GSI Commerce, a company that powers e-commerce platforms for major brands, has acquired Retail Convergence, which operates RueLaLa.com, a private sale site and SmartBargains.com, an off-price e-commerce marketplace, in a deal valued as high as $350 million.
Launched in April 2008, RueLaLa is a members-only online sample sale that sells luxury brands at discount prices during two-day private sale events in the fashion, accessories, footwear, home, jewelry and other categories. SmartBargains.com, which launched in 1999, is a online marketplace for the sale of off-price merchandise across a wide cross-section of categories. → Read More
Manufacturers, let me save you some money. It won’t be much, but something is better than nothing. But more importantly you would be helping out the consumers actually spending money on your products. So please, stop including standard A/V cables with Blu-ray players. We don’t need anymore of them, thankyouverymuch. Every household in America already has a drawer full of red/white/yellow cables and plus, Blu-ray players shouldn’t be hooked up with them anyway. But if you simply must include a set of cables with your players, how about a set of component cables or even an HDMI cable? After all Blu-ray player buyers are probably – hopefully – getting the player to watch high-def content and those simple red, white, and yellow cables don’t provide that last time I checked. → Read More
Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft and Google, they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.
There isn’t much more to say about this right now. We’ve reached out to both Yahoo and OneRiot for comment and await their reply. The look of the Yahoo search results may look similar to the OneRiot/WebMynd Firefox plugin that adds real time results to the side of normal Google search results – it certainly makes sense to keep the results separated. See image below.
OneRiot has raised $27 million to date in venture capital. → Read More
Back before I started playing World of Warcraft (because of something that was work-related, incidentally), I used to tease my then-roommate about playing it well into the night, every night. I was a freshman at a certain horrendously expensive school, and my gaming started and stopped with my Xbox; I had no time for time-sink PC games. Not my roommate, no sir. The day the game came out—he had also been part of the beta—he plopped into his small, uncomfortable chair, Sunkist in hand (man alive did he love Sunkist for some reason), and quested well into the night away. → Read More
There’s something alluring about the idea of a message in a bottle. You write something, cast it out to sea, and hopefully someday some random person finds it. Naturally, someone had to do that for Twitter.
As a Twitter app, 140inABottle is as simple as they come. On the page, you’re presented with a 140-character space to write whatever you want. You’re not asked to sign in to Twitter to send it, because it will be sent from the 140inabottle Twitter account. The only thing you have to do is complete a reCAPTCHA to ensure you’re a human and not spamming the system. → Read More
Libraries, the places where homeless people, famously, shave and go BM, are seeing an uptick in subscribers thanks to their embrace of ebooks. Our own Brooklyn system has had downloadable ebooks for a few years now and the system is fairly simple: you check out a book to read on your device and then “check it back in” when you’re done. This frees up the download for the next person. The book deletes itself automatically past the due date. → Read More
Robots now enter the agriculture industry, too. First the award-winning rice-transplanting robot, now this: Major Japanese conglomerate Fuji Heavy Industries has developed an agricultural robot that can tend fields autonomously. → Read More
Perhaps someday you’ll buy an Android device to use primarily for gaming. It could happen! Pictured above is the ODROID, a gaming-focused portable running Android and packing a powerful 833MHz Cortex A8 CPU. → Read More
Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have just announced that they’ll be leaving the company come October 31, when their contracts expire. The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise — it will have been three years to the day that Condé Nast acquired Reddit, and the founders likely had a three year contract as part of the deal. Reddit’s post notes that while co-founder Chris Slowe’s contract also expired he’ll be staying on board.
Reddit was funded by Y Combinator and launched back in 2005, emerging as the most popular alternative to Digg. As with Digg, stories are presented based on how many people have up and down voted them, but the two sites have distinctly different communities. → Read More
Twitter is on the verge of rolling out its Geolocation API (actually, it’s already partially rolled out). That feature should be a boon to location-based services which can now send their location information back to Twitter and vice versa. But these locations will just be coordinates, it won’t be like Foursquare or Gowalla where you check in to actual places to tag your location. A new group aims to merge the ideas.
