Skimlinks makes an impact

The Evening Standard's piece on Skimlinks' new Twitter initiative tops a round of pretty extensive publicity that Alicia has generated for her fledgling business.
Techcrunch, which has liked the business from the start, covered their latest sales milestone and funding here.

Her idea for monetising Tweets is simple and uses the Skimlinks technology to follow links via 19 affiliate networks through to many thousands of retailers:

The project, called good.ly, allows people to recommend items such as books, electronic items and clothes by putting a link on Twitter.

When a person clicks on the link, they go to the retailer's website. If they buy the item, a proportion of the sale price goes to a charity — currently Dogs Trust, a fund for rehousing, or Crisis for homeless people.

To use the service, users log on to a shopping website and go to the page that shows the item they want to recommend. They then copy its webpage address into a text box at
www.good.ly.

When they press return, good.ly creates a message — or tweet — with the link on the Twitter website.
A commercial version of the system is being sold to publishing companies.

Alicia has been shortlisted for The Entrepreneur of the Year at the National Business Awards, together with:

Chris Bond, W H Bond & Sons Ltd
Gary & Carmen Lewis, A1 Pharmaceuticals
Georgina Tarrant, The Great Outdoor Gym Company
Hunter Abbott, Now Group UK,
Karen Paterson, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions
Marc Boyan, Miroma
Margaret Manning, Reading Room
Mike Tobin, TelecityGroup
Sara Murray, buddi [Great job, Sara!]

[BTW, Sara was an adviser to Seedcamp when it first set up in 2007]