“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” is a truism that Yahoo! wants to monetize with its $1.1bn cash purchase of Tumblr blogging platform.

With 108m bloggers generating 13 billion page views per month on the NSFW-oriented (Not Suitable For Work – read – adult content) Tumblr, Yahoo! is hoping to turn eyeballs into advertising revenue (perhaps using its other recent purchase Summly to curate and summarise Tumblr topics).

Will it work where Yahoo! has failed in the past (think Geocities, del.icio.us, Flickr..)?

The challenge is simple - convert Tumblr into profitable advertising space.  But the solution is less evident.

Tumblr generated just $12m in revenue in 2012 – valuing the company in the real world at $36m – not $1bn. If plastering pixel-spam on Tumblr dashboards and posts was a really good idea, wouldn’t Tumblr have done it already? Facebook has held off haemorrhaging users by not turning Instagram into advertising space (yet), and Google has gone on record promising not to pollute Glass-vision with ads. Perhaps Yahoo! has something different up its sleeve – more than old-style interruptive advertising imported online? But given the ‘adult’ nature of much Tumblr content, how many big advertisers would want to take the PR risk advertising alongside explicit content?

So what if Yahoo! pivots Tumblr away from advertising and towards commerce?  We’re not talking the roaring trade that Tumblr could do in selling ‘adult toys’ and ‘adult content’ – but a bigger social commerce opportunity… Here are three ideas;

1. Since so many Tumblr blogs are themed (most fetishes appear to be covered), could Yahoo! allow bloggers to post a ‘shop’ button on the blog’s menu, that picks up the ball that Google shopping recently dropped with a decent price comparison/top picks).  A revenue share with Tumblr users – a la YouTube – could work? Think Google Shopping 2.0
2. Building on the themed nature of Tumblr blogs, the blogging network would make a ideal platform for a new generation of group-buy commerce – allowing like-minded people to come together and get great prices if they buy in bulk. Think Groupon 2.0
3. The simplicity of Tumblr would make it ideal as a next-generation e-commerce platform, making it easy to sell their stuff to communities of people passionate about a subject.  Tumblr has a real opportunity to tie this content + commerce knot, and become a leading e-commerce solution.  Think Etsy 2.0

Tesco has launched a new social commerce site for wine, Tesco Wine Co-buys.

Using Buyapowa social commerce software, consumers can club together to buy wine in bulk at discounted prices. What we particularly like is that it appears to be demand led; customers are able to choose wines they want to buy together in bulk – and set a maximum price they’d be willing to pay.  The more people that sign up, the heavier the discount – with the person who recruits the most co-buyers – via social sharing – getting a case of wine for free.  Sweet.

In the PR blurb, Tesco director of digital and social Tom Daniell says: “This channel really puts customers in control – from determining the final price they pay, to telling us the products they’d like to see featured.” Now you know. But the point is well made.  This is social commerce for the empowered customer.

We think Buyapowa is one of the few social commerce software companies that really ‘gets’ social commerce. First, it’s about commerce – i.e. shopping, not conversations, And second, it’s social, and that does not mean social spam from retailers or their customers, but shopping together as a social activity. Buyapowa gets this, and its software delivers by helping people shop together to get value.   And that is what the Tesco brand is about – value.

But if the new site is to be a success, Tesco is going to have to brand Tesco Wine Co-buys better – it really should look more like this or this, and it needs to offer value in more ways than just savings – access, appreciation and advice – will be key.

Right now – the ‘site’ straddles two sites – with users having to flip between Tesco.com and Buyapowa.com site to participate.  Apart from burgundies turning blue and tahomas turning to helvetica, it’s unclear what’s happening where. If we were involved, we’d be recommending Tesco consider using their wine club, currently hidden on the site, with a fresh new feel (again – look at NakedWines – they get it) as a vehicle for this initiative.  The idea is good enough to warrant this.

