Interest may be weakening in consumer social media businesses. But social technologies are working their way deeper into enterprise computing, and social media is playing a bigger role across advertising and marketing sectors. Read more »
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Style and social commerce platform Polyvore on Tuesday announced that it had launched a free mobile app for the iPhone that enables users to assemble and share personal style collections, as well as browse and purchase items. Read more »
Pickie, a recent graduate of TechStars New York, announced Monday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from a range of investors, including DFJ Gotham, Betaworks and Liberty City Ventures. The startup uses social data regarding products to generate personalized iPad-based magazines for shopping. Read more »
About a year after launching, social marketplace Copious is expanding to appeal to men. In addition to launching new men’s clothing categories, it is also adding new verticals for photography, home decor and design. 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 »
New York-based social commerce platform Fancy is rolling out a new option that lets users organize group gifts. The startup also announced a new partnership with American Express that it says could mark the beginning of an extended relationship. Read more »
Treater, a social gifting startup launching Wednesday, wants to use Facebook help people send impromptu, casual gifts to friends. The Washington, DC-based startup is also announcing that it has raised $2.5 million dollars. Read more »
Retailers are looking increasingly to social networks to bring in customers and ultimately drive more sales. But data from online marketing provider Monetate show that social still lags email and search in sales conversions and average purchase amounts. Read more »
Chicago-based Boomerang, backed by Groupon founders’ Lightbank, is launching Tuesday to give Facebook users a way to give friends paperless gifts, including vouchers for local restaurants, spas, sporting companies and theaters. Some gift options are free, offering merchants a new way to attract customers. Read more »
Design shopping site Fab on Thursday released an updated version of its mobile app, which enhances social sharing, and it added Facebook connect to allow members to sign in with their Facebook credentials. The company said social and mobile are driving a lot of traffic. Read more »
Glimpse, a new Pinterest-like application powered by Facebook Likes, is now making the ubiquitous “Like” button a lot more useful by tying universal price alerts to it. Users who like a product can receive an email alert when it goes on sale. Read more »
Pinpuff, an India-based startup that measures influence on Pinterest, is Los Angeles-bound. Startup studio Science announced Tuesday that it is acquiring the young startup and moving its founder to its California office. Read more »
Martha Stewart-style crafts and cooking projects generate a ton of “likes” and “pins” online, but social discovery and commerce site The Fancy and peer-to-peer marketplace Zaarly think they can also generate some cash. Read more »
Nearly every day, it seems like yet another social commerce site springs up. But as more sites crowd the space, it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to separate the junk from the gems. That’s where Pickie comes in. 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 »
Project Decor, a New York-based social home decorating platform, will open its site for an invite-only beta launch in June. Read more »
AdKeeper today said that it’s launched a new holding company, Keep Holdings, in addition to two new products, Swizzle and Keep.com. Read more »
Riding the wave of social commerce, London-based Shopcade launched in November with a platform that lets people earn rewards for recommending products to friends. Now, it’s expanding its presence stateside and beefing up its business model with new ways users can receive those rewards. Read more »
TheFind, a shopping search site with a trove of product data, is going after Pinterest with the launch of Glimpse, a new Facebook shopping discovery app that curates shopping pages for users based on their likes, as well the stuff their friends like. Read more »
On Wednesday at the Entepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator Demo Day in New York, three start-ups showed off some cool ideas on how to tackle social commerce and let brands and companies start to make some real money from social. Read more »
While Facebook commerce has been a dud, 8thBridge believes there is a future in f-Commerce, though it means rethinking the role Facebook plays in it. The company unveiled a new new social commerce platform on Tuesday, that doesn’t rely on steering shoppers to Facebook stores. Read more »
Chirpify, a payment platform that uses Twitter to conduct transactions, announced it has raised $1.3 million in a Series A round and is finding good traction from Fortune 500 companies. It is also expanding the platform to include the sale of digital goods. Read more »
Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. Read more in the full report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Pinterest-like discovery site Fancy rolled out a new social commerce platform in February, letting brands and retailers sign up to be a seller on any item that’s been fancied on the site. That has helped Fancy double its user base to 500,000 users. Read more »
After attracting attention last summer for social commerce initiatives with Foursquare and Facebook, last week American Express announced a new coupons hook-up with Twitter. Amex has the potential to be a powerhouse in social commerce, but so far that potential remains ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week, a negative Bloomberg story about Facebook storefronts described how GameStop, Gap, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom had closed their Facebook stores. That doesn’t mean retailers should give up. Instead, they should put their Facebook stores in the hands of their marketing and promotions staff and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
WalmartLabs, the new commerce research lab created out of Walmart’s acquisition of Kosmix, is formally launching its first product, a gift-finding Facebook app called Shopycat. The app enables users to take the likes, shares and interests of friends and turn them into intelligent gift recommendations. Read more »
Ebay’s recent purchase of Hunch illustrates how social media has leveled the playing field for e-commerce recommendations engines. Mixing human-powered reviews with algorithm-powered recommendations will be a key driver of social ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
EBay has announced it’s buying New York startup Hunch, the recommendation engine, to help improve its recommendation services. The purchase helps eBay improve its technology base, compete better with Amazon and it might also be another asset in eBay’s X.commerce platform. Read more »
The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Innovation is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival. Read more »
Retailers ignore social channels at their own risk, and a number of recent market trends have coalesced to make social commerce top of mind. These four approaches can help you leverage social commerce tools on your own site. Read more »
Facebook’s explosive growth has led many to question whether it will become the de facto hub of commerce for retailers. Here are three ways to leverage Facebook and social commerce on your site to grow conversions and sales. Read more »
With the stock market in flux, do tech startups stand a chance when it comes to luring investors? To find out, we polled GigaOM readers on what’s hot, what’s not, which sectors might favor buyouts versus IPOs and how it all will change in the near ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For mobile developers looking to engage their users, push notifications have become a key tool in drawing users back into apps. Notification provider Urban Airship told me it has hit 5 billion push notifications since it delivered its first message a little over two years ago. Read more »
The big news lately in local deals is around public offerings by Groupon and LivingSocial and the rising competition from web players like Google and Facebook. But a much older player, American Express, is also activating local deals through social channels. With 90 million card members ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For once, the biggest news in social media and real-time technologies didn’t come from Facebook. Rather, it was Google that, at the end of the second quarter, introduced an innovative collection of technologies, under the Google+ label. Another big headline was the return of digital music: Pandora filed a successful IPO, and Google and Apple unrolled cloud-based music offerings. Meanwhile, other social networks generated valuable lessons about technology and business strategies. LinkedIn went public, while Myspace was sold. And Apple essentially appointed Twitter its mobile social network infrastructure supplier. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Skype, Groupon, Turntable.fm and Amazon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