HashCeratops (yes, that’s really the name) is a group being led by Buzzd, the service that finds hot places in cities based on other location services. One main feed Buzzd looks to for its data is the Twitter stream. The problem is that without a standard for naming locations, it can be hard to parse tweets to find out exactly where people are. Hence, HashCeratops. → Read More
Multitouch isn’t just for tech nerds anymore according to Dell. The firm’s latest convertible tablet PC is rocking a 12.1-inch multi-touch capable touchscreen in a chassis that’s designed for manly men tasks. The chassis was engineered and tested to meet MIL-810G standards, but yet the notebook is only 1.5-inches thick and weighs in at 5.4 pounds. Look out, Jack Bauer and Mike Rowe. This one is for you two. → Read More
Yes, you can leave work early today. No need to ask your boss, he/she is okay with it.
If you haven’t had your fill of music rhythm games by now or you watched with a furrowed brow as guitar-based game after guitar-based game flooded the market, your giant headphones covering only one of your ears and held in place by your own shoulder just like your favorite DJs, then you’ll want to scrounge up between $100 and $200 for Activision’s DJ Hero, depending on your console and whether or not you want the special “Renegade Edition.” → Read More
There we were ranting about Google selectively sharing Android 2.0 without making it available to developers en masse, and then they went ahead and did just that. Beginning immediately, Android 2.0 support is available in the Android SDK.
Don’t expect it to be available (at least not through any official means) on any device until the Motorola Droid launches, which all signs indicate will happen sometime in early November.
Here are the big, user-facing changes: → Read More
If you’re into button-mashing melee games a la Super Smash Brothers and whatnot, then perhaps you’d enjoy a change of scenery and fighters with our old friends the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. → Read More
Venture backed adult site Zivity finally figured out that there’s a whole other market out there beyond guys (and a few women) who want to look at naked women. Lots of women (and a few men) apparently want to look at naked guys, too. So in a lightning bolt of marketing genius, they doubled their potential market size in a single blog post: Zividudes.
They’re taking nominations for who users want to see without their clothes on (topless for now). Once the list is set they’ll start going down the list to see who’s brave enough to say yes: “We’ll start with the top choice and work our way down until someone is brave enough to say yes! We’ll pay for the photo shoot by one of our top photographers, so the Zivity Dude will look *fantastic*.”
Who do you want to see shirtless? Twitter the name out with the hashtag #zividude and your vote will be counted. Early favorites include Kevin Rose, Chris Saad, Loren Feldman (although his wife is making the push), Jim Fishef and Sean Percival.
Let me know how it all turns out. And be on the lookout for Ashton Kutcher to try to steal the show. That guy will do anything for a little press. In fact, maybe Kutcher and Kevin Rose can do a dual bromance photoshoot? → Read More
“Media insiders” in Australia are reporting that Apple has approached them to produce content for a device “larger than the iPhone.” The Sydney Morning Herald puts another shrimp on the barbie by saying:
Apple has sent specifications of the device to Australian media companies in an effort to sound out whether they would be interested in delivering their content to the tablet. None would speak about the device on the record.
This follows Bill Keller’s offhand remark that the paper was working for content on an “Apple Slate.”
I call bull. → Read More
Toronto-based BlueCat Networks, a provider of enterprise IP management solutions, has raised $11 million in its first round of institutional financing led by Menlo Park, CA-based firm Bridgescale Partners.
BlueCat caters to network administrators who face a variety of IP-related pressures like the introduction of VoIP networks, wireless devices (including RFID tags), virtualization, and the complexity IPv6 brings to company networks by offering automated solutions that simplify network processes. → Read More
Let me catch you up. Late yesterday afternoon, a report surfaced that claimed Nintendo will launch a 4-inch DSi in Japan before the end of the year. Sounds good, right? Well, Nintendo has responded to the claims. → Read More
Jon Steinberg, now former Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team, has accepted a position as Executive in Residence at Polaris Venture Partners. Steinberg will be working from the VC firm’s New York offices, where he’ll help identify new investment opportunities as well as working with existing portfolio companies.
The investor’s portfolio is of course listed on CrunchBase in its entirety, but the most familiar to our readers will be JibJab, Sprout, Quantcast, LogMeIn, Thing Labs (of Brizzly fame) and Automattic (parent company to WordPress). → Read More
Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software platform (formerly called laconi.ca, now called status.net) which anyone can download and run on their own servers. Now, it is working on a hosted version of Status.net, currently in private beta. (We have 50 invites for anyone who includes the invitation code “TC09″ on the signup page).
The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. → Read More
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