At the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator Demo Day in New York, 10 startups debuted, pitching services ranging from marketplaces for custom goods, catering and yoga gear to companies looking to optimize online video. Here are a few that stood out. Read more »
Social shopping startup Fancy is getting into subscription commerce with a new monthly box of items curated by its community of two million members. Despite the glut of subscription commerce companies, Fancy says members requested the new box. Read more »
Walmart has announced that it will stop selling Kindles in its stores and on its website, suggesting that as it beefs up its own e-commerce strategy it does not want to turn sales over to a competitor. Target also stopped carrying Kindles in May. Read more »
In its first acquisition, New York-based beauty discovery startup Birchbox has acquired JolieBox, a Paris-based subscription beauty company. With the purchase, Birchbox expands its footprint to France, the United Kingdom and Spain. Read more »
New York-based social product design startup Quirky is launching its first product vertical around Apple and is partnering with design shopping site Fab to bring a line of community-created iPhone 5 accessories to market. Read more »
Online shopping giant eBay today announced that it has acquired New York startup Svpply, which curates products from across the Web. eBay said the acquisition will build on its recent purchase of recommendation engine Hunch to further personalize online shopping experiences. Read more »
BigCommerce, an e-commerce platform that powers the online stores for 30,000 small- to medium-sized businesses worldwide, is on Wednesday announcing that it has raised $20 million Series B funding from General Catalyst and Floodgate. Read more »
Chicago’s Excelerate Labs may not have quite the outsized demo day as Y Combinator, but the 10 companies that just graduated from is accelerator program were still impressive. Here are the five startups that made the biggest impression on us: Orbeus, Lasso, Cureeo, Pictarine and Whimseybox. Read more »
In a move to boost sales through social recommendations, online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, has added a new feature called “PinPointing” that offers recommendations based on Pinterest accounts. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work very well yet. Read more »
France’s three big mobile operators are cooperating to put out a common API that mobile retail sites and apps can use to autofill customer data into a purchase screen. It’s a small achievement, but a notable one, considering operators past failures to lure in developers. Read more »
For the past two years, Beautylish has developed a strong community of makeup enthusiasts and artists who contribute comments, reviews and ratings. On Wednesday, the beauty startup is announcing a new e-commerce feature to help it remake the cosmetics industry for the digital age. Read more »
Pinterest, Fancy and plenty of other websites help shoppers find deals and inspiration for clothing they can buy online, but some early startups are developing mobile apps that encourage shoppers to make their fashion purchases in stores. Read more »
The online food-ordering firm is emblematic of a new breed of aggressively expansionist German e-commerce startup. And, according to CEO Fabian Siegel, the race is on for pretty much anywhere that’s not the U.S. Read more »
Miss Nev (as in “never miss a package”), the winning hack of Dwolla and Etsy’s eCommerce Hack Day in New York, plans to launch a platform that lets local businesses receive packages for customers in exchange for purchases or payment. Read more »
ThredUP co-founder and CEO says prohibiting his employees from coming into work one day a week allows his team to think big picture, and increases productivity. (Just make sure that work from home day isn’t Friday). Read more »
The VC behind big European exits like Skype, MySQL and Lovefilm has been arguing that London should play host to more IPOs. Now Robin Klein, one of its high profile partners, is spearheading the attack with an appeal to government, investors and startups themselves. Read more »
The Internet has made it easier to market unique or small-batch products made by individuals and small businesses, but Ordoro, which just raised $1.2 million, wants to make it easier for those merchants to track and ship their product as well as manage inventory. Read more »
What if a photo could be more than a static image, and tell a story through tags, links and videos? Stipple’s updates Thursday bring forward what it hopes is the “smart image,” allowing photographers and brands to track and monetize their photos across the web. Read more »
