The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘online’

Online private sales is a growing business model that is rapidly becoming a staple of online shopping. Ideeli, Gilt Groupe, Vente-Privee, HauteLook and others are quickly gaining millions of users each and attracting significant amounts of venture funding. But the one issue I find with these sites is that it’s annoying to have to check each site every day for sales. I subscribe to almost a dozen different sites, which means sorting through the notification emails each day and then logging in and trying to shop on each site. Often the sales take place at the same time, so I need to prioritize which site has more appealing goods for a given day. Today, MyNines is emerging to streamline the private sale space by offering a Kayak.com for private sale sites.

MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from 14 different private sale sites including, Billion Dollar Babes, Ebay FashionVault, Wired For Wine, Gomatta Girls, Guiltless Purse, Left Lane Sports, Reverse, Enviius, BeautyTicket, BonVoYou, Editor’s Closet, DD Push and JomaShop.

You can also set up customized alerts to notify you via email or SMS whenever products or designers of interest go on sale from the sites MyNines partners with. The site makes money off of affiliate fees on CPA basis. The site also wants to generate revenue down the line from providing white-lable platform solution to traditional retailers.

The idea behind MyNines seems brilliant, especially considering the success of Kayak when it comes to the online travel industry. But one of the challenges of the model is signing on the private sale sites to release their API to MyNines. But the startup’s founder Apar Kothari says that she is currently in talks with a number of other well-known sample sale sites.

It’s unclear whether the private sale market will be open to the type of convergence that has taken place in the travel industry. First and foremost, most, if not all, of the vendors will need to be on board with the aggregation model in order for it to succeed. As of now, MyNines has been able to attract some of the more well known players in the space, including Billion Dollar Babes and eBay’s FashionVault. And if consumers respond in a positive way, then other sites like Gilt and HauteLook may jump on board.

Does the world need more than one Twitter? How about 10,000 of them? That is how many sites are running on the hosted version of StatusNet, which went into private beta at our Realtime CrunchUp last November. Today, StatusNet is opening up its hosted service to all comers in a public beta.

You can think about StatusNet as the WordPress of microblogging. StatusNet is open-source software which can either be downloaded and run on your own enterprise servers or now on StatusNet’s hosted servers. Basic service is free, with plans to charge for premium levels down the line. The premium versions will be ad-free, support unlimited users, larger file sizes, your own domain and design, Facebook and Twitter integration, and XMPP feeds.

CEO Evan Prodromou describes the various ways StatusNet can be used: as an open-source microblogging server akin to WordPress, as the basis for an online community “(ning.com for microblogging); for enterprise (Open Source Yammer), or for a single user to own their social media presence (your own ping.fm).” One of the cooler features of StatusNet is OStatus, which lets you follow people on different social networks all from within your hosted microblogging enevironment.

The largest site hosted on StatusNet is the company’s own identi.ca, but StatusNet will also be hosting microblogging sites for ABC News, Shit My Dad Says (both not live yet at the time of this posting), the Twit Army, Kirsty Ally’s weight loss community Phitter, Germany’s Bleeper, and Today’s Mama. All together, there are more than 1 million registered users across all 10,000 StatusNet sites.

Shit My Dad Says has 1.2 million followers on Twitter and a TV pilot in the works starring William Shatner. He will use StatusNet to push his updates to Twitter while controlling the advertising. ABC News plans to use StatusNet as a central dashboard to push out its headlines and updates to different social networks.

StausNet is based in Montreal and raised $1 million in seed capital last year.

We’ve written about Plancast, a “Foursquare For The Future,” that essentially broadcasts your plans to your online social circle. We’re big fans of the startup, which just raised seed funding from an impressive group of investors. Startup Go Tribal is rolling out a different take on the social planning application, launching a site for a more targeted audience: women.

Go Tribal has simple ambitions. The site basically aims to help women answer the question, “who’s down to go out?” Users can sign set up an account and broadcast message to their friends to see who is down for going out. Of course, you can tap into your social graph via Facebook Connect, Gmail and Twitter, but all of the planning needs to take place on Go Tribal’s site and each participant needs to sign up for an account to start “planning.” Once you see which friends are available, you can vote on, discuss, and finalize your plans. In terms of privacy, there are three levels of privacy for plans. You can opt to go public with your plans, private (plans are only visible to your Go Tribal friends) or locked (plans are only visible to the people invited to the plan).

Go Tribal is oriented towards helping member form informal plans, like grabbing a impromptu dinner with friends. Shruti Challa, CEO and co-founder of Go Tribal, says the service aims to eliminate planning via text, email or Facebook. But one of the virtues of these mediums and networks is that all three can be easily accessible from your mobile device. Although Go Tribal doesn’t have a mobile app available, the startup offers SMS notifications so that you can stay up-to-date with any changes to a plan.

