BuyReply, a company that has developed a new platform for e-commerce that allows consumers to purchase items from offline medium, such as TV, print, newspapers and more using email, SMS, or Twitter, has raised $1 million in seed funding, from Peter Thiel’s international fund Valar Ventures, along with Square Peg Ventures (Paul Bassat, founder of SEEK), Adrian MacKenzie, and others. → Read More
Amazon has launched a new store catering to mature adults and seniors, the company announced today. But while “Amazon Seniors” would have a nice ring to it, Amazon went with a more polite, if wordy, branding: “50+ Active and Healthy Living Store.” As the name implies, the new store will be focused on a variety of “healthy living” needs, including nutritional products, wellness, exercise, fitness… → Read More
Hip online eyewear startup Warby Parker has, over the last two years, been partnering with boutiques to open “stores-within-stores,” or small Warby Parker showrooms, where customers could try on their eyeglasses in 3-D. These showrooms popped up in L.A., Nashville, San Francisco and many others. Today Warby Parker officially announced its first, flagship retail store in SoHo in New York City. → Read More
Wanderful Media, a startup backed by of a bunch of major news publishers, announced today that it’s launching a dramatically improved version of its Find&Save service.
The company’s vision is to create the online version of the deal- and coupon-filled circulars that are delivered with newspapers and in the mail. The first version of Find&Save seemed to take that idea quite literally —… → Read More
Forrester recently predicted that the online retail market will grow to $370 billion over the next four years, up from $231 billion this year — a 10 percent compound annual growth rate. In other words, the message is clear: The eCommerce juggernaut ain’t slowing down any time soon. In 2013, every business needs some kind of online presence; the problem, of course, is that many small business… → Read More
About a month ago, I wrote about a stealthy company called IronPearl, led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed. In fact, they don’t even really like the word “growth hacker.” For years, Chudnovsky had been advising companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how to… → Read More
While eCommerce has exploded over the last decade, digital marketplaces still suffer the same nagging user experience flaws they always have — particularly person-to-person marketplaces. It probably hasn’t been that long since you heard someone mutter “craigslist is creepy,” or lament about digital payments, security issues or about how it takes forever to sell something on eBay. → Read More
Ribbon, the AngelPad-backed payments startup that introduces a simpler checkout experience when buying from merchants online or via social media, is today rolling out two big new features: support for YouTube payments and a new Twitter “in-stream” payment option that lets you buy without ever clicking away from Twitter.com. The company has also reduced its fees in order to be more competitive with… → Read More
Software may be eating the world, but at present, it’s only been nibbling at entertainment venues and sports stadiums. With the wave of easy-to-use, mobile friendly payment solutions like Square, sweeping through eCommerce, vendors are well aware that they need to upgrade their clunky payment systems. But the problem, Brandon Lloyd tells us, is that most solutions on the market today require… → Read More
Lightbank has invested $650,000 in its own Founder-in-Residence Josh Hernandez’s new startup, Walk.by, a platform for bringing local merchants into the e-commerce world by way of smartphones. The company is today announcing the release of its consumer-facing iPhone app which lets shoppers browse and follow offline retailers, the brands they carry, as well as very specific items, like “brown… → Read More
According to a report published by the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging last year, more than 130 million Americans are living without dental insurance. That means more Americans have smartphones than dental coverage. (And they say the UK has bad teeth!) Yes, while robotics takes quantum leaps, millions of Americans forgo dentist visits each day because they don’t have insurance, or… → Read More
The EC has been banging the open data drum for a while now, launching its Open Data Strategy for Europe back in 2011. Today another step along the road to liberating government data across the region so that startups can get their hands on it: an EU committee has endorsed plans to modernise the 2003 public information directive to make all non-personal public sector info available for reuse. → Read More
With the outcome of a two-year long EC investigation into its search practices looming, Google is likely to have to change how it presents search results in Europe to improve the visibility of rival specialised search engines, according to the FT. The newspaper says the visibility of “vertical search” results in areas such as mapping, weather and finance is one of the key concerns of the EC. → Read More
Recent TechStars Boston grad Fashion Project has a different take on the second-hand apparel market. It operates an online store where women can donate their high-end designer items, and others can re-purchase them for less than retail, knowing that the majority of sales are donated directly to charity. The company has now attracted the interest of investors, too, and days ago closed on $1.8… → Read More
After raising $100M+ last June, Donuts — a registry for the new top-level domain names that ICANN is ushering in this year (such as .yay or .jobs) — has announced it has raised a new funding round. The exact figure for its Series B, which is led by existing investor Generation Partners, has not been disclosed but the company said the equity investment is “twice the valuation” of the Series A. → Read More
Vitamin & health food retailer Vitacost has launched a tablet-optimised website that’s designed to encourage shoppers to put more than just the core items on their shopping list into their basket. Introducing a little serendipity into the buying process makes a lot of sense when you’re selling 40,000+ different products but what’s interesting is that Vitacost sees tablets as the place to do… → Read More
Last week, a young startup called Realty Mogul took home top honors at “Founder Showcase,” a Silicon Valley pitch competition and networking event hosted by TheFunded.com, in which eight early-stage startups showed off their wares in front of 400 investors and founders. → Read More
GetNinjas, a local services marketplace startup based in São Paulo, Brazil has closed a $3 million Series A round backed by new investor Otto Ventures, with existing investors Monashees and KaszeK Ventures also participating. The latter both invested in GetNinjas’ 2011 seed round, which raised a total of $700,000. → Read More
If there is any downside to Stripe, the payments startup that makes it simple to accept payments online without having to first set up a merchant account, it’s that the service is aimed at developers and other technical users. Newly launched payment system MoonClerk wants to change that, by making it easy for non-programmers to quickly accept and mange both recurring and one-time payments on… → Read More
Fitiquette, a developer of virtual fitting room technology and a TC Disrupt finalist in September 2012, has been acquired by Myntra, one of the big fashion and lifestyle e-commerce companies in India. → Read More
Braintree, a payments gateway that’s backed by Accel Partners and NEA, sounds like it has effectively doubled the volume of mobile transactions it sees per year to $2 billion. It now touts 40 million credit card accounts in its vault. How does that compare to competitors? eBay, which operates Paypal, said it had 123 million registered accounts in its last earnings filing and that it expects… → Read More
When it comes to office supplies, companies like Office Depot, OfficeMax and Staples have long owned the majority of mind-share and brand recognition in the market. But, with the recession, the rise of eCommerce and the growing ubiquity of devices like the iPad, business has been in steady decline for many big-box chains, forcing them to make big cuts to brick-and-mortar operations. → Read More
Bitcoin’s wild surge in value has made it even more of an attractive target for hackers. Another wallet service called Instawallet said it is suspending itself indefinitely until it changes its security architecture. The crypto-currency, which currently trades at $129.90 to the dollar, has risen by almost fourfold in the last month, as new clarity in U.S. financial regulations and a banking… → Read More
Online e-commerce giant eBay last week said that it expects to have 12% of its sales coming from BRIC countries by 2015 in a global e-commerce market that will be worth $300 billion, and here is one more step in that strategy: it is leading a $50 million, Series C investment in Snapdeal, an online marketplace in India with 20 million users. Existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture… → Read More
It seems like every time we make purchases online or in a store, we’re collecting some sort of points or rewards. For the most part, those points go unused, mostly because the companies who give them out don’t do a great job of explaining what you can actually do with them. You know the deal, you purchase a video game and you get some GameStop points that you can use after you purchase three more… → Read More
Bonobos‘ newly hired San Francisco engineering team is fracturing, but there’s no disaster. Bonobos CTO Mike Hart has departed the company to become a co-founder, along with Cory Hicks, of a brand-new business.
After cooking up some hot new personalization technology at Bonobos, Hart and five other engineers from the team will be spinning out that technology into a standalone company separate… → Read More
Bespoke Post, a subscription-based e-commerce startup offering a hilariously titled “Box of Awesome” (no, not that one - Bespoke Post is for grown-ups), is today announcing having closed on $850,000 in seed funding, led by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor, Great Oaks VC. Also participating in the round, which actually closed last fall, were 500 Startups, Brad Harrison Ventures, 1-800 Flowers’… → Read More
Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might work.” Two years ago, if you’d have told me that an open-source, P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I would’ve told you that you were on a lonely bus headed to CrazyTown, U.S.A. But today, Bitcoin officially became a crazy idea that’s actually… → Read More
EBay is in the middle of its Analyst Day, and just a little while ago it announced plans for some significant expansions for eBay Now, its same-day delivery service, with Chicago and Dallas deliveries coming this summer, and integration of the service into its “core experience” as it gears up for competition with Amazon and now Google. → Read More
Material Wrld, the fashion startup seed funded by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor Great Oaks VC, is today making its public debut. The e-commerce site has come a long way since the beta it had running late last year, and to kick off its launch, the company is introducing a number of new features to help its fashion community discover new styles, ideas and people to follow. → Read More
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