GigaOM » gift card

Facebook adds iTunes content to gifting platform

Eliza Kern — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 18:00:12 +0000

Beginning Monday, Facebook will allow users to give their friends real-life gifts that are already popular during the holiday season: Apple’s iTunes gift cards and iTunes digital content. Facebook is adding iTunes content to its gifting platform, so users can pick out either a gift card or specific song, album or app to give a friend. This move puts a highly popular holiday gift in Facebook’s offerings, and adds slightly more integration with Apple in getting users to pull out their credit cards while visiting the site.

Facebook launched its gifts platform in September as a non-advertising method of growing revenue. Users can see when friends have birthdays or get engaged, and are given suggestions for physical, real-world gifts they can have sent to the friend. The company initially partnered with 100 retail partners including Starbucks, and recently expanded to include a variety of well-known brands including Brookstone, Baby Gap, Dean & Deluca, Fab, L’Occitane and Lindt chocolate. The addition of iTunes content will provide a lower-priced option for gift-giving on the site. And songs, apps, and gift cards are some of the most versatile gifts out there, much more so than many of the existing gift options.

Facebook already allows users to find iOS apps in the Facebook App Center and then purchase them through iTunes store, but turning Facebook gifts into a direct platform for purchasing digital content via iTunes marks another step forward in that integration. Apple has heavily integrated Facebook into iOS 6 after Ping failed to gain any social traction among users, so working with Facebook to gift digital content could be an interesting way to drive sales and recommendations.

With the new iTunes offerings, users will be able to select either a song, movie app or album to purchase for a friend, and a code will be sent to the friend’s email address to redeem. Users who don’t want to pick out and recommend specific content can also purchase gift cards for friends, which are available for $10, $15, $25, or $50. When a user purchases content for a friend, it will show up in the timeline, serving as a recommendation both for the content and Facebook’s gift platform.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Social gift app Wrapp steams ahead with UK launch

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:00:43 +0000

When the CEO of Wrapp told us last week that the social gifts company was speeding up its expansion plans in order to combat the threat from a Samwer brothers clone, he wasn’t joking: today the business is announcing that it is launching in the U.K., with an American rollout due in the near future.

Previously only available in its home market of Sweden, Wrapp essentially turns the already-popular idea of virtual gifts into real-world items.

Using the service’s mobile app (currently it’s available for iPhone and Android) you can send a gift card from a participating retailer — of whatever value you choose — to one of your Facebook friends. Other people can also add to the card to increase its value, while some retailers offer free gifts. When you’ve sent it, the recipient can then redeem that card either online or in-store. It’s a straightforward proposition that the company thinks can be a big deal for retailers and disrupt the multi-billion dollar gift card industry.

Partners at the British launch include fashion retailer ASOS, gym giant Fitness First and the popular restaurant chain Pizza Express — as well as a selection of other smaller brands. And while the number of initial partners is relatively small, the company said its hand was forced in part by the arrival of Dropgifts, a clone from Germany’s Rocket Internet, the controversial incubator run by the three Samwer brothers.

“Our initial idea was to launch in the U.S. first,” co-founder Hjalmar Winbladh told me. “But that will come soon.”

He added that there were also plans for a substantial international presence, with salespeople already on the case building relationships with retailers in a number of territories.

“We’ve already got staff in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Italy,” he said. “We are looking possibly at partnerships in China, Japan, Brazil and we are in discussions for Eastern Europe.”

The company, which has already seen $10.5 million of investment from Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Nordic VC Creandum, thinks it’s onto something —

That’s in no small part because of the track record of the team, which includes not only Winbladh, the former CEO of internet telephony service Rebtel and mobile internet firm Sendit; but also Andreas Ehn, the founding CTO at Spotify, and Fabian Mansson, the former CEO of Swedish fashion retailer H&M and Seattle sales Eddie Bauer.

Given those connections, isn’t there a big gap in Wrapp’s portfolio of partners. What about Sweden’s biggest retail names, I asked Winbladh: where are Ikea and H&M?

He was coy about relationship with those household names, but suggested there may be something coming in the future. Perhaps a deal is being worked on for the American launch — which, he hinted, is likely to happen sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, U.K. users can download the app from iTunes or Google Play.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Meet Giftly: A gift card company with actual tech cred

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:32 +0000

Gift cards are big business. Studies show that 50 percent of all Americans either buy or receive a gift card every year, and the industry as a whole brings in $100 billion annually. But gift card companies are not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of technology. That is, until now.

Giftly, a San Francisco-based startup that launched to the public last month, is bringing serious innovation to how gift cards work.

How it works

Here are the basics: Giftly lets you buy gift cards that work at any place of business in the U.S. that is listed on Yelp — restaurants, bars, spas, clothing stores, you name it. A Giftly card can be customized to work at up to three different locations, so the recipient can have a choice of how and where to spend it.

