A new app just hit the iOS App Store called Shopster that uses the geo-location services in the iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) to not only keep track of where you frequently buy your groceries, but what you buy at which store. Then it can notify you when you’re near those locations and what you might possibly need to run in and grab.

Shopster costs 99 cents and it’s iOS only right now. The developer is Quadion Technologies, a software company based in Buenos Aires. Previous iOS titles under its belt are games; Shopster is the first utility app.

The design of the app is simple and cheerful. There are just a few screens: one for your items you’ve said you need to buy, one for items you’ve previously purchased, and another that shows you the stores you’ve frequently purchased a specific item at on a map.

There’s not much to learn either. There’s a sliding bar on the right hand side that suggests quantities (so you don’t have to jump to the numbers keyboard on your iOS device). You select a quantity then start typing “sourdough bread” or whatever you need to buy. Once you’re at the store and you tap the check box to mark sourdough off your list, the app makes note of the geo-position of the store for that particular item. It doesn’t delete the item, but moves it to the “purchased” page for later.

Just after playing with it for a bit, I can see a few ways this would come in handy. For example, if you really like the produce at your neighborhood market, but prefer to get your meats at the butcher across town, Shopster will notify you when you’re near those places of what you’ve noted you need to pick up. Another way to use it: if you hunted all over town in a panic for fenugreek seeds before a dinner party and then later can’t remember where you found it, if you marked it off your Shopster checklist at that store, the app will be able to tell you the name. It’s also just a simple way to keep a running grocery list. Once you check something off as purchased, it goes to the “past purchases” tab. Need to remind yourself to buy it again next week? Just uncheck the box and it goes back on your “to buy” list.

Shopster is aimed at keeping lists of frequently bought items, so groceries is the natural application. But it doesn’t have to be used that way: if there are supplies or parts you often need to pick up locally, Shopster would work with that too.

They’re not doing it yet, but it’s easy to see that one day Quadion could begin to incorporate coupons or deals from grocers or other retailers if they know what you shop for at their store. It could be similar to what ZipList offers with coupons, but with the added twist that Shopster actually knows when you’re in the store or nearby.

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Its new app released Friday runs in the background to monitor consumers’ location and then surfaces valid and place-appropriate coupons and deals when it knows that they’re shopping. The app learns from users’ Facebook preference and, over time, their in-app behavior to personalize the offers they receive.

In the version rolling out today, the app will only serve up coupons once it senses that users are at one of 1,000 malls across the country (in every state). But the founders said though they started with malls because of the density of shoppers and retailers, their next targets will be big retailers like Target, Kohl’s and Macy’s and by early next year they anticipate a big increase in locations.

“It’s such a hassle to research coupons, especially when you’re in a store but we’re basically missing out on a ton of savings,” said co-founder Navneet Loiwal. “[With Shopular], there’s no need to remember to open an app… a fresh valid coupon shows up on the phone and you can just show the screen to the cashier.”

Other couponing apps out there similarly try to surface relevant in-store deals through the phone – Shopkick, for example, uses proprietary technology that involves in-store sensors to reward customers when they walk into stores, but it requires that they open the app first. And Placecast’s ShopAlerts program uses geofencing technology to send push notifications regarding deals to consumers when they’re near a specific location.

Shopular’s advantage, Loiwal said, is that it not only surfaces deals without consumer action, it runs in the background to monitor consumers’ locations (via GPS, WiFi and cellular sensors) and learn from their movements and shopping behavior to personalize offers.

Historically, one big drawback of location-aware apps that continuously run in the background – like social discovery apps Highlight and Glancee, for example – is the battery drain.  But Loiwal emphasized that he and his cofounder Tommy Tsai have used their technical chops to make the technology efficient and minimize the battery issue.  For example, to conserve power, it figures out the times of day you’re less likely to be shopping and monitors your location less closely then. Loiwal co-founded Google Finance and is a former Shopkick engineer and Tsai was the first engineer at Shopkick and previously worked at early location-based app Loopt (which sold to Green Dot, a provider of retailer pre-paid cards, in March). The pair graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class, although during the accelerator program they were building different technology that involved push notifications but not for shopping.