Whatever Tesco decides, they’ll need to avoid making this initiative look like a temporary promotion – and steer well clear of Groupon-style promotional cues – we’ve been there before and it didn’t work. Instead it should be looking at the new generation of e-commerce wine site like NakedWines 0r ClubW, which just raised $3.1M. But if Tesco decides to develop social commerce for wine, it has the muscle to trail blaze, and grow the site into a major e-commerce wine destination.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college textbook division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices. Speculation about the plan to discontinue the Nook surfaced in February. The documents we have are not clear on whether the third-party tablets would be Microsoft’s own Windows 8 devices, tablets made by others (including competing platforms) or both. Third-party tablets, according to the document, are due to get introduced in 2014.

Nook e-readers, meanwhile, do not appear to fall into the discontinuation pile immediately. Rather, they’re projected to have their own gradual, natural decline — following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets as all-purpose devices.

Microsoft and B&N representatives declined to comment for this story.

A deal to buy the digital assets of Nook Media is the natural next step for Microsoft, which first announced a plan to work with Barnes & Noble on its Nook devices and content in April 2012, ponying up $300 million at the time to help. That plan included an additional $180 million advance to develop content for its Windows 8 devices — which Nook has been doing.

To date, there have been 10 million Nook devices sold, including both tablets and e-readers, with more than 7 million active subscribers. Microsoft has seen limited interested in its Windows 8 devices (although it says it has sold more than 100 million licenses for the OS to date). Currently the Nook app is available on every major platform, including Android, iOS and Windows.

Nook Media split from the retail arm last October with a $300 million investment by Microsoft for a 16.8 percent stake in the company. The partnership was aimed at getting B&N content on then-nascent Windows 8 tablets. At the time, President of Digital Product at Nook Media, Jamie Iannone, said “It’s hardware, software, content: everything Nook is part of Nook Media. There will always be a long-term relationship between Barnes & Noble and the Nook business.”

Nook’s decline seems to have helped alter company strategy. Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio proposed buying back the whole of the company’s retail operation.

The documents TC has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion. When Nook Media was first formed, the valuation of that division alone was $1.7 billion. When Pearson invested $85 million at a 5 percent stake in January, it was valued at $1.8 billion. If the deal goes through, Microsoft’s $1 billion purchase will be well below the price it had originally bought in at.

Projections in the document, which are based on company filings and management discussions, show the Nook unit bringing in total revenue of $1.215 billion for fiscal year 2012 (which for Barnes & Noble ended April 30th), for a loss of $262 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). It expects revenue to fall to $1.091 billion in fiscal year 2013, for a loss of $360 million as tablets are phased out — and estimates revenues to gradually recover, up to $1.976 billion by fiscal year 2017, for EBITDA profit of $362 million.

In the meantime, the Nook division has taken a beating this year following a slow holiday season. The new models have sold at a discount for weeks at a time and their flagship 10-inch Nook HD+ fell from $269 to $179. Kindle is offering the Fire HD for the same price. The hardware, while in many ways superior to Amazon’s, seems to have fallen behind in the race to market share and revenue. If Microsoft steps in, the dedicated e-reader race between the stalwart B&N and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon could be over.

John Biggs contributed to this article.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cisco Meraki has launched a new service called Presence that provides data about mobile behavior across location and automatic log-in to wireless hotspots using a person’s Facebook account.

Presence additionally provides an API that allows integration with real-time location data into CRM and other business systems. Presence also allows for third-party data integration that can be analyzed with location-based information.

Merak was acquired by Cisco last November for $1.2 billion. According to Josh Constine’s post, Meraki began as a research project at MIT in 2006. It provides mid to large-size companies, schools, and organizations with on-premise mesh Wi-Fi networking and security devices plus the software to manage them. Its technology is now integrated into Cisco access points. According to the blog, with Presence, customers get an analytics dashboard that displays real-time metrics such as capture rate, median visit length, and visitor repeat rate for mobile devices in proximity to Meraki access points.

