Fancy, the one-time Pinterest competitor which has long since set its sights on social e-commerce, is expanding its reach today with the launch of its internationalization efforts. The company is now making its service available in 30 languages and is shipping its products worldwide.

Going forward, Fancy will automatically detect which language to use based on browser settings or device settings. However, web users will also be able to go into the Preferences menu at the top of the screen on the desktop site and change that selection if they choose.

According to Fancy COO Michael Silverman, the company is also handling logistics and customer service locally, as well. He explains that Fancy had been seeing a lot of demand from non U.S. audiences, which is what prompted these changes.

“Just over 50 percent of our users are domestic and the other half is international – including Europe, the Middle East, and Asia,” says Silverman. “Outside of the U.S., there are a bunch of young shoppers on mobile devices who want to shop this way…and we are the only ones doing this.”

That statement could be misinterpreted to mean that young, international shoppers want to buy products using their mobile phone and Fancy is the only social shopping site available to them. That’s not true, of course. What is true is that many of the top competitors in this social shopping market – product discovery sites like Polyvore, Wanelo, or eBay-owned Svpply, for example – link out to other e-commerce sites on the internet, which is not always an ideal experience.

The resulting link may be dead, the product may be sold out, or you find that the company doesn’t ship to your country (or charges so much for international shipping, that you wouldn’t want to bother). On Fancy, users are buying directly from its own website and checkout directly there, too.

That being said, Fancy still has some tough competition.

In the U.S., its iPhone app is ranked #237 in the “Lifestyle” section, behind eBay Fashion (#130), Polyvore (#47) and Wanelo (#18), as well as hot, young adult e-commerce stores like ModCloth (#108), and brick-and-mortars gone mobile like American Eagle (#95) or Nordstrom (#94). However, it is a bit ahead of Pose (#305) and Svpply (#389).

And a quick (non-scientific) look at its web traffic shows similar trends in terms of stateside competition, at least. It’s closely tied with Wanelo, for example, which now has over 8 million registered users according to its website.

Officially, Silverman says Fancy has over 7 million registered users worldwide and 12 million uniques across all platforms (web and mobile) as of last month.

(Note that Fancy had until recently been thefancy.com. It now redirects to Fancy.com, but there’s no data on that URL.)

It makes sense that Fancy would try to shift its battle to the world’s stage instead, by focusing on growing its footprint in other areas where competition may not be as fierce.

The company has been experimenting in other directions as well. Earlier this year, it acquired Samplrs.com, an artisanal foods seller, which Fancy used to beef up its Fancy box subscription service. As for all those acquisition rumors we keep hearing (with unsubstantiated reports ranging from Apple to Yahoo), Silverman says only “I don’t know why you are hearing that, it’s not something that is coming up in discussion over here.” Hmm.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Songza, the app that matches expert-created music playlists to your mood or activity, has just released a huge update to its iOS app, streamlining the experience quite a bit and cleaning up the UI to ensure that users are getting the best music to match their mood and activity in the fastest time possible.

To start, you’ll notice straight off the bat that the Concierge screen has changed dramatically, with new colors in the background and the removal of the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. But it’s not just about looks. Songza’s smarter now, too.

The Songza team has always prided itself on finding you an amazing playlist to match your mood and settings in just three clicks. Today, they brought that down to one long-press click on any Concierge situation (like Driving or Sweaty Dance Party) to get music playing quickly.

Songza 3.0 also includes a faster way to find music for the situation you’re in, even if Concierge hasn’t predicted it for you. Simply shake the app while on the Concierge screen and you’ll be asked what you’re up to, leading you to the right playlist for the right moment.

One of the biggest pain points with Songza is that it’s difficult to find the right music based on artists. Sure, you can hunt for mixes by genre, mood, activity and artists, but even then you have to sit through most of the playlist before your fave comes on.

