News of what we’ve been working on at Lookery is starting to leak out. Its always great to get press, especially when it’s Fortune , Mashable and Business 2.0 . More details to come over the next several weeks on our blog.

Scott and I started Lookery because we saw an obvious need. We also saw a lot of worthless data.

The obvious need was getting application (aka widget) developers paid ($$$), pure and simple. No dreams of drag-and-drop widget creation or widget hosting platforms that someday, just maybe, can be turned into an ad network here.

Why not just start with the ad network? Why not just focus on getting developers paid? Well that’s what lead us to dive head first (Is there any water in the pool?) into creating an ad network focused first on the obvious point of traction, Facebook.

This week we’ll be launching Lookery for the Web. Not abandoning our Lookery for Facebook publishers, quite the opposite actually, we’re growing our relationships by servicing all of their sites not just their Facebook apps.

Let us know if you have a site or app that you’d like help getting paid on.

1. From we don’t serve ads…
2. …to we’ll just copy Overture and only do text ads…
3. …to banner (graphical) ads are crap we’ll never do them…
4. …to we’re experimenting with banner ads only…
5. …ok, ok we’re doing some banner ads and video ads and mobile ads…

By the looks of this ad Google’s crossed yet another line. –>

They are on the way to becoming a generic “back of the room” [of Adtech] / informercial-like ad network.

At Lookery we’re getting ready to publicly launch what we’ve been working on for the last month. It’s a bold move. Some will be pissed and some will love it, regardless it’s going to get the advertising world talking.

My “new” favorite podcast is JETSET. It’s part of the NextNewNetworks (N3) media meta-network.

JETSET’s host Zadi Diaz looks like she could be my sister but
that’s not why I like the show.

It’s the first vidcast that really gets the format right, at least for me. It’s not your typical “I’m trying to be a TV show” podcast or worst yet the “slideshow of pictures put to music” podcast.

I bought Lise an Apple TV a while back but we never got around to opening it so I returned it. I’m seriously considering getting another one now that I know that there’s some good content available.

My partner Scott Rafer gave a talk this week at Founder Hacks II.

His secret to starting a business? Get lots of people to send you their seemingly worthless data.

At Compete we sat on a goldmine of data.

At Lookery we’re off to a good start. We’ve been running in private beta for about 9 weeks and have already served about 1/4 billion ads, not bad.

We launched the Compete API about 8 months ago. Along with the launch of free competitive web analytics it changed Compete’s value overnight. Thanks to the guys at Mashery we were able bring our API online in days not months.

I’ll be speaking at The Business of API’s Conference in October in San Francisco detailing the important strategic and business goals that were met by opening up Compete’s data.

Hope to see you there.