Organizations are coping with the challenge of processing unprecedented volumes of data. However, the processes involved with using a large cluster to run applications like Hadoop are error-prone. So IT managers are turning to cluster-management solutions to automate tasks associated with cluster creation, management and maintenance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tablets featured prominently in the connected consumer space, both as a product category and as a component of broader platform strategies by major OS providers Microsoft, Google and Apple. Meanwhile Facebook began laying the groundwork to add payment processing to its platform. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With the goal of becoming nothing less than the world’s next big design brand, commerce site Fab Wednesday announced that it had raised $105 million. Read more »
27 companies made their pitches at the 500 Startups demo day on Tuesday in Mountain View, and it was a diverse bunch of startups that took the stage, emphasizing mobile technology and a large number of shopping-related and kid-oriented apps in their pitches to investors. Read more »
As if we needed more evidence that brick and mortar stores are at a crossroads, a study out Tuesday from Paris-based consulting firm CapGemini found that more than half of shoppers globally said they think more physical stores will become merely showrooms by 2020. Read more »
Cloud-based storage and cross-device syncing of media content are two of the most competitive areas in consumer IT. Apple, Google and Amazon see cloud-based media services both as a way to increase attachment to their platforms and a means to extend and amplify their broader strategic goals. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
New York-based social commerce site Fancy said Monday that it will roll out a program to compensate users for their curation and sharing. Each time a friend buys a product shared by a user, the user will get 2 percent of the transaction value. Read more »
Launched Wednesday, Seattle-based OfferUp is the latest company to take on Craigslist with a mobile, peer-to-peer marketplace. Read more »
Online retail sales may slump during the summer, but that doesn’t mean shoppers aren’t occasionally willing to drop the big bucks. New York-based data analytics startup SumAll shares several e-commerce trends for the dog days of summer. Read more »
These days, WordPress acts more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service), says WooThemes CEO Adii Pienaar. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to help make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word. Read more »
Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, co-founders of the social media startup Kosmix, have announced that they’re leaving WalmartLabs, where they led the San Bruno innovation and data arm of the massive public company. Read more »
What do you do when Google and Sean Parker kill your idea? Change direction. That’s what Ali Ahmed and his videochat startup Lutebox have done, switching from the idea of helping people chat about premium videos to focusing on social shopping. Read more »
Between Pinterest and Fab and Fancy and Svpply and Wanelo and Lyst and many other similar startups, the social-meets-design-meets-commerce space is nothing if not crowded. But a couple of former MySpacers believe they can push through the pack with Uncovet, an e-commerce site rolling out to the public today. Read more »
Privacy was often an afterthought for small companies, but that’s changing in the era of big data. As TRUSTe’s CEO, Chris Babel has seen the impact privacy can have on a startup — for better or worse. Here, he offers tips on how to avoid the pitfalls. Read more »
Launched in November by former Squarespace CEO Dane Atkinson, data analytics startup SumAll gives small- to medium-sized online businesses a much-needed leg up in understanding the real-time metrics that are having the biggest impact on their bottom line. Read more »
Google is transforming its formerly free Google Product Search listings into Google Shopping, a new vertical that will only be stocked with products that companies have paid to place there. That’s a big change for Google, which has never shifted an originally free product to all-paid. Read more »
Six months after launching its iPhone app, Etsy says that nearly one in five visits to its site comes from a mobile device. The company said that it has surpassed 1.5 million downloads of the app after reaching the million download mark two months ago. Read more »
Project Decor, a New York-based social home decorating platform, will open its site for an invite-only beta launch in June. Read more »
The Windy City is famous for one big giant startup Groupon, but the folks at Chicago’s newest incubator Catapult believe there will be many more, and — for a short while at least — it hopes to play host to the next big Web sensations from the Midwest. Read more »
Compared to Mexico, the web and mobile startup ecosystem in Brazil is hot — probably too hot. Here’s 10 things you should know if you want to build, buy, invest in or work at a tech startup in Brazil. Read more »
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten wants to plug Pinterest in to purchasing, after leading a $100 million investment in the social pinboard curator. Read more at paidContent »
Fab announced a collection of updates intended to make it easier for users to socialize and discover content on the site, and said it was dropping Google+ for Pinterest. Read more »