Songza 3.0 solves this problem by letting you hunt out all the playlists that include your queried artist, with the mixes that are most relevant to your preferences coming up first. And if that weren’t enough, the app automatically moves songs by your favorite artist to the top of the playlist.

Last, but certainly not least, the new and improved Songza made a few tweaks to its Audio HQ feature, which was debuted in collaboration with Audyssey Laboratories back in December.

Record Store Clerk, a feature that tries to match you with new music based on what you already like, has been baked into the experience on the back-end, rather than remaining as a front-end feature.

Clearly, things have changed a lot in the land of Songza, but the new version comes with in-app tips to help you find your way. Songza has picked up tons of traction since it launched, now boasting 4.7 million monthly active users who spend more than 65 million minutes with Songza on a daily basis.

The update is available now on the App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In our state of continued information overload, and because of the growing number of services which we have to check in order to keep up with the information that matters to us, things get missed by even the most active social media users. A new startup called Slim wants to change that, and is today launching an iOS application which allows you to discover and be alerted to the most important life events from your friends and colleagues – like births, anniversaries, job changes, and more.

Today, there are already a number of companies attempting to make sense out of the noise that’s out there by leveraging the data on social services, then applying their own unique algorithms to present things you shouldn’t have missed. For example, I have a folder on my iPhone dubbed “Summarize” filled with apps that do similar things to Slim (or at least play in the same general news summary space), including things like Prismatic, Clipped, Thirst, undrip, Wavii, Circa, Antenna, NewsWhip, and, until recently, Summly. Some of these are more focused on summarizing news stories, while others are meant to filter through your social media accounts, like Facebook or Twitter, for example.

But, combined, what they point to is that we’re now in search of tools that help us address the real-time nature of information flow and what it’s doing to our abilities to keep up and stay engaged. Just because news moves in real-time, that doesn’t mean people do.

Slim’s app is slightly different from apps that merely summarize Facebook or Twitter in that its focus, as CEO Yair Levin explains, is also on the business user, not only the consumer. “We are targeting business users who have little time but want to stay aware of opportunities and reasons to get in touch with friends and clients, active social media users who need a ‘safety net’ to ensure they don’t miss an important update from one of their networks and infrequent users who just want the highlights from social media,” he says.

The app uses natural language processing to build users a customized feed of all the important activity across Facebook and LinkedIn, and it sends out push notifications when a major milestone occurs. As you swipe through the updates that appear, you can also train Slim even further by starring the updates you appreciated and marking those you don’t want to see again. The app will learn your preferences in time, becoming more relevant the more you use it.

In addition, Slim takes things a step further than some others do, by allowing you to not only view the updates, but also respond. What’s clever here is that the app doesn’t just allow you to respond via the social network (e.g. by commenting on the post itself on Facebook), it also offers other real-world mechanisms for reaching out, including text messages, calls, emails, and it even connects you to Gifts.com if the announcement requires a gift. Handy.

Slim users can opt to receive a weekly or daily digest of their updates, as well, which works as another good way to stay on top of what’s happening, even when you haven’t had time to check the app or the social networks yourself. (Note that the weekly digest email is switched on by default.)

As of today’s launch, only Facebook and LinkedIn are supported, but the plan is to add Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Salesforce and Yammer in the next month or so. Based in San Francisco, Slim’s co-founders include two Israelis, CEO Yair Levin and CTO Zeev Vax. Currently a team of four, Slim has closed on $200,000 in seed funding from G7 Ventures, and the round is ongoing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Get ready for some more M&A activity in the real estate sector. This morning, the real estate search engine Trulia announced that it is looking to raise up to $100.3 million $150 million in a follow-on offering, with “some or all of such net proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, products, services, technologies, or other assets.” Trulia went public last year, and currently has 23.6 million monthly active users. Update: today’s follow-on filing is an amendment that includes the partial release of some shares owned by “certain officers and directors of the company” that were previously locked up. A spokesperson says that it is for $150 million, with $100 million going to company reserves.

In a filing with the SEC, the company said it would be offering some 5.25 million shares in a primary and secondary offering. 1.75 million of those shares will come from selling stockholers, and 3.5 million will come from Trulia itself, with the $100.3 million calculation based on its $30.44 per share price as of March 8 on the NYSE. It also notes that the raise could be as high as $115.4 million “if the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares in this offering is exercised in full.” It also notes that the follow-on offering altogether could raise as much as $164 million.

The only other major acquisition from Trulia was a move to enhance the usefulness of its real-estate search service by making it more social and interconnected with other aspects of local life. In 2010 it bought Movity, a Y-Combinator alum and specialist in geodata that also had created a service to track local check-ins. It was still in stealth mode at the time.

A spokesperson for Trulia noted in an email that two-thirds of the proceeds, or $100 million, “will go straight to the company’s cash reserve.” He also added a bit more color on what acquisitions might mean:

“The follow on offering is for the company to build a bigger cash reserve to accelerate the growth of the business. As a company, we will continue to be very thoughtful and disciplined in our approach to putting our capital to work. The purpose of raising additional capital is to strengthen our cash reserves and balance sheet, so we can execute on growth opportunities as they arise, such as mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and funding new product initiatives.”

In a market very crowded with real-estate startups and several bigger players, Trulia has been slowly ramping up the functionality of its service beyond straight listings. Last week, the company introduced a recommendation engine called Trulia Suggests to improve personalization features on the site. That service uses an algorithm that you seed with some of your preferences, and then it combines that with your browsing history on Trulia itself to suggest properties to you.

At the same time that Trulia is forging ahead in these kinds of moves to improve engagement and use of its services, the company needs to drive more revenue-generation for its bottom-line results. In February, for the second quarter of reporting as a public company, Trulia posted a net loss of $1.59 million, or a loss of $0.03 per share. That was down by around $1 million compared to a year ago, when its net loss was $2.5 million. Revenues were up by 75% to $20.6 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s new Chromebook Pixel is a curious device. While its beautiful, seamless hardware nearly justifies its $1,299 price tag, the Chrome OS (which only offers access to a limited pool of third-party apps and Google products, plus the Internet) does not.

In the specs department, both John and I are impressed. The Pixel has a 12.85-inch 2560 x 1700 touchscreen. To be exact, that’s 4.3 million pixels (not 4.1 billion, like I mentioned in the video). As MG points out in his review, the touchscreen is truly beautiful. I find myself longing for it at this very moment, while I type this out on my MacBook Air.

The Pixel powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, and comes with 1 terabyte of free storage on Google Drive over three years. If you prefer, Google is also coming out with an LTE-capable version of the Pixel soon, which will come with 100MB/month for two years courtesy of Verizon.

And boy is the Pixel a beauty! It’s possible that the Pixel is one of the best looking laptops I’ve ever set eyes on, and John seems to agree (albeit less enthusiastically).

The main obstacle between the Pixel and two flies is how caged-in the user will eventually be. If you use all Google services, exclusively, then please don’t hesitate to pick up the Pixel. However, if you’re fond of Skype or Microsoft Office or TweetDeck, you’ll find yourself quite displeased the moment you realize you can’t download any of that.

Of course, Google has its own answers for those services with Docs, Hangouts, Drive, etc. But we all have our preferences, and no one likes to feel restricted while at the computer.

As we move toward life entirely in the cloud, the Pixel will become increasingly relevant. For now, however, you either need to adore Google products exclusively or be ready to install Linux.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Trulia, the popular real estate search engine, just launched the beta of Trulia Suggests, a personalized real estate recommendation engine. The typical search experience on virtually every online real estate site involves telling the service how much you want to pay, how many bedrooms and bathrooms you need and what locations you are interested in. That works, but you often end up looking at many homes that clearly don’t match what you’re looking for. Trulia’s service, on the other hand, learns from your behavior on the site and then shows you houses that it believes will match your interests.

