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.

If you have no experience of setting up and running a website or blog you might imagine that it is a difficult process requiring technical knowledge. However, this is certainly not the case these days and easy website hosting is something that anyone who can use a computer can easily setup so they have their own website or blog.

It will not be cost free as you need a domain name and a web hosting service. Whilst it is possible that you can obtain one of these free, by obtaining both from the same provider, it is worth paying more to get a domain name that is appropriate for your site.

The process is simple:

Decide on a Domain Name:- The extension you need will depend on the purpose of your site. If you are looking for an international audience then a .org or .net might be appropriate or .com if there is a commercial element.

In this case cheapdomainnames.com is a good place to start looking. It will almost certainly be cheaper to use a local extension such as .au, .co.uk or .de in which case you will need to search for a local registration site. Prices do differ so it is worth checking the registration costs on a few sites.

Choose your Website Hosting Provider: – There is a lot of choice here with varying levels of service. For a new user of such services I recommend going for one of the larger companies who have a good reputation for customer support. If any problems do arise you can then be confident that you will be able to get support.

Website hosting companies often also offer domain registration services and you can do this as part of the sign-up process with them. Be aware that whilst this is certainly the easy way forward it probably won’t be the cheapest. The alternative is to register your domain name first with another company and, later, enter the DNS information provided by your hosting company. This is easy, it just adds another step to the setup process. If you decide to do this you should register your domain name before setting up your hosting account.

Set-up Hosting Service:- Firstly you need to select the package you want and decide how far in advance you want to pay. The longer you pay upfront the lower the equivalent monthly cost will be. Your contact and payment information will then be required, pay by credit card or paypal as this simplifies getting a refund if you need to cancel later.

There is an additional step if you registered your domain name elsewhere. You will be given the names of your host’s name servers and you need to login to your domain registration companys site and enter these.

Creating your Site/Blog:- Your hosting company will give you access to your Cpanel through which you control everything, including your email and FTP accounts. To get started quickly open “Fantastico De Luxe” which is in the Software/Services section. This will enable you to quickly set-up WordPress, the very popular free software for creating websites and blogs. You do not need any technical knowledge to make a sophisticated site using WordPress given the number of themes and plugins available and best of all it is all free. To install it in your root directory (i.e. your home page will be at yourdomain.xxx) select WordPress in the left hand column of Fantasico. Click New Installation on the next page then complete the simple form leaving the Install in Directory box blank. The data entered on this page can be changed later and you will no doubt want to do so once you see what it is used for. Finish the installation and you will then get a page containing your database and login details.

You can now go to your Home Page and see the result. You can then log into WordPress and pick a theme you like and start building pages and/or posts.

Easy website hosting is therefore available to anyone, so get out there and start publishing!

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.”

Article by Muzhafar A.Z

Article by Alphabytes

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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