The latest from TechCrunch
- Going Shopping Today? Share What You #JustBought With All Your Friends
- 6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan's Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan)
- Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January
- Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products
| Going Shopping Today? Share What You #JustBought With All Your Friends | Top |
| Perfect for Black Friday: JustBought.it lets you share what you’re thinking of buying – or what you’ve already picked up – with your Twitter and Facebook friends in just a couple of steps. When you sign up for the service, you can have it connect directly to your Twitter and/or Facebook account, giving you the opportunity to share your shopping experience with your social graph by letting your friends and followers know what you’ve purchased where (including pictures and product links). You can hook up with other people who have similar interests, and easily determine if you have friends who are already using the service on Gmail or Hotmail. So if you stumble on what looks to be a good deal today, inform you friends and have them help you decide using the website or the accompanying free iPhone app ( iTunes link ), if you’re into the whole social shopping thing. Do you have an Android-powered phone? Check out the startup’s augmented reality application, which shows you what others have purchased in the stores you visit. JustBought.it is an initiative from Adarsh Pallian , who has in the past started other projects related to Twitter such as Tweetizen and Chart.ly . It was first launched a couple of months ago, but just recently relaunched with a new design and some additional features. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| 6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan's Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan) | Top |
| We reported today that Digital Garage , Twitter’s partner in Japan, is ready to roll out a new, Japan-only way to monetize the service. The way it’ll work is pretty simple: Japanese Twitter users will soon be able to charge their followers to view tweets – on a monthly basis or per single tweet. Otherwise they will only see excerpts or no text in the postings at all. Digital Garage gets a 30% cut. Not charging companies for holding accounts but having users pay to view tweets? What may sound like a bold move at first actually makes sense, as the web in Japan (where I am based) features a number of peculiarities that play into the hands of Digital Garage’s Japanese operations: Japan is the only market in the world where Twitter offers an official mobile client (launched last month ). And in this country, the mobile web is bigger than the fixed Internet, with no signs of a reversing trend (not too few people even expect the gap to be widening in the future). Japanese mobile web users are used to pay for content. The possibility to conveniently pay through the monthly phone bill makes it easy for content providers to charge fees ranging from a few cents to many dollars ( more background ). And tweets are nothing but content. Charging for premium access on the fixed web isn’t unusual either. Japanese social networks like Mixi or special interest sites such as super-popular recipe site Cookpad have been doing this for years (paying monthly unlocks premium features on both the mobile and fixed Internet). Roughly speaking, between 5 and 15% of all members usually opt for these premium models in Japan. Twitter is estimated to have around 2 million registered users in Japan – enough critical mass to make a payment model experiment worthwhile. Writing in Japanese and Chinese characters, Japanese Twitter users can squeeze considerably more text into single tweets than those posting in English, for example. This theoretically boosts the potential for posting tweets that are “valuable” content-wise. It might also be part of the thinking behind the pay-per-tweet option. In sharp contrast to the West, Japanese web users are generally way more interested in what celebrities (singers, actors, TV stars etc.) “are doing” or “what’s happening” in their private lives. Some posts on their official blogs can contain simple content such as a picture of a lunch meal and still draw thousands of comments – on a single posting (click here for an example with 10,000 comments). Digital Garage explicitly says the payment model is geared towards fans of those “famous” Twitter users. Fueled by coverage in the press and even on national TV (unusual for any web service in Japan), Twitter’s growth in Japan has been accelerating in the past weeks. Elsewhere it seems to be flattening currently. It’s unclear at this point if only users of the Japanese interface will be able to see if Digital Garage’s experiment (Twitter Japan doesn’t exist as a separate entity) turns out to be successful or not. Another question is how the payment option will be handled in the API and how closely Twitter in the US is watching what’s going on in Japan. We’ll stay tuned. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January | Top |
| The news of the day in social media land: Twitter is apparently going to start experimenting with paid premium accounts through its Japanese subsidiary, which has always been a bit separated from the rest of Twitter and in many ways a playground for the company ( Groups , Twicco , Twitvideo.jp ). Details are sketchy at this point, but Japanese media are reporting that Twitter is going to introduce a tiered payment model and aims to charge people to view tweets from certain premium Twitter accounts. Update: TC contributor Serkan Toto (who’s based in Japan) followed up with six reasons why this subscription model might just work out well for Twitter … in Japan. Twitter Japan, which is operated under supervision of Twitter investor Digital Garage , launched in April 2008 and boasted display ads right out the gate. At a conference earlier this week, Kenichi Sugi, COO of DG Mobile (a Digital Garage subsidiary), announced that Twitter would now add paid subscription options starting in January 2010, allowing account holders to charge audiences for access to their tweets, more text, images, links to their external websites and so on. Billing would be done on a monthly basis for a price that ranges from 100 Yen (approx. $1.15) and 1000 Yen (which converts to roughly $11.5). Users will apparently be able to use their credit cards, have their mobile carrier include it in their invoices, or even purchase a prepaid ticket at a convenience store to pay for the premium service. Finally, Twitter will be taking a 30 percent cut on transaction fees. The assumption is that this model would be fit for account holders who deliver real-time information, news and educational content, and tend to include original photographs, video images and audio in their tweets. The idea isn’t exactly brand new: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned earlier this year they were thinking of commercializing accounts as a way to get some revenue out of the popular service. But the surprising part is that people will actually be charged for access to premium accounts, rather than having holders pay for them. At least, in Japan. If I were a betting man, I’d say this is not something Twitter is going to be rolling out in the rest of the world any time soon though. (Thanks for the tip, Paul Papadimitriou and ITmedia for the image below – more coverage at The Next Web and Brandrepublic ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products | Top |
| If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO – not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods). The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes , a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics). Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet. Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader , which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated). Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well. Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
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