Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Google continues to enhance its business in e-commerce and providing a portal for users to search and find things to buy alongside ads for those products. Today it was announced that Google has bought Channel Intelligence, a provider of technology to companies to enable customers to buy their products online, for $125 million in an all-cash deal.
The recently launched, AngelPad-backed payments startup called Ribbon is today introducing new functionality that allows users to buy from merchants and other sellers directly in the Facebook News Feed. In addition, the company is confirming the close of its $1.6 million seed round, led by Tim Draper’s Draper Associates. Participating in the round were Siemer Ventures, Emil Michael (Klout COO), Naguib Sawiris, Winston Ibrahim (Hydros) and MicroVentures.
Millions of people across the U.S. are preparing their jerseys, face paint and horrific nachos. Yes, football fans rejoice, the big game finally kicks off tomorrow in New Orleans — that is, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Franciso 49ers. The Super Bowl is always one of the biggest media events per year, and our inboxes have been flooded with “OMG this is going to be the most social Super Bowl EVAR” emails for weeks now.
It’s going to be a close, hard-fought game between two teams that most people will probably know nothing about until kickoff. But because the Super Bowl has become such a spectacle, there are tons of things to pay attention to on the Web and on social media, while stuffing your face with fried food and trying to watch the game while asking your friends what happened on the last play.
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InfoArmy — a startup built on the “Data 2.0” concept of crowdsourced competitive intelligence — has today sent out a letter, printed in full below, to its researchers informing them that it is pulling the plug on its current business model after failing to find enough sales for the research reports, and being unable to sustain the quality of the work that was being produced. As a result, it will be offering reports on its site free of charge and will no longer be paying researchers for their contributions, as it tries to figure out what to do next.
Urban Compass, the startup in stealth mode that raised an $8 million seed round from high-profile investors late in 2012, is slowly revealing more details about what it will be doing, and how it will be doing it, when it launches for business later this year — most likely in April.
As Facebook continues to build out the App Center and its overall business as a platform for third parties, it’s also tightening up how payment policies work within it. In one of the latest moves, the company has changed how it pays out to PayPal accounts for new (not existing) developers who select that option. Specifically, Facebook now requires extra levels of authentication for new developers from certain countries, including large, emerging markets like China, India, Brazil but also some mature countries such as Australia, Japan and Norway.
Chilean startup Vendly wants to cash in on mobile by turning your smartphone into a free mobile marketplace. The Vendly iPhone app lets you sell (aka ‘vend’) items; impulse buy from your friends (or strangers); and help others sell their item by ‘revending’ (think retweeting) their item on your profile so that all your friends/followers get to see it too.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, isn’t entirely happy with what he has created — and has thrown down the gauntlet to web developers to come up with more disruptive forms of online communication. He was speaking in an interview at the World Economic Forum today entitled ‘what’s wrong with social networking?’ but joked the title had been cooked up merely to draw in the crowds.
“We could go public,” SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg says, “but the cost of going public — of running a public company — outweighs the benefits.” As the founder of LAUNCH Media, which he took public before selling to Yahoo! (where he stayed for six years), Goldberg is familiar with the IPO process and isn’t in any hurry to repeat it.
TechCrunch has learned that Lockerz, the social commerce and photo sharing service, is downsizing. It has shut down its San Diego office, laying off all but two of the staff who will now work remotely, and it has also laid of “around 30%” of its head office in Seattle, with its chief product officer Michael Walton among those going. A source tells us that the other people laid off in Seattle include people working in merchandizing and marketing.
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