This is possible for two main reasons: Giftly utilizes Yelp’s open API, and it does some really cool stuff at the point of redemption. When a recipient wants to use his Giftly, he goes to Giftly.com on a mobile phone. Once Giftly verifies that the recipient is at one of the places on the gift card by checking the phone’s location data, the user can pay for something there exactly like he normally would, with cash or a credit card. Giftly immediately reimburses the designated amount immediately to a registered credit card, debit card or PayPal account. For its part, Giftly makes money by charging a small fee to the gift card buyer.

What’s under the hood

Creating a Giftly screenshot (click to enlarge)

Giftly has developed some serious technology and business methods to make this work seamlessly, says founder and CEO Timothy Bentley (who is best known for being employee number one at Aardvark, the social search startup acquired by Google for $50 million in 2010.) After all, it’s not for nothing that large-scale innovation has not yet happened in the gift card space, Bentley said in an interview this week:

“This is a heavily regulated space, and we’ve spent months working with banks and lawyers so that we could become experts in the payment space. The same challenges that Google Wallet has, we have. The way we’ve structured the product has been very innovative.”

Not surprisingly, Giftly plans to protect that innovation: The company has filed two patents, one concerning the way the gift card is created and one on how the financial side of the product works. Giftly has 12 employees and has raised $1.8 million in a seed round of funding from Baseline Ventures, RPM Ventures and Lightspeed Partners. Bentley says the company will likely raise some more funding after the holiday season is over.

Personal gift cards: No longer an oxymoron

The coolest part about Giftly cards to me is that they can truly work everywhere. For example: I live in San Francisco. This Christmas, rather than buying my sister in Chicago a gift card to a chain like American Apparel or Starbucks, I can get her a Giftly to spend at a local shop there, such as Eskell clothing boutique or Ipsento Cafe. It’s still a dead easy thing to buy, but it has the potential to come across as a far more personalized present than gift cards are known to be.

The gift card market is tough to break into, as it’s currently dominated by huge players such as Blackhawk Network (a subsidiary of grocery giant Safeway) and Incomm, which reportedly brings in more than $300 million in revenue annually. But the industry could clearly stand to be brought up to speed with our increasingly mobile and social world, and who better than a tech industry startup to do it? Giftly is giving it a solid try, and it will be interesting to see how it grows in the months ahead.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Why Apple’s new Back to School deal is good business

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:29:49 +0000

Apple has unveiled its Back to School promotion for 2011, and it’s . . . different from what it has been in years past. Rather than a free iPod (or a $200 discount on iPods costing more than that), as Apple has previously offered, this year, when you purchase a new Mac with education pricing, you get $100 credit for use at the Mac App Store, the iOS App Store, the iTunes Store or the iBookstore. Yay?

Looked at it purely from the perspective of monetary value, this year’s deal is definitely less of one than what Apple has offered previously. So why is Apple getting stingy with the rebates when it appears to be at its most successful?

First, it’s possible Apple doesn’t need the back to school bump anymore. Education used to be Apple’s bread and butter, but lately the Mac maker has been reaching a much broader audience, thanks to sales of iOS devices and the halo effect those are having in other segments. Apple might also just have found that it no longer needs to use Macs to move excess inventory of iPods ahead of the usual fall refresh, if they’re selling well enough on their own. Or possibly, it’s shifting all of its product update cycles, since the iPhone didn’t get a June update this year. If there’s no new iPod touch in September, Apple doesn’t have to get rid of its existing stock between now and then.

Apple is also cutting margins elsewhere, so it may need to make up for that by lowering the overall value of this year’s discount. Lion will now be distributed exclusively via the Mac App Store and will retail for only $29.99 for a copy that can be used on all computers authorized for use with your iTunes store account. Snow Leopard, by contrast, costs $29 for a single upgrade license, while a five-user family pack costs $49. Apple also separated out the apps from its iLife and iWork suites this year, making them available for cheaper as individual apps on the Mac App Store. As Apple continues to drive down the price on its software offerings, hardware margins become even more important as a source of revenue.

Finally, consider that in the past few years, Apple has gone from a computer company that also sells mobile devices to a mobile device company that also sells computers, and now potentially to a cloud company that sells hardware to leverage that ecosystem. If the hardware platform is no longer the center of Apple’s universe, it stands to reason that it would offer a promotion that doesn’t emphasize one aspect of its hardware business over another.

Personally, I’ve got plenty of iOS devices, but one thing I can always use more of is software for those gadgets. I think Apple is thinking that most of its Back to School Mac buyers will be in similar circumstances. Plus, $100 gift cards are a nice way of giving the Apple development community a little boost. What do you think? Are you on board with Apple’s latest promotion or not?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.