The app launched in beta on iOS and Android three weeks ago, and has been downloaded about 250,000 times. But Loiwal said none of the reviews on either platform mention battery problems.

Shopular sources deals from Facebook pages, websites and emails and then has a team manually verify details to make sure consumers never receive expired offers. It says it provides coupons from more than 100 national brands and retailers, like the Gap, Aeropostale, Bath and Body Works, Target and Home Depot.

In the future, it could give retailers a platform for offering more targeted deals to consumers – for example, it could reward its most loyal customers with extra savings or use steeper discounts to lure away a rival’s customers.

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Maluuba users can enter in all kinds of shopping-related requests and Maluuba will find a list of products it thinks matches your criteria. These can be both local and online products. Maluuba produces results from Google and has integrated into the data feeds of Best Buy and Walmart, allowing people to also see products from those retailers. It also provides local results for stores nearby.

For example, you can say: “Find me a humidifier under $50,” and Maluuba will bring back a list of a products that match. When I performed that search, Maluuba first took me to results from Google but I could check out tabs for Walmart and Best Buy. You can also ask for a specific brand or describe the product you’re looking for. When you’re ready to buy, you just click once and you go through an external check-out process.

The actual buying is still a little balky on a smartphone because you have to enter in payment and shipping data on a small screen. That’s why you see more smartphones in use for shopping research as opposed to actual buying, which happens more on PCs and tablets. But since starting a shopping query is pretty fast and intuitive with Maluuba, this might help spur on more smartphone-based commerce especially since the product isn’t limited to online shopping. Maluuba can also point you to retailers nearby that stock a product. That feature is based on Yelp data but it’s not always accurate.

Maluuba also provides a look into more than 100 etailer websites, including Amazon, eBay and others, so asking about a product from that retailer prompts Maluuba to send you into their website. For example, I was looking for sweaters at Zara and Maluuba took me right into the search results page for sweaters on Zara.com.

Maluuba, which has $2 million in funding from Samsung Ventures, is looking to integrate with thousands of commerce site and it also wants to incorporate social signals, said Tareq Ismail, Maluuba’s user experience designer. So in the future, Maluuba can customize searches and results based on a person’s interests and likes.

I think Maluuba needs more deep ecommerce integrations to be really useful, though it’s off to a good start. And it would be great if Maluuba could speed up the actual checkout process. I’d also like a simple way to continue reading my Maluuba results from another device so I can complete my purchases later. But I think it’s nice to have a way to craft shopping queries using natural language, especially when you’re on the go. And it might just get me to start more shopping quests from my phone.

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Through the site, members can assemble collages of products (called sets) that can be shared with other users. They can also follow other members, “like” each other’s creations and then purchase items from the site. Users can also browse items by category, style, color and other variables, as well as search for specific kinds of items.

Last November, the company launched a mobile-optimized site and, like other e-commerce platforms, has watched its mobile traffic soar. Already, 25 percent of its overall visits come from mobile, Polyvore said. But with the new app, users will be able to do more than they could on the mobile site, such as assemble sets and receive push notifications with messages from other members.
When Polyvore launched in 2007, fewer startups were taking on fashion and social commerce. But over the years, fashion and e-commerce have grown significantly, with the rise of Gilt Groupe and other sites. More recently, social commerce startups, such as Fancy and smaller rivals like Uncovet, have also taken off offering fashion items (as well as other kinds of products) online.

Given that iOS Polyvore users outnumber their Android counterparts by a ratio of three to one, Lee said the company plans to focus on apps for Apple products first (an iPad app is also in the works) and then later launch on Android.

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IBM said that 77 percent of mobile traffic on Black Friday came from iOS devices. This despite the fact that Comscore said that Android has 52.5 percent of smartphone subscribers while iOS has 34.3 percent. Some of it comes down to the iPad, which is still the dominant tablet and produces the most traffic compared to iPhones and Android phones. But like the iPhone, the iPad exhibits outsized usage patterns beyond its actual marketshare. Gartner said in the third quarter, iPad shipments have dropped to 50.4 percent. But IBM said it contributed 88 percent of the tablet traffic over the long weekend.

This is a pattern than has been in place over the last few years. But now that Android is now the top dog on smartphones marketshare-wise and is eating into the iPad’s lead thanks to the Kindle Fire, Nook and other Android tablets, why is iOS still so dominant?

Here are some theories we’ve gathered from around the web alongside our thoughts:

• Horace Dediu of Asymco wondered if Android was attracting more late adopters, who were prone to do less with their phones than hardcore smartphone users. But he’s not convinced that’s the answer. Perhaps, it has more to do with “design considerations” or “user experience flaws or integration.”
• One thought is that Android users are more apt to want things for free, so they’re not as likely to shop for things on their devices. We’ve seen a gap in how Android and iOS users are willing to pay for apps — Android users prefer free apps – but that difference is going down over time.
• Some Android users are just graduating up from a feature phone and really don’t understand all they can do with their device. Considering the declining number of feature phone options, it’s possible that people are graduating to cheap Android devices, but just still talk and text on them, something Daring Fireball’s John Gruber mentioned before. 
• Tim Windsor from Digitally Speaking goes a step further, saying that most iOS buyers are specifically buying their devices for the features they can access, while most Android users are just buying what’s available to them. Most, he believes, aren’t interested in serious computing power.
• Jason Grisby of Cloud Four recently wrote that the gap doesn’t exist when looking at web traffic over cellular. It’s only when you examine iOS and Android traffic over Wi-Fi that a usage gap emerges. He believes that Android users might not be aware of the availability of Wi-Fi networks through their device or are in lower income brackets and have less access to Wi-Fi networks.
• Some people believe there is no gap at the high end when looking top Android devices. The problem is with cheaper and older Android devices, which don’t provide as good an experience or are saddled with older versions of Android, which are worse at browsing. It is true there are more cheap Android phones options available, so that might contribute to some of the gap. And a majority of Android users are still on devices running Android 2.0x.
• Apple users are more likely to use apps, which can provide a better user experience. Android users who turn to a browser may not find it as inviting or engaging.
• It’s also possible that shopping data is not an accurate proxy for engagement. NetMarketShare earlier this year said, however, also came up with general browsing data that showed iOS devices have 65 percent of mobile traffic compared to 20 percent for Android.

To be clear, the data we’re looking at is from the U.S. only, and it’s based primarily on shopping traffic. My theory is that there are people who walk into a cellular store, see only a handful of feature phones available and a salesperson who is heavily pushing Android devices. If they want to walk out with a new phone, it’s likely going to be an Android unless they came in already looking for an iPhone. Those people may not be savvy now, but they will get more experienced over time. What are your theories on this Android paradox?

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The startup, which is a recent graduate of TechStars New York, is announcing on Monday that it is launching in Apple’s App store with $1 million in seed funding.

The round was led by DFJ Gotham, and included Betaworks, Liberty City Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and MESA+. It also included several angel investors, such as Buzzfeed president and COO Jon Steinberg, TechStars New York’s former managing director David Tisch, SessionM CEO and co-founder Lars Albright, Highland Capital Partners’ Andy Miller and Epsilon EVP Eric Stein.

We first covered Pickie back in June, when it was still in beta but already an interesting entrant into the growing social commerce space. Recognizing that more startups and established companies would marry social features with e-commerce, Pickie’s pitch was that consumers would want one destination that would filter through all of the social recommendations and highlight the most interesting and relevant items.  In addition to showcasing the products at the center of social activity, Pickie layers in original content, as well as eventually more content from publishers, to give it an editorial identity.

“Long-term, the plan is to build out content and make it feel more like a magazine than a catalog,” said co-founder and CEO Sonia Sahney Nagar.