For now, Trulia Suggests will only be available on the web, but the company plans to roll it out to its mobile apps in the future.

As Trulia’s VP of product Lee Clancy told me earlier today, he believes that adding this recommendation service will have a “transformational effect on the company.” While it won’t replace the usual search experience, he thinks this feature could become a part of the company’s other tools, including its rental business. “Personalization is not just a feature but a new product direction,” Clancy said.

Here is how it works: users seed the proprietary recommendation algorithm with a few ‘likes,’ in order to start creating their personalized profile (users can now also likes every posting on the service as well). Trulia will ask new users to sign up for the service after this in order to track their behavior on the site. After reviewing a few more homes, the service will start showing a selection of houses that should match your interests under the Trulia Suggests tab.

You can, of course, also ‘hide’ homes you don’t like in order to tell the algorithm when a place doesn’t match your preferences. For now, Clancy told me, this feature only hides homes in Trulia Suggests, but they will still appear in your regular search results. Once Suggests comes out of beta, hiding a house will also remove it from your search results.

The algorithm looks at the kind of houses you like, hide and look at on the site and automatically tunes its recommendations in real time according to your preferences, including how much you seem to be willing to pay for a house, location and other details.

A feature like this, Clancy argued, is especially important in today’s real estate market. With only a few houses available for sale and high demand from buyers, Trulia Suggests allows the company “to expose consumers to properties they might not have otherwise looked at.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve known for some time that Google would be transitioning users away from its Picasa photo-sharing service to Google+ Photos, but now that process is nearly complete. Google has begun to redirect users from the old Picasa URL (picasweb.google.com) to Google+ Photos, which currently still offers a way to return to the old Picasa Web Albums interface during this transitional period.

The Google Operating System blog (an unofficial Google watching blog) noticed this redirect today, as well, noting that you can use the URL  https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1 to go directly to Picasa Web Albums without experiencing the redirect first and having to click back.

As not everyone will be ready to make the move just yet, the service will remember your preferences before the final switch is completed. So for example, if you head to Picasa Web Albums and are redirected, but choose to click the link back to Picasa, Google will set a session cookie to remember your choice and take you directly to Picasa the next time.

A redirect has been in place for photo viewers for quite some time, although you might not have heard about it since there has been no official announcement. That means if you were a Google+ user who clicked a link to a Picasa Web Album, you were already redirected to Google+ in the past.

What’s new is that redirect for photo owners, however. That means if you’re a Google+ user who is visiting the Picasa Web Album URL, you’re now being redirected to Google+ Photos. This has been live for about a week. It’s another step forward on the slow and careful transition process that Google is taking with what will be Picasa’s eventual shuttering.

The good news is that if you’re ready to make the switch, you won’t have to move your photos – they’ll all be transitioned for you to Google+. Since last year, Google has been synchronizing the uploading and storage activity for new photos between the two services, it should be noted. And it has now also transitioned over your old photos from Picasa Web Albums to Google+ Photos, as well. That’s a big step forward towards finally shutting down Picasa for good, which is clearly the direction Google is headed.

The company ended support for its Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac and its iPhoto plugin in spring 2012, and Linux support has ended as well. Desktop software programs still work if you already have them installed, however, and the Picasa homepage still points you to software downloads.

Google+ Photos Chrome App Nears Debut

Google is working on a full transition of Picasa’s service to Google+, which also includes a new photo organizer Chrome app called the Google+ Photos App. During its recent Chromebook Pixel news conference, the company announced the app would arrive “in the coming weeks.”

In late February, developer Francois Beaufort, who digs around in Google code for unreleased apps and upcoming features, figured out how to access the Google+ Photos app in advance of its debut. The images he posted show the automatic import process, first launch screens, and the app’s main screen, among other things. (Some photos he posted came from Saša Stefanović).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

20 years ago, you discovered music on the FM dial. End of story. Now there’s an uncharted frontier of outlaw torrents, renegade bloggers, on-demand gold miners, and fur-trapping radios. The zeitgeist has splintered, and there’s no piecing it back together. And I think we’re doing just fine without the robber barons of old.

Just ask rock band The Silversun Pickups. I did (below). Best known for the low-fi, garage blur and piercing crescendo of their first hit single “Lazy Eye”, The Silversun Pickups say right now they have to be best friends with the music tech companies. And while they did perform that night at the Slacker party, they truly believe there’s no clear front-runner yet worth tying their horse to.

Until recently, the three pillars of music discovery — on-demand, automated radio, and human curation —  were fragmented across different services. There was Napster and then iTunes and then Spotify. There was Pandora. There were blogs. But now we’re seeing companies like Slacker and Spotify attempting to unify these into a single service.

Slacker’s recent redesign highlighted this convergence, making it easy to swap between searching for specific songs, radio that evolves to your preferences, and hand-picked music selections from actual DJs. Spotify went from being strictly on-demand to adding radio, and now is starting to roll out a new Twitter-esque following system to help you get recommendations from real people. Slacker’s far behind in traction, leaving Spotify the most likely company to bring order to the music discovery space and make us comfortable settling down.

In some ways that might not be a good thing. Without a single company in control, competition forces innovation and low prices. Decentralized and self-determined music discovery liberates us. We can chase what uniquely resonates with us rather than surrendering our tastes to mass media. It may not be civilized and easy, but true music fans like life with a little edge.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in March eToro, the investment network that uses real-time features to let users follow and trade based on other users’ activities, raised another $15 million in funding taking its war chest to $33.9 million. The online investment network now claims to have more than 2 million users across 140 countries. The investment proved that so-called ‘social trading’ it a hot area right now. Taking the investment model and adding a Twitter/Klout-like features is proving a powerful combination, allowing investors to look to friends, acquaintances, and colleagues for trading advice.

But the company has yet to properly launch in the US. That delay means there’s opportunities for other startups to get in on the act. Tradeo, which already operates its Forex trading platform in the US, has now launched the new Twitter-like follow method of managing your contacts. You can now find interesting traders, follow them, and copy their trades.

The platform not only allows investors to Tweet out into Twitter, but also enables cross-market syncing with the platforms that investors are trading on. A visual-chart demonstrate their positions and the trades they’ve made.

Additionally, the new version of Tradeo includes several new additional options in the trade copying feature. For instance it now allows you to set multiple additional variables that let you better set up the trades to your preferences.

Led by CEO Jonathan Adest, Tradeo has a team of 15 and has raised $1 million in funding from angel investor Gigi Levy and AMV venture capital.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Songza has long been one of my favorite music apps, and as an iPhone user, I’ve had access to all the latest and greatest features within it. But as I’ve mentioned the app to various friends and such, I’ve learned that Android has been missing out. But no more.

Songza’s core feature — Concierge — is now available within the Android version of the app. The update is now live, so if you’re interested in checking it out, go ahead and download the update.

Concierge, if you aren’t already familiar with it, takes all the work out of finding the music you’re looking for. Rather than hunting through the Genres or Activities tab, Concierge knows what kind of device you’re on, your preferences, and combines that information with the day and the time.

So for example, on Saturday late at night, Songza will offer up activities like a Sweaty Dance Party or Getting Naked, whereas the service will offer up something like Working Out or Summertime on a Tuesday afternoon. After filtering that activity, you’re a click away from a playlist.

But Concierge isn’t the only thing coming to Songza’s Android app. The company has also revamped the app to be completely compatible with Android 4.0, meaning that the same look and feel of the ICS UI will be present on both 4.0 devices and earlier.

Past that, Android users will be able to control volume and other settings from the lock screen and/or headphones as opposed to opening up the app.

Songza just recently launched an iPad app, which was featured in the App Store, and saw over 1 million downloads in ten days. Clearly the service is picking up even more momentum.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch