Quality assurance is not one of the more glamourous positions in the tech world but it may be just the stepping stone necessary to bring in a new generation of programmers. That’s the thinking behind a new White House initiative called SummerQAmp. Read more »
Pack up the robots, your Apple gear and the Red Bull because it’s almost time for South by Southwest in lovely Austin, Texas. Each year I’ve tried to showcase 10 hot startups in the city for visiting VCs, executives and job seekers. Here they are. Read more »
LuxeYard, a site selling high-end home decor products, is launching Tuesday. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The new breed of e-commerce sites offers consumers ways to socialize and be entertained. But as Rags Gupta of Brightcove points out, these new new commerce sites are taking advantage of old principles. Their innovation comes from introducing them online. Read more »
Gilt Groupe, the designer flash sales website, is reportedly set to start prepping an IPO next year. But as more consumer and retail companies get savvy to the web and mobile worlds, should IPOs of companies like Gilt and Groupon really be considered tech industry stories? Read more »
As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
What does content mean for online retailers, and how can publishers successfully work commerce into their websites? Those were the questions… Read more at paidContent »
Europe’s web scene is now thriving, and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Depending on how closely you watch Europe’s online scene, some of these companies may be familiar to you. Others you may not have heard of. But all of them are worth watching closely. In this report, we profile the 20 startups that we feel best represent Europe’s current tech scene. We have organized our list around perception, and as lists go, it is intended to be a guideline rather than a rule book. It’s not exhaustive, and clearly, with such a diverse and vibrant continent as our playing field, it never could be. Companies mentioned in this report include GetJar, Huddle, Made.com and Songkick. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, epicurean travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, CEO Philip James tells me. Read more »
Interactive fashion website Polyvore has officially entered into inflection point territory. The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, which is backed with $8.2 million in venture capital, has achieved profitable operations and is currently seeing record web traffic, co-founder Jess Lee told me in an interview this week. Read more »
Groupon’s prospectus for an IPO started arguments over the company’s huge losses. Silicon Valley wants Groupon to look like a technology company, but right now it’s more or less in the Yellow Pages business. But by better applying big data analysis, Groupon could start seeing profits. Read more »
The publishing world continues to expand, with high-end group shopping service Gilt Groupe launching its own cooking magazine and the New York Times Library releasing a magazine-style iPad app. As the tools to publish become cheaper and cheaper, brands are becoming publishers in their own right. Read more »
Social commerce involves businesses using online collaborative tools — social networks, real-time feeds and user-generated contributions, for example — in order to sell products and services to consumers. The space is now more dynamic than ever: Hundreds of startups like Groupon, Zynga and CrowdStar have emerged, and it’s also attracting the attention — and cash — of online giants like Google, Amazon and Apple. This report examines the factors propelling the sector’s growth, how it will evolve over the next one to three years and what that means for those companies involved. We also examine factors inhibiting the growth of social commerce, and the likelihood of fragmentation as more local markets emerge. Companies mentioned in this report include Groupon, Foursquare, Gowalla, Playfish and LivingSocial. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social shopping is all the rage, with new money flowing into new startups every day. Is it a bubble? The answer is no: despite the outward appearance of being an overcrowded marketplace, it is a new era for e-commerce. Read more »