When users first sign in to the app, they indicate their gender and top categories of interest. Then, Pickie integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social sites to identify the products that are attracting the most attention from users’ friends. From that social data, the app generates a custom magazine of items, enhanced by relevant articles. For now, Sagar said, most of that additional content is produced in-house. But over time they plan to expand with more content from third-party publishers, so that a drop-waist dress could appear alongside a Glamour article on the trend or a book could be featured with a New York Times book review.

For now, the company makes money through affiliate commissions. But, down the line, Nagar said, the plan is to host transactions and charge a fee, as well as work closely with retailers to offer dynamic catalogs through the app.

Personalization and social are two huge trends in e-commerce, so Pickie is hardly without competition. The startups mentioned earlier, as well e-commerce giant eBay  (which recently acquired New York-based Svpply) all want to be a place where consumers discover products.  And Google Catalogs and CoffeeBook both provide a tablet-based magazine-like experience for browsing new items (although they’re not as focused on social curation). Pickie may be a helpful app but it remains to be seen whether consumers feel like they need an aggregator when they can just go to the sites they know well directly.

Still, similar to how Flipboard found success by using social data to assemble a personalized magazine for news, Pickie could draw in users with a personalized magazine for shopping. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, Nagar and her founding team seem to have the experience that fits their goal. All three co-founders are engineers who previously worked at Amazon, Microsoft and Applied Predictive Technologies (a big data company that works with top retailers).

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“You can’t reconfigure a physical space to personalize it,” Shopkick co-founder Aaron Emigh told a panel on the topic. “But you can have the mobile phone be a personalization lens when they walk in to that store… importing the things that are best about shopping online in to the physical world where they weren’t available before.”

For example, Barnes & Noble loyalty and retention marketing VP Marc Parrish said a trick the book retailer borrowed from online personalization – printing custom book recommendations on till receipts – had “increased our sales a significant amount.”

Such customization may be easy in the data-rich web world, but “takes a lot of grunt in the back” for physical stores, Parrish said. Walmart mobile and digital SVP Gibu Thomas agreed that physical stores presented personalization hurdles because, often, the necessary data is stored in big, slow data warehouses rather than on speedy web servers where it can make a difference.

There are other ways in which mobile can blend online and offline retail. Thomas said an in-store option introduced to Walmart’s mobile app, which had previously majored on delivering an out-of-store retail experience, was quickly used by 60 percent of users within two weeks – enhancing the usability of Walmart’s hundreds of real-world sites.

In fact, portable devices are uniquely placed in the retail chain, Emigh said: ”Mobile is the only device that’s with the consumer all the way through that path to purchase.”

All of which is encouraging retailers to think more online. Thomas: “The challenge is – a lot of retailers are very good at retail – but we have to develop muscles that make us as good a digital as we are in retail.

“Things move so fast, you have to get in a mode of iterative development, be open to some things not working well.”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Bloomberg reports:

Zappos users were 13 times more likely to share a purchase on Pinterest than on Twitter and 8 times more likely to share on Facebook than Twitter, [Zappos Labs director Will] Young said. Even so, posts on Twitter brought in the most revenue — an average of $33.66 an order — while Facebook posts garnered $2.08 per order and sales from Pinterest were 75 cents on average, he said.

If you liked this dress, you’ll love…this tie?

PinPointing aims to convert Pinterest posts into sales. Type in a Pinterest username (it can be yours or someone else’s) and the site pulls up Zappos items recommendations based on the account.

The feature doesn’t work very well yet. Here are a few examples:

The feature works better if you’ve pinned something from a brand that Zappos already sells. For example, I’d pinned a pair of Superga sneakers and PinPointing pulled up four other pairs by the same brand. The hard part is pulling up brands I wouldn’t have discovered on my own, but that I’d like — and PinPointing isn’t doing that yet. If I’ve pinned a colorblock dress, for instance, Zappos should pull up similar-looking dresses, not clunky shoes. And I don’t see the connection between a garbage can and a tie-dyed backpack.