So how does the startup make money? Well, because Go Tribal has a targeted audience, it can offer targeted advertising to restaurants, bars and other local establishments. Challa says that the site is also in the process of incorporating deals at certain restaurants and bars.

It should be interesting to see if Go Tribal can take off. The conventional behavior for people to make casual plans usually takes place over email, Facebook or SMS. It may be tough for the startup to change that natural behavior right away, but with an attractive interface and the proper partnerships (I’m thinking a Yelp or CitySearch partnership), the site could find a loyal following.

Summer will be here before you know it, so that means it’s time to stock up on anything that’ll keep you out of the sun. In that spirit, Amazon has discounted both the standard and Collector’s Edition of the new-ish Star Trek Online franchise. The standard edition will set you back $28 (selling for $45+ elsewhere) and the Collector’s Edition, which features “additional bonus items including unique packaging, descriptive material, and in-game items,” is on sale for $48 (selling for $80+ elsewhere).

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CrunchDeals: Star Trek Online for $28, Collector’s Edition for $48

We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public’s attention. The interface just wasn’t designed for finger input

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Notice the lack of Windows in HP’s slate device

Online dating sites can be daunting. Between setting up the perfect profile and then trying to meet your dream partner from profiles of hundreds of thousands of people on each site (or on some of the more popular sites like Match.com, millions of users ). One startup, OneGuyOneGirl, aims to simplify this process.

The site displays One Guy and One Girl each day. You can see a picture on the site and access their Facebook and Twitter pages, as well. And if you like what you see, you can email as the guy/girl directly. You can also request to be featured on the site.

I admire the simplicity of OneGuy and One Girl, but there are a few holes I’d like to point out. First, it’s unclear how the site will actually makes money and doesn’t appear to have a viable business model. Also, some of the Facebook profiles of some of the featured guys/girls are available, which makes it difficult to know much about the person besides their age and a one sentence description about the individual’s interests. Lastly, the site seems to skew very young; both individuals who were featured today are only 18 and when I’ve checked the site out previously, the individuals were in the same age range.

Slide, the online entertainment company founded by Max Levchin (who we just interviewed in Davos), has decided to stop development on two of its social games, Slide SuperPocus and Top Fish, and will be laying off “less than 10%” of its employees in the process. The company had around 40 employees working on the two games, some of whom will be reassigned to work on other projects. Prior to the layoffs, Slide had around 137 employees.

This is a somewhat surprising move, because Slide only launched the two Facebook applications last fall. The magic-themed SuperPocus launched in October, and Top Fish, a virtual aquarium app, launched in early November. Both games were designed to turn into virtual economies that revolved around virtual gifts. Clearly Slide has a ’sink-or-swim’ attitude with regard to its applications, and it’s ready to cut its losses quickly.  Slide VP of Strategy and Business Development Keith Rabois says that the company is continuously evaluating its games based on their growth, user retention, and monetization, and that the two games weren’t reaching their goals.  Rabois says that the company intends to release a new project later this month.

Slide has dabbled in quite a few areas related to social gaming and online communities over the years. It is behind some of Facebook’s most popular games, as well as other entertaining apps like SuperPoke. The company used to generate most of its revenue through advertising, but the majority of its income now comes from virtual goods.

Atmosphir, a game platform and world by Minor Studios, was first unveiled to the world at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It’s an ambitious project – users can create their own games, block by block, release them on the platform and then play and share them with others. Players create and customize a single avatar and use it to play the various games that others have created.

In the initial beta users needed to download software to build and play Atmosphir games. Last year the company decided to move to the Unity platform to allow for in-browser game creation and playing. Unity does require a plugin, but the experience is significantly lighter on the client.

Game creators have nearly unlimited freedom to create worlds from whatever they imagine. Games can be combat or puzzle based (or both), multi-user or not, and an audience of users will jump in and try out whatever new levels/games are built immediately.

This is still a beta project with a long waiting list, and the company is just starting to move existing users to the new platform. But if you’re a game designer and want in now, we have ten designer accounts to give away. Just let us know in the comments why you think you’d be a good choice for one. Check out the video below for an idea of what Atmosphir is all about.

Contact microphones are all sorts of fun.

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Playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin thumb piano

The iPad is getting more than its fair share of press, I think — or to be precise, it’s getting its fair share, but a lot of it could have gone to any other quality tablet device, of which at the moment there are admittedly few (the Adam comes to mind). So these days, when I read an interesting article like this one, or write that someone is making an iPad tablet version of their magazine , I deliberately conflate the terms “iPad” and “tablet.”To their credit, Apple is making a very robust reader app that’s ripe for exploiting, as Craigmod says , as a canvas for rich media. I’d never pretend that the iPad is the be-all and end-all of tablet devices.

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Interesting read: the potential of the iPad, from the perspective of a book designer