The team behind share-your-purchase-information startup Blippy has started talking about its new direction. After pivoting from Blippy to another e-commerce project, it has pivoted again and is now working on a live auction website called Tophatter, and it launched an iPhone app today.
Like Blippy, Tophatter is a social shopping product. The vision, according to CEO Ashvin Kumar and COO Andrew… → Read More
Today, a company simply called Mine is launching its online and mobile directory of people and purchases, backed by $600,000 in funding from Michael Dearing’s Harrison Metal. Using an email importer functionality as well as manual entry, Mine allows users to selectively share their online and offline purchases with their friends on the network, and those friends can then click through on the… → Read More
Earlier this summer we wrote a post on purchase sharing site Blippy’s decline, titled “The End Of Blippy As We Know It.” While Blippy CEO Ashvin Kumar didn’t want to reveal what the team’s next step was at the time, we’ve now got a few more details to share as to what the company’s pivot new venture will be – Heartsy.me, a daily deals site for handmade goods and other products.
Heartsy.me… → Read More
Let’s be honest: One of the reasons David Hornik actually agreed to be on camera at All Things D is that he didn’t have a startup about to file to go public any second. So we talked about some of his more high profile investments that haven’t always lived up to the hype.
Hornik explains why reports of Blippy’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and why he says the investment still wasn’t a… → Read More
If you haven’t heard, Lady Gaga is taking over the internets with marketing and branding deals to spread the word on her new album, “Born This Way.” The pop artist just launched a new deal with Zynga for Gagaville; and today Lady Gaga is debuting a partnership with flash sales giant Gilt Groupe; offering Gaga-inspired merchandise, curates sales, access to Gaga events and more. And to help spread… → Read More
So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases. And also that just adding a social element to a feature isn’t enough to make it useful. The lessons of user adoption are sometimes learned the hard way.
Thus is the story of the failure of Blippy, a product that launched in private beta in December of 2009 and that we breathlessly fawned over again, and again, and … → Read More
It was back in July of last year that we first wrote about a service called Voyurl with the headline: It’s Hard To Tell If Voyurl Or Their Ads Are Creepier. You see, at the time, the still-in-stealth startup was targeting angel investors via Google ads get their attention to hopefully talk about their product. That’s actually pretty smart. So we had to give the edge to the product itself being… → Read More
If you haven’t tried out Blippy since the company rather infamously launched last year as the social network for sharing credit card purchases, you should go back and give it another look. Things are quite a bit different now. And a new partnership showcases that.
Blippy has partnered with Sephora to create a version of Blippy specifically tailored to the fragrance and beauty retailer’s brand. → Read More
Users on Blippy, the controversial service which lets you share purchases and purchase prices with your friends, are sharing $500,000 in purchases per day, according a Tweet posted by co-founder Philip Kaplan.
To put this in perspective, users were collectively sharing more than $1.5 million worth of purchases every week in May (or $214,000 per day). Back in December, Blippy was showing $1… → Read More
Over the weekend Philip Kaplan, co-founder of social purchasing site Blippy tweeted out a link to Steve Jobs demoing iTunes Ping, with the added sly comment “Looks like Blippy.” Curious about what Jobs’ movement into the social sharing space means for Blippy, we brought Kaplan into the TCTV studio and grilled him on what exactly Jobs did or did not copy, how often iTunes purchases were shared on… → Read More
Earlier this month, we pointed out that social shopping site Blippy had pretty much the best 404 page ever. It was a double rainbow all the way. Tonight, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan felt like he had some deja vu. Check out Ben & Jerry’s homepage.
Now, do we really think a giant national ice cream chain is copying a small startup’s 404 page? I don’t know. But between the grass, the sky… → Read More
Creating 404 pages (the error page you get when a page on a site cannot be located) has become something of an artform. Startups can earn major bonus points in the geek community for having a humorous one. And Blippy has just tapped a perfect meme for their’s.
As you can see here, Blippy’s 404 page features a glorious rainbow. And while it’s not exactly a double rainbow, the cute unicorn child… → Read More
A few weeks ago, we were alerted to a new site currently in stealth mode called Voyurl. As the name implies, the idea behind it is to make it so you can see what other people are looking at on the web (and to make your clickstream seen). It sounds creepy as hell. It’s like Blippy but with more potential porn. I love it.
But when I tried to sign up for the service, they sent me a note back that it… → Read More
WeShop is hoping to shake up the online shopping space with its platform that allows consumers to share purchase information on a free and anonymous basis.
