For over a decade, if you were to say “home shopping,” you were likely referring to the experience of viewing products on your TV set, and ordering over the phone. After launching in the ’80s, it wasn’t long before television networks like QVC and The Home Shopping Network (HSN) had become synonymous with “home shopping.” The Web and eCommerce changed that. Today, QVC and HSN both have active online shopping experiences, and HSN, for example, does 35 percent of its sales on the Web, which alone represents a multi-billion-dollar business.

As the CEO of HSN in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Mark Bozek oversaw the launch of HSN.com as well the network’s expansion overseas, which doubled the networks revenue. Having served as HSN’s CEO for four years, and having served as VP of Broadcasting at QVC, Bozek knows the business — and its target customer — well. That’s why he and team are today launching Evine, a commerce platform that aims to create an engaging and online-only version of the HSN and QVC model.

For those unfamiliar, the two giants of televised home shopping offer products and merchandise are exclusive to the network’s audience, which is, by and large female and over the age of 35. The products are often sold at specific times, for limited durations. In this sense, QVC and HSN are the progenitors of the flash sales model now employed by Gilt and so many others. As Bozek sees it, there’s an opportunity to bring the same appeal of exclusivity and discounting that’s inherent to flash sales to the same demographic that is so loyal to QVC and HSN.

Of course, the problem, Bozek says, is that the Web doesn’t really have a platform that caters to this customer in a way that’s engaging, or that focuses on creating a social shopping experience, especially online. That’s why Evine aims to offer value-driven merchandise in fashion, beauty, accessories, fitness, and food, for women over the age of 35 through a platform that offers a variety of shopping-centric entertainment.

The goal is to not just give women a platform where they can shop, but where they can interact and share content and merchandise with friends. Evine plans to offer both live, streaming video content as well recorded video programs, which will be hosted by former QVC personalities and more. Bozek says that Evine will also offer games, but as of now, it remains unclear whether the site will be integrating existing games, focusing on social, Facebook-hosted gaming experiences, or simply offer a gamified viewing and interactive experience.

The entertainment content will initially be created by the Evine team, with plans to eventually open the platform up to user-generated content — all with the goal of adding depth to the shopping so that it’s not just about coupon clipping and products, but engaging and interactive. Bozek says that he wants Evine to be appealing beyond those times when its users are in the mood to shop.

What’s more, Bozek sees the opportunity for much higher margins in the online-only model. While QVC and HSN are both wildly profitable businesses, they come with the costs of having to operate expensive television studios and call centers. Evine not only does away with those significant costs, but Bozek believes, with the right product mix, it can attract a large, scalable customer base without having to pay to acquire those customers.

He hopes that this will be Evine’s valuable differentiator with flash sales and subscription-based models that focus on acquiring customers, and then later have to figure out how to monetize them. By creating entertainment content and brands that have long-term value, the CEO thinks that Evine can have high margins right from the start. And with cosmetics and ingestibles (vitamins, etc.) coming with margins between 35 to 65 percent, Bozek says, there’s plenty of opportunity for profitability.

Of course, Evine will need scale to get there, so he has recruited his co-founder Russel Nuce, former QVC merchant and current President of its Accessories Council, Karen Giberson, as well as former QVC host, Kathy Levine. The startup’s advisors include Thom Beers of Original Productions, Kim Caccavo of Steelpoint Capital, Jim McCann of 1800Flowers, Greg Renker of Guthy Renker, Joan Solotar of the Blackstone Group, and Fred Siegel of Fred Siegel Partners. Evine has also raised $500K in seed financing from these investors, and others, to get the platform off the ground. In the coming months, the team will begin raising its series A.

Leveraging new brands with personalities, whether they’re famous or not, Evine is setting out to create a fun, interactive customer experience that engages customers in realtime to make the shopping experience that much more enjoyable. Of course, there are a lot of elements already in place that could make Evine a big business, but it’s all about execution. And it also remains to be seen whether an older customer base is ready to spend more time online than it is offline, or in front of the TV.

The site officially launches to the public today, and includes a complementary “coming attractions” platform on Facebook, which invites members to join for free and learn more about what brands Evine will offer beginning this summer.

For more, find Evine at home here.

Etsy has become the go-to site for people looking for home-made crafts and vintage items from independent artisans — and for artisans wanting to sell them, and it now counts some 39 million monthly unique visitors, 13 million items and 800,000 storefronts within its virtual walls.

Now it looks like Etsy wants to expand into serving a new class of buyers and sellers: the company has apparently bought Trunkt, which specializes in selling artisanal goods wholesale.

The announcement came in a very indirect way: Adam Brown, Etsy’s head of PR, noted it in a comment at the bottom of a post about Etsy on the Pando Daily blog.

He notes that Trunkt is effectively a one-person operation, and that the acquisition is “an investment in a really talented person who has a deep understanding of an area of business that impacts a number of our sellers.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

No official word yet on how Etsy will be leveraging Trunkt (“we have more details coming up about that soon,” Brown notes), but if you go to Trunkt, you’ll see that Etsy is already using it as a platform for its members who do offer wholesale products to sell them there.

The idea of offering wholesale, which presupposes the idea of mass production, hits a current bone of contention among Etsy sellers. Some of them have been getting increasingly upset over how the site is letting in more “artisanal” creators, who are in reality larger manufacturers rather than independents who make hand-made crafts. As Pando Daily points out, as the site continues to grow, it’s not surprising that the lines between homemade/independent and manufactured/made by machine are getting blurred and possibly harder to police.

So it comes as no surprise that one thing Etsy seems to want to make clear already is that buying Trunkt is not about Etsy selling out or becoming a platform for the kinds of big manufacturers that upset the business model for the independents who have become the lifeblood of Etsy’s existing marketplace.

“If and when we do pursue wholesale tools on Etsy, it will be in service of bringing new channels to existing Etsy sellers to meet their needs, not working with large manufacturers,” Brown says. Indeed, for some long-time Etsy sellers who do have the bandwidth to create items in quantity — even if it’s not Costco or Walmart quantities — the Trunkt move could be a great opening.

While Etsy has yet to comment officially — and we have reached out ourselves now, too, in case this is an elaborate hoax — some Etsy users have picked up on the Pando story and have started their own discussion thread on the Etsy site — with many a colorful response in the growing list of comments.

Zillow, according to one report, may be closing in on a deal to buy rental marketing software maker RentJuice for $45 million, but in the meantime the online property portal is focusing on the rental market in another way: by launching its first dedicated rentals app — a free app for Android devices.

Zillow Rentals is the latest development in Zillow’s strategy for mobile, which — now numbering at 10 apps — has become a huge part of its business: on weekends, a full 40 percent of all of Zillow’s traffic — 32 million uniques in March — comes from mobile devices, and in the same month 155 million homes on Zillow were viewed from mobile devices: that works out to 57 homes per second, the company tells me.

And although users are able to view some rental information on the original app, the new, dedicated app gives a speedier and more streamlined experience for the fast, high-volume property viewing that characterizes the average would-be renter, says Jeremy Wacksman, VP of marketing at Zillow.

Wacksman says Zillow opted for Android first over iPhone for the launch because its Android users “tend to skew younger, and we felt this group of earlier adopters could benefit from an app developed specifically with renters in mind.” He says the company will extend it to other platforms in the “near future.” Other apps from Zillow work on iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms.

Zillow is partly launching this rental app — and in general getting more focused on the rental space because activity in that segment is on the rise. At the moment, some 70 percent of markets tracked in the Zillow Rental Index showed increases in annual home value. In contrast, only 14 percent of markets tracked in the Zillow Home Value Index (for house sale prices) went up in price.

The new app will have several features that are unique to it. Among them will be the ability to view Rent “Zestimates” — the company’s proprietary rental price estimates on some 100 million properties in the U.S.

The app also lets users compare selected rental properties on a side-by-side list and to narrow searches by geography by drawing boundaries around neighborhoods. It also integrates with Android voice search to find homes in a specific area. People can also browse based on the age of the rental posting, to find those that have just been listed versus those that have been on the market for longer or have already been viewed (and may therefore be a waste of time to visit). Users can also get push notifications for when homes that match your search criteria get posted. There is also the ability to contact owners or landlords through the app.

Zillow has added in a few elements to its property portal that have set it apart from many others in the same field: in addition to list prices, it compiles a list of data around price valuations and recent renovations among other things; and it has inked big deals with other portals like Yahoo and some 180 newspapers to extend its reach.

Wacksman says that Zillow is still seeing “tremendous” growth from its activities in the U.S. so it is continuing to stay focused here rather than expand internationally.

Wrapp, a social gifting service backed by Greylock Partners and Atomico, is crossing the pond with the U.S. launch of its mobile gift card and retail app. Wrapp, which was available previously only in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Japan, Wrapp is actually launching today with a number of U.S. retailers including Fab, Gap, H&M, Sephora, The Wall Street Journal, Wayfair, and others.

As we’ve reported in the past, Wrapp was co-founded by Rebtel and SendIt founder Hjalmar Winbladh, Spotify founding CTO Andreas Ehn, and lets friends give, receive and redeem digital gift cards using mobile devices, and allows friends to contribute to gifts given by mutual friends. With Wrapp, which offers iPhone, Android and web apps, you sign in via your Facebook account, and you can then tap the Celebration tab on the app, browse your friends or major events, and select the person you want to send a gift card to. All available gift card offers for that friend are automatically listed.

You can then select the retailer and the gift card offer you want, write your celebration greeting, select a delivery date, enter payment details (if you’re contributing extra funds to a free gift card), and send the gift. Your friend will be notified and celebrated through Facebook and the Wrapp application. Merchants can actually specify the amounts they’d like to offer via the service, and target specific demographics of users with gift card options, which is something other online social gifting options don’t allow.

To collect a gift card you click on the link sent to you in email, text message (SMS) or on your Facebook wall, which lets the user automatically download the Wrapp app. To use the card, you select the card you want to redeem, and then show the resulting barcode to the cashier, which then gets scanned to complete the transaction.

For merchants and in-store retailers, says founder Winbladh, Wrapp is an ideal way to connect with potential customers because it not only allows them to target specific users by demographics, but also provides a valuable form of advertising.

Winbladh says that while he’s always been bullish on mobile, in 2008, he started observing the increased pressure on brick and mortar retailers and was thinking through the ways that retailers can drive people in stores. He and his co-founders sought out to reinvent the gift card market to help drive traffic for retailers. He believes the gift card, which has gone through little innovation to date, can be made social, viral and mobile.

“Friend to friend marketing is best way to drive sales in retail market,” he explains. “Not only is Wrapp a innovative, social way for consumers to gift, but it’s also a performance tool for big retailers.”

And the service seems to be gaining traction amongst both consumers and retailers. Participating merchants report that each sale averages four to six times the value of the free gift card they let Wrapp users give to their friends.

In December alone, Wrapp users used the service to buy 250,000 gift cards. And the app went viral in the country, with 2 percent of all Facebook users in Sweden downloading the app. After three months live in Sweden, one percent of the Swedish population had interacted with Wrapp. During the last four months more than 165,000 people have given their Facebook friends over 1.4 million free gift cards that could be redeemed in stores operated by nearly 60 major retailers in Europe.

A launch in the U.S. could be a turning point for the company. As board member and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman tells us, for the vast majority of Internet companies, the degree with which they succeed is determined by how well you an do in the U.S. But he believes Wrapp is in a perfect position to potentially reach critical mass, and create a network between retailers and consumers at a high volume. “Retailers know that they need to move towards retail 2.0; and Wrapp provides this valued experience,” Hoffman tells me. And because of the upswing in consumer use of smartphones and social network, Wrapp is in a prime position to gain traction amongst shoppers.

There are other players trying to shake up the gift card market with mobile technologies, including recently launched Karma. But what’s compelling about Wrapp is the win for retailers in helping drive traffic in-store and being able to target certain user based upon social and demographic data provided by Facebook.

What’s next for Wrapp? We’ll be seeing a number of more big-name U.S. merchants announced in the next few months, says Winbladh. We’re told that more than 15 additional U.S. merchants are now scheduled to start using Wrapp in the coming months. And we’ll see the company expand to other countries as well.

AHAlife, an e-commerce site for hard-to-find and exclusive luxury lifestyle products, has raised $10.1 million in Series B funding, led by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, with DCM and FirstMark Capital also participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $19.1 million.

As we wrote in our review of the site, AHAlife introduces one new product a day in editorial format through its email list, tells the story about how the product was made, who made it, and where it came from while allowing you to also purchase the product. Products span fashion, food, beauty, travel, accessories, home décor, tech, and travel experiences.

What makes the site compelling is the blend of content, commerce, and curation in AHAlife’s platform. Celebrity curators on the site include Tim Gunn, Wendi Murdoch, Donna Karan Daniel Boulud, Cynthia Rowley, and Tina Brown.

As founder and CEO, Shauna Mei tells us AHAlife’s focus is on helping luxury brands who have never gone online sell via e-commerce. In term of products sold on the site, she says the company is “Focuses on quality not quantity of items sold on the site and aims to help customers cut through the noise,”

The new funding will be used for global expansion, especially to Japan and other Asian markets, as well as building out the merchandising and technology teams.

ComScore today released its analysis of this month’s top properties on ye olde Webernets in the U.S. There are a number of points of interest, but among them, it seems that lotto sites were the top beneficiary of U.S. internet traffic. This was largely a result of the unprecedented Mega Millions jackpot, which became the largest jackpot in U.S. and world history, reaching $656 million in March. Lotto sites drew nearly 29 million visitors (with MegaMillions.com grabbing the top spot), up 25 percent from February, making it the biggest mover in March.

Travel info sites were the next biggest beneficiary of traffic, according to comScore, as Americans looked to book last-minute spring break trips and summer travel. This made travel one of the top-gainers, up 10 percent to 69.7 million visitors in March. Of the web’s growing number of travel properties, TripAdvisor saw the biggest boost, up 5 percent from the prior month, to a total of 18.1 million visitors. TripAdvisor was followed by Travora (which today acquired NileGuide) at 15.5 million visitors (also up 5 percent), and Yahoo! Travel was up 9 percent with 11.1 million visitors in March.

As is expected in the travel vertical, a rising tide lifts all planes — that is to say that airline sites benefitted from travel’s boost in March traffic, growing 8 percent to 29.8 million visitors, with Southwest nabbing the most traffic, up 17 percent to 10.9 million visitors. Following Southwest was Delta at 6.1 million, United Airlines at 5.4 million, American at 4.8 million, JetBlue at 3.3 million, and U.S. Airways at 2.6 million.

As to the top 50 web properties, comScore found a usual suspect at the top of its rankings, with Google Sites bringing in 189.7 million visitors in March. Microsoft Sites came in second at 178.9 million, followed by Yahoo! Sites at 175.4 million, and Facebook.com at 158.9 million. In terms of March movers, Ask Network rose into the seventh spot, while ESPN vaulted six positions to 26th place.

Google also grabbed the top spot in comScore’s “Top 50 Ad Focus” ranking, with its ad network reaching 91.7 percent of U.S. consumers online, followed by AOL Advertising at 83.1 percent, Yahoo Network at 81.4 percent, and AT&T AdWords at 81.1 percent reach in March.

As for the top properties seeing the biggest change in unique visitor counts from February to March, interestingly PerformerSoft.com — the makers of software like PC optimizer, driver automatic updater, data recovery, etc — saw a 152 percent hike in traffic, up to 9.2 million visitors. Rounding out the list, in order, were Sun Microsystems, Babylon.com, College Humor, TheStreet, MLB.com, DailyMotion, SB Nation, Instagram, and ESPN.

More from comScore here. Charts below:

There was a little gem that we almost missed yesterday in Facebook’s amended IPO filing. But it looks like Facebook acknowledged that it may have to move away from a 30 percent revenue share with app developers if it expands Credits, its virtual currency, and payments beyond gaming.

This is what it said in the filing yesterday:

We receive a fee of up to 30% when users make such purchases from our Platform developers using our Payments infrastructure. In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary.

That line has not appeared in any of the company’s four previous IPO amendments and filings. Plus, I’ve covered the Facebook platform for the last three years and the company has always been vocally steadfast about the 30 percent revenue share with me. It also says right here in this Facebook policy agreement that for every 10-cent Credit they redeem, there is a service fee of 3 cents or 30 percent.

If Facebook cuts its 30 percent revenue share for music or media apps, the choice will set it apart from other platforms. Right now, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google are all warring with each other to become predominant vendors of digital content on the web and on mobile.

So here’s a reminder of what everyone is doing: Apple does a flat 30 percent revenue share for iOS. Google does a 30 percent revenue share for Android, but a 5 percent revenue share for games on Google+. Amazon has an unusual arrangement where it controls app pricing and it either keeps 30 percent of what it sells the app for or 80 percent of what the developer intended to sell it for (whichever is lower).

The important point is that all of these schemes are indifferent to whether the apps are games, fart apps, encyclopedias or whatever. If Facebook introduces variable rates, then it’s changing pricing based on the type of app. That’s new.

Compare that to Apple, which has not deviated from its 30 percent share for any partner, even ones that might have lower natural profit margins like newspapers or music apps that have to pay expensive royalties. Apple’s choice has famously rankled brands like The Financial Times, which circumvented the iTunes app store and Apple’s revenue share by building an HTML5-based web app for tablet readers.

In fact, Apple doesn’t have much wiggle room right now. The across-the-board 30 percent revenue share is what is protecting Apple in the face of a Justice Department antitrust case around price setting for e-books. In a Wall Street Journal column worth reading from two days ago, Apple senior executive Eddy Cue told L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Journal, “I don’t think you understand. We can’t treat newspapers or magazines any differently than we treat FarmVille.”

Apparently, Facebook might be thinking that newspapers and magazines are worth treating differently compared to Zynga games. Facebook board members like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Washington Post CEO Don Graham will probably be happy about this, especially if they one day intend to sell subscriptions through the social network.

Lowering revenue share will help Facebook get more content partners on board. If Facebook has a more diverse offering of paid digital content outside of games, that will help the company convert more of its users into paying for things. Right now, only 15 million users paid for virtual goods with Credits out of the 845 million monthly active users the company had in 2011, according to Facebook’s filing.

There have been a few early experiments with using Credits outside of games. Some musicians like Widespread Panic and David Gray have let fans pay with Credits for video streams of concerts while David Guetta has offered tracks for Credits. But it’s still early days.

Needless to say, this is a total can of worms. What is a “fair” revenue share for the music industry? What is a “fair” revenue share for selling digital subscriptions to The Washington Post? What if you have a game that sells music tracks inside of it?

If Facebook does move away from an across-the-board pricing, the precedent it sets for digital content sales will have ripple effects across the entire web.

Social Annex, a retail-focused social platform that’s been in stealth mode for the past two years, is today announcing having gained the attention (and the investment) of some big backers of e-commerce, just in time for its public debut. In addition to Kamran Pourzanjani, the former CEO and founder of PriceGrabber, and Brian S. Lee co-founder of ShoeDazzle, Legalzoom, and Honest.com, Social Annex is now seeing investment from Jody Mulkey, CIO and SVP of Technology at Shopzilla, and Lawrence Ng, the co-founder of Oversee.net.

Terms of the investments were not disclosed.

However, according to founder and Head of Client Services Al Lalani, bringing in these backers was less about raising funding and more about bringing their expertise and involvement to Social Annex.

Pourzanjani, who sold PriceGrabber.com to Experian in 2005 for $485 million, is also an investor in the mobile app monetization platform Pocket Change and recently invested in Post Card on the Run’s first round along with pop star Selena Gomez. In addition to his Social Annex investment, Pourzanjani is joining the company’s advisory board.

“Social Annex has a unique all-in-one approach for managing social marketing for online retailers and ensuring social engagement and customer success,” says Pourzanjani. “Social engagement is emerging as the most attractive ROI for online marketing and Social Annex with its impressive platform is poised to be the leader in the market.”

The company was originally launched in 2010, and now offers retailers three suites for generating ROI for their online operations. The startup leverages social sharing, social engagement, and social merchandising through website implementations designed to increase orders and conversion rates. The Sharing suite, for example, works to maximize a retailer’s visitor and consumer shares on social networks, to drive incremental revenue. The Engagement suite focuses on tools for brand-to-consumer relationships and the Merchandising suite uses Facebook’s Open Graph to enable better product discovery.

On the backend, retailers also have access to an analytics reporting system, which lets them track things like referral order, conversion rate increases and their “top influencers.”  In addition, the suite of tools are entirely customizable and white-labeled, allowing retailers to easily craft them to work with their own needs.

Lalani says the key differentiator for the service is that it can help unify “anything and everything that a retailer would ever want to do with social on their site,” he says. It’s not a company built to deliver just one feature, but rather serves as a one-stop shop. That said, the company is just now launching a new feature that offers improved social loyalty option for retailers. Before, retailers could offer deals and discounts, but now customers can interact with the brand to gain points instead, which could later turn into rewards.

Social Annex says its service has now been integrated for several top retailers including some Internet Retailer Top 500 brands. Some clients include Swatch, Cache, and Entertainment.com. In total, there are over 50 enterprise customers on Social Annex now. The companies pay between $1,000 to $8,000 per month for the services from Social Annex.

Notably, the company says that it’s been profitable since the first two months of its inception, which is why Social Annex isn’t giving details as to how much the e-commerce founders have put in, but rather that it has their support. More angel investors have also been lined up, but Social Annex isn’t ready to reveal details yet.

The company is currently 27 employees, and has offices in L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago. It plans to expand to the East Coast (likely NY or Boston) in the next three months.

When you think Twitter, you may think realtime news, or CRM, or brand marketing, or maybe even Justin Bieber, but “eCommerce”? Probably not. In the social network landscape, Facebook is generally seen as being the most eCommerce-inclined, what with its “F-Commerce,” but up to this point, consumers really haven’t fallen in love with the idea of brands replicating their storefronts on Facebook. Meanwhile, Twitter’s priorities lie elsewhere, so, in spite of its growth, the social network has yet to leverage its own eCommerce potential. That’s why Portland-based Chirpify has developed a platform that transforms Twitter from a broadcast platform into a transactional one.

In February, Chirpify rebranded from SellSimp.ly and launched a Twitter commerce platform that allowed brands and consumers to buy, sell, donate and transact through tweets without leaving the comfort of Twitter. Since launch, Chirpify has seen growing traction, thanks in part to a promotional campaign launched at SXSW, called “Tweet-a-Beer,” which used the startup’s API to allow people to buy each other a pint over Twitter. The campaign resulted in a huge boost of traffic for Chirpify, with two new users signing up every second — activity that Chirpify Founder Chris Teso tells us continued for several weeks after SXSW. Although its slowed down a bit since, the campaign proved that direct commerce over Twitter was not only possible, it was so easy a tweet could do it.

Today, the startup’s direct sales model for Twitter is officially getting further validation — this time in the form of capital — as the startup announced that it has secured $1.3 million in series A financing. The new round of investment, which adds to the $50K in seed it raised from its incubator Upstart Labs, was led by Voyager Capital, with participation from Geoff Entress, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, former Facebook exec Rudy Gadre, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and TiE Oregon Angels.

Just in case there’s any confusion in terms of how Chirpify works, put simply, when users sign up for Chirpify, they connect their Twitter and PayPal accounts to the platform. Merchants upload whatever they want to sell to their dashboard, and tweet the link. Consumers simply reply to the tweet and include “buy.” Boom, Chirpify sends you a secure download over DM, the cost is deducted from your PayPal account, the funds instantly transferred to the merchant’s account, at which point they get a receipt.

Anyone can sell, buy, or donate on Chirpify. Even if the process sounds complicated, it’s not. So, the more one considers the fact that the platform offers a simple way to turn tweets into transactions, and seeing as people already use Twitter to follow their favorite brands, musicians, and other people they care about, why not let users buy the latest product or download the latest song by tweet? Well, in addition to its funding announcement, Chirpify is today launching Twitter Commerce for Digital Content, which enables musicians to sell songs and concert tickets directly to fans on Twitter (with the by-product being increased control of their own distribution).

While Chirpify is working with musicians and music labels, at first, the goal Teso says is for this to work for any brand, event, product, or service. (Next, Chirpify plans to work with eBooks vendors, for example.) That’s because the cool thing about Chirpify is it that it works wherever Twitter is, on mobile, desktop, or tablets, and this direct commerce even applies to re-tweets — which has the potential for some serious amplification by allowing for-sale items to reach more streams and thus more eyeballs.

But what if your brand or band is already using a storefront to manage transactions? Chirpify also offers integration with existing eCommerce storefronts (like Magento, for example) so that brands can leverage back-end fulfillment, listing, and transaction management. Merchants just click the “list on Twitter” button when creating a listing for sale, either in their eCommerce or Chirpify dashboard, and can then set the price, quantity, shipping price, and shipping timing.

Chirpify’s solution starts off free, with the startup taking a 4 percent commission on each transaction, but for those merchants looking to conduct more frequent business using Chirpify, the platform offers an enterprise plan, which is priced on a case-by-case basis. The pricing generally starts at around $500 a month, but removes 4 percent Chirpify commission and adds eCommerce platform integration, priority support, co-branding, etc.

For now, Chirpify’s sole payment system is PayPal, but Teso says that they’ve had interest from just about every payment solution out there, and the team plans to add additional payment options in the near future.

But for now, Teso says that the company is focused on scaling and will be using its new capital to ramp up hiring, with additional specific forms of digital content (like eBooks) to come later. The solo founder has already had conversations with reps from Twitter, who are following the startup’s progress with interest. Although he wouldn’t comment on any specifics, if Chirpify can sign continue to sign on big brands (HP and Nestle are already using the platform) and get back to that 2-new-users-a-second kind of traction, my guess is that those conversations with Twitter would change in tone. Hard not to see Chirpify as being serious acquisition bait down the line.

For more on Chirpify, check ‘em out at home here.

Bee Media, the makers of a mobile shopping platform that serves location-specific offers and info to mobile devices, today announced that it has acquired Adcentricity, a similarly location-focued digital media startup. Under the terms of the acquisition, Bee Media secures rights to the Adcentricity name and will operate as Adcentricity going forward. Doug Woolridge, the current CEO of Bee Media will take the helm of the joint venture as its new CEO, while Adcentricity CEO Rob Gorrie will become a senior strategic advisor. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

So, why did the two companies agree to enter into the deal? Gorrie explains that there is a plethora of companies currently targeting different pieces of the shopping pie, whether it be local, marketing, mobile, in-store radio and video networks, all of which has led to a fractured landscape that limits their ability to grab the attention of (and find adoption by) big brands. The two companies believe that, in combining their assets, they will be able to more effectively target and distribute content across any digital channel with location attached to it. This includes mobile shopping apps, which Bee Media has been building over the last year.

Said another way, Bee Media has built expertise in consumer mobile apps, whereas Adcentricity specializes in the location-based delivery side of marketing, so together the two give brands, advertisers, and retailers a more unified platform that makes it easy to create, launch, and measure hyper-local mobile marketing campaigns.

The new Adcentricity aims to help brands execute and respond to localized events and activities, and to easily scale communication and campaign creation to include thousands of places and big customers bases. To do this, it will be leveraging existing products (and continue to offer ADCentral, a hub for venue-specific planning, targeting and content creation) and in turn is today announcing two new products, ADMobile and ADFormat, designed to give brands access to new channels and functionalities in one platform.

ADMobile, for one, offers brands and advertisers to use a single platform for creating location-based mobile shopping experiences, which includes mobile interfaces, shopping tools, location services, mobile payment, content management, analytics and reporting. Its second product, ADFormat, builds on the service’s customizable shopping experiences with an automated content generation tool which enables advertisers to easily create customizable campaigns, be they video, copy, images, or graphics, for any screen. Those campaigns can then be uniquely messaged to any market or location.

Adcentricity has already worked with brands like Toyota, American Express, GM, Samsung, and more, and will be looking to capitalize on its strategic partnerships with The Nielsen Company, Polk, Environics Analytics, Computer Sciences Corporation and PwC, and build upon those. It hopes that an integrated platform that enables the creation, localization, and distribution of ad campaigns to any and all location-based digital media will have the appeal to do just that.

For more, check out Adcentricity here.