Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral to the engine of job creation. According to the White House, companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades in the U.S. and what’s more, accounted for all net new jobs created over that time. In a struggling economy, the incubators and accelerators that help grow startups and SMBs, giving them access to the network and capital they need to grow, are essential to job creation and building a healthy economy.

Accelerators have been popping up around the U.S. (and the world) in the past year, and the big incubation houses (like TechStars, Y Combinator, 500 Startups, etc.) continue to grow. Yet, these generators can (and should) have the most influence not in big cities/markets like New York, San Francisco, and Boston, but in places where unemployment is high and economies are stagnating.

Cities like Detroit are depressed, but they are doing everything they can to encourage innovation and fuel business development. Another is St. Louis. St. Louis has a rich big-company history, and has at various times been home to the headquarters of a slew of Fortune 500 companies. Anheuser-Busch still makes its home there. Yet, while headquarters may live there, the production likely happens elsewhere.

The city wants to fight stalling unemployment by building an innovation-focused ecosystem, which is why Arch Grants was born and launched last month. Arch Grants is a non-profit organization led and supported by a band of lawyers, investors, real estate managers, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and more, that wants to create a more robust startup culture and infrastructure in St. Louis. The company wants to turn the city into a place where entrepreneurs want to go to grow their businesses.

Arch is starting with a business plan competition that selects the most promising startups, giving them $50K in grants to turn their ideas into reality. Typically, accelerators offering venture capital take equity stakes in the startups they choose, but Arch Grants offers non-dilutive capital — they are, as one would expect, grants and therefore don’t require founders to cough up any equity in exchange for the capital.

After receiving the initial $50K grant, startups then go on to compete for a second round of up to $100K in funding, along with access to angel investors. Arch Grants President Jerry Schlichter, a trial lawyer, says that the program will be selecting at least 12 companies per year, and plans to run the program for at least three years.

Generally speaking, it’s tough for non-profit organizations that dish out growth capital to for-profit companies to receive approval from the government, but the IRS makes exceptions in areas of high unemployment, and Schlichter says that they were surprised by how quickly Arch Grants was able to be approved.

To that point, Arch Grants isn’t a business accelerator, but they want to, for all intents and purposes, operate like one — or at least create the same opportunities for their startups. The organization has tapped five local universities, business mentoring organizations, experts, investors, and a host of other support organizations to offer resources and assistance to its founders.

Its affiliates can also hook up startups with affordable apartments and office space, business networking and mentoring, free legal and accounting services, and collaboration with local universities, etc.

While Arch Grants has a model that may be slightly unusual for startups and entrepreneurs used to the Y Combinator approach, Schlichter and others believe that the real hook for entrepreneurs can be that they would be part of something broader than their own goals, helping to put a city back to work. “These startups are going to get a deep level of support here, because this is something that is really important to the entire city,” he says, “because it has greater implications and importance than it does for Silicon Valley.”

To assist it in its endeavors, Arch Grants today announced that it has secured a $150K donation from Peabody Energy (the largest private-sector coal company in the world). This donation brings the organization’s total funding to $2.5 million, which has been contributed by a mix of individual and corporate donors.

Another feather in the cap for Arch Grants? It’s also officially announcing today that Square Co-founder Jim McKelvey (who along with co-founder Jack Dorsey is a St. Louis native) will head the organization’s advisory board. This means that, among other things, McKelvey will help lead strategy for the business plan competition and selection of grant recipients as well as advising the selected startups and founders.

Again, while tech companies will be the program’s focus, all entrepreneurs are encouraged to apply. Arch Grants is currently accepting applications through its proposed deadline of March 9th. Those interested in applying can do so here.

And young entrepreneurs looking for another cool pitch competition and resource/hub for entrepreneurs, should check out Intel Innovators. More here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Let’s say that you’re browsing the searchable web at your job, looking for some facts on some hot startup or whatever it is you get paid to do …

You’re sitting there web surfing, just going about your business on Google.com, and all of a sudden it’s like “Well gee I’ve got seven notifications on Robert Scoble Google+ … Well let me just click on this animated red button here …”

“Hmm … well look at this ‘hi sweet baby how r u’ comment some stranger has left on my last post [click] …” And boom, seventeen hours later you wake up deep inside the belly of the Google+ beast, with the crumbs from day-old Dorito taco shells crusted around your mouth and empty Merlot bottles strewn across the floor.

“FROM WHERE YOU ?” some random person from your “Public” circle asks from within your 20-person Google+ hangout. The answer is … “I DON’T KNOW.”

My point is that my Presidents’ Day weekend your whole Google+ K-hole could have been avoided, had  I you used “Go Away! Google Plus” a user script that eliminates those pesky (and manipulative) Google+ notifications and requests to share plaguing you every time you visit a Google site, except for when you visit plus.google.com on purpose, of course.

The script can be installed directly from this page in Chrome and needs a Greasemonkey extension to work in Firefox, an extra plugin to work in Safari and what the hell are you doing using IE?

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go wash Doritos out of my hair. Enjoy!

Image via Guanabee

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve been using Facebook since its early years. So today it has the most complete and accurate set of connections to people I’ve known throughout my life. Exactly because of its success in assembling this group, I’ve avoided turning on its five month-old Subscribe feature — until now.

For those of you who want to gain a big personal Facebook following but don’t want to spam your friends, here’s my reasoning for taking my Facebook profile public.

Subscribe, if you’re not familiar, lets a Facebook user allow other users to follow their publicly-shared information without that person having to follow any of them back. It’s a more visceral way for users to connect with real people versus the relatively stilted and underused individual fan pages.

Like Twitter, and in contrast to Facebook’s 5,000 friend limit, any person who has enabled Subscribe can get as many followers as possible. Facebook may have adopted this asymetrical relationship model years after competitors, but because its 850 million user base is so much larger than anyone else’s, it can offer many more potential followers. It has also been boosting Subscribe growth by recommending users Subscribe to relevant users via a module on the right side of its home page.

All sorts of real celebrities, web mini-celebrities and even fellow tech bloggers have been racking up tens of thousands of subscribers. And these numbers aren’t just for vanity, they drive serious usage. When TechCrunch writers who have enabled Subscribe share their posts with their Facebook audience, they tend to get the most traffic out of the dozens of posts we publish each day.

I won’t reveal the specific stats for authors, although you can get a sense from the share numbers to the left of each post. But here’s a related measure to illustrate the high engagement that comes from Facebook. TechCrunch has a whopping 2,041,083 Twitter followers but only 421,657 Facebook fans. However, total Facebook pageviews to TechCrunch, whether from authors or the fan page, beat out the total from our Twitter account and author tweets over the last thirty days.

In fact, Facebook beat out every other traffic source over the same period, except for Google (which in contrast to Facebook also drives lots of traffic to older articles). This measure is complicated by the fact that we only share a few posts each day on Facebook versus blasting out every post on Twitter  – it could be that this more curated approach yields more engaged users, but it could also mean that we’re not maxing out the potential traffic we could get from Facebook.

But still. It has been impossible for anyone in the business of getting web traffic to ignore these types of results. By anyone I don’t just mean celebrities and journalists, I mean topical experts, marketers, any type of politician, any business driven by a personal brand, etc.

Which brings me back to the problem I’ve been wrestling with. How do I reconcile the incentives for new traffic and engagement from Facebook users with the obligation to not spam my real-life friends? You know, people who I’ve friended over the years with the implied understanding that we’d mainly be sharing information that we’re mutually interested in.

I’ve been through this question before, in 2008, when for a period of time I imported all of my tweets into my personal Facebook account. While some friends told me that they did appreciate learning about all the random tech stuff that I was covering at VentureBeat, I got the impression that I was being spammy because quite a few of the posts didn’t get serious interaction. I ended up turning off imports and switching back to only sharing personal information. Tech was far less mainstream them, so maybe people will be more interested now?

But here’s my approach, and it’s similar to what TechCrunch community manager Elin Blesener does for our Facebook page. I’m only going to share a few stories here and there, that seem especially relevant. So, stories about Facebook (like this one, of course), or stories with a relatively straightforward consumery angle.

This is ultimately a kludge that encourages me to do exactly what Facebook doesn’t want, which is not sharing to Facebook. The real solution here will be on Facebook’s end. As Josh laid out in December, the company should just create a new sharing setting that allows you to just share with the people who subscribe to you but not your friends. Maybe its product leaders have thought of some scenario here that us tech bloggers haven’t, because every single person I talk to is surprised that such a feature doesn’t exist.

In closing, here’s the obligatory plug for all TechCrunch staffers who have Subscribe enabled:

John Biggs

Elin Blesener

Mike Butcher

Matt Burns

Josh Constine

Eric Eldon

Anthony Ha

Jason Kincaid

Sarah Perez

Erick Schonfeld

MG Siegler

Alexia Tsotsis

Chris Velazco

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A recent post on MinimalMac posits an interesting case for the slow, growing sense of the irrelevance of Microsoft, at least in the applications space. Go and read the piece – it’s excellent – but the gist is that for years Microsoft banked on Office being as important to users as, say, Windows. Office is Microsoft’s biggest money maker and for most of this decade no self-respecting IT department would consider any alternatives, even though they existed. You needed it to get work done. OpenOffice? That stuff was just weird.

However, with the rise of tablets, office workers have suddenly noticed that they don’t need Office anymore. All they need is an email app, a notepad, and something like Dropbox. You can open Office docs on any device, you can edit text on nearly any tablet, and $9.99 gets you a capable word processor on the iPad. In short, Office is becoming irrelevant.

Patrick Rhone calls this a “miss” but I call it a paradigm shift. This shift is probably as jarring to offices as the transition from paper to electronic records and I doubt the reverberations of this shift will die down any time soon.

The story of office automation has been one of slow and inexorable change. As a child of the 1980s, I’m amazed when I watch movies and documentaries that show records being stored in a big room staffed by the office equivalent of librarians. As an adult of the aughts, on the other hand, I find myself appalled at the necessity for paper records and often, in a fit of pique, I fill out forms with my own style of chicken-scratch handwriting. Take customs forms at the border, for example: what government will ever be able to go through those written records in time to notice, say, a nefarious pattern? It’s literally impossible and it’s a waste of paper. Harumpf.

But old habits die hard and although we’re not even close to a paperless office yet, I think the rise of tablets will move us that final step towards a place of no printers. For most of this century, the main means of communication has been a typewritten report or memo. People needed eight hours in an office just to go through paperwork. When they took work home they took paper home. Even the desktop paradigm – the trash can, the inbox, the folder – mirrors this concept.

But what is the paradigm now? Mobile OSes don’t have trash cans or folders. Email apps talk about accounts and the icons show little paper airplanes rather than a flying letter. That the OS X Mail icon is still a stamp is as much an anachronism as saying you’re “dialing” a cellphone (but don’t get me started on Apple’s incessant desire to mirror real-world objects. Leather calendars? Really?). In less than a decade, our mental models for getting work done went from “go to some guy in records to find a number” to “Google it.”

And what was Word if not the ultimate typewriter? Word was the gold standard for the printed word, a way for the design-challenged to create a handsome training manual or break room notice (“Do not drink the ‘milk in the fridge’ it is Tonys.”). What was Excel if not a handsome, electronic ledger? You could print out reports with the important numbers in bold or, if your office was really rich, you could print it on the color laser printer.

And what was Access (remember Access?) but a way to put those poor schlubs in records out of a job?

Now Office’s namesake, the office, is changing. I’m not saying it’s changing quickly nor is it changing as wildly as I would like, but with the move to web-based business interfaces, cloud computing, and instant sharing, there is less impetus to make documents look “professional” and more on just getting them out the door. I think the real switch will come when documents, as a matter of course, will be signed electronically and not by hand. This will spell the death knell for Office and usher in a new era of entirely cloud-based document handling.

Is Microsoft sunk because of this? Absolutely not, but they’d better start spinning up some services that speak to the post-Office generation. After all, who needs Word templates when you can make this in two seconds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week, an article on financial news site Bloomberg.com took a derogatory tone when it reported on the future of f-commerce. Its case was built based on the number of companies that had closed the doors on their Facebook stores – Gamestop, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Gap and others.

Adding fuel to its fire, the article cited Forrester Research analyst, Sucharita Mulpuru, who said that retailers attempting to ply their wares on Facebook was like “trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

In an April 2011 blog post – Will Facebook Ever Drive eCommerce? – Mulpuru came right out and said she was bearish on f-commerce and that her bias against it was evident. In the year since, Mulpuru’s stance hasn’t changed that much. In a February 1, 2012 post – Why Facebook Is Still A Tough Sell For Retailers – she said, “As for commerce, don’t expect much.”

The Bloomberg piece also quoted Wade Gerten, CEO of social commerce provider 8thBridge, as saying that cracks in the model showed quickly and that clients have chosen to take a different approach. However, an 8thBridge spokesperson told me that Bloomberg took his comments and twisted them out of context. She referenced a guest post at Forbes where Gerten wrote a rebuttal.

Stating that Bloomberg was correct in that Facebook stores have failed to match retailer’s expectations, Gerten staunchly defended the use of f-commerce by saying that the article “failed to articulate what the REAL opportunity is for social commerce.” The best way to monetize social media, according to Gerten, is to “empower people to promote products to their friends, not for brands to spam you on Facebook.”

He reinforced that opinion by citing research based on his own clients and said that, “Almost 90% of the shopping activity we’ve tracked on Facebook over the last 6+ months has been between friends sharing things with other friends.”

Point/Counterpoint

So, who is correct, Mulpuru or Gerten? The answer, in my view, is both – to a point. To date, Facebook hasn’t proved itself to be a must-have commerce tool, not in a broad sense. But, the final story in the F-commerce “timeline” hasn’t been written either, even though Mulpuru opined in one of her posts that “the best of Facebook is already here.”

Gerten’s company, which works with major retailers to implement f-commerce strategies, may have found a key. Rather than brands promoting products/services (let’s call that F-commerce 1.0), how much better to let users do it. (That’s a much less interruptive and much more social approach, don’t you think?) Gerten has such as wholesale belief in that philosophy that he led his company to change its business model to reflect it.

Facebook is About Discovery

In an hour-long interview I conducted with Christian Taylor, founder and CEO of Facebook shopping cart provider Payvment, he stated matter-of-factly that f-commerce is about one thing: discovery. In his view, it’s a way for brands to connect with consumers where they hang out. Getting prospective customers to make a first purchase from a brand is his company’s goal.

Taylor takes a somewhat antagonistic view toward the idea of people sharing product information with their friends in the newsfeed. “Facebook’s social graph really isn’t that powerful. Most people only have 130 friends. Even if we were to get people sharing products, that not going to make a big dent,” he said. “If only 130 people have the capacity to see it, how many are on at that time to see the newsfeed item?”

Taylor said that the key to f-commerce is what he refers to as the “taste graph.” In other words, people who have a certain interest will influence the purchase decisions of others who share that interest. Payvment’s business model reflects that paradigm.

Facebook is About Fans

Here at SCT and in the SYZYGY whitepaper on f-commerce, Dr Paul Marsden offers a “third way”, arguing that f-commerce is not necessarily all about discovery or friends promoting to friends on Facebook, but about ‘fan-commerce‘.

Marsden takes a customer loyalty perspective and suggests that the business case for f-commerce really only makes sense when you think of it as fan-commerce and use Facebook as a fan-loyalty platform to drive customer retention (via fan loyalty) and customer acquisition (via fan advocacy).

So in this view, f-commerce is is all about rewarding fans with exclusive fan-firsts or fan-only offers to build loyalty and activate advocacy.

Five Blind Men “Observe” an Elephant

I liken the whole brouhaha over f-commerce to the story of the five blind man and the elephant. Touching whichever part of the pachyderm’s anatomy their hands happened to land on, each remarked that it was one thing or another – “A wall,” said one; “A rope,” said another; “It’s a snake,” said yet another, and so on. Soon, not unlike what we’re seeing with f-commerce, an argument ensued among the men about who’s observation was correct.

Conclusion

What f-commerce will become has yet to be determined, in my view. It’s an evolutionary process fraught with experimentation. Each of the people mentioned in this post – Mulpuru, Gerten, Marsden and Taylor – have their own distinct views of Facebook, its impact on commerce (or lack thereof), and the business model that’s best suited to take advantage of what the social network has to offer.

Whether or not you buy the view of SCT Editor, Dr. Paul Marsden  that f-commerce is only likely to thrive as fan-commerce in the context of Facebook as a fan-loyalty platform, he perhaps draws a useful conclusion for all involved with Facebook commerce: ”There are no cookie cutter recipes for setting up successful Facebook stores for your brand fans; f-commerce is too new and experimental for that.”

His advice is to retailers is simple: make customers smile. “Ultimately, f-commerce for consumer brands will not succeed or fail based on processes, but on the ability to act on the insight that making your fans smile is smart for business,” Dr. Marsden said. “So the best advice for embarking on an f-commerce journey is to ask yourself how you can make your customers smile with a privileged and personal point of purchase on Facebook, and work back from there.”

I would like to hear from you. Whose side are you on? Which business model is the one best suited to make Facebook the social commerce powerhouse its purported to be? Or, in your opinion, has that determination yet to be made?

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at SponsorPay, GREE International, Inc., Social Point, King.com, Atari, TinyCo, Addmired, PlayMesh, Spooky Cool Labs, Identified, XMG Studio, FashionPlaytes, Inc., Stealth Mobile Startup, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe and Game Show Network.

• Director of Developer Relations

• Director of Business Development
• Senior Manager, Corporate Development

• Product Manager (Video Games)
• iOS Developer
• Senior Systems Administrator

• 3D Artist
• IT Support Engineer
• Game Developer – Social and Mobile Games
• Ad Operations Traffic
• Senior Producer, Social Games – King.com
• Product Manager Network

• Monetization Analyst – Mobile/Social Games
• Acquisition Marketing Manager – Mobile Games
• Mobile Producer
• Mobile Advertising Sales Manager
• Business Development Director – Mobile Games

• Data Analyst
• Product Manager
• C++ Game Engineer
• Game Designer
• UI Artist

• UX Artist
• Erlang Infrastructure Developer
• C/C++ Game Developer
• Tools Engineer
• Scalability Engineer
• Build/Release Engineer
• Senior Producer/Project Manager
• QA/CS Director
• Senior Operations Engineer
• Acquisition Manager/Mobile Ad Buyer

• Backend Game Developer

• Marketing Director
• Software Engineer – Games Front End/Unity

• Core Software Engineer

• Data Jockey

• Social Game Designer

Stealth Mobile Startup

• Senior Android Engineer

• Head of Mobile/Senior Mobile Producer

• Art Director
• Senior Programmer

• Senior QA Engineer-Mobile Games

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Large or small, companies of all sizes use social media for marketing. As a case in point, three entrepreneurs who are co-founders of start-up companies, along with a representative of @Walmartlabs were given the opportunity to share their own social commerce success stories at Business Insider Social Commerce Summit held last week in New York.

The foursome were featured panelists in a session entitled “Product Discovery + Demand Generation: From Blah, Blah, Blah To Ka-Ching! : Cracking The Product-Discovery Code.” Part of the focus was on how each used social media to distinguish themselves,  build their brand and generate sales activity.

The panelists were:

• Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Birchbox;
• Chris Bolte, VP of Demand Generation, @WalmartLabs;
• Brian Lee, Co-Founder & Chairman, ShoeDazzle;
• Jason Ross, Co-Founder & CEO, JackThreads.

For Beauchamp, success came as a result of a blogger outreach. “We had a list of bloggers we intended to reach out to, that’s really what kicked things off. When we sent out the first few boxes, it just went crazy. It was totally organic growth,” she said.

Beauchamp added that Facebook and YouTube have both been channels that benefited the company. “Facebook has been incredibly powerful, but YouTube was eye-opening…People were creating videos and showing what a Birchbox was. It’s an authentic conversation about product.”

Brian Lee had his sights set on not a group of people, but one person in particular, Kim Kardashian. His banking on her popularity and huge fan base put Shoedazzle on the map.

Eventually, however, the Kardashiam glitter wore off and it took bringing in other celebrities to keep things rolling. “Every month or two we have a new celebrity come in and design our shoe for us. We get a new celebrity to design a shoe and get all her fans to come join,” said Lee.

In regard to a social media platform that has been kind to Shoedazzle, Lee said,” For us it was absolutely Facebook, no question.”

Jackthreads co-founder Jason Ross paid homage to Thrillist, which publishers a daily email newsletter filled with offbeat recommendations. “Any time Thrillist wrote about our brand, their readers were signing up for our site. They created a trusted editorial voice for their audience. We joined forces with them in 2010,” he said.

Ross cited the company’s use of Facebook and Twitter as a way to engage with customers and expressed interest in Pinterest due to its huge growth and the attention currently being paid to the site.

That’s the story from three startups. Representing one of the largest companies on the planet, Walmart, was Chris Bolte, VP of Demand Generation at @Walmartlabs. Bolte said that Walmart is using social analytics for supply chain management purposes. “We see where products are spiking” and “whether there was negative or positive sentiment” around them he said. “Then we can tweak supply to those stores, relay that to managers and it closes the curve with supply and demand.”

As you can see from these examples, there is no one-size-fits-all social commerce solution. What works for one is not necessarily what worked for the other. In reality, it’s a case of what works is what works for you, whether that be a blog, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, up-and-comer Pinterest, or a combination of tools and approaches. As for @Walmartlabs, well, that’s something else altogether – social commerce taken to an entirely new level.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Netflix is looking to make things right again. The company just reintroduced its DVD-only subscription plan. Consumers are finally able to sign up for this plan without also paying for (or trying) Netflix streaming. As Softpedia points out, this option briefly disappeared last fall as the company was trying to realign after the Qwikster disaster.

Netflix experienced a fall from grace in 2011. The once star of Wall Street, the company could seemingly do no wrong. But then they did wrong: prices increased by up to 60%. Next, the company spun off its legacy DVD business in an effort to focus greater on streaming media. Netflix’s stock plummeted and quickly lost more than one fifth of its value.

But don’t count Netflix out. The company’s stock price has doubled since its 52-week low of 62. This latest move, while seemingly pro-consumer, will also allow Netflix to leverage DVDs again. Streaming is still Netflix’s future, but DVDs are still big business — even if the company’s CEO sees DVD subscribers decreasing until they’re all gone. Until that happens, though, Netflix is back in the business of delivering movies and TV shows to consumers no matter how they want it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Having built a socially-driven market research business on Facebook and across the web, Peanut Labs is launching a new iteration of its crowd-sampling tool today called CrowdVi.be. The goal is to let a brand or anyone else quickly ask questions and get meaningful answers back from random internet users.

Sure, you can use other social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, to instantly get feedback online. But the difference is that Peanut Labs has some 50 million users on 200 social networks around the world, who take its surveys in order to earn Facebook Credits or other forms of virtual currency in games and apps. In other words, it has a huge, fairly random pool of consumers who are easily to access and hear back from. During its private beta, Crowdvi.be has already been used by companies testing various versions of logos, video trailers, site redesigns, and other tests of words and images.

The new service costs a dollar or less per user, and takes less than a minute to start delivering results. Surveys are priced in a way that’ll be quite familiar to anyone who uses modern social networks — there’s a virtual currency called “Credits,” with 10 Credits costing a buck, that you spend to run your surveys. Each one requires a minimum of 100 users, with prices starting high for smaller ones and dropping with volume. Larger surveys will take longer than a few minutes, but will still conclude within 24 hours.

(The company is offering a special discount for TechCrunch readers, where it’ll match whatever you pay for your first survey. Click on this link to get it.)

Peanut Labs is able to target surveys to particular categories like retail, consumer electronics and banking, because all of its users are first required to provide demographic information about themselves. So, these surveys still have the inherent bias of only selecting for people who have chosen to participate in exchange for offers. But, as Peanut Labs chief executive Noman Ali tells me, its total population is so large, the cost is so much cheaper and the results so much faster than traditional reports that lots of companies are going to be able to get new value out of it.

After starting as a social network called Xuqa last decade, the company discovered that users were willing to take various offers to earn a virtual currency that it had built into the site. It turned this discovery into Peanut Labs right around the time that Facebook launched its developer platform, and began providing surveys from research firms and other organizations within offer walls for social games. It grew this business over the next few years, and in 2010 sold it to research panel provider e-Rewards.

Going forward, Alis says, the product will include more features for sampling, including income ranges, and will also include templates for specific types of industries.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch