Copious revamps social commerce service with a new twist
Pinterest has yet to provide many details about how it intends to make money from its fast-growing image-sharing social service.
But that’s not stopping others from trying to capitalize on the online service’s rich catalog of product images.
Copious, a social commerce start-up, launched a new version of its website on Monday that lets consumers buy many of the bags, shoes and other fashion accessories that get shared by Pinterest’s millions of users every day.
Pinterest is just one of several online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, that the Copious site connects to, allowing consumers to create a personalized online storefront that changes as frequently as your Facebook newsfeed.
The idea is to create a shopping experience based around people you follow and their actions, rather than around static categories of merchandise. Instead of browsing pre-set selections of shoes or sweaters, a visitor to Copious sees an ever-changing mix of items, based upon whatever the friends and bloggers they follow are sharing or commenting on at that moment.
The result is a shopping experience that’s constantly morphing, supposedly giving consumers a reason to come keep coming back.
“Conversation is always ongoing. That’s why people go back to Facebook on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily go back to Amazon.com on a daily basis,” said Jim Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Copious.
Facebook’s new class of apps expand the social vocabulary
Time was when “liking” something on Facebook was the standard way to recommend something on the social network.
Now Facebook users will have a whole new vocabulary at their disposal so they can tell friends they “want” tickets to an upcoming rock concert, they are “cooking” a certain dish or that they “ran” five miles in the park after work.
On Wednesday evening, Facebook announced the availability of more than 60 third-party appsthat can be integrated directly into Facebook, including apps from Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Foodspotting and Pinterest. Facebook also said that any software developer can now create their own such specialized apps for Facebook integration and submit the app to Facebook for approval.
Once you begin using one of these apps, your interactions within the app – say clicking on a dish you see in Foodspotting to note that you have “tried” it – are broadcast to the Facebook “ticker” for all your friends to see. The apps are also integrated into each user’s Timeline – the revamped version of a user’s personal profile page that Facebook has been gradually rolling out to its more than 800 million users. Now when you visit a friend’s Timeline, for instance, you might see a special section showcasing the top movies they’ve indicated that they want to see on the Rotten Tomatoes app, or the latest hotel reviews they’ve written with the TripAdvisor app.
The new apps are part of the so-called open graph feature that Facebook rolled out at its developer conference in September. The initial open graph rollout focused on integrating media apps from partners such as Spotify and Yahoo into Facebook, allowing users to notify friends of the music they were listening to, the news articles they were reading and the videos they were watching.
With the latest move, Facebook has opened itself up to a broader world of activity that can relate to just about anything an app-maker can think of. Among the initial third-party apps are ones that involve travel, food, fashion and fitness.
It’s a good bet that there will soon be open graph apps in even more categories, now that Facebook has opened the doors and effectively given software developers carte blancheto go wild (so long as the apps adhere to Facebook’s basic terms of service, of course).
anyone that hates the new facebook look.
this is what it used to look like
http://www.thenology.com/wp-content/uplo ads/2012/01/first-facebook-design.jpg
Why are cheap startups so expensive?
Starting up a Web company is never easy, but at least it’s not as expensive as it used to be. Instead of buying and maintaining an IT infrastructure, as they had to do in the dotcom boom, startups now turn to cloud server services like Amazon’s. Instead of costly proprietary software, OpenOffice and Google offer cheaper (or free) options. Instead of paying office rent, employees can work from home. And the viral power of social media can bring new customers with little marketing. Open-source projects and the durability of Moore’s Law promise to lower costs even further.
But if it’s cheaper than ever to fund a startup’s growth, why are some Web companies receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in financing? And why are valuations rising quarter after quarter, to the point where some venture capitalists are complaining that certain startups have simply gotten too expensive to invest in? How is it that Web companies are becoming both cheaper and more expensive? Are VCs valuing companies on fundamentals, or following the market’s momentum?
Such questions might seem academic, except that the gap between startup costs and valuations keeps widening. The last six months alone have seen a surprising number of nine-digit venture rounds. In July, Airbnb, a home-sharing startup that had 130 employees, raised $112 million in a round that valued the company at $1.3 billion. A week later, Twitter, which had 600 employees, raised $800 million (half going to cash out early investors), valuing it at $8.4 billion. In October, online-storage company Dropbox, another small company of 70 employees, said it raised $250 million in a round valuing the company at $4 billion. And just last month, group-buying company LivingSocial closed a $176 million round, vowing to raise an even larger amount in the coming months.
There are two key reasons for such outsize venture investments – one strategic and one emotional. The strategic is that startups that have built a loyal customer base and strong word of mouth often solicit big investments to scale up in a nascent or highly competitive market. So, for example, Airbnb is building on its early success to expand internationally and bring in more users. And LivingSocial is looking for a bigger share of a group-buying market that once belonged to Groupon.
“There’s not a lot of value in second place,” Ryan Moore, a partner at Atlas Venture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Reuters. “If you have an interesting model, you spend aggressively and build aggressively to win in your category. There are a lot of situations out there where people are betting big.” In accepting a large investment round, a small startup may be banking on ambitious growth, or even preparing against the risk that the capital markets may slow down.
The second, more emotional reason is that these companies are raising all that money simply because people are willing to give it to them. This is especially common in early rounds, where valuing a startup relies less on metrics. As a result, the correlation between what it costs a company to grow successfully and what investors decide it’s worth has become looser, especially in Internet startups.
“You have companies raising far more money than they know what to do with, simply because valuations are high,” says Josh Goldman, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “They can raise money now – and put it away for a war chest or for future needs that they can’t even anticipate now – because investors are tripping over themselves to give it to them.”
I believe that crowdfunding will be a part of the solution to give a new meaning and bring more transparency to investment!
Many new players are showing up in the 4 main crowdfunging categories but unfortunately blogs only speak about very few one.
Just to let you know that we will launch http://www.mymicroinvest.com by March 2012, A european based platform
concentrating on equity investments for innovative start-ups.
Hope you will like it.
Regards,
