Leapfish is giving away $100,000 in gadgets, prizes and cash to Internet users who participate in leveraging their search engine in unique ways.

If you want your share of the $100,000 cash from Leapfish, you can use your online social media and social networking presence to earn points towards prizes and cash drawings. By doing this, you will help LeapFish’s goal of 1 million homepages set in 2010. You can earch cash and prizes by blogging, Tweeting, creating a LeapFish Homepage, searching, referring friends, or other ways ways that promote the Leapfish search engine.

I guess that just by blogging about Leapfish already I may be in the running, especially since my previous blog post about Leapfish ranks well in the Google search engine for “fastest search engine”. I’ve been a fan of Leapfish for a while now, even though I am still not seeing a whole lot of search traffic from the Leapfish search engine directly. However, using the social media and social networks to promote Leapfish, that may change this year.

LeapFish is an evolved search engine that captures the traditional, multi-media and real-time Web through a single, connected platform for both searching and sharing content. LeapFish is a privately held corporation headquartered out of CARR America Corporate Center in Pleasanton, California.

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In his post announcing the milestones, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that they’d hoped to reach cash positive sometime next year—but, happily, they made enough to cover their operating expenses starting last quarter.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard financial news from Facebook—and the last reports weren’t so good. Almost a year ago, many were speculating whether Facebook was headed for financial ruin, and their ad rates had fallen. And less than six months ago, there were some reports that Facebook was snubbing a $4B valuation despite needing the cash the sale would have given them. (A far cry from $15B, eh?)

Up to this point, it seemed that Facebook was struggling to monetize itself enough to cover its costs. But according to Zuckerberg, their finances are better than fine. One recent effort that may have helped (but, let’s be honest, is so new that it probably hasn’t made a whole lot of money yet) was opening the gift shop to developers. Inside Facebook notes a few other potentially contributing efforts:

What’s driving Facebook’s revenue growth? A combination of revenue streams: Facebook’s self-service ad business has been very strong lately, it continues to invest heavily in brand advertising efforts, and it also continues to release many experimental expansions to its virtual goods and virtual currency business, Facebook Credits. The company is also still deriving revenue from its advertising deal with Microsoft, signed when Microsoft invested in Facebook in 2007.

If Facebook is a microcosm of the Internet, and they make money off serving ads that lead to other parts of their site (driving up time onsite and possible ad rates), perhaps this is a good sign for the Internet at large.

What do you think? Is Facebook’s cash positive status a sign of a turn around? Or are clever new monetization strategies keeping Facebook ahead of the curve?

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I offered a $100 prize, and gained about 300 followers which is about $0.30 per acquisition. Right now social media gurus and web 2.0 weenies are tearing the temple robes since I’m referring to twitter followers in a commodity sense, but hey deal with it. I did have some drop off after the contest, but nothing significant, and you can see the slope of  line adding new followers remained fairly consistent, after the event.

I know some people believe this was all some evil plan that I executed to look like an “accident” but really it wasn’t. I opened my mouth said what I was thinking, the opportunity presented itself and I ran with it. I know there are some people who won’t ever believe me, and that’s cool. However if I had thought about this before hand I would have executed it a little better, here are some of the ways I would have improved it:

• By offering cash I attracted everyone, I would have been better offering something more targeted to my community like a BOTW listing, or SEO Book Membership, or pro SEO Moz account.
• I would have started the offer earlier in the day and on a day when I could devote my time to pimping it. Sure I could just robo-tweet but scheduled tweets are almost always inferior to live tweets
• I would have put up a short message and required people to retweet my name to be entered
• I would have taken out some PPC ads for popular twitter terms and software.
• I would have scheduled some guest posts on popular social media blogs for that day allowing me to saturate the twitterverse with my presence and the contest

Are twitter contests a viable way of gaining followers … absolutely. However you do have to be aware that many social media purists dislike the concept, so it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, be prepared for criticism. If you take the time to plan beforehand and execute a little better chances are you’ll have even better results than I did.

Lastly less someone think this was just a game and I never gave away the prize, here’s a link to the winner @SteveGarfield, who did the right thing and turned the money around and donated it to charity

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The announcement for the launch of this service is scheduled to take place in between an annual event that Microsoft organizes for its online advertisers on Wednesday. The details of this new feature will be revealed in a speech by Bill Gates (Microsoft Chairman) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft Senior Vice President)

The new cash-back service is being described as a positive prospect to the consumers as they will be able to search for products online and at the same get good deals on the products too. The cash-back will work by calculating a small percentage of product’s price and that amount will be awarded back to the consumer via a cheque, direct bank account deposit or if a user has an account with eBay’s PayPal online payment service. Some of the prominent products that would be available on the cash-back offer are running shoes, perfume, Canon Inc. digital cameras, Bulova Corp. watches and Oakley Inc. sunglasses. The site also lists participating vendors including Barnes & Noble Inc. booksellers, Circuit City Stores Inc. and Home Depot Inc.

Microsoft is giving its best shot in just about every field to get a grip with zipping Google. But, everytime Google beats Microsoft and leads the way. Let us see, if this endeavor is any different than the previous ones.

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