The latest from TechCrunch
- Addoway Is Like eBay With A Social Streak
- How To Avoid Getting Fired From Your Own Company
- Google As A Carrier. It's Not A Question Of "If They Will", But Rather "When They'll Try"
- What The "Great Delicious Exodus" Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard
| Addoway Is Like eBay With A Social Streak | Top |
| If you’ve ever gone shopping on eBay, you know how important seller ratings can be — take a stab with someone who has less than a 90-something approval rating, and you’re testing your luck. And even when you’ve found someone with a satisfactory rating, the descriptions left by other buyers tend to be mostly useless ( A++++ , anyone?), which makes the whole thing feel a little risky regardless. Oh, and sellers can always get scammed by buyers, which makes it even more fun. Addoway is an e-commerce site that looks to help reduce these feelings of anxiety by using Facebook Connect to help you find sellers that your friends have had good experiences dealing with in the past. The site launched eight months ago, and is currently drawing 90,000 uniques a month. The premise is simple: when you run a search on Addoway for whatever it is you’re looking to buy (say, an Xbox), the site will let you sort listings by your social connections. If you know someone who has interacted with a certain seller before, then they’ll show up at the top — and you can talk to your friends about their experience with that seller if you’re still hesitant. Of course, in order for these social connections to be of any use you need to actually know people who are using the site to either buy or sell things. And right now it’s pretty unlikely — even if you have a few hundred friends, the odds that one of them is using Addoway to sell the item you’re looking for is very low. CEO Fredrick Nijm agrees that it’s unlikely that the social connections will be much help at this point, but he believes that if the site grows in popularity, it will become much more useful. For the nearer-term, Addoway has a back-up plan in place to help make shoppers more comfortable: very transparent seller listings. The site invites sellers to link up their blogs, Amazon accounts, eBay seller profiles, and YouTube videos, allowing visitors to quickly get a snapshot of who they are. Granted, reading someone’s blog or watching their videos doesn’t necessarily help you determine if they’re a reputable seller, but this kind of transparency can still potentially help instill a greater sense of trust. Maybe. So far the site has over 400,000 listings, most of which have been sucked in from eBay (Addoway lets sellers connect with their eBay, Etsy, and Bonanza accounts). Nijm declined to say how many active sellers the site has, but says that most of them (including those who have linked their eBay accounts) are still active. The site makes money by offering a premium account to sellers for $8.95 per month that gives them prominent placement in search results and Addoway’s social media presences. In the future the site will also add transaction fees, though existing users will have a window where they won’t have to pay them. This is a very difficult market to crack into, especially given how much traction Addoway will need for its social connections to become useful, and Nijm knows it. Still, he says that this is the only service that uses Facebook Connect to help buyers pick out reputable sellers (as opposed to using it for product recommendations, the way Amazon does), and he says that Addoway has seen significant growth over the last several months, going from 60,000 uniques a couple of months ago to 90,000 today. CrunchBase Information Addoway Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| How To Avoid Getting Fired From Your Own Company | Top |
| According to an SEC filing today, the Chicago based Centro has just raised a whopping $22.5 million (rounded up) in equity only funding. Listed on the SEC form are Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker and FTV Capita l Partner Eric Byunn as Director. Centro is a digital media and technology services company founded in 2001, serving over 350 ad agencies world wide . The company’s recently launched platform Transis automates and centralizes the media buying and selling process so agencies can save time and money. This looks to be the first major funding round for Centro; The company had also raised a much smaller $276,247 round back when it was called Intégrent, Inc. CrunchBase Information Centro Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google As A Carrier. It's Not A Question Of "If They Will", But Rather "When They'll Try" | Top |
| CNNMoney published an interesting piece by David Goldman this morning entitled, Google: Your new phone carrier? In it, Goldman lays out what he sees as the preliminary steps Google has taken to become a wireless carrier themselves down the road. He also gives some reasons for why they would and would not want to do that. In my mind, the concept is much more straightforward. Goldman ends the title of his piece with a question mark — but it should be a period. It’s not a question of “if” Google will try to become a carrier. It’s just a matter of “when” they’ll try to. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean I think they’ll actually be able to become a carrier. The biggest hurdle there has nothing to do with the technology needed, the money needed, or the expertise. Rather, the major issue would be the government. Would they allow Google, already one of the biggest corporations in the United States, to enter a new area that could extend their control (particularly in the advertising space)? Probably not. Actually, I have a feeling it might have more to do with Verizon and AT&T lobbying dollars influencing the government to block Google in such a cause. But again, Google will try. It may be a few years from now, but it’s inevitable. Here’s the key blurb of the CNNMoney piece, far down: It’s not likely in the immediate future. Google’s Android is the hottest item in the mobile market, and the company relies on carriers to adopt its software and drive customers to its search site. But it’s a real possibility down the road. The Federal Communications Commission recently failed to enact strong Net neutrality rules for the wireless community. That leaves open the option for carriers to restrict their subscribers’ access to some of Google’s offerings. Without the net neutrality safeguards in place, the carriers will make moves to restrict certain services down the road. YouTube is one example. Google Voice is probably another. There will likely be a dozen others. Interestingly enough, it’s none other than Google who will share a big part of the blame for this happening. Not only did they leave Android so open so as to allow for the carriers to do whatever they want, but they also teamed up with none other than Verizon to dream up the current bogus non-rules the FCC just voted to adopt for wireless access. But what if it is just a big “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” scenario? What if Google saw teaming up with Verizon as the only way to move at least part of the net neutrality debate forward (as Google CEO Eric Schmidt has more or less stated) and realized that it was inevitable that they’d be competing with them in wireless down the road? It can’t be ruled out. And at the very least, the partnership may be a bit of bet hedging — a way to ensure continued money-making just in case they can’t enter the wireless space down the road. Remember that Google has done some sly manipulation of the space in the past. In 2008, they put up a huge bid to buy a portion of the wireless spectrum that the FCC was opening. But Google had no intention of actually winning with that bid. Instead, they bid just enough ($4.6 billion) to ensure that the open device and application rules would be put in place on the spectrum, no matter who won the rights to control it. And who won those rights? Verizon (and AT&T to a lesser extent). While Google and the carriers may seem all buddy-buddy now, in the not-too-distant future, they will likely be at odds with one another. The reason will be that the carriers will begin restricting what Google thinks should be open. And Google will have to make some moves to open things up once again. Rumors of Google buying one of the smaller U.S. carriers, namely Sprint, have been around since at least 2007. Those rumors pop up every year, and they will likely only intensify going forward. One issue there is that it would only solve the U.S. problem. Of course, given the state of carrier control in this country, it is likely the problem Google will want to solve first. The other bigger issue, again, is the government blocking such a purchase. Instead, Google may simply try to buy up chunks of spectrum from others. Or build out their white space initiative, the so-called “ WiFi on steroids “. Or maybe they’ll dream up some other new technology to try to end carrier dominance. This is the company behind self-driving cars , after all. Remember, Google is already entering the ISP game with their fiber optic broadband test. Why? Because the state of broadband in this country is pretty piss poor thanks largely to de-facto regional monopolies in place. The next, and more important step is for them to take to the skies. And for largely the same reason. And Google will try to. It’s only a matter of time. I’m just worried that like most things they’re attempting these days, it will be easier said than done . [photo: flickr/ woodleywonderworks ] CrunchBase Information Google Verizon AT&T Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| What The "Great Delicious Exodus" Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard | Top |
| When word got out two weeks ago that Yahoo is not 100% committed to Delicious, people who still use the bookmarking service started to panic and look for alternatives. One competing bookmarking site that some people turned to is Pinboard , a barebones bookmarking site which looks a lot like Delicious did in its early years: lean, no-frills, and very useful. The company saw an influx of traffic and activity. The chart above shows requests per minute to its servers in the three days following the Delicious news compared to the week before. A couple hour ago, Pinboard Tweeted out a link to the chart: @PinboardIN Pinboard This is what the Great Delicious Exodus looked like to our servers: http://bit.ly/frLwmA (contrasted with normal traffic a week earlier) December 29, 2010 7:42 pm via TweetDeck Retweet Reply The service wasn’t handling a huge number of requests to begin with—a few hundred per minute at peak—but that number increased about tenfold to over 2,500 requests per minute. Pinboard allows you to import your bookmarks out of Delicious. Mike suggested switching from Delicious more than a year ago. But from what I can tell it only has about 9,000 users. You are asked to pay a one-time fee to sign up, which helps to prevent spammers from joining. The current fee is $9.07 and it is based on the number of users. So not a whole lot of Delicious users switched to Pinboard, but it was enough to move the needle for the small bookmarking site. Update : Pinboard says it has closer to 16,000 users. The longer Delicious remains in purgatory , the more users are going to look for alternatives like Pinboard. The site even provides an honest list of pros and cons for those considering the switch. CrunchBase Information Pinboard delicious Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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