February 11th, 2013

Yardsellr, The “eBay For Facebook,” Becomes The Latest Casualty In Social & Local Commerce

yardsale_CMYK

In the fall of 2011, we caught up with social commerce startup, Yardsellr, which the founders claimed at the time had grown into a community of over 5 million people. The Facebook-based social commerce platform was listing 6K new items for sale each day (at the time) and had over 120K items for sale in total. This, by the way, came after the company raised $5 million from Accel in 2010. → Read More

March 14th, 2012

Google Offers Partners With Signpost, The “AdSense For Local Commerce”

googoffers

Today, Google is announcing a partnership with a NY-based company called Signpost, which will now run deals on the Google Offers website and in subscriber emails. Signpost, which has $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Spark Capital and other angels, has been flying under the radar in the local deals space. The company recently tripled its employee base and now claims revenue has been… → Read More

January 31st, 2012

CardSpring Raises $10 Million To Connect Payments To The Web

cardspring_logo

We measure every last click when it comes to the Web, but there remains a gulf between online and the real world. Yet the online world increasingly drives behavior offline, especially when it comes to purchasing habits. How many times have you researched something online or on your mobile phone before buying it? Yet when you go to a store to buy it, everything you did online might as well… → Read More

January 29th, 2012

LivingSocial CEO: Lumping Us With Groupon Is Like Lumping eBay With Amazon

Tim O'Shaughnessy

The local commerce industry as represented by daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is still barely learning to walk, even though Groupon has 10,000 employees and LivingSocial has 5,000. While the two companies look nearly identical today, don’t be surprised if they diverge.

LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy reminded me in a conversation last week that “a lot of people lumped eBay… → Read More

October 23rd, 2011

Iterations: Swords and Shields in the Merchant Economy

Photo Credit: Atomic Jeep, via Creative Commons

“The American Dream,” loosely defined, is made up of a few building blocks. The right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. The opportunity to advance, whether through education, sport, entertainment, or enterprise. Perhaps have a family, live in a house, run your own business.

Over the past ten years, for a variety of factors, the pursuit of the American dream got significantly harder. → Read More

September 27th, 2011

Groupon Closes The Redemption Loop With Loyalty Rewards

Groupon Reward

Groupon may be struggling to get its IPO out the door, but that is not stopping it from introducing new products. Up until now, Groupon has built a billion-dollar business by getting local merchants to offer great one-time deals to consumers. Those daily deals are all about attracting new customers. Now the company is about to roll out a new product called Groupon Rewards that tries to give… → Read More