In private beta, WeShop allows consumers to pool their purchasing information which is available to other WeShop members. WeShop then analyzes and sells this data for vendors. Here’s the catch-consumers have to give WeShop access to your… → Read More
When Blippy was looking for a little help creating an overview video for their service, I recommended that they take a look at Mountain View based Transvideo Studios. I know executive producer Rico Andrade there fairly well and have seen some of the work they’ve done for Gmail (another), Box.net, Facebook, Mint.com (very dramatic) and others. It’s high quality stuff, and can be aimed at users… → Read More
Audioo bills itself as the “Blippy for Voicemail”. As you’re probably aware, Blippy lets users share information that’s considered to be really private by most people (credit card transactions) with others – and sometimes, much more than just transactions.
Audioo basically lets you do the same thing, but with voice mails. → Read More
Today, a new service named Swipely launched with $8.5 million in funding to make everyday purchases more social. This, of course, is a direct competitor to Blippy, the controversial service which lets you share purchases (and purchase prices). This afternoon, Blippy is swiping back at Swipely with the launch of its API.
Co-founder Philip Kaplan has just announced the feature today at the … → Read More
While it’s easy to rag on Blippy for their controversial model (making credit card transactions social), and their security slip-ups (making credit card numbers social), it’s hard to deny that there is something compelling behind the idea. If there weren’t, no one would use the service. Enter Swipely, a service that also aims to make your purchases more social. But rather than focus on the money… → Read More
The best way to describe Offermatic is this – imagine if Mint, Blippy and Groupon went off to Vegas for the weekend, got wasted and ended up in bed together. Nine months later, out pops Offermatic.
Like Mint, Offermatic is a front end user interface to Yodlee’s robust financial network. And the service digs through your credit card transactions just like Blippy does (although they aren’t posted… → Read More
Earlier today, testers of the new mobile payment service, Square, got a scare.
Emails were sent out suggesting that users had changed their bank account information, and Square was emailing to let them know that the new account was verified. The only problem? These users didn’t actually change a thing. Obviously, this caused some concern, as did the note at the bottom of the email, “If you have… → Read More
As I mentioned in Sunday’s post, Blippy’s founders were hammering out a new security plan to assure users that all their information, especially their credit card numbers, would be safe. They delivered this morning, in their latest blog post, issuing new details about the blunder, how it worked with Google, and the framework for a go-forward plan. In addition, Blippy sounded more contrite about… → Read More
Imagine combining your best and worst week ever into one— welcome to Blippy’s world. This week the site closed a new $11.2 million funding round, got its first picture in the New York Times (leading an article on the new wave of social media sites), and dealt with a true PR nightmare when Google search results revealed the credit card numbers of five users. Although five users represent a teeny… → Read More
Earlier today, VentureBeat detailed a major Blippy privacy breach that exposed user credit card information to search engines. The breach appears to have occurred on a small scale — Blippy believes that only four users had their credit cards compromised — but the fact that it happened at all is unsettling. After all, Blippy’s service asks users to entrust it with their credit card… → Read More
As we first reported last month, Blippy has raised another round of funding. Following the initial $1.6 million angel round in January, the controversial service has just raised another $11.2 million.
As we expected, the latest round was led by August Capital and partner David Hornik will join Blippy’s board. Humorously, Hornik shared his investment on Blippy itself, so we know he put in about $8… → Read More
Early this year, Blippy, the highly controversial startup that lets you share your credit card and online purchases with your friends, ran into some trouble with Amazon.com. Namely, Amazon told Blippy to stop pulling in user purchase information, and to go back and erase all existing data they’d already sucked in. Today, Blippy users have regained the ability to share their Amazon purchases, but… → Read More
Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and venture capitalists in their first round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.
August Capital partner David… → Read More
When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.
Today, Blippy… → Read More
Blippy, the Twitter-like service that lets users publish the details of all their purchases, is just a couple of months old. But it already got Stephen Colbert’s attention (thumbs up). And now it has Amazon’s too (thumbs down).
Cofounder Philip Kaplan first mentioned that Amazon had turned off Blippy’s access to the service on an episode of TWiST with Jason Calacanis. I spoke to Kaplan tonight… → Read More
Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with Blippy.
Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s. → Read More
Readers seem pretty split about what to think of Blippy, the service which allows you to share your credit card purchases online. About half think it’s the next logical step in sharing data online. The other half think it’s just about the worst idea ever. Retailers, it seems, are starting to lean towards the former.
Blipply has reached agreements with three partners to promote and use Blippy on… → Read More
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