The data and algorithms to deliver better recommendations are already out there. In building this feature, Zappos should use them.

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Monetate, which analyzes more than 100 million online shopping experiences, said that in the first quarter of 2012, tablet traffic to commerce sites hit 6.52 percent, overtaking smartphones (5.35 percent) for the first time. In the last year, tablets’ traffic increased 348 percent while smartphones visits grew by 117 percent over the same period. Almost all of the traffic (95 percent) was from the iPad, said Monetate.

The rise of tablets is chipping away at the PC, which saw its share of traffic to commerce sites drop to 88 percent, a steep four percent drop in just one quarter. At this pace, PC traffic should fall below 75 percent within the next year.

Monetate’s numbers are more aggressive than previous figures from Adobe, which reported last month that tablet traffic worldwide will exceed smartphones by early 2013 and represent 10 percent of website traffic in early 2014. The difference may be Monetate’s focus on commerce web sites, which may get more tablet traffic than other sites.

Kurt Heinemann, the CMO of Monetate, said tablet traffic should hit double digits by this year’s holiday season. He said tablets offer the best of both worlds, offering more of the portability of a smartphone but with a bigger UI that encourages shopping and browsing.

“Tablets are at an inflection point, where its coming into its own as a primary Internet portal,” Heinemann said. “It’s only going to grow at this point.”

Monetate, which serves more than 100 top commerce sites, said smartphone traffic peaked at 7.1 percent during Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year. Heinemann said the smartphone will continue to drive traffic but it will be more as a reference device, letting people do research in stores or see products that they click through from emails.

Tablets are in many ways performing like PCs when it comes to commerce. Monetate found that tablets converted visits into purchases at a rate of 3.23 percent, not far behind the PC at 3.51 percent and well ahead of smartphones at 1.39 percent. Tablet users view an average of 11.07 pages per session, compared to 12.05 page views for PC users and 7.18 pages for smartphone users. And tablet owners add items to their cart at a rate of 9.66 percent, compared to 10.2 percent for PC users and 4.25 perent for smartphone users.

Heinemann thinks that tablets can do even better than PCs if websites start tailoring their experiences for them. Right now, most are still oriented toward a desktop experience. But there is still more optimization that can be done for tablets, including better touch navigation and bigger links.

We’re still early in the tablet boom and the couch commerce era is just getting underway. There’s still more than retailers can do to optimize for tablet visitors. That might be just better touch and swipe navigation or it may mean some consider tablet-specific sites. But the tide is clearly turning toward tablets and that’s only going to continue.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto

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Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has confirmed it is leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, together with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital plus angels.

WSJ reports sources as saying the deal means a $1.5 billion valuation.

Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (via announcement):

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining.

“We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

In other words, Rakuten is excited about how enthusiastically Pinterest users clip and share items they might want to buy.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman:

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Pinterest’s visual presentation of those products is not the only potential boon to e-tailers (it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to present product listings in this way); the tie-in with social sharing could effectively enable social commerce.

There is a wide number of retailers for which Pinterest could perform this role:

• Rakuten has built up its heft through acquiring the online retailers Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil, Tradoria in Germany and, recently, Play.com in the UK.
• It also recently bought the Kobo e-reader and e-book store business.
• And it has made investments in Russia’s Ozon.ru and the AHA Life luxury shopping site.

Pinterest has boosted web referrals for sites in certain categories like women’s lifestyle publishing, so some publishers, as well as retailers, had become excited about the possibilities.

It’s unclear what the e-commerce investment means for the media’s current Pinterest penchant, but some pundits think content and commerce is a marriage made in heaven.

The Next Web had reported on Wednesday its expectation that Pinterest would announce a funding round at a $1 billion valuation on Friday, which is also Facebook’s IPO day.

Pinterest had previously taken a total $37.5 million from angels, Bessemer, Ron Conway, FirstMark, Andreeson Horrowtiz and others, through an angel and two proper rounds.

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