ThisNext, an online shopping discovery start-up, Katie wrote about last month, has launched. Erick Schonfeld, over at the Business 2.0 Blog has a detailed review of the service, which is backed by Clearstone Ventures.
Erick says the company makes it “as easy to create and share online product playlists as it is to share music playlists. The site just launched a few weeks ago in a closed beta, and will open up a public beta in late August.”
The company has lined up a lot of famous people to create their product lists, much like celebrity playlists on iTunes store. Perhaps star power will help the company fight off an increasing number of competitors entering the same space.
gross, made me instantly think about chomsky in ‘the corporation’ waxing poetic about ‘manufactured want’ and all of that…really, just what we need: a white collar only shopping aid for broadband users who already buy through influence-only channels…
…and fast forward 2 years: they now pay ‘buzz agents’ to seed product suggestions based on advertiser agreements (well, that’s old news, but new news for a site like this…similar to what we’re already seeing with character endorsements on myspace coupled with elgoog’s new back-of-myspace deal)…
Om
Thanks for the mention. I just wanted to clarify a couple of points:
1, ThisNext launches our public beta in a couple of weeks. We are still in private beta right now. If you, or anyone else, would like an invitation, please email me: gordon at thisnext dot com
2, I wanted to mention that Anthem Ventures also backed ThisNext. I don’t want anyone to feel left out- makes for bad board dynamics :-)
Many thanks
GRG