

The social networking sites like friendster, myspace are famous because they are all free and built a community, lack a b-model and became famous only by their aquisition by Yahoo, News corp etc.

What fascinates me about v-shake.com is that they are clearly focused on a segment of business users who are power networkers - the sales people, bizdev partnership people, entreprenuers seeking investors, executives networking amongst themselves to keep their marketability.
These are people targeted by the conference industy which tries to segment them by verticals and earn their dollars for the overall conference program.

V-shake.com tutorial is proof of the smart technial people behind the company. Its the best written visual tutorial I've ever seen.

I hope the company would listen to the market and lock-in this segment of customers and create the first revenue generating new b-model of web 2.0 companies.

Nothing can get more human on the net than gethuman.com

My friend Paul English started gethuman.com by passionately wanting to make life as a consumer in America easy with faster access to customer service phone lines.

Its an amazing example of social networking clearly solving a problem bringing people to bond together as a community. I think this community has built itself on the net with so much passion like the early formation of real towns by the early settlers of America, guided by the marketing genius of Paul.