Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook.

While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360, a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties

As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy.

Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall.

For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example.

To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages.

The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties.

For more, check out Wishpond at home here, Mall360 here, or see the video below:

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers’ lives easier (its first slogan: “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.”) Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple’s domain.

Today, about 50 percent of GitHub’s traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

GitHub released a similarly-targeted Mac client last year, which has since seen wide adoption. However, as popular as Apple has become, the majority of enterprise development still takes place in a Windows environment. As a result, GitHub has been looking to make its platform more appealing to corporate developers and enterprise, and its new Windows app intends to do just that.

Developing in private or open-source for Windows has lagged behind in terms of adoption among developers because they’ve lacked a full toolset for project collaboration, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner says, so, with its new Windows client, the startup just made it easier to get up and running using Git and GitHub on Windows machines.

GitHub for Windows is a native app that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8, and includes a complete installation of msysGit. The app syncs users’ code to the cloud and allows developers to clone their repositories right from the app or directly from GitHub.com with its new “Clone in Windows” button.

Of course, anyone who’s been following GitHub’s progress will notice that it took the team more than a few days to finally release its Windows client. As one might expect, the reason for this was, besides a need to tear down development hurdles for Windows developers, that the team wanted to create an app (and a toolset) they would actually use themselves. In order words, to build a Windows app by Windows developers — for Windows developers.

To do that, GitHub has been amassing a pretty serious team of developers who collectively — aside from having cache in the community — own quite a bit of experience developing on and for Windows. For starters, GitHub brought on Phil Haack and Paul Betts, both of whom left Microsoft to join GitHub to help ship the app.

Before GitHub, Haack led the development of both ASP.NET MVC and NuGet, among other things, during his four-plus year stint as a senior program manager at Microsoft. Paul Betts joined Github following a four-year run at Microsoft, where he worked on Vista, and created development tools, among other things.

GitHub for Windows also relied on help from Tim Clem, Cameron McEfee (the guy behind GitHub’s Octocats), and Adam Roben to get the startup’s new app ready for shipping.

Developing tools that are useful to Windows developers right out of the box is essential to the success of GitHub. Of course, most big companies are still hesitant to put their code in the cloud, and although the startup puts most of its focus on open source project hosting, it’s free. The company makes its money off of its private repositories, and so better tools for companies and corporate developers could mean a significant boost in revenue for GitHub.

Of course, it’s also for the love of a challenge.

For more, find GitHub’s announcement here.

Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg took the stage today at Disrupt, he laid out a grand vision for the site. Backing up that vision, he noted that Fab launched less than a year ago, and it already has 4.5 million members.

“That’s not an e-commerce site, that’s a movement,” he said.

If Fab.com is a movement, what are its goals? That goes back to the site’s beginnings, when the company was still working on gay social network Fabulis. “We just couldn’t get enough people to use it,” Goldberg said (it had about 150,000 users), so he and his co-founders sat down to discuss a new direction. He recalled drawing circles on a napkin showing their passions, the untapped opportunities, and what the team could be “best in the world at.” Those circles intersected in one area: Design.

And “everything design” is what Goldberg wants Fab to be known for. More concretely, he says that if you know exactly what you want, you should probably go to Amazon.com. But if you think, “I need a lamp,” or “I need jewelry,” and you don’t have a specific product in mind, Fab should be your first stop for “discovering things I didn’t know existed.”

As for turning that mission into a big business, Alexia Tsotsis, who was interviewing Goldberg, said she’d heard that Fab is raising a nine-figure round that values the company in the billions of dollars. Goldberg didn’t deny it, but he said he wasn’t going to “comment on a fundraising round that we haven’t closed.” He also said he doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about valuation.

Goldberg added that he doesn’t care whether Fab makes $100 million or $200 million in revenue this year, because it’s all about “building a brand” around design: “We care more about making people smile than making money from them.”

He also talked about Fab’s recent redesign, which downplayed the flash sales angle in favor of social shopping.

“From day one, we never said Fab is a flash sale site,” Goldberg said. “We said Fab is design.”

Alexia compared the redesign to Pinterest. She meant that in a complimentary way, while also asking: What happens to Fab is if Pinterest starts to compete on the shopping front? Goldberg replied that he doesn’t use Pinterest regularly (he tried it out), but argued that the two products might be complementary: “We’d like to work with them.”

Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms — an area that it had said it’s admittedly weak in. The price was not disclosed.

With the deal, Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps. Karma’s chief executive Lee Linden and its co-founder Ben Lewis were behind Tapjoy, a company that became a huge force in distributing and making money from mobile games. Both he and Lewis were product managers at Google and Microsoft. Linden and Lewis have known each other since they were kids and have been building companies together for a couple years.

Note: This was a real product acquisition, not a lower-priced, talent-based one. Karma had done one venture round with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. The sense that we’re hearing from sources is that Karma will get Facebook’s 901 million users at its feet and more power behind building partnerships with other brands.  It’s not clear whether Karma will be left alone to run autonomously like Instagram or whether it will become a Facebook-branded product. Last year, Facebook acquired an early group messaging app called Beluga and turned it into Facebook Messenger.

This acquisition makes sense for a couple of reasons. Facebook needs all the help it can get in making its mobile platform produce revenue. Linden and Lewis built Tapjoy into what became a $100 million annual runrate business for app distribution and monetization. Now they’ve turned their attention toward mobile commerce. Facebook hasn’t figured out how to make money from mobile apps quite yet. It’s starting to show sponsored stories in the mobile news feed, but it doesn’t have that many opportunities to make payments revenue from third-party mobile developers because it’s blocked from taking a revenue share on iOS. Android offers some possibilities but it’s quite complicated to build a rival app ecosystem like Amazon has done over the past few years with the Kindle.

Facebook has tried its hand at gifting before, although it was the virtual kind. It abandoned its gifts store in favor of working on a more broad-based virtual currency offering called Credits that would power purchases of virtual gifts and goods from other developers. It also has tried direct commerce with its Groupon competitor Deals, but obviously that is a very expensive model to operate and scale if you look at Groupon’s margins.

But the physical good gifting that Karma specialized in could be a perfect fit. Facebook already knows who your friends, when they have birthdays, and their interests. It could suggest gifts to give and who to give them too, let users pay with their credit card or credits, and take a healthy cut.

We had heard a few weeks ago that Lewis was considering taking personal time to travel the world and step down from running Karma with Linden, but apparently we were wrong. He is definitely joining Facebook with the rest of the team.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

Karma also had a post on its own blog:

We founded Karma with the goal of adding the sentiment and meaning back into gift giving. That’s what Karma is all about. That’s what the Karma team set out to achieve.

Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.

We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.

Simply put, together we can celebrate life’s important moments in ways we could not before. A word of heartfelt thanks to our partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us share Karma with so many people.

Sincerely,
Karma Co-founders Lee & Ben

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.

First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site.

There are already some building blocks in place for this. First of all, Rakuten already pins on Pinterest through at least a couple of official accounts: Rakuten Commerce and Rakuten Travel.

On the other hand, there is Rakuten’s existing e-commerce presence in the country. Mikitani notes that 75 percent of Japan’s internet population — equivalent to about 80 million people — already have a Rakuten ID — this is similar to an Apple ID, or an Amazon ID, in that there are payment details associated with it.

It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest: “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he says. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.” He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.” One other area, TechCrunch understands, is for users logged in with Rakuten IDs to pin images and then use those pins to buy items away from Pinterest, on Rakuten’s own Rakuten Ichiba site.

And because Pinterest is so buzzy right now, it can be used as a way of reigniting some of Rakuten’s legacy business. The company has a lot of “sleeping customers,” as Mikitani calls them. These are people who have IDs but are not regular users of Rakuten’s services. “This is a good way of getting them to start using those Rakuten IDs again.”

The other area where he would like to see more development is in the area of mobile commerce. Mikitani tells me that already, 25 percent of all Rakuten sales in Japan originate on a mobile device, and that proportion is growing. “There should be a huge synergy with Pinterest there,” he says. “We are going to promote their app using our presence here in Japan.”

International growth. The $100 million investment, which was led by Rakuten with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as a number of angel investors, will also give Pinterest the financial muscle to extend its service into new international markets. Pinterest, perhaps above all social networks, has a lot of potential as an international product — one that can work across borders– because while sites like Facebook and Twitter are text-led, Pinterest is focused around images, and therefore less limited by language barriers.

Of course, a lot of Pinterest’s growth today and in the future will be non-commercial, but the potential for commerce is very much there, too. (We wrote just the other day about another example, Curalate, which has created a social marketing service for brands to visually track how and where their images are getting used across the site.) Within that trend, Rakuten is looking at how to leverage its Pinterest investment in its international business outside of Japan, as well.

Mikitani points out that while Facebook is an “extremely powerful social network”, when it comes to shopping and e-commerce, Pinterest’s image-led service “has stronger potential.”

Facebook and Twitter, he says, are about connecting you with your friends and contacts, while Pinterest is about connecting people with the same interests via graphic images. Apart from the fact that products are put right there for you to see, you can also imagine how that social set-up can be developed into a commercial model (group buying is one that comes to mind here).

Rakuten has holdings that extend well beyond Japan, and include properties like Buy.com in the U.S., Kobo e-reader and e-books, Priceminister in France — in all, operations based in 10 countries and extending to 17 countries in total. Mikitani says that he is hopeful that the kinds of groundwork it wants to lay in Japan will also be extended to the rest of its footprint.

For example, Mikitani points out that Kobo already has a “great partnership” with Facebook to encourage people to post excerpts and read more using Kobo, which it would like to extend to Pinterest, too: “Facebook is why Kobo is growing so fast right now,” he says. “We will see more of Kobo in Pinterest, too, I think.” And buy.com — which is slowly, gradually, getting rebranded as Rakuten — is another site you could imagine could get linked up more closely with Pinterest.

But this is not to rule out other partnerships with other e-commerce players. “We are totally open to other e-commerce partnerships,” he says. “Pinterest should work with them.”

No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here’s the latest at a company we’ve been watching for a while now. RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was the product of a pivot from the developers behind “experiences marketplace” Skyara, has sent a letter out to its users telling them that the app is getting shut down at the end of this month. In RAVN’s place, the founders are starting up yet another business — their third — also loosely based around events but with a decidedly more commercial bent: a design flash sales site called Touch of Modern.

“After two years of building a new marketplace for experiences, we have decided that it is time to close down RAVN. The website and mobile app will completely stop working by the end of the month,” the RAVN team wrote in the note to users.

“We’ve had a great time helping people discover unique events and experiences they wouldn’t have found anywhere else. And we thank you for being a part of that experience.”

There is no word on how many users RAVN has picked up since its launch in November 2011, but the three founders behind the projects – Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou — clearly have the ear and eye of the investment community behind them. Skyara received seed funding from i/o Ventures of an undisclosed amount; and then when the RAVN pivot happened, that picked up some seed money, too, this time from HillsVen Capital — again, for an undisclosed amount.

When RAVN launched, it had amassed a database of 13,000 events, with the idea that users of the app could find and book events near a specific location, share that event with friends, get access to exclusive events, and keep all of that together in a planner — a little like Time Out meeting Gogobot or Tripbirds or one of the many other social travel/event apps out there.

What RAVN might have lacked was a commercial enough element to transform the app into a viable business. That seems to effectively be what they are getting in spades with their newest effort. Touch Of Modern, they say, will be starting its first flash sale at the end of this month. Users of the RAVN app are being offered a $5 credit towards those sales — although there is no indication of whether that represents a typical price for an item or a small discount.

We have contacted RAVN and Touch of Modern to try to get more information about both — what hapened with RAVN, and why the move to flash design sales, and what happens to the team and past funding. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Update: One of the founders, Jonathan Wu, has gotten in touch with some more detail. He notes that RAVN was active for eight months and the founders decided to close up shop for both the website and iPhone app for several reasons, and they are likely to be familiar ones to others in startup-land: “The website and app were hard to scale, local discovery isn’t social or viral enough to perpetuate organic growth, and we weren’t making enough money to pay for advertising costs,” he wrote to me in an email. “We executed several iterations, but in the end, getting the traction required to grow RAVN into a big business proved to be more difficult than we had originally anticipated.”

He also notes that RAVN faced the same challenges that others such as Plancast have seen in the event discovery space; and his words confirm some of what I wrote above: “Without sustained organic or viral growth and without a solid monetization strategy, scaling is very hard in this space. We’ve toyed with the idea of offering local deals, but this still would not cure the challenges inherent with local discovery.”

He continues: “The problem with local is that it’s very hard to reach critical mass.” He notes that Yelp solved it by focusing on one city at a time and leap-frogging across multiple cities once they had traction. But he also notes that with the area significantly ore crowded with similar offerings, this is significantly harder to do.

“Many of us here believe there is still room for RAVN or another events discovery app to win the market. But they would have to solve the scaling and growth problems that we couldn’t,” he concluded. He also added that they will be raising another round of funding shortly for Touch Of Modern.

Design shopping site Fab.com is debuting the next major release of its platform today, Fab 3.0, which is going live on the U.S.-based Fab.com first. The revamp focuses heavily on improved “social shopping” features, and will soon arrive in Fab’s mobile applications before rolling out to Fab’s European properties later this year.

The update offers over 100 enhancements, both big and small, but the most notable changes involve the redesigned navigation, a new feature the company calls “smile pages,” and a major update to Fab’s Live Feed which adds Facebook integration and a number of filtering options, while doing away with Google+ in favor of Pinterest.

When you log into the Fab 3.0 site, you’ll now land on a new page called “Featured Today,” which reflects the most popular sales and categories on the site that day. This is the page that appears whenever you click the “Fab.” logo from any other section of the site going forward.

The new top navigation is noticeably less cluttered than before, too, as Fab has now ditched ”Stores” and “Sales” from here. Instead, there’s now an increased focus on social shopping features (the “Live Feed”) and the newly added “Search” option, which offers searching by price, category and even color. Sub-navigation directs users to favorite sections like “Art,” “Home,” “Kids,” etc., and to the right, a “live ticker” displays constantly updated trending items.

But the removal of “sales” is telling for a service which some still think of as being in the “flash sales” genre – Fab is telling the world that it’s just not that kind of site. There will still be sales, however, they’re just not the reason Fab wants customers to shop there.

“From the beginning, we never really thought of Fab as a flash sales site, we thought of ourselves as design,” explains CEO Jason Goldberg. “People appreciate Fab for discovery, or for finding products they didn’t know existed, or for delighting them, and price is not a big deal. We don’t want people to think ‘sale, sale, sale,’” he says.

As for the discovery features on Fab, they’re getting a big boost today with the updated Live Feed section. This Pinterest-like part to the Fab experience was initially rolled out in December as a part of the Fab 2.0 launch as a way to show a live, dynamic feed of what Fab’s members are buying, favoriting and sharing. As a result of the feed’s introduction just five months ago, 15% of visits to this section now result in a purchase, says Goldberg.

The most important change here is Facebook integration. Members will now be able to filter the feed to see just what their Facebook friends are buying, favoriting and sharing. It’s an obvious next step for the company, which has already worked closely with the social network on things like Facebook Timeline integration, Open Graph (implicit sharing) integration, and most recently, adoption of Facebook’s new “actions.”

The social shopping angle does well for Fab, which already saw anywhere from 15% to 30% of its traffic come from Facebook any given day, plus around 2% from Twitter, and another 2% from Pinterest. And that’s before today’s introduction of the new Pinterest “Pin it” buttons which were added in favor of Google+ (now dropped).

Google+ traffic was practically non-existent on Fab. To give you an idea of context, here are some sites that sent more traffic to Fab than Google+ did: W00t, Bing, Coolmaterial.com, Svpply, TechCrunch, NYT and Goldberg’s blog.

Also new to the Live Feed section is a filter by category, color or price option, which just generally improves the browsing experience, as well as support for buying items directly from the feed itself.

The final change is the introduction of “Smile pages,” which is just another way to feature popular items on the site, by pulling trending items onto what you can think of as “best of Fab” pages.

“How do you help people dig into a site, discover and browse?” Goldberg says of how Fab has approached these new changes. “It’s like the anti-Amazon. Amazon is the best place in the world if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but you don’t browse Amazon. Fab is like going shopping with your friends, or maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you want the fun of discovering stuff,” he says.

The update should be live now on Fab.com.

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.

iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.

iZettle is filling a practical need in the current market. The initial aim of the service, according to Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO, is to target not those merchants that already take card payments, but those who have never signed on to using anything other than checks, cash and invoices to accept payments. There are roughly 20 million small businesses in Europe that fall into this category, he says, with the “uncarded” ranging from sole traders like carpenters to small independent cafes. “We’re not trying to go after those with existing infrastructure because switching costs are too high,” he says.

De Geer will not yet reveal the total number or value of transactions or how many consumers that have used the service to date, except to say that the company is building out its infrastructure to keep up with the demand and has grown by 10 percent in recent months. What’s interesting is that, for now at least, the service seems to be attracting high-value transactions: De Geer says the average value of a transaction is €60 ($76), compared to between €10 and €15 for the average NFC transaction in the Nordic region. (In comparison, he notes that Square transacts between $8-10 per day on any given reader, but that’s an average number and it has picked up a huge number of merchants now.)

The iZettle service works similar to PayPal’s Here and Square, in that a merchant plugs a card-reading dongle into an iOS device to process a card payment using an app downloaded to the device. Instead of reading the magnetic strip on the back of the card, iZettle reads the chip — these are now near-ubiquitous in Europe and tend to be more secure. Like other card payment services, you sign on the device screen to complete a payment, and the funds are deposited in a merchant account the next day.

Similar to other payment services iZettle works on a commission basis — in its case a percentage on each transaction, with that percentage varying by country. It actually dropped a transaction fee it used to take only days ago — perhaps a sign of how the area is heating up and so offering more competitive offerings is essential.

For now, the service is only on iOS but De Geer says that Android is coming soon, “this year for sure.” He says that the delay was due to (surprise!) fragmentation across too many versions of the platform, and too many devices. But the evolution to Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest OS — is definitely making things more standardized, he notes.

One expansion that is not coming soon is to the U.S. Not only do companies like Square and Here have a lot of early business sewn up, but he also notes that “The U.S. is not too interesting for us given that they use the mag stripe and we focus on chip-and-PIN services.”

More interesting, he says, are markets like Asia and Latin America, where there is good chip-card penetration but card payment facilities are still relatively low among smaller businesses. Still, the next launches are likely to be in Europe, with Germany, France, Italy and Spain all on De Geer’s roadmap, with “one or two of those” expected to come online this summer. To date, iZettle has received venture funding of $16.4 million from Index, Creandum and others to fund that expansion.

Interested companies can either register a request through iZettle’s web site, or via its iTunes app, and the first 3,000 will get a free card reader to get started.

BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying.

The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round.

Part eBay and part group-buying site (eg Groupon), BagThat is a clever kind of twist on both ideas, in which a user can bid on an item with a price that he/she is willing to pay for it, using a simple sliding feature to pick a price in a range set by the seller.

The system then collects all the bids from other users, and calculates a final selling price for the item, based on the minimum total amount that the retailer was willing to make from the deal. If enough people bid on the item in the bidding phase, with a total amount reaching the seller’s reserve, then they win the product: that final price might be the same price the buyer offered, or it might be lower — but never higher. PayPal is used for all the transactions on the site.

The social aspect of the site also includes the ability for bidders to spread the word to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to try to get others to join in on the deal — the more who join, the more likely the final price will be lower.

Will this new variation be enough to bring in punters to a new site, in a market that already has established players like eBay, Groupon, LivingSocial and others?

It will probably, most likely, depend not on the new brand but what BagThat offers through its retailing portal. For now, the selection on the site — which launched in November 2011 and is founded by Andy Sutton, who is also the CEO – is relatively streamlined rather than sprawling, and is covering several different bases: food/drink; fashion; home goods and vacations among them, with higher-end rather than cheaper offerings. (Examples: an Apple TV box, a man’s suit, a cute teddy bear)

It looks like that list will be growing with retailers like Halfords (a UK sporting goods retailer) and brands like Samsung signing up to BagThat for future deals.

At the end of March, we covered Behance’s major site redesign, at which point we learned that the startup was launching over 20K new projects every week, with 1 million projects created to date, and its network had doubled over the last month, with 10 million visits to its network in the last 30 days.

Since its founding in 2006 and launch less than a year later, Behance, which, for those unfamiliar, is an online platform on which creative professionals can connect, showcase and discover creative work, has been a bootstrapped enterprise, Behance CEO Scott Belsky tells us. But, no longer. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised its first round of outside funding, a $6.5 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, with noted investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), Path Founder Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp.

Belsky tells us that Behance is at an inflection point, and that it’s an important point in its growth cycle, one that puts the company — after five years — in a position where it’s ready to take on outside funding. The company passed the 1 million-projects-created milestone eight months ago, and this week, it is passing 2 million projects created. User projects have received over 1 billion views, with 75 million views coming in the past 30 days.

Visitors have “appreciated” projects over 22 million times, and Behance’s curation team is reviewing about 30K projects every week for featuring across the company’s 15+ curated gallery sites. What’s more, users have created over 10K personal websites using the company’s custom website creation tools for artists and designers.

In short, the site is growing fast, and Behance leadership feels that now is the time to take on that growth capital to help is scale. Belsky tells us that the team is excited to bring on Union Square Ventures as its first lead investor, as the firm has a track record of having funded and advised network-based businesses like Etsy, Twitter, Foursquare, and Kickstarter.

The company has also become active both in its online and offline communities, as it will this week host “Portfolio Review MeetUps” in over 400 cities around the world, in which it gathers members of its community to exchange feedback, live, in-person. And since launching its first major redesign in March (which you can read more about here), searches for creative talent have increase 70 percent.

For more, check out Behance at home here.