The service has uses in retail to give a marketing manager access to data that may show how long they look at a window display or if an in-store promotion drew them to the store. That data can then be correlated to revenue data and third-party CRM data.

Cisco and Facebook have also partnered to let guests log-in to Wi-Fi networks with their Facebook account. This seems pretty unique and an example of how Facebook is becoming a universal identity provider. It benefits the client who can use the Facebook login to make it simpler for their customers to get wireless access.

Now just think of what all this additional data provides to Facebook. They get data to target ads for the retail customer or perhaps a coffee shop down the street that wants to draw traffic with a special drink offer for a dry latte with extra foam.

Privacy. Well, this is the elephant in the room, isn’t it? The Meraki blog makes a point of saying they do not collect personal data. That it’s nothing more than understanding customer behavior.

In summary, Meraki collects no personally identifiable information (e.g., we don’t see or store a user’s Facebook credentials). Clients’ MAC addresses, used to construct location analytics dashboards, are hashed and truncated before being stored in Meraki’s cloud so they cannot be associated with an individual device (i.e. there’s no data stored that can show that a given device was at a specific location.) Users can also opt-out of Meraki’s Presence data collection across all Meraki networks; we won’t store MAC addresses — hashed or otherwise — and Presence events will not be passed through the API.

But here’s the thing. Data analytics is about correlating information. A retailer may not need to know who you are with one set of data. But they can always cross-reference it with other information to know exactly who the customer is, how they got there, what they did in the store and where they went after leaving.

So sure, everyone takes privacy seriously. But it’s up to the vendor and the client to be responsible in how to handle the power that they gain from all that information.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook removed 27 job listings from its careers page this week, likely after making hires in the areas of measurement, strategic partner development, communications and others.

In notable departures news, Chief Accounting Officer David Spillane is reportedly stepping down, with Jas Athwal, Facebook’s Corporate Controller, Revenue, taking his place.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Executive Speechwriter, Marketing Communications (Menlo Park)
• Lead, Vertical Measurement – Retail (Chicago – New York – Menlo Park)
• Regional Product Marketing Partner (London)
• Account Manager, CPG (Chicago)
• Global Account Manager (Mexico City)
• Strategic Partner Development, Entertainment (London)
• Strategic Partner Development, Media (New York) (New York)
• Media Solutions, Melbourne (Australia) (Melbourne)
• Media Solutions, Sydney (Australia) (Sydney)
• Agency Partner (Warsaw)
• Client Partner, Warsaw (Warsaw)
• Client Partner, Czech (Dublin)
• Client Partner, Gaming, EMEA (Dublin)
• Client Partner – Retail, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney – Melbourne)
• Head of CPG, Entertainment & Automotive (Sydney)
• Relationship Manager (Singapore)
• Agency Account Specialist (New York)
• Finance Manager, FP&A – Platform Partnerships & Operations (Menlo Park)
• Lead Advertising and Privacy Counsel (Menlo Park)
• Associate Manager, Consumer Communications (Los Angeles)
• AV/VC Operations Manager (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Physical Security Systems (Menlo Park)
• Benefits Program Manager (Menlo Park)
• Associate UX Researcher (Menlo Park)
• Logistics and Warehousing Program Manager (Menlo Park)
• Technical Writer, Site Operations (Menlo Park)
• Sourcing Manager, Server Hardware (Menlo Park)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The team at Siminars has developed what they call an “online platform with all the tools you need to build, publish and distribute highly effective courses.”

It means that rather than just using a written text to teach a concept, Siminars’ web platform lets a teacher of a subject tie together many different media types into one unified experience that steps a user through the learning process in an organized fashion.

The subject could be anything from an academic concept or a training procedure. The platform allows the teacher to create a series of steps to teach the concept that includes everything from reading text, to watching videos, to completing projects away from the computer and more.

To be clear, Siminars doesn’t seem to deliver anything that couldn’t be accomplished with multiple tools like Powerpoint, and various web quizes, but the concept here is that they bring it all into one platform so it is easy to use to teach and learn. It’s a one-stop-shop, so to speak.

Recently the startup inked a deal with Deepak Chopra (who happens to be a relative of one of the founders) to republish one of his books in this new learning format.

In terms of monetization, Siminars has three different models: Open, Retail and Private. The Open model is totally free. Anyone who wants to teach something for free can do so with the platform.

However, if a teacher decides they want to comercialize their content, then they can sign up for the Retail program where Siminars takes 20 percent of each content purchase. The private model is yet another model where a company may want to offer internal training to small teams or to an entire enterprise. It’s a tiered model based on the number of users.

In general, this seems to be a valid approach and holistic way to streamline teaching subject matter. I could see how there could be appeal for businesses and educational institutions. The only hang-up I could see in the primary/secondary educational route would be maintenence of a pricing scheme that fits in with tight educational budgets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After bringing on a new global business lead from Google, Square is making another key executive hire today. The payments company is announcing that Alex Petrov, a former PayPal exec , will be the Square’s Vice President of Partnerships.

Petrov was most recently the Vice President of Retail Marketing at PayPal, where he was responsible for merchant marketing and helping launch PayPal into offline retail. He was previously the Vice President of Consumer Brands at Safeway, where he led the marketing and growth of Safeway’s private brands portfolio, including launching over 1,000 new products. Petrov was also a marketing executive at Nestlé.

“Square’s passion for innovation and its relentless focus on the customer experience completely change how retailers can do business,” said Petrov in a release. “I look forward to bringing Square to merchants of all sizes, from local businesses to the largest retailers in the world.”

Square, who just updated its iPad register app to be more restaurant-friendly, says that its adoption amongst merchants is growing at a faster rate on iPads, where customers are using Square as a full point-of-sale system. iPad customers now represent nearly 50% of total payments processed by Square. The average payment volume processed by these customers is also more than double the average volume processed by Square customers using smartphones.

More high-profile brands and partnerships like the Starbucks deal could be helpful for Square when it comes to marketing and branding. We’re told that Petrov will be working on forming these types of partnerships, as well as strategic business development and customer acquisition for Square.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice for day two is ShipHawk, a Santa Barbara-based shipping startup that launched this week at the conference. ShipHawk, co-founded by Jeremy Bodenhamer and Aaron Freeman, is a fully-featured online shipping platform that takes care of everything from providing shipping estimates to handling package pickup, delivery, packing, insurance and more for both residential and commercial addresses, for small and medium-sized businesses.

While the key difference that ShipHawk has from other shipping services is that it provides estimates without having to see items packed beforehand, it also adds to the experience by allowing customers located anywhere to organize pick up and delivery from other locations, so that a client based in SF can ship an item from New York, without doing so much as cutting a piece of packing tape. And the process is made much more transparent, including packing (boxes, materials) and transport.

The company works like any other retail shipping operation, and charges the same as you’d find at any of those. It makes a referral-type commission from the businesses that actually handle fulfillment, including UPS and FedEx, as well as insurance companies and agencies that handle the packing. Right now, Bodenhamer says that they make their revenue strictly by collecting the finder’s fee for referring customers to the services of other companies, but they’re already talking to VP-level execs at FedEx about fostering a deeper partnership.

Both Bodenhamer and Freeman have previous experience in the shipping and logistics worlds. Freeman has 10 years experience in shipping, and Bodenhamer’s business recently acquired Freeman’s retail shipping store in Santa Barbara.

“We got together after I bought the business and we said ‘What’s broken around retail shipping?’ and we came with an idea to solve the problem,” Bodenhamer said. That involved looking at pain points for customers, which included the process mentioned above around assessing the price of a shipping job up front, and around getting the package to a shipper quickly and easily without having to resort to using yet another service provider.

