NEW YORK (Reuters) – Actor Brad Pitt was honored on Thursday for his humanitarian work in helping rebuild hurricane-ravaged New Orleans at former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s philanthropic summit, the Clinton Global Initiative.Pitt was presented with a plaque from the U.S. Green Building Council which said the actor and his foundation “Make It Right” had created the “largest and greenest single-family community in the world.”"‘Make It Right’ has exceeded my expectations,” said Pitt who set up the foundation in 2007.”Our criteria from the beginning were at odds, to say the least. We demanded that these homes be sustainable, that they…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier battled on Saturday to win over a large pool of undecided voters on the last day of campaigning before a federal election.Merkel told a rally in Berlin, hours after arriving on an overnight flight from a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, that her conservatives must use the final campaign hours to convince the one-third of voters who pollsters say have yet to make up their minds.”Every vote counts,” said Merkel, 55, Germany’s first woman chancellor and the only one to have grown up in communist East Germany.Security has been…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Google Inc is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.”We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters GlobalClimate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.Google, known for its Internet search engine, in late 2007 said it would invest…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

As most readers know, I typically refrain from promoting conferences on this site (aside from my own Social Ad Summit confernece) but later this month I’ll be heading out to California to attend the Engage! Expo. The event has a large number of social web industry executives speaking and attending which is why I’ve decided to go to this one. September through November is a busy season for conferences, however I try to limit the number I attend as you can spend all year going to events and never get any work done!

With the sheer number of people attending…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.

While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated,…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

A few weeks ago we announced the first speakers for this year’s Social Ad Summit. Today I wanted to announced a second batch of speakers and also state that we’ve decided to open up registration. The primary reason for opening registration is that managing the invites while blogging and planning the conference was getting a bit overwhelming. We’ve actually had a large volume of invite requests (close to 1,000) but filtering through them was getting to be a task.

Ultimately many people that should be in attendance haven’t received an invite simply because we don’t have their email in our…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Just over two weeks ago we announced the 2009 Social Ad Summit and today I’m happy to present the first 8 speakers for the event. The conference is being held at Tribeca Rooftop in New York City on October 5, 2009. So far we’ve had a great response and expect this event to sell out based on the number of inquiries we’ve received so far. If you haven’t received the registration information for the event yet, head over to the Social Ad Summit website and enter your information on the homepage.

Over the next few weeks we will be announcing…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Last year we hosted the inaugural Social Ad Summit in New York City. The event also happened to be hosted on the same day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the markets began to slide downward. Despite turmoil around the corner on Wall Street, 250 people still managed to get together to discuss the future of advertising on the social web (although many were hopping in and out of the event to see if sky had fallen).

While not nearly as important as a global financial crisis, the conversation was important for an industry still trying to figure out…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]