ShipHawk has around $500,000 in seed funding so far, mostly secured from friends and families, as well as some independent angels and investment firms. Thus far, the focus has been on getting help to make sure the platform addresses the needs of actual users, Bodenhamer says.

“We have a network locally of people who are advising us and helping us to formulate the whole plan,” he said. “We believe strongly that this has the potential to grow into a household name-type business, just like Expedia or Kayak. So just like when you need a plane ticket, you don’t go to American Airlines, you go to Expedia.com, when you want to ship something you won’t go to FedEx.com, you’ll go to ShipHawk.”

At first, ShipHawk will be serving the Southern California area, with plans to expand across the U.S. after that. It’s a good idea to start local with a business like this that involves quite a lot of logistics, and coordinating with local companies and resources. It’ll also offer a “ship free” promotion that rewards people for recommending their friends, the same way that Dropbox has done to ramp up user acquisition as it expands.

The mobile app for ShipHawk, which is now on the web as an MVP product, is currently on the roadmap and will arrive sometime down the road once they have the product up and running smoothly in their initial launch markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With a plan of making product ratings social, Greentape is launching a new app that they hope will bring in-store product reviews to consumers while (hopefully) spawning more product purchases for merchants. The team is demoing this new app at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

Greentape works like this: Consumers download the app, and as they move throughout a retail store the location aware app notifies them about products with the active user reviews as they pass by those products. It is accurate to about 3 feet or so, according to CEO Chris Daltas.

My first question of course was “how is this different from ShopKick”. Chris was quick to point out that Greentape is all about reviews and not rewards. It is purely about what user reviews exist for certain products, but tied to products in a local store.

For example, their demo on the Startup Alley floor included a faux shoe display. As a user comes within range of the display, a list of reviews for all the different shoes in the display pops up on the app. The product with the highest ratings, shows up on top. Users can view these reviews to make purchasing decisions, or leave their own reviews.

From a technical standpoint, Greentape’s system works with the help of a fixed number of hardware beacons that are installed within a retail location. Those beacons are linked with software, so that merchants can associate products with certain areas in the retail store.

From that point on, any smartphone using the app in an outfitted retail location can have access to leave and read product reviews.

So that’s how it is good for consumers — empowered shopping experiences. But how is it good for merchants?

It is good for merchants because, the reviews could trigger an engagement that leads to a purchase. Also, the merchant is capturing lots of data about consumers inside their stores.

Greentape will be deploying this service soon, in some capacity, with both Whole Foods and  Alex and Ani.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LightSpeed, the retail software company that raised $30 million from Accel Partners last year, is launching a new Mac application today that it calls the StoreMaster — it’s supposed to serve as a “command center,” offering a real-time, customizable view of the latest sales and inventory data.

The StoreMaster is the big piece of LightSpeed’s version 3.8 upgrade. Founder and CEO Dax Dasilva told me that LightSpeed (which was founded in 2005) has recently focused on “front counter” tools, such as iPad apps that help salespeople show off different products. The StoreMaster, on the other hand, is more of a “back office” tool and an overhaul of the previous Mac experience.

“Lightspeed is this integrated platform — it’s got all these pieces, and this is where it all comes together,” he said.

Features include a gallery of products, including price and inventory data; immediate notifications for all incoming orders, as well as monthly reports; the ability to save custom searches as “Smart Finds”; and widgets that allow managers to see things like how the store’s performance compares to daily or monthly sales goals. One of the big advantages, Dasilva said, is the ability to see how a product is performing across all channels — in-store, mobile, and online.

He added that even though it’s not exactly the target customer, the LightSpeed team — which has expanded from 41 to 85 people in the past year — uses LightSpeed software, and that team members have become “obsessed with our dashboards.” Again, the dashboard is built from various interactive widgets, so users get a completely customizable view of store data. Dasilva said his own own dashboard shows an annotated chart of the LightSpeed’s sales and targets.

Existing customers should be able upgrade to LightSpeed 3.8